Writing English and studying Chinese absorbed far too much time to enable me to indulge in stupefaction of the senses, yet because I kept myself comparatively to myself I had evidently become a sinister figure in European eyes. Lurid stories were repeated to me about my arcane activities. But the foreign community was small, and having tracked down one story to a notorious busybody I sent her a stiff note advising her to hold her tongue or I would hold it for her with a pair of legal pincers, and signed it ‘Dracula’ Acton. ... My myth preceded me to Europe, for what could keep me so long in the land of Dr. Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril unless some secret vice, some enslavement of the senses? [pg. 380]
[Of the optimism in Italy inspired by the Abyssian victory] The Duce would lead the world yet, and with Hitler imitating him, bah! democracy was doomed, like the old whore in Aleister Crowley’s poem:
‘There in a hospital bed she lay
Rotting away.’ 381-2
[Of childhood at La Pietra, Fiorenza] I was distinctly anthropomorphic and peopled the trees with spirits of good and evil. [pg. 11]
[Of a log-fire] ... beguiled by its final flickers through the doorway I would creep out and feast my eyes on that miniature smouldering Pompeii. For I was always something of a Zoroastrian. [pg. 13]
[Of his English nurse] She had fits of weeping and sang hymns that filled me with gloom, and the same gloom returns to me whenever I hear them over the radio. [pg. 14]
There were subterranean intrigues between the other servants, and I remember hearing that one of our maids had consulted a witch to put a curse on a faithless footman. The witch had written the curse on a scrap of paper and forced it down the belly of a toad which [sic] had then been walled up alive. [pp. 15-6]
Binz on the island of Rügen ... in 1912. From Binz I bore away a chunk of transparent amber which assumed the properties of a lifelong talisman ... [pg. 19]
But the principal charm of Cromer for me was a derelict church tower on the edge of a high cliff with poppies blazing all the way up to it which [sic] I was told would send me to sleep. It looked haunted by a demon or a poltergeist, and sure enough it has since slipped into the sea. [pg. 25]
[At Eton] Under the influence of a special kind of macabre Brian [Howard] became very prolific. While others walked to Windsor on Sunday afternoons, Brian and I walked conscientiously to Slough, feeling rather like the Goncourts, in search of “copy”. The masonry of Slough suggested all sorts of atrocities. As for the Sundayfied people of middle age, Brian was quick to detect streaks of queer cruelty and fetishism under ordinary exteriors: their very ordinariness was suspicious to Brian. He saw witches in charwomen, and in many semi-detached Victorian villas he visualized appalling scenes of sadism; corpulent women in bangs and bustles suffocating pale little girls by inches. He would pause before a neo-Gothic structure and ask, with a startled air: “Did you hear anything peculiar?” Or when we came to a monkey-puzzle tree: “Stop! I’m sure I heard a whimper.” Thus our walks in the purlieus of Slough enhanced our sense of the macabre. Behind façades of dingy respectability we were convinced human toads were staring balefully through stained-glass windows, having cast a spell on the other inmates; retired solicitors were gorging themselves on sausages of freshly minced corpse at high tea. ... Many an old couple walking home from church seemed incarnations of damned souls; and flowers in window-boxes flowers of evil. [pg. 98]
A fancy-dress party, at which a few women were present, was the final straw [for the Hypocrites Club] ... I donned an O.T.C. [Officers’ Training Corps] uniform for the occasion, a disguise of both body and soul: and I thus retained a successful incognito. Robert Byron gave a hectic impersonation of the Widow of Windsor. ... The party was uproariously gay, but rumour transformed it into a shocking orgy, and shortly after the club was closed by the Proctors. [pg. 124]
Noel Coward had offended her [Edith Sitwell] grossly with his parodies of “Façade”. And to make matters worse, he had published them under the name of Hernia Whittlebot. [pg. 131]
[On being asked for an Oxford novel] Even when I was an undergraduate I had become something of a legend, and divers feats and sayings were ascribed to me that had little foundation in fact. So great is the mythopoetic faculty of undergraduates, that I have been tracked by grotesque versions of my legend throughout my life. [pg. 166]
After dinner in Paris one evening [after the war], Diana drove Evelyn back to Chantilly and, during the drive, she told Conrad Russell, ‘He gave me a past and present picture of Quennell, a good and harmless man, fond of pretty girls, and really he painted something so foetid and sinister that it will colour most unfairly my sentiments for Peter Q.’ [pg. 500]
[In a letter to Ann Fleming] ‘Have you noticed how everything beastly begins with Q? Like Quennell and queers and the queen, quibbles, quod, quagmire, quantum theory, queues, quiffs, most Quintins, questionnaires, quarrels — well, everything.’ [pg. 571]
For Evelyn, it [a trip to the US in Nov 1948] was a joyless experience, the unbeautiful campuses, the characterless hotels — in New Orleans he smashed open the window of his air-conditioned room with his stick ... [pg. 536]
Evelyn, currently [c.1932 — a letter to Lygons about Easton Coury hotel, run by Postlethwaites would date it, because it was written after he had only just met the L’s] fascinated by masonic rituals and insignia, frequently embellished his letters [to the Lygon sisters, Sibell, Maimie and Dorothy] with pentangles, swastikas and encircled triangles, assigned to himself the masonic title of ‘Boaz’, often shortened to ‘Bo’ ... [pg. 251]
A few weeks later, in a letter headed with a masonic pentangle, Evelyn wrote ... [pg. 255]
Evelyn Gardner ... was extremely pretty, with a round face, little upturned nose, huge eyes and a flawless porcelain complexion. [pg. 154]
Georgia Sitwell recorded of the ‘little Evelyns Waugh ... he is rather dapper and baby-faced like a drawing by Mabel Lucie Attwell ... she has rather popping eyes but is pretty.’ [pg. 187] (Sacheverall Sitwell: Splendours & Miseries, Sarah Bradford, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993, pg. 202).
A somewhat bizarre work which I was responsible for Duckworth’s publishing ... was Tiger-Woman (1929), the autobiography of Betty May ... Betty May, as it happened, linked up with a story much talked of during my first Oxford year (though at that time I never heard her name connected with it), which had involved the magician Aleister Crowley (familiar to me by repute from childhood), and an undergraduate of St John’s College, Frederick Charles (renamed by himself Raoul) Loveday.
Loveday, an early member of The Hypocrites Club [sic ambos] (which gave him a certain additional interest), like the Scholar Gypsy — though with far more baleful results — had abandoned Oxford halls to learn the secrets of Crowley’s magic lore. In the first instance he had met Crowley in London, but, soon after an association between them had been struck up, the Mage moved to Sicily, where he established an abbey (in fact a farmhosue of characteristic local type) at Cefalù. There, having first married Betty May, Loveday followed him. While engaged in practising the magical arts, Loveday died at Cefalù; quite how and why, no one seemed to know. That happened in 1922, the year before I came up to Balliol.
The early forms of the Loveday myth had centred on a projected undergraduate expedition to rescue this Oxford friend from Crowley’s clutches. I think the party was to have included Alfred Duggan and several other members of The Hypocrites. By the time the story was retailed to me Loveday himself died the previous year; Crowley had been ejected from Sicily by the Italian authorities. Nevertheless, the circumstance were remembered for their sinister climax. When, not without some difficulty, Betty May managed to get back to England, she sold to the press a fairly lurid account (‘ghosted’, of course) of her Cefalù experiences. [pp. 79-80]
Since everything said in Tiger-Woman about Crowley had appeared years before in the newspaper articles, when no legal action had been taken, trouble about libel — an aspect of statements about himself in which Crowley always took a keen interest — was not much feared. At some stage, however, whether before or after publication, C telephoned to the office, inviting me to lunch with him at Simpson’s in The Strand. I had never met him in person, but his celebrated near-cockney accent grated at once on the ear, as familiar from stories. [sic]
‘You will recognize me from the fact that I am not wearing a rose in my button-hole.’
The ring of the old-time music-hall comedian in this observation was much C’s style. On the way to Simpson’s I wondered whether I should be met in the lobby by a thaumaturge in priestly robes, received with the ritual salutation: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’; if so, whether politeness required the correct response: ‘Love in the Law, Love under Will.’ ...
The reality at Simpson’s was less dramatic. Instead of a necromantic figure, sonorous invocation, a big weary-looking man rose from one of the seats and held out his hand. He was quietly, almost shabbily, dressed in a dark brown suit and grey Homburg hat. When he removed the hat the unusual formation of his bald and shaven skull was revealed; so shaped as to give the impression that he was wearing a false top to his head like a clown’s. This Grock-like appearance was not at all unbefitting the steady flow of ponderous gags delivered in the rasping intonation. ... There was much that was absurd about him; at the same time it seems false to assert — as some did — that his absurdity transcended all sense of being sinister. If the word has any meaning, C was sinister, intensly [sic] sinister, both in exterior and manner [sic]. [pp. 81-2]
There was a touch [in Wyndham Lewis’s work], if only a faint one, of Crowley’s moments of thaumaturgical majesty of demeanour, though Lewis was, of course, a considerable artist, not a sinister if gifted buffoon.[pg. 152]
One night [at W’s family home on North End road] Waugh asked if I would like to hear the opening chapters of a novel he was writing. ... Waugh’s embryonic novel — then called Picaresque, or the Making of an Englishman — was the first ten thousand words, scarcely altered at all later, of Decline and Fall. The manuscript was written with a pen on double-sheets of blue lined-foolscape, the cipher EW printed at the top of the first page of each double-sheet. There were hardly any alterations in the ext. ... Some months after the reading aloud of these chapters — probably a moment towards the end of the same year [1927] — I asked Waugh how the novel was progressing. He replied: ‘I’ve burnt it.’ [pp. 21-2]
In the days in which we first knew each other in London [c. 1927], Waugh, not caring in the least what details he broadcast about his private life, told me things of a fairly intimate kind, but I am sure that he would revealed them no less to almost anyone else he found momentarily sympathetic ... [pg. 131]
In November, 1965, at a country wedding, we found ourselves in the queue to greet bride and bridegroom with Waugh, his wife, one of their daughters.[sic] Waugh did not look well. For some time he had been too fat to be in good health; now he seemed at the same time portly, yet wasted. He walked in a very shaky manner. ...
‘Do you think there’s any whisky?’ he asked at once.
‘I’d forgotten you drank whisky.’ ...
‘One must at an affair like this. I’ll have a look round the house.’ He broke off from the queue; reappearing a minute or two later, before we had anything like reached the newly married couple.
‘I’d very much like your opinion on two decanters I’ve found. I’m not sure either is whisky. My sense of smell isn’t what it used to be.’
He led me through the back parts of the house into a kind of scullery. On a tray, with a bottle of barley water, stood two all but empty decanters. Whatever they had contained could have dated back some days, if not weeks. It was evident that they had been put out of the way for the party that was taking place. I diagnosed port residues in each case. Waugh sighed.
‘Just what I thought myself.’
We returned to the queue. The main part of the reception was taking place in a marquee, to reach which a ramp had been placed, leading down to the tent from the higher level of the lawn. The slope, though perceptible, was not a specially steep one.
We happened to leave the party at the same moment as the Waughs. Laura Waugh went first, Waugh following, holding his daughter’s arm for support. Suddenly, from sheer physical weakness, he could not manage the ascent. His daughter had to call to her mother to return and help. Together they got him up the ramp. This was the first time I grasped quite how bad was his state of health by that stage.
At the top of the slope the three of them paused. Waugh smiled as we passed, making a faint gesture of his to say goodbye. That was the last time I saw him. He died about five months later. [pp. 132-3]
He entertained himself with grandiose projects [at Piers Court]. He built what became known as The Edifice — a semi-circular stone wall about ten feet in height, surmounted by battlements and with a paved area beneath it. When this was finished he advertised for human skulls to adorn the battlements. He received a surprising number of replies, which I doubt if he had expected, and he had to refuse most of the offerings. The Edifice was not a great success. Many people thought it hideous and Evelyn himself was not satisfied with it, although he got pleasure out of the building. [pg. 23]
I went up to Balliol, this time unescorted, on October 10th 1923, was ceremoniously received at the porter’s lodge and taken off to my allotted rooms, painted a dark depressing brown, in the oldest quarter of the college. They occupied half a top floor. My sitting-room commanded St Giles’s; my bedroom overlooked the Broad. Though meagrely furnished, they gave me a sense of space and, what is more, a glorious sense of privacy. I had a college servant to attend to my well-being, make my bed, and, if the weather demanded it, build me a huge coal-fire in my Victorian black-leaded grate. But I still needed friends, and therefore sought out the staircase on which my school friend Graham Greene lived. Our reunion, however, was disappointing. Having taken up residence a year earlier, he had already formed his own circle, which, rightly or wrongly, I considered rather tedious; and, after a week or two of sharing their honest fun, I wandered off into a different milieu. Why Graham at Oxford should have so carefully avoided notice is a question that I cannot answer. And perhaps he did well to avoid the showy, expensive world that I myself was soon frequenting.
Though much could be said in dispraise of the Oxford I knew, it proved a nursery of distinguished writers. Among my friends and friendly acquaintances between 1923 and 1925 were Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell, the brilliant ill-fated Henry Yorke (who wrote under the pseudonym Henry Green), David Cecil, Edward Sackville-West, Robert Byron, Kenneth Clark, Patrick Kinross, the renowned polemicist Claud Cockburn and the noteworthy historian Richard Pares. Each was destined to make his name in print; while Harold Acton represented poetry, performing his part with a flamboyant verve that would have captivated Oscar Wilde, and with all Wilde’s eloquent scorn for contemporary philistines and moralists. Him I met, I suppose, through Evelyn Waugh, who, remembering our Berkhamstedian links, had decided to visit me at Balliol. Since our early meeting Waugh had scarcely changed. An alert, slender, dandified youth, he found Oxford, he tells us in his autobiography, a modern Kingdom of Cokayne; and it was either he or Harold Acton who introduced me to the notorious Hypocrites Club, where for the first time I became extravagantly drunk, and whence I staggered homewards by long and difficult stages, reeling into Balliol just on the stroke of midnight beneath the porter’s sharp but sympathetic eye.
The Hypocrites was then the chief citadel of bohemian life at Oxford, which at the time seemed to possess almost as many coteries as colleges. Oxford, indeed, was a microcosm of the adult universe, with its own snobberies and elaborate class-distinctions, its own social shibboleths and intellectual vogues. Thus, we had a Côté de Guermantes, made up of fashionable young men, who hunted and rode in Bullingdon Grinds, but were often by no means averse from the company of rich and pleasure-loving dilettanti and, attached to them, a much more genuine bohemia — among its representatives were several wild eccentrics — that boisterously disregarded fashion. In one respect, however, we were all alike: we were extremely lavish spenders; and, except for the very rich, we most of us went down leaving many bills unpaid.
That was largely the fault of Oxford tradesmen. I had only, I discovered, to present myself at a shop, give my name and state my college; and the assistants would allow me to carry off any article that caught my fancy. At Adamson’s I could order new suits; at Blackwell’s, collect piles of volumes; even at the college-stores I was free to choose whatever provisions that I thought I needed — boxes of Russian and Balkan cigarettes, a magnum of champagne or some exotic liqueur such as ‘Danziger Goldwasser’, which I favoured not because I liked the taste, but because, if it were briskly shaken, delicate fragments of gold leaf floated to and fro inside the bottle.
During my first absence I had my rooms repainted; and meanwhile I hung up various portraits — Dürer’s print of a rhinoceros and a portrait by my mother of her old nanny that, as a representative of old age, had, I thought, a fine Rembrandtian touch — and purchased decorative strips of coloured material which I draped across the chairs and sofa. At the same time, I had my card engraved. Georgian Oxford preserved many of the features of Edwardian society; and undergraduates, when they visited a friend but found he was not at home, were accustomed to drop their card upon his table, adding perhaps a few scribbled words and carefully turning down a corner. Since our rooms were not equipped with telephones, we communicated by means of visits; and the visitors who climbed my wooden staircase were far more numerous than I expected. As a poet whose works had already appeared in print, I enjoyed a small immediate success — at least a success of curiosity; and, had my temperament been a little better balanced, it would no doubt have lasted longer.
Meanwhile, I entered the section of Oxford society that Harold Acton dominated. When he first arrived, he had been obliged to ‘sport his oak’ against the attacks of furious Christ Church athletes, who had smashed his windows and threatened that, should he re-emerge, they would duck him in the fountain. By the time I appeared, however, he was already well on his way to becoming an Oxford institution; and, after I had gone down — he both preceded and survived me — he had grown so popular that the Bullingdon Club once invited him to dinner, where he delivered a blithe and witty speech for which he was rewarded with uproarious applause. The son of American and Anglo-Italian parents, he had an impenitently alien look — the air of a Renaissance Prince of the Church and of a youthful Chinese sage combined. His voice was strange — dulcet and elaborately mannered; and a suspicion of a stutter, or trick of momentarily hesitating before he brought out his most pointed phrases, gave his conversation added charm.
That voice, I presently learned, he had inherited from the veteran actor Robin de la Condamine; and Condamine, in his turn, had inherited it from Oscar Wilde. The scraps of information we collect on our way through life have a curious knack of fitting together in the jigsaw puzzle of our memories; and, hearing Condamine mentioned, I recollected that my mother had described a young man of that name, whose family lived near The Postern, and who had terrified her by the faces he made as she passed their garden gate. Her tormentor was evidently Harold’s old friend at an early stage of his existence, while he was still rehearsing his mimetic gifts. They had been considerable; and Webster’s Duchess of Malfi was a play that afforded him the fullest scope. Harold would imitate him performing the part of the half-mad Ferdinand —
‘I have this night digged up a mandrake...and am grown mad with’t’— so loudly and expressively that, if he were walking along a crowded street, he cleared the pavement all around.
Harold’s method of reciting his own verses was just as stentorian and dramatic. He occupied rooms in the Victorian annexe of his college, overlooking Christ Church Meadows; and, having provided his guests with an opulent luncheon, accompanied by large quantities of the steaming mulled claret that he had brewed upon the hearth, from his balcony he would declaim his latest poems through a large megaphone to crocodiles of Oxford schoolchildren trotting back and forth among the trees. Though mulled claret often leaves behind it a somewhat sickly after-taste, these were memorable occasions. Harold possessed the gift of raising the spirits, and electrifying the atmosphere, of any occasion he attended. The art of life, said Jean Cocteau, was to know ‘just how far to go too far’; and Harold went too far with remarkable gusto and unfailing intrepidity. By aesthetic circles much admired, elsewhere he was fiercely criticized; and a good deal of the criticism he provoked was transferred to his supporters. From Christopher Hollis’s autobiography [The Seven Ages, 1974] I learn that a future Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, at that period Lord Dunglass, besides abominating Harold Acton, wondered if Peter Quennell were ‘quite decent’. We were surrounded by an immense array of unknown rowing-men and footballers; and some highly intelligent undergraduates, like Kenneth Clark and David Cecil, led a far less Dionysiac life, and would never have considered setting foot among the drunken, noisy Hypocrites.
I had got into the wrong set, my father afterwards told me; and, from his personal point of view, his judgement was not entirely misguided. It was wrong for my education, wrong for my peace of mind, and had a disastrous effect on my standards of sobriety and solvency. I abused my freedom; but to find myself free seemed a wonderfully stimulating experience. Oxford was rich in oddly contrasted characters; and the most gifted were sometimes the least promising. Who would have thought that the carefree Evelyn Waugh was destined to become one of the finest novelists of his literary generation? At Oxford he made no special mark. The member of an obscure college, he had a group of devoted friends, including his fatherly admirer Harold Acton; but he showed none of the conservative social bias that he would develop during early middle age. He belonged neither to the Côté de Guermantes nor to any High-Bohemian clique. His tastes were simple; ‘my absurdities’, he writes in A Little Learning, ‘were those of exuberance and naivety, not of spurious sophistication’. He wished ‘to do everything and know everyone, not with any ambition to insinuate myself into fashionable London or make influential friends...’
Wisely, he refrained from frequenting the rich; and his only patrician friends were the amiable Lord Clonmore, a lively but unusually well-connected attendant at the Hypocrites, Hugh Lygon — the ‘original’, if his literary personages can be said to have had originals, of Sebastian Flyte, the sweet-tempered and sympathetic young man he drew in Brideshead Revisited — and Hugh’s monumental brother Lord Elmley. As a rule, he preferred bohemian misfits; and among his closest associates was the eccentric vagrant Terence Greenidge, who, among his bizarre habits, had a passion for purloining other people’s small possessions, ink-pots, nail-scissors, and hair brushes, and accumulating scraps of dirty paper, which he stuffed into his coat-pockets, preparatory to scattering them on Evelyn’s carpet — a whim his good-natured friend did not discourage.
Evelyn’s rooms in Hertford were then pleasantly spacious and decoratively furnished, with Lovat Fraser prints and Nonesuch editions of the English classics. Later, a dramatic change occurred. Finding himself into severe financial straits, he sold off all his most valuable possessions at a boisterous luncheon-party (where I bought his Nonesuch Donne), abandoned his former lodgings and retreated to the smallest and dingiest rooms that the college bursar could provide. He thereupon exchanged his dandyism for a truculent bohemianism, took to drinking beer in dusky riverside pubs, and after dark roamed the streets and quadrangles, carrying a heavy stick and venting his personal likes or dislikes in Bacchic chants and objurgations. He especially disliked the Dean of my own college — ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, who kept a modest intellectual salon above the St Giles’s college-gate. Curly-headed, wrinkled and rosy-cheeked, ‘Sligger’ was fond of entertaining handsome youths, particularly if they displayed some intellectual promise, and had thus acquired a popular reputation that, I believe, was largely undeserved. By night, should Evelyn pass through Balliol, poor Sligger’s vices often excited him to ribald gaiety; and ‘The Dean of Balliol sleeps with men! — the Dean of Balliol sleeps with men!!’ he would assure the college in a voice of thunder [to the tune of “Here We Go Gathering Nuts in May”].
As a rule, however, though from the window of my room he once hurled an empty champagne bottle at an inoffensive passer-by — an exploit that cost me a heavy fine — he was an amiable and notably generous companion. Not until he had left Oxford did he begin to assume the mask that afterwards grew so forbidding; and then, while the outlines of his character hardened, his talents simultaneously materialized. When I knew him best, it did not strike me that he showed very much creative promise; his drawings and woodcuts were unremarkable; and he wrote nothing I can now remember. Cyril Connolly, on the other hand [That’s enough Connolly. Ed.]
Very different was his [CC’s] Etonian contemporary, the ultra-fashionable Brian Howard, whom I met about the same time, and who, having made me some preliminary advances — he knew that I had published a book of poems; and he professed a deep regard for art and literature — had almost immediately dropped me as beneath his notice. Thereafter I watched his career from a distance; and an extraordinary spectacle it was. [See Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure, edited by Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster, 1968 (republished in 2006).] Although at school Brian had been an aesthete, and with Harold Acton had founded and edited a little magazine they called The Eton Candle, at Oxford he joined the Guermantes set, among whom he performed the part of elegantiae arbiter. His attitude towards his aristocratic friends was that of Petronius towards the young Nero, or of Beau Brummell towards the future Prince Regent. If Brian dearly loved a lord, he also greatly enjoyed tormenting one. Confronting a good-natured young peer, he would put him smartly through his paces: ‘Your waistcoat, my dear Harry! What do you mean by wearing it?’ ‘Oh, I say, Brian,’ the victim would protest, ‘I think it’s rather a good waistcoat.’ ‘Good, indeed! It makes you look, my dear, like some ridiculous old bumble-bee. Go away and take it off at once!’ Not only did he lecture his friends on the subject of his clothes, and order them to follow his example and have their racing-colours designed by Charvet, but he generally supervised their education and, to complete the process, at times would fall in love with them — a tribute they accepted just as amiably as his frequent gibes and insults.
Evelyn loathed Brian, and afterwards took several hints from his character when he created the personage of ‘Anthony Blanche’; but in his autobiographical narrative he concedes that his old enemy possessed a certain curious fascination — ‘a kind of ferocity of elegance that belonged to the romantic era of a century before our own’. Besides resembling Brummell, whose insolent aplomb he matched, Brian had also many of the traits of the youthful Benjamin Disraeli. Through his father he had inherited Jewish blood; hence his acute profile, his pallid fine-drawn skin and his large, long-lashed, heavy-lidded eyes. Brian’s mask was supremely self-assured; yet everything about him was a trifle suspect, even his patrician English surname. His father, a successful art-dealer, was said to have been christened Francis Harrison Gassaway, but during his youth had apparently adopted a more impressive patronymic. Brian, asked to identify himself by an Oxford proctor or his ‘bulldog’, always rolled it out triumphantly. ‘My name,’ he would announce, ‘is Brian — Christian — de Claiborne — Howard’, in the tone of the Baron de Charlus informing M. Verdurin of the various titles that he bore. Did it perhaps afford him an odd amusement to sail so boldly under false colours?
It was his ambitious American mother who had encouraged his social progress; and, during her sad old age, she would watch him decline into bohemian obscurity. Unlike the Prince Regent, his aristocratic friends did not summarily discard their Brummell; but, once they had gone down and assumed their appointed stations in life, they tended to outgrow his charm; while, at house-parties, their more conventional parents found him an alarmingly exotic guest. I myself happened to witness the occasion when a decisive break occurred. Once we had both left Oxford, he lowered his social standards, and we had renewed our previous friendship. He had invited me to supper at the Eiffel Tower; and, by way of filling a gap in our conversation, I said that I noticed a favourite Guermantes friend had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday with appropriate pomp and splendour. On Brian the effect was violent; and he scarcely troubled to conceal his feelings. ‘But I was not asked! Are you perfectly sure you’re right?’ And waiters were sent hurrying around the streets until they had collected a whole sheaf of papers, which he settled down to pore through. At this moment, I think, he renounced the upper classes, and became an impassioned, though slightly unorthodox supporter of the anti-fascist Left Wing.
Brian had a genuinely demonic nature; during his restless later life, he seems to have been driven by a host of furies, and wandered in search of his own salvation to and fro across Europe, always accompanied by some solid bewildered youth whom he loved and spoiled and often ill-treated, and who (except for the last, killed by a disastrous mishap, which precipitated Brian’s suicide) eventually eluded him. Much more peaceful were the last days of another Oxford dandy. Alfred Duggan lived on my staircase at Balliol, where he occupied the first floor. He was very rich, the son by her earlier marriage of the splendidly opulent Lady Curzon, and thus the stepson of the famous Lord Curzon, then the Chancellor of the University. Alfred enjoyed a privileged position; and he made the most of it. While Brian Howard suggested an early-nineteenth-century exquisite, Alfred was the Edwardian ‘heavy swell’. At Oxford he kept a string of hunters; and every night, wearing full evening dress, he would journey in a hired motor-car to a London night-club, the nefarious 43, and spend the next few hours drinking and talking and ‘having a woman’ — an essential part of the ceremony — before he travelled back again. Once he returned, he was obliged to scale the façade and struggle through his first-floor window. The bribes he paid his scout, he told me, ran into several hundred pounds a year; and Thompson, also my attendant, a small, weak-looking, white-faced drudge, grew increasingly demoralized, and produced — much against his will, he assured me — an enormous family of children, which made it impossible for him to refuse a five-pound note.
Drunk or sober, Alfred was always polite and impassive; and his starched shirt-front, with its gleaming pearl studs, at the end of the most tumultuous evening seldom showed a dent or crease. On his thick neck he carried the fine head of a beak-nosed Roman emperor; and despite our immense dissimilarity, I found his conversation entertaining. That he had an excellent mind he revealed in later life, when he lost his fortune, became a Catholic believer and made his name as a distinguished historical novelist. At Oxford, he said, he had found that there was no need to write a weekly essay for his tutor, but would hold up a blank sheet and rapidly improvise half a dozen learned paragraphs. Meanwhile, he did not regard his rakish behaviour as exceptionally adventurous; he merely did what might be expected of a self-respecting English gentleman. A gentleman regularly attended a night-club, had a woman, and drank a bottle of champagne, just as he rode to hounds and, if he attended a ball, wore a pair of white kid gloves. Long afterwards I saw him at a party given in honour of his niece’s wedding. Time had altered him; he looked weary and stout and sober; but the hand he extended, I saw, was still beautifully gloved, and he had preserved his calm Edwardian dignity. ...
Ours was a womanless Oxford. The Guermantes would occasionally enliven their rooms by importing a small flurry of attractive débutantes; but few of us had woman friends; and my affectionate, though innocent association with a group of lively girls at Somerville was considered both perverse and vulgar. The part of Oxford society I knew had strongly homosexual leanings; ‘a romantic interest in our own sex,’ writes Cyril Connolly, ‘not necessarily carried as far as physical experiment, was the intellectual fashion’. Many of my contemporaries, who followed the fashion at Oxford, soon discarded it on entering the adult world; but, meanwhile, they were inclined to adopt the mores of an Hellenic city-state. Unable to share their affections myself — I had received no previous indoctrination at an English public school — I observed them from afar, while Platon paid his court to Agathon, and Socrates and Alcibiades strolled arm-in-arm. ... Our literary and artistic tastes, however, had a fairly wide range. We venerated The Waste Land, which had appeared in 1922 — Harold Acton once recited the whole poem at a Conservative Oxford garden-party — read the novels of André Gide, particularly L’Immoraliste, and bought copies, and carefully cut the pages of Du Côté de chez Swann and the volumes that succeeded it. Paul Valéry’s poems I began to appreciate with the help of Cyril Connolly; and, on a lower level, we were much attracted by Jean Cocteau’s sparkling modish talents. Among us we had one or two scholarly musicologists, such as Kenneth Clark and Edward Sackville-West, who had acquired splendid gramophones and fine collections of records. But my musical education, I am obliged to confess, never properly got under way — my ear has always been deficient; and the tune that comes back to me most clearly is a popular piece of light music, George Gershwin’s haunting Rhapsody in Blue. On summer days, its poignant nostalgic rhythm would float out through the open windows of many a sleepy Oxford college. (ch. iii, pp. 112-27 passim)