Vienna, he thought, seemed a little lifeless. The inability to speak German was humiliating. Then on 31 May Bobby took him to dine with Mitzi “whom everyone is expecting to marry Frank Wooster. I had long wanted to meet her, having heard so much of her enormous wealth, her eight palaces in France, Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, her energy at directing all the businesses that the old Baron Springer left, and her adoration of Frank. But as dinner came nearer I felt shy.” It was Derby Day, and Mitzi’s horse was the favourite. Meidling was the sort of house he didn’t know existed outside Ireland. The little old lady arranging gramophone records and getting on the wrong side of Mitzi was Tante Bébé, otherwise Fraülein d’Italia, a member of the family and who lived in the house permanently. “Also were Poppy and Lily, two schoolroom daughters who never spoke except in family jokes, and the Baroness herself, very small, very Jewish, very chic in black and so forceful that she compelled me to think her attractive (I sat next to her) and brilliant. She has an active, malicious tongue and great charm, I thought at last. Conversation was difficult, being conducted simultaneously in three languages, and worst of all for me who knew no-one. However, I think everything went off quite well.” On 3 June, his last day in Vienna, Alan was invited back to Meidling for lunch. This time Mitzi was very gracious, he thought, and whenever a new guest arrived the two daughters muttered “God help us,” and giggled in the back of the room. (Poppy was just seventeen, Lily just fifteen.)
Alan departed to Vence in the south of France, and was soon describing to his parents how he had seen a concours d’élégance of men’s bathing dresses and deportment: “Daddy would not have approved!” “I shall miss him awfully,” Bobby told Vere and Harry, “I don’t think a cross word has passed from one to the other of us all the time we have been together. He has, I really think, enjoyed everything…. And now I have something to tell you and do hope that Harry and you will agree. I have asked Alan to come with me to South America this next winter.” In The Bonus of Laughter Alan held at bay anyone who might be wondering about his relationship with Bobby: “So successful was the human element in our little adventures that we spent the two following winters together, in South America and Central Africa. No doubt this looked strange to some. I was twenty-two, Bobby in his forties.”
On the liner out to Brazil, Alan finished Spring Journey, and posted the manuscript to Kenneth Rae. Published by Cobden-Sanderson in 1931, the book had good reviews, one of which called him “perhaps the most brilliant and versatile of the youngest English writers … he has already attracted wide notice as poet, critic, essayist and musician.” Copying this praise into his diary, Alan supposed that Squire was responsible for it. (Visiting Australia, I found in a second-hand bookshop in Perth a copy on whose flyleaf Jan Masaryk, the Czech Foreign Minister defenestrated by the Communists, had written his name – evidence of the book’s reach.)
Journey to the South, retitled Hot Places for the American edition, is a hybrid of fact and fiction. The stories of invented characters supposedly convey the South American experience. Experimental at the time, the device does not wear well. Bobby and he reached Rio de Janeiro just before Christmas 1930. They were to move on to the Argentine, Chile, Cuba, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. A sense of superiority again rose close to the surface. Santos was “a poisonous town,” Valparaíso “really horrible,” Quito “bijou.” More inquisitive than before, however, Alan did meet a number of people, including the Argentine Foreign Minister, and Bobby Pryce-Jones, a cousin descended from one of Harry’s brothers who had exchanged Dolerw for Buenos Aires. In Montevideo on 5 February 1931 he wrote to Patrick Kinross (who could never have enough of this kind of thing), “Here in the Plaza Zabala, there are pretty goings-on, very squalid, and for an elderly clientele of sailors and crossing-sweepers.” In Lima, he was frightened momentarily by the revolution to depose the President. Still, an attachment to South America lasted for the rest of his life; he was to lecture there for the British Council; and Jorge Luis Borges had noticed his writing and more than once expressed approval of it in print. In the family Guy Dawnay told Vere that the book was extraordinarily clever: “More power to Alan’s literary genius.”
Extravagant by nature, he was not earning a living. Before leaving for South America, he had complained to Patrick Kinross, “Papa’s income is exactly halved and his taxes precisely doubled, so I haven’t the heart to take any more money off him which means getting a job at once. I suppose that means the B.B.C. if I can persuade them to have me. Isn’t everything hell?” The two travel books were to earn in the order of a hundred pounds each. Hot Places was having an American succès d’estime, he again told Patrick Kinross, and a cheque would follow for £3.12.0 on account of six months’ royalties. Journeying one last time with Bobby – to Kenya, Uganda and Sudan – produced no book, but at its conclusion he put a heartfelt cry into his diary: “Money! Money! Money! Will no-one give me £1,000 a year? Surely not much to ask.” When Harry had to go back on his promise to furnish a flat for him, Alan hoped instead to retreat to some office that also served as a bolt-hole. For the purpose, “I mean to cheat Papa out of £100 if I can’t get it any other way.”
The exhibitionist in Alan was strong enough at that point to overcome the would-be artist pressed by dull financial reasons to finish his masterpiece. “I find I write more easily if I paint my lips scarlet,” he told himself – an admission that writing for him means posing. Taking a flat in Paris for the summer of 1931, he spent the time indulging himself. It seems like an omen that he wrote to his father on 29 June to say that he had seen a good deal of Frank Wooster and Madame Fould-Springer as he calls her – two people Harry had surely never heard of previously. Friends arranged a meeting with Jean Cocteau. Writing it up in extremely vivid prose with the date 1 July, he comes out abruptly with the sentences, “I’ve taken cocaine. A clean medicinal smell, but no apparent sensation whatever.” And then, “At about 2.30 we took to heroin and the effect improved; I talked copiously and felt great affection towards my friends … at 5.00 I went home to my new flat, unpacked, arranged books and felt in superb humour, looking brown and quite untired.” Returning to England by Dieppe and Newhaven towards the end of the month, he writes that he burnt the cocaine he had with him and all day long was in a stupor. “O, the nausea, the exhaustion, the hot pains, the collapse.”
“I saw Pryce-Jones in Paris,” Maurice Bowra wrote to Patrick Kinross, well aware of the glee the information in his letter would cause – Bowra was himself pursuing Adrian Bishop, another aesthete. “I telegraphed at great expense offering him his fare and keep in Italy, but he did not answer. His book is very bad and gets very amusing reviews in the Sunday press where he has not seduced the reviewers…. He was very odd in Paris, having a good deal of fun with Ironside [Robin, the artist], taking drugs, his eyes shooting in opposite directions on strings, and his face knee deep in slap.”
(Bowra was writing salacious and supposedly satirical poems that he read to the select few. Published after his death, this excruciating drivel must owe something to Alan:
Baronin Fould-Springer of a first-rate family
Said to be the fattest woman in Europe
Went to bed with a dud Czech
Who talked French with a real French accent.
He froze all her assets,
And the psychologist takes over her guilt-edged securities.)
Back in Paris in January 1932, Alan might well have paid the cost of settling into this lifestyle. To wear make-up and take drugs was to be free from the arduous discipline of writing. Other men, richer and more in the social swim than Bobby, might be found to keep him, and one of them was Arturo Lopez. A Chilean, he had a huge fortune from minerals and mining. Everyone who was anyone gossiped about the extravagance of his house in Paris, and the debauchery that took place there. As he describes it, Alan’s sense of superiority was again in play. Taking his distance, out to shock, he was far above anything respectable and boring. “I caught myself delighting when people s
tared – knowing my face was brilliantly made up and my eyes wide with cocaine. A glow of vice…. Nothing could uproot me and furious stares were the proof of it. The joy of Arturo’s black enamel and looking-glass bathroom – with shelves of silver instruments, boxes, bottles, pencils. I spent half an hour experimenting – quite childishly, luxuriating.”
“A first experiment with morphine in Maddox Street,” is an entry in Alan’s diary dated that April. Those injecting him were evidently addicts; protectively Alan identifies them by initials only; he omits the surname of Irene, one of these friends who had died from the drug. “Of all, heroin seems to work best on me,” he decided. “By mixing it with opium, pernod, cocaine, and pâté de foie gras, however, I made myself ill.”
Among contemporaries with much the same background and similar literary aspirations as Alan were several specialists in failure. One whose fate Alan might have shared was his friend Brian Howard, self-described as a poet, in circuit around the pleasure-spots of Europe, dissipating his gifts in drugs and the young men he picked up. Alan’s two travel books had not matched the expectations they had raised. To judge by the works of André Breton and Marcel Duchamp that he kept to the end of his life, the Surrealism of the period was another possible route into a dead-end. For Surrealists, life and art spread the nihilistic premise that no one human being has anything in common with another. According to Alan’s diary, he had admired and wanted to meet the Surrealist René Crevel, “struck by his great beauty,” but before this could happen Crevel committed suicide. Into the 1950s Cocteau was still sending Alan copies of his books, with his usual doodles and inscriptions on the flyleaf.
Throughout 1932 and 1933 Alan pursued Joan Eyres-Monsell, the first woman who had meant anything to him. Both seem to have found the business of love rather erratic and unusual. When I was up at Oxford, Maurice Bowra, by then Warden of Wadham seemingly in perpetuity, invited me to dinner to meet Joan. Dark-haired, she was very attractive in a grand bohème way, and greeted me saying in a quite deep and seductive voice, “I could have been your mother.” By then in her fifties, she was living in Greece with Paddy Leigh Fermor, who wrote the kind of stylised and idiosyncratic travel books that Alan had been expected to write. When she eventually married Paddy, as Artemis Cooper makes plain in her biography of him, Joan was finally resigning herself to the male selfishness that she had come up against. By then, she was too old to have a child.
The Eyres-Monsells lived at Dumbleton, a large Gloucestershire house with an estate. Joan’s parents were forbidding; Sir Bolton Eyres-Monsell was First Lord of the Admiralty. “Lady Eyres-Monsell is immensely rich,” according to the Daily Express of 2 April (possibly on a tip-off from Patrick Kinross). “The fortune she inherited cannot be less than £50,000 a year.” Joan’s brother Graham was cultivated, knowledgeable about music, and, as a friend from Alan’s brief Oxford interlude and himself a homosexual, in a position to tell tales. On 2 January 1932 Alan was one of a large house party at Dumbleton, and by that August he was asking himself if he was in love with Joan. “She could not be more lovely; yet, could we be happy if she was as foolish as I fear she is?” A couple of days after that reflection, he proposed and was accepted. “Since then I’ve alternated between rapture and despair…. Is she stupid? Am I perverted? Are we poor?” One evening at this point Cyril Connolly talked to her about Alan, “whom she says won’t marry her without a grand wedding. We all got tight at the Florida.” Joan seems to have accepted that she had to indulge Alan. No sooner engaged than he sped off to Spain by himself, ostensibly to settle somewhere long enough to finish a play he was writing (there is no trace of it). At first Granada was a city where he would have liked to stay permanently. Quite soon the room he had found in the Villa Carmona, part of the Alhambra, the great Moorish palace in Granada, proved too cold and uncomfortable, “as bad as Eton.” Once more a tourist, he took in Córdoba, Seville (“The bliss of bathrooms and cocktails”), and Cádiz from where he sent home a postcard, “Lady E-M has told Graham that she finds me an exceptionally nice young man. How could she not?” Then Algeciras, Tetuán, and Xauen in Spanish Morocco. “Only Joan is a comfort,” he could still tell himself. “I think she is decided to marry me from the depth of herself.” The Eyres-Monsells happened to be in Spain and a meeting back in Granada had been arranged. Joan’s mother had no objection to him, Alan gathered, but her father would like someone who could be of use to him, “a politician or a duke, I suppose.” At least, “the atmosphere is improved.”
During the summer of 1933 Alan and Joan had a foretaste of the social life they might have had as a married couple. Meeting up with Evelyn Waugh at a late-night party, Alan found him “more like a carved potato than usual.” Other guests at a weekend with Cyril and Jean Connolly were Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, Nigel Richards, Piers Synnott, Peter and Marcelle Quennell, Brian Howard, and John Strachey: a roll-call of the smart set. Alan was by himself at the Salzburg festival, however, and there was someone called Bobby Marshall, a friend of Joan’s brother Graham. “I knew I was sunburnt and looking my best; but he is a ‘hearty’, who has always led a perfectly normal life, and I am engaged…. I don’t want to go to bed with him (or do I?) nor he with me and yet we can’t bear to be apart.” An excursion across the border into Germany offered a preliminary glimpse of what was to come. “I saw Hitler, aquiline-eyed, bareheaded, and Goering later in a heavily-guarded car.”
Needless to say, the Eyres-Monsell parents in reality were having none of it and sent Joan away to India, pleased that Alan at the same time was going his separate way to Vienna. From Admiralty House on 21 November 1933 Joan wrote a farewell letter to Vere, the fond mother-in-law who was not to be. “I very nearly came to see Alan off on Friday but didn’t in the end – Of all the depressing and unsatisfactory things, seeing people off is the worst. I’m sure I shall really enjoy India…. Anyway I would rather be there than in London if Alan is in Vienna.”
EIGHT
Mr Pryce and Mrs Jones
DUCKWORTH WAS A small but successful publishing house, with Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf among others on its list. One of its good ideas was Brief Lives, a series of short biographies of great men written for the general reader. Beethoven was Alan’s subject, and throughout 1932 he was researching and writing what was more an extended essay or monograph than a book. Harper’s Bazaar paid the flowery compliment that Alan “has deserted music for the primrose path of literature.” The August diary entry in which he wondered if he was in love with Joan starts, “Days in the British Museum, reading up Beethoven. Musical lives are the dullest literature in the world. About Beethoven they are interminable and tedious to a degree beyond what I have ever conceived.” Writing in a high and indeed superior tone, as though one genius taking the measure of another, Alan emphasizes Beethoven’s bad temper and conceit at the expense of the universality of his music. He could apply the word “dull” to Beethoven’s eighth symphony. The book was to come out in March 1933 and a friend, the writer Anne Fremantle, told him that Duckworth was “dotty with excitement” about it – news which he passed on to his parents. (Evidence of this book’s reach: Benjamin Tammuz, author of Minotaur, a novel with touches of genius, used to tell me that reading the Hebrew language edition of Beethoven had been part of his education.)
As Joan set sail to India, Alan installed himself in a flat in the Schoenburgstrasse, in the Fourth District of Vienna. He paid his rent to a lady of “superb lineage” whose money had vanished in the postwar inflation. For under £50 a year, he said, he had the choice of dozens of modern flats. The intention now seems to have been to write a book of short stories (no trace of them) and to learn German (a skill that would have come in handy with Beethoven).
Vienna then was the capital city of an empire that had just been dismembered. Nothing remained of the Habsburg past except some splendid buildings now purposeless. Alan had strayed into a crisis of collapse and confusion whose outcome could not be predicted. The struggle for mastery between Nazis on the one ha
nd and Communists on the other was already out on the streets, and many expected that the clash of ideologies was sure to spread from Austria right across Europe. Vienna was an early testing ground for those of Alan’s generation who were committed politically to the Soviet Union and Marxist revolution. Engelbert Dollfuss, chancellor since 1932, was prepared to treat extremists as they treated him; traduced as an Austro-fascist, that is to say a Hitlerite, he had survived attempted assassination. Alan ignored the tide of violence or registered it as an inconvenience. English friends there included the writers Ethel Mannin, Jimmy Stern and John Lehmann. As for Austrians, “We know nobody who isn’t a prince.” Work went by the board almost at once. “My Christmas week has been almost too merry – though involving, I hasten to add, no disgrace,” he wrote to his mother. The two of them began to correspond so frequently and in such detail that they numbered their letters. His skates had cost 78 schillings or £2.13.6. “There are literally about fifty people in all Vienna whom one wants to see and I see them, chiefly on the Rink [the Eislaufverein] before luncheon (very sure art!) and at the opera. Tea-parties merging into cocktails and an occasional ball are the recognized entertainments here and I go to a number of them.”
“One night last week I was the victim of an outrage; when Nazis threw tear-gas bombs into a cinema where I was,” Alan recounts in his Letter 13, dated January 1934, but omitting the actual day. “Luckily they only had time to throw two before they were arrested, so, as it was a large cinema, my eyes only watered a great deal.” He then reverts to the familiar: “More parties. Melanie Hoyos, Mary Apponyi, and other of the names which quite fill my life, gave them … and on Thursday there is the great party of the season: the Fould-Springers which is to last from six to six.”
Faul Lines Page 10