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"Thomas Edward Neil Driberg ( 1905-1976 ) was, successively, at school
with Evelyn Waugh, at Oxford with W.H. Auden, compiler of the “William Hickey”
gossip-column for the Daily Express, an Independent – later Labour – MP for the
remote Essex constituency of Maldon ( 1942-1955 ), Chairman of the Labour
Party, Labour MP for the east London seat of Barking ( 1959 – 1974 ) and, at
the end very end of his life, ennobled as Baron Bradwell Juxta Mare. He was
also a high-churchman, a socialite, an associate with the Kray twins, a friend
of Mick Jagger – whom he encouraged to stand for Parliament – a promiscuous
homosexual and a snob, who after surveying the guests at the party given to
celebrate his seventieth birthday remarked to a friend, ‘One Duke, two Dukes’
daughters , sundry lords, a bishop, a poet laureate – not bad for an old
left-wing MP, eh ?"
D.J. Taylor in The New Book of Snobs / 2016
"A journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a
gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist, a homosexual", the first time,
according to journalist Christopher Hitchens, that the newspaper had ever
defined a public figure specifically as homosexual.
Nevertheless, Driberg's incomplete memoir Ruling Passions,
when published in June 1977, was a shock to the public and to some of his
erstwhile associates, despite advance hints of the book's scandalous content.
Driberg's candid revelations of his "cottaging" and his descriptions
of casual oral sex were called by one commentator "the biggest outpouring
of literary dung a public figure has ever flung into print." The comedians
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore depicted Driberg as a sexual predator, wearing
"fine fishnet stockings" and cavorting with a rent boy, in a sketch,
"Back of the Cab", which they recorded in 1977.
More vituperation followed when Pincher's allegations of
Driberg's links with the Russian secret service were published in 1981; Pincher
christened him "Lord of the Spies". However, Foot dismissed these
accusations as typical of the "fantasies of the secret service world that
seem to have taken possession of Pincher's mind". Foot added that Driberg
"had always been much too ready to look forgivingly on Communist misdeeds,
but this attitude was combined with an absolutely genuine devotion to the cause
of peace".
In his 2004 biographical sketch Davenport-Hines describes
Driberg as "a sincere if eccentric Christian socialist who detested racism
and colonialism", who at the same time "could be pompous, mannered,
wayward, self-indulgent, ungrateful, bullying and indiscreet". As to the
apparent contradiction between sincere Christianity and promiscuous
homosexuality, Wheen argues that "there had been a recognisable male
homosexual subculture in the Anglo-Catholic movement since the late nineteenth
century". This theme is explored in a paper by David Hilliard of Flinders
University, who maintains that "the [19th century] conflict between
Protestantism and Anglo-Catholicism within the Church of England was ...
regularly depicted by Protestant propagandists as a struggle between masculine
and feminine styles of religion".
In this atmosphere, Pincher published Their Trade is
Treachery (1981), in which he maintained that Driberg had been recruited by MI5
to spy on the Communist Party while still a schoolboy at Lancing, and that he
was later "in the KGB's pay as a double agent". Other writers added
further details; the former British Intelligence officer Peter Wright, in
Spycatcher (1987), alleged that Driberg had been "providing material to a
Czech controller for money". The former Kremlin archivist Vasili Mitrokhin
asserted that the Soviets had blackmailed Driberg into working for the KGB by
threatening to expose his homosexuality. In a 2016 biography of Burgess, Andrew
Lownie reports that Driberg was "caught in a KGB sting operation" at
a Moscow urinal, and as a result agreed to work as a Soviet agent.
The weight of information, and its constant repetition, made
an apparently strong case against Driberg, and former friends such as Mervyn
Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark, became convinced that he had indeed
betrayed his country. Other friends and colleagues were more sceptical.
According to ex-Labour MP Reginald Paget, not even the security services were
"lunatic enough to recruit a man like Driberg", who was famously
indiscreet and could never keep a secret. Mitrokhin's "blackmail"
story is questioned by historian Jeff Sharlet, on the grounds that by the 1950s
and 1960s Driberg's homosexuality had been an open secret in British political
circles for many years; he frequently boasted of his "rough trade"
conquests to his colleagues. The journalist A. N. Wilson quotes Churchill
commenting years before that "Tom Driberg is the sort of person who gives
sodomy a bad name".
Pincher, however, argued that as homosexual acts were
criminal offences in Britain until 1967, Driberg was still vulnerable to
blackmail, although he also claimed that the MI5 connection secured Driberg a
lifelong immunity from prosecution. Driberg's colleague Michael Foot denied
Pincher's claim that Margaret Thatcher, when prime minister, had made a secret
agreement with Foot to protect Driberg if Foot, in turn, would remain silent
about the supposed treachery of Roger Hollis, another of Pincher's recently
dead targets.
Wheen asserts that Pincher was not an objective commentator;
the Labour Party, and its supposed infiltration by Communist agents, had been
his target over many years.[130] Pincher's verdict on Driberg is that "in
journalism, in politics and intelligence ... eventually he betrayed
everybody".Wheen argues that Driberg's greatest vice was indiscretion; he
gossiped about everyone, but "indiscretion is not synonymous with
betrayal". Driberg's Labour Party colleague, Leo Abse, offers a more
complex explanation: Driberg was an adventurer who loved taking risks and
played many parts. "Driberg could have played the part of the spy with
superb skill, and if the officers of MI5 were indeed inept enough to have
attempted to recruit him, then, in turn, Tom Driberg would have gained special
pleasure in fooling and betraying them".
REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN
By - The Washington Times - Sunday, September 1, 2002
Of all the odd ducks ever to grace the benches of the
British House of Lords in the 20th century, there can have been fewer
characters more genuinely strange than Baron Bradwell of Bradwell juxta Mare in
the County of Essex. But his perch upon the red benches at Westminster was only
the last act in a life filled with improbabilities. Better known throughout his
seven decades on this earth as Tom Driberg, he was a mass of contradictions.
Longtime member of the Communist Party of Great Britain,
which he joined in his teens, he was also a passionate adherent of the most
High Church form of the Church of England. Neither of these convictions
interfered with his being a high-paid gossip columnist for the Express
Newspapers, whose proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, a right-wing Tory, was also the
subject of a rather problematic biography by this longtime employee.
A Labor Party MP from the early 1940s to the mid 1970s, he
was in Parliament as in his journalism as much a scourge of Labour as of
Conservative governments. The most promiscuous and predatory of homosexuals
(but no pederast), he was married for the quarter-century before his death, an
alliance detailed in this biography as one of the oddest and unhappiest marital
unions ever.
All this and there is more obviously makes for a rich
subject for biography and Francis Wheen, author of a recent life of Karl Marx,
has made, if not the most of this embarras de richesse, at the very least a pretty
decent job of it. After a rocky start with a polemical, opinionated, even
bitchy, introduction, which might put some readers off, the text of the
biography itself is lively, often judicious, and generally sound. Best of all,
it lets Driberg speak for himself as much as possible and his distinctive voice
in journalism, political speeches, and letters adds an extra piquancy to an
already tasty dish.
Mr. Wheen begins his narrative with Driberg's death in a
London taxicab in August 1976. Driberg had partially completed the
autobiography which would appear the next year entitled "Ruling
Passions." Although it was to date one of the frankest homosexual
biographies and created quite a stir, not least among those who feared being
named (sexually) in it, there might have been still more shocks had Driberg
lived a little longer. Ever "the soul of indiscretion," the erstwhile
author of the William Hickey column in the Daily Express was truly a
world-class gossip. The trouble is, that he was also one of the greatest
fantasists ever.
Biographer Wheen does an admirable job of trying to sort the
wheat from the chaff in Driberg's tall and lowlife tales, but is,
understandably, not always able to come to a definitive conclusion.Those who
love rooting around in muddy waters will find the whole process vastly
enjoyable; those who find it distasteful will probably not want to read a book
about Driberg anyway.
This is not to say that "The Soul of Indiscretion"
is merely a frivolous, gossipy book nor that the life it chronicles was without
serious significance. Mr. Wheen is clearly charmed by his subject, occasionally
even delighted by him, but he is also sometimes exasperated by him. On the
whole, he is a realistic judge of where Driberg stood politically. But on the
vexed issue of whether Driberg was actually a Soviet agent, Mr. Wheen may let
his subject off too easily.
Certainly, Driberg made no secret of his pro-Soviet
sympathies, but after all sometimes the best place to hide something is in
plain sight. In the end, Mr. Wheen thinks Driberg was too unreliable and
untrustworthy to have been a likely candidate to attract the attentions of the
KGB. (What about Guy Burgess, one is tempted to ask surely more endowed with
every bad quality possessed by Driberg?)
Yet certainly Driberg was capable of the kind of surprises
that would not have gone down well with the Soviets: for instance, his
sympathetic, firsthand reporting from Korea of the British troops fighting
there. (Indeed, his staunch support of the Anglo-American position in the
Korean War stands in stark contrast to Mr. Wheen's perfervid and hostile
account of this UN-backed conflict.) Since this book was originally published,
new accusations more or less credible have surfaced about Driberg's spying
activities. Would they have changed this biographer's judgment? It's hard to
know, but I suspect not.
The chapter on Driberg's marriage to the equally devout
socialist Mrs. Ena Mary Binfield in 1951 is a fascinating study of Driberg at
his most contradictory, puzzling, and unaccountable.
He must certainly have been one of the worst husbands on
record: neglectful, nasty, vituperative and totally unwilling to give of
himself in any way, including sexually. Indeed, he even managed to portray
himself as a victim when he excoriated her for attempting to "pounce"
on him during their honeymoon. Did he marry merely to provide a chateleine for
his country house? Perhaps he was attempting to cloak his disreputable private
life in a measure of respectability for political advantage.
Mr. Wheen's exploration of his motives and conduct as a
husband are a model of judicious deduction from the sources available. Ena's
letters, reproduced at length here, must induce sympathy even in the most
stony-hearted of readers and Mr. Wheen has brought to life a woman known
previously only as the butt of a cruel joke by Winston Churchill, who famously
quipped, when told of Driberg's marriage to a less than beautiful lady:
"Well, you know what they say, buggers can't be choosers."
Tom Driberg's life is fascinating at least in part because
of the people he knew and Mr. Wheen does an excellent job of acquainting us
with how such varied characters as Lord Mountbatten and Mick Jagger came to
figure in this most unusual of 20th century political lives. Driberg himself
stands out as a most unpleasant man, as unappealing when he is a schoolboy
friend of Evelyn Waugh as when he is a denizen of the National Executive
Committee of the Labour Party.
If he was himself unhappy and his constant self-pity shows
that he clearly was he managed whether in his columns or in person to entertain
most people.
His contributions to political and public life were not
great, but in his private life he definitely had a talent to amuse, something
which he continues to do in the pages of this colorful and fluent biography.
Indeed, he could entertain the most unlikely people, as in the incredibly
obscene crossword puzzles which he produced for the British publication Private
Eye in the last years of his life.
The winner of the 2-pound prize for a particularly
lubricious puzzle in 1972 was a Mrs Rosalind Runcie, wife of the-then Bishop of
St. Albans, later Archbishop of Canterbury in the Thatcher years. There's truly
no end to the surprising circles into which Driberg's life and pen could propel
him.
Martin Rubin is a writer in Pasadena, Calif.
THE SOUL OF INDISCRETION: TOM DRIBERG, POET, PHILANDERER,
LEGISLATOR AND OUTLAW
By Francis Wheen
Police blocked from charging former Labour MP Tom Driberg
with sexually abusing boys, claims Simon Danczuk
MP says new allegations concerning the former party chairman
were made by retired Met Police detective sergeant
Jonathan Owen
Thursday 3 December 2015 20:05
Police suspected that a former Labour party chairman was
sexually abusing teenage boys but were blocked from bringing charges by the
Director of Public Prosecutions, a campaigning MP has claimed.
The openly gay Labour
MP Tom Driberg was a friend of the Krays and a KGB spy
Police suspected that a former Labour party chairman was
sexually abusing teenage boys but were blocked from bringing charges by the
Director of Public Prosecutions, a campaigning MP has claimed.
The new allegations
concern Tom Driberg, a prominent Labour politician in the 1950s and 1960s, and
were made by retired detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, according
to the Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale.
“[Michael Cookson,
the police offficer] alleges that the boys were interviewed and it soon became
clear that they had been abused by Driberg and wanted charges to be brought
against him. So did the police and filed an application to charge to the
Director of Public Prosecutions, Norman Skelhorn,” he added.
Mr Danczuk said the
retired officer, who contacted his office last year, claimed police were
confident an arrest would take place.
“They were clear that
obvious crimes were being committed. But then nothing happened. Eventually, he
said word came back that Skelhorn had ruled out any chance of prosecution and
they were told not to proceed with the case because it was not in the public
interest.
The Rochdale MP
added: “If Cookson’s story is true, I certainly don’t think it’s unique. I’d
heard similar stories from officers trying to investigate Cyril Smith and I’m
sure this type of scenario repeated itself with other important people.”
Sir Norman Skelhorn
also blocked attempts to prosecute Liberal MP Cyril Smith and the Conservative
MP Victor Montagu for the sexual abuse of boys, he claimed.
Mr Driberg started
out as a journalist, founding the William Hickey gossip column in the Daily
Express, before becoming the MP for Maldon in 1942. By 1957 he was chairman of
the Labour Party, a role he stepped down from in 1958. He spent 15 years as MP
for Barking before being made a life peer in 1975.
But the openly gay
politician’s private life saw him repeatedly come under police scrutiny. In
1935 he was acquitted of ‘gross indecency’ with two strangers. And he was
caught with a Norwegian sailor in 1943, but not arrested. His friendship with
the Kray twins led to MI5 keeping a file on him amid allegations that the Krays
would provide ‘rent boys’ for Mr Driberg. And it emerged in 1999 that the
Labour politician, who died in 1976, had also been a KGB spy codenamed Lepage.
”
The retired police officer who made the allegations
regarding Mr Driberg has since died, but Mr Danczuk has written to Alison
Saunders, Director of Public Prosecutions, demanding she disclose any documents
relating to the former Labour Party chair, who died in 1976. Speaking to The
Independent, Mr Danczuk said: “Perhaps some of the victims are still out there,
and perhaps it would help them to know if he was suspected of committing these
types of crimes.”
In a statement, a
spokesperson for the Crown Prosecution Service said: “We can confirm we have
received the letter.
Everybody in the house
BY
FRANCES WILSON
Frances Wilson is an author, biographer and critic, whose
works include The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth.Her most recent book is How to
Survive the Titanic, or the Sinking of J Bruce Ismay.She reviews for the TLS,
the Telegraph and the New Statesman.
Not all the "Bright Young People"
who dominated the celebrity pages in the latter half of the 1920s had
brightness or youth on their side, at least not at the same time. And while
each was clearly a person, or at least a "has-been", as the notorious
Stephen Tennant boasted, identification with the rest of humanity was not one
of the group's more memorable characteristics. The left- wing gossip columnist
Tom Driberg was unusual in being bright, young, and supposedly on the side of
the people, but as Lord Beaverbrook pointed out, Driberg's communism was of the
cafe variety - to which the bright young reporter brightly retorted:
"Clear thinking need not imply poor feeding." Another well-fed clear
think er was Robert Byron, who wrote erudite tomes about Byzantium at the same
time as cavorting at parties in the guise of a drunken Queen Victoria.
Driberg and Byron
were part of a clique so select you could squash them all into the back of a
Rolls. The selection process was, however, surprisingly democratic. Bright
young people could be middle-class like Cecil Beaton, driven like Harold Acton,
directionless like Brian Howard, aristocratic like Elizabeth Ponsonby, trade
like Bryan Guinness, fascist like Oswald Mosley, Jewish like Tom Driberg, and
even heterosexual, like Evelyn Waugh. What drew them all together was what
Patrick Balfour, another insider, recognised as "impulse", to which
can be added a restlessness that today we might call melancholia.
While millions of unemployed marched the streets, "High
Bohemia", as the press called this group, were playing their fiddles.
Bored with being themselves, they hosted impersonation parties, hermaphrodite
parties, sailor parties, Episcopal parties, Mozart parties, second childhood
parties, White parties, Black and Red parties, and the party with which D J
Taylor begins his fascinating study of hedonism, futility, and fracture, the
Bath and Bottle party, held in a municipal swimming pool and regarded as the
social event of the season. Brenda Dean Paul, one of the bright young people
who was still there in the morning, recalled the night in elegiac terms,
"turgid water and thousands of bobbing champagne corks, discarded bathing
caps and petal-strewn tiles as the sun came out and filtered through the giant
skylights of St George's Baths, and we wended our way home". Every party
was experienced as the last.
This was an age in
which not only were Brian and Brenda swanky names, but the shadows of war were
such that the brightness of a few party-goers could be blinding. While the
press was obsessed with these celebrities, nothing could match their
self-obsession. When not falling over each other at the same events, they wrote
about themselves continually - and usually very well - in novels, poems, plays,
diaries, newspaper columns and letters. Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, in which he
dramatised the lifestyle of his friends, is Taylor's primary source and he
reads the novel as reportage rather than fiction. But in order to get to the
heart of this "lost generation", Taylor uses the journals and letters
of Arthur and Dolly Ponsonby, who watched their daughter Elizabeth - the Hon
Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies - dissolve into a world of dissipation, and die
of drink before she reached 40.
It is the Ponsonby
archive that provides the emotional heart of Bright Young People, and
transforms it from a superior social history into a complex study of family,
fear and breakdown. The daughter of a Labour peer and a pacifist, Elizabeth was
clever, accomplished, charming, cultured, and with a death-drive so determined
that it overrode all else. Her rage for superficiality left her thoughtful
parents utterly baffled, and examples of their bafflement serve as a Greek
chorus throughout the book. "My daughter has drifted back into the chaos
of extravagance," reads a typical entry in her father's journal; "E's
affairs utterly hopeless", "E draining us as usual and refusing to
find a job", until "the astonishingly lovely face as she lay there dead".
Compared with the tragedy
of Elizabeth Ponsonby's listlessness, Brian Howard's failure to become a writer
is comic relief. Howard, sent up as Johnny Hoop in Vile Bodies and ridiculed by
Cyril Connolly in "Where Engels Fears to Tread", is wonderfully
described by Taylor in a sub-chapter devoted to "The Books Brian Never
Wrote", books with titles such as Splendours and Decorations of Bavaria,
and The Divorce of Heaven and Hell.
Taylor's achievement
is to remind us that there are few periods of recent history more culturally
interesting than the years between the wars. I guarantee that before you have
reached the final page of Bright Young People, you will be searching out everything
ever written by Waugh, Anthony Powell, and Nancy Mitford, and will even have
placed an order for the poetry of Brian Howard.
Frances Wilson's "The Courtesan's Revenge" is
published by Faber & Faber from Mr Danczuk and we will reply in due
course.”
Scoop! The shockingly intimate truth of how Evelyn Waugh's
gay Oxford lover became Brideshead Revisited’s Sebastian
A new biography uncovers the reality behind Brideshead
Revisited
Novel drew upon Evelyn Waugh's bohemian lifestyle at Oxford
University
The biography coincides with the 50th anniversary of Waugh's
death
Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited, by Philip Eade, will be
published on July 7
By PHILIP EADE FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
PUBLISHED: 22:21 GMT, 2 April 2016 | UPDATED: 23:36 GMT, 2
April 2016
Endlessly evocative, Evelyn Waugh's hymn to a vanished age
of aristocracy has delighted and entranced generations.
Now, as the 50th anniversary of Waugh's death approaches, a
powerful new biography uncovers the reality behind Brideshead Revisited - and
the shockingly intimate truth that inspired a masterpiece of nostalgia.
Brideshead Revisited is about ‘very rich, beautiful,
high-born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make
themselves and those are mainly the demons sex and drink which after all are
easy to bear as troubles go nowadays’, Evelyn Waugh wrote to a friend.
Suffused with nostalgia for a disappearing aristocratic way
of life, the novel draws heavily upon Evelyn’s bohemian lifestyle at Oxford
University – far more heavily than many might suspect. Indeed his intense
relationship with a fellow student inspired the most colourful and perhaps most
famous character in the book: the charismatic and unmistakably homosexual Lord
Sebastian Flyte, recognisable to millions through his portrayal on screen by
Anthony Andrews.
Evelyn, who also wrote the 1938 classic Scoop, regarded the
novel, published in 1945, as his ‘magnum opus’ and he revealed more of himself
in it than in any of his previous books. It is still hugely popular today and
the iconic 1981 Granada TV series is regarded as a classic.
Brideshead Revisited begins in 1923 with the narrator
Charles Ryder, a history student at Oxford University, befriending Sebastian,
the son of The Marquis of Marchmain. Sebastian takes Charles to Brideshead, his
magnificent family home, introduces him to his eccentric friends, and the two
young men develop a very close relationship.
Everyone was queer at Oxford in those days
Evelyn himself had gone up to Hertford College, Oxford, on a
history scholarship in January 1922 and quickly set about gathering new
experiences.
He learned to smoke a pipe and to ride a bicycle. He got
drunk for the first time, discovered a zeal for alcohol and soon developed a
reputation for riotous roistering.
By Evelyn’s own account, most of his Oxford friendships were
forged while drunk.
Many of these friendships had a pronounced homosexual
flavour. As John Betjeman later remembered: ‘Everyone was queer at Oxford in
those days!’
Evelyn’s friend Tom Driberg, later a Labour MP, recalled
that he and Evelyn enjoyed ‘some lively and drunken revels – “orgies” were
they?’ – mainly homosexual in character.’
And, in the spring of 1923, the 19-year-old Evelyn took up
with the ‘friend of my heart’, as he described him, a handsome 18-year-old at
Brasenose called Alastair Graham.
Eight months younger than Evelyn, well-born, rich and
dreamy, Alastair became one of the great loves of Evelyn’s early life. As a
muse, he made the most obvious contribution to the character of Sebastian in
Brideshead, which in manuscript twice has ‘Alastair’ in place of ‘Sebastian’.
Alastair was seen by Evelyn’s contemporaries as a catch.
Novelist Anthony Powell remembered him as ‘frightfully good-looking, with
rather Dresden china shepherdess sort of looks… a lot of people were
undoubtedly in love with him’.
Among the queue of admirers was Evelyn’s friend Harold
Acton, the writer and scholar, who gushed in a letter jointly addressed to
Evelyn and Alastair: ‘I had erections to think of you two angels in an
atmosphere salinated with choir boys and sacerdotal sensuality!’
He later described Alastair as a Pre-Raphaelite beauty and
said that he had ‘the same sort of features as Evelyn liked in girls – the
pixie look’.
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When, at the end of the summer term in 1923, Alastair failed
his history exams and was removed from the university by his mother, Evelyn
asked his father if he, too, might be taken away from Oxford and sent to Paris
to live as a bohemian artist. Not surprisingly, his father did not like this
idea.
But though Alastair had left the university, he and Evelyn
remained ‘inseparable’, or, as Evelyn later recalled, ‘if separated, in almost
daily communication’. Alastair ‘continued to haunt Oxford’, driving down
regularly from his home in Warwickshire in his two-seater car, whereupon he and
Evelyn would zoom off into the Oxfordshire countryside.
In advance of one such visit, Alastair wrote a letter
enclosing a photograph of himself naked, posing like some alluring wood nymph
beneath an overhanging rock face, his backside pointing seductively towards the
camera.
In the letter, he wondered ‘will you come and drink with me
somewhere on Saturday? If it is a nice day we might carry some bottles into a
wood or some bucolic place’.
Alastair enclosed a naked picture of himself
Brideshead also drew heavily on Evelyn’s friendship with the
Lygon family at Madresfield in Worcestershire in the 1930s. But while the
disgrace of Lord Beauchamp – who was hounded into exile on account of his
homosexual affairs – provided the idea for Lord Marchmain’s story in the novel,
Alastair Graham remains the most convincing model for Sebastian.
Evelyn had often visited Alastair’s home, Barford House,
near Stratford-upon-Avon, which was presided over by Alastair’s widowed mother
Jessie. Barford is nothing like the size of Brideshead or its television alter
ego, Castle Howard, yet beneath its handsome, peeling, white-stucco facade can
be glimpsed the same gold-coloured stone that Charles Ryder sees on his first
visit to Brideshead.
Its front is embellished with a similar, albeit far less
grand, row of Ionic half-columns; and there is even a dome and lantern on the roof,
though again on a considerably more modest scale than in the book.
Alastair’s mother was a wealthy American. His father, Hugh
Graham, was a bona fide scion of the British landed aristocracy – the younger
son of a baronet and grandson of the 12th Duke of Somerset.
His sisters, Alastair’s aunts, were the Duchess of Montrose,
the Marchioness of Crewe, the Countess of Verulam and Lady Wittenham. It was
while staying at Barford (which he was to do on countless occasions, sometimes
for weeks at a stretch) that Evelyn gained his first meaningful entree into the
upper-class world he eventually came to inhabit.
In his third term, Evelyn moved to rooms on the ground floor
of Hertford’s front quad, which soon became the epicentre of the self-elected
‘Hertford underworld’.
Evelyn and his set of louche friends gathered there most
lunchtimes. Starting with a glass or two of Sandeman’s Brown Bang, a heavy,
glutinous sherry, Evelyn would then go on to beer and would often be completely
sozzled by five o’clock. Not infrequently he would carry on drinking throughout
the evening.
In Brideshead, Charles’s first encounter with Sebastian
recalls an evening when members of the Bullingdon Club came roaring across the
quad, and one of them staggered over to Evelyn’s room and was sick through the
window.
Because of the amount of time he spent with Alastair at
Barford, Evelyn, never the most industrious of students, neglected his studies
and in 1924 was only able to achieve a dispiriting third-class degree.
That autumn, Alastair went to Africa to spend the winter
with his sister in Kenya. In Alastair’s absence, Evelyn continued to visit
Barford, although whenever he went into Leamington with Mrs Graham he felt ‘a
little sad to pass all the public houses where Alastair and I have drunk’.
However, Evelyn and Alastair were together a lot in August
1925 and a resumption of intimacy is hinted at in Evelyn’s record of their
having ‘dined in high-necked jumpers’ at Barford and done ‘much that could not
have been done if Mrs Graham had been here’.
A polo-neck jumper was ‘most convenient for lechery’,
according to Evelyn, ‘because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like
studs and ties’.
Alastair wrote to him after this visit: ‘I feel very lonely
now. But you have made me so happy. Please come back again soon. Write to me a
lot, because I am all by myself, and I want to know what you are doing… My love
to you, Evelyn; I want you back again so much.’
There is a sense here of Alastair beginning to lose his hold
over Evelyn, who appears to have been turning his attention more towards girls
in general.
He had confided to friends that he wanted to find a wife and
was, at this time, fruitlessly pursuing 18-year-old Olivia Plunket Greene, the
sister of an Oxford friend.
He remained close enough to Alastair, however, to invite
himself to accompany him and his mother to Scotland for three weeks in the
summer of 1926. The men then went on to France, where Evelyn reflected: ‘I
think I have seen too much of Alastair lately.’
Alastair took up a diplomatic posting in Athens, as honorary
attaché to the British Minister, Sir Percy Loraine, who was rumoured to have
had an affair with the young Francis Bacon.
When Evelyn visited him that Christmas, Alastair seemed to
be seizing every opportunity to explore his sexuality away from the restrictive
laws of England; as Evelyn recorded, the flat he shared with another diplomat
was ‘usually full of dreadful Dago youths… who sleep with the English colony
for 25 drachmas a night’.
Meanwhile, Olivia continued to reject his advances and, one
day, when the message finally got through to him that she would never sleep
with him, Evelyn took hold of her hand and very deliberately burnt the back of
her wrist with his cigarette.
He carried on seeing Alastair intermittently. He took him
with him when he went to stay with the Longfords in Ireland in the autumn of
1930. Evelyn had been invited by his friend Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford.
As Evelyn cheerfully wrote in the Daily Mail: ‘No one has a
keener appreciation than myself of the high spiritual and moral qualities of
the very rich. I delight in their company whenever I get the chance.’
By this time he had achieved success with his first novel,
Decline And Fall, and had been married to, and separated from, his first wife,
Evelyn Gardner.
Evelyn camped it up when they were together
He was assumed by some of the Longfords’ other guests to
have resumed his love affair with Alastair, a suspicion scarcely allayed by
Evelyn’s tendency to camp it up and put on a high-pitched voice whenever they
were together, which was most of the time.
The following year he went to stay at Barford when he was
trying to start his third novel, Black Mischief, but found it impossible to
work with Alastair around.
‘We just sit about sipping sloe gin all day,’ he complained
to a friend. ‘I am reading all the case histories in Havelock Ellis [a doctor
who studied human sexuality] and frigging too much.’
The last appearance of Evelyn’s name in the Barford
visitors’ book was in 1932, by which time he had stayed there on more than 20
occasions. (He had also, by then, surprised his family and friends by becoming
a Roman Catholic.)
After that Evelyn and Alastair disappeared from each other’s
lives.
Years later, when Alastair’s niece asked him why their
friendship had ended, he replied vaguely: ‘Oh, you know, Evelyn became such a
bore, such a snob.’
Evelyn’s relationship with Alastair had not been his only
dalliance with a man. Richard Pares had been his ‘first homosexual love’, he
later told Nancy Mitford.
Pares had come up to Oxford from Winchester the term before
him. He was widely admired among Oxford undergraduates for his bright blue
eyes, flax-gold hair and, as historian A. L. Rowse, an Oxford contemporary,
wistfully remembered, ‘red kissable lips’.
Pares and Evelyn were, wrote Rowse, ‘inseparable in Evelyn’s
first year’.
In 1936, Alastair bought a house just outside New Quay, a
remote fishing port on the west coast of Wales. Occasionally he threw parties
for his neighbours, who at one time included Dylan Thomas. The poet used
Alastair as the model for Lord Cut-Glass in Under Milk Wood.
Neither Thomas nor anyone else in New Quay appeared to know
that Alastair had also been the model for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead.
He remained more or less incognito in this respect until the
late 1970s, when he was encountered in a local pub by Duncan Fallowell, as the
writer recounted in his book How To Disappear.
Not knowing who he was, Fallowell chanced to fall into
conversation with him about Evelyn Waugh, about how ‘well-endowed’ he was as a
writer, at which point the stranger at the bar suddenly interjected: ‘He wasn’t
well-endowed in the other sense, I’m afraid.’
It was never established whether he was referring to
Evelyn’s private parts or to the fact that he never had any money and Alastair
was always having to bail him out.
When the television series Brideshead Revisited aired,
Fallowell returned to New Quay, knocked on Alastair’s door and asked him out to
dinner. Alastair replied that he’d had a stroke and was ‘not fit to be seen!’
He could not remember anything, he said, it was all so long
ago, then remarked, somewhat cryptically: ‘He was older than me, you know.’
Alastair Graham died the next year, taking his secrets with
him.
© Philip Eade 2016
Extracted from Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited, by Philip
Eade, which is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, priced £30, on July 7.
To pre-order a copy at the offer price of £24 (a 20 per cent discount) until
April 17, call 0844 571 0640 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk. P&P is free.
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