the stops out …
There Bignose plays the organ
And the pansies all sing flat …
In Alan’s old age, the university and the college used to appeal to him for donations as though he were the loyal alumnus that he made sure not to be.
He didn’t care for anyone or anything that made demands on him. At the end of February 1928 he told his parents, “All is exceedingly well between me and the Dean. The authorities are easily pacified, being by nature loving and utterly obtuse and before long I shall be President of the Junior Common Room and sink into an unparalleled depth of academic superiority. Seriously, don’t worry.” What he had sunk into was debt. Here was the first instance of an attitude that was to shape his life, that he could be as extravagant as he liked because somebody was bound to turn up and pay the bills. He knew it of himself of course. “If one can’t afford something the moment one wants it,” he wrote in his diary just three years later, on 24 May 1930, “one must just arrange for someone else to pay for it.” This time, Harry came to Magdalen and after a meeting with the college authorities signed the cheques without apparently demurring. Immediately afterwards, by way of imposing discipline, the Dean of the college gated him, meaning that he had to be in by nine o’clock at night. On that very same evening, Alan went in a white tie to a ball, was caught returning, and rusticated, that is sent down for the rest of the term, rather an indulgent punishment in the circumstances.
According to Alan, his father had no idea how to cope with him at this point, and could only say that there could be no question of returning to Magdalen. Alan was unemployable but could no longer live off his father, he could never marry, he had no future. But that same afternoon, Alan continues, fortuitously a friend contrived a meeting with J.C. Squire, editor since its inception in November 1919 of the The London Mercury, a monthly for those whose literary taste stopped well short of T. S. Eliot and The Criterion. Squire apparently had heard of the prizes Alan had won at Eton and offered him a job as assistant editor, to start the following Monday.
Harry and Vere and friends of theirs had long been sending out Alan’s poems in the hope of attracting attention. “Dear darling” Evan Tredegar was a writer whom they knew and they had introduced Alan to him. Writing on Times notepaper with the date 5 January 1926, that is to say well before Alan’s first term at Oxford, an acquaintance by the name of R. I. H. Shaw says that he has been talking about Alan to Bruce Richmond, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and also to A. P. Herbert. The latter thought that an approach to J.C. Squire was “excellent advise.” To meet him, “you have only to drop me a line.” Sure enough, ten days later Alan had an appointment at 4:30 in the afternoon with Squire.
Squire and The London Mercury, then, had been hovering in the wings for some time before Alan’s misadventure. A few weeks after his father had made it clear that rustication meant being sent down from Oxford, Alan returned to France. Cast in exaggerated self-congratulatory mode, a series of letters home begins on 5 June and gives no clue that there might have been family tension about his prospects. On entering France, trouble with the customs over his typewriter had left him “mentally a broken fountain with no drop of water” but this passed soon enough. He rejoiced to be starting his novel. “Harvest And The Ruin” was the title of one of the poems he posted to his parents, jotting on the typescript, “The thing is very fine.” On his behalf, a friend had approached J. L. Garvin, influential editor of The Observer, and Alan was critical for fear this might be seen as an embarrassing put-up job. Another contact led to Blanche Knopf, an eager talent-spotter and founder with her husband Alfred of the New York firm that still has their name. She asked to see what Alan had done so far, which he thought “impertinent,” even “damnable insolence!”
Three weeks later, on June 26, he sent a postcard from Montbazon in Touraine. “As for Sir Herbert Warren, I consider that the privileges of dotage can be carried too far. Boo to him!” Uncle Guy Dawnay had taken sides with Alan because, in Alan’s words, “He knows a genius when he sees one. I have just finished the first section of my novel…. I have written a very remarkable poem. I am a Clever Young Man!” In the margin a caricature of himself thumbing his nose at Sir Herbert illustrated his feeling. By July 5 he was informing them that he had written 1,617 words more of the novel. “Bless you, poppets,” he addressed them, ending with spoof signatures, C. B. Cochrane, A.A. Milne, Noël Coward, and Queen Mary.
“For Ever Grey” is the title of another poem sent home on August 11. The opening lines are:
Nothing is sad this morning, nothing grieves,
The earth is slow and sweet, the quick feet of a hare go gladly.
Alan patted himself on the back, “Shelley pales before this slight but distinguished piece. Observe the brilliant technique, the clever internal rhymes.” Or again in August, “My famous book has already begun – some 2,000 words are written – magnificent stuff.” The weather was so hot that month that he bought “a straw hat 70 foot round.” Asking him to begin in the office on the 23rd of the month, Squire put paid to the Oxford episode. Unidentifiable, the famous novel remained one among other false starts but the aspiration endured. Reading War and Peace a few years later, he noted in his diary, “Such is my vanity that I long to tackle an enormous novel myself.” He was capable of analyzing what was holding him back.
Whenever I write about people they are always quite inhuman – far more intelligent than human beings and very eccentric. I don’t know what to do about this. Also I can’t write “hearty” conversation. All my characters speak in a pert, queenly way because that is the language of the people I have always lived among…. I am so shy of squalor and noisy crowds and I hate the poor so much that I am not sure that I could [just set out at random]. Yet I don’t see how otherwise to get in touch with ordinary people. Certainly it is not easy to do it in my usual procession from Ritz to Ritz. How passionately I long to be stupid and a stockbroker.
“Lately,” reads an entry in his diary dated January 1932,
the great thing has been my sailor, Tommy, lately a midshipman on the Devonshire and now on leave. Sailor and I had planned a weekend in Glastonbury (why?) but he had influenza at the last moment…. I lied to my family that I was going to Windsor, took rooms in Laurier’s Hotel and he came. Oh, what furtive pleasure! What laughter! … actually my emotions about the Sailor were piercing: I liked the queer heartiness, the shyness, attempts at intellectuality, violence, childishness.
At the same time he had a vital insight.
The reason no homosexual affair can ever be translated into art is that there is no common ground of homosexual, as of heterosexual, experience. Homosexual affairs are entirely personal; without knowing the actual lover, without being one of them, no translation into art could mean anything.
If there is a solution to this impasse, Alan never found it.
In the course of a lunch many years later still, Mitzi suddenly turned on him, saying that she had never believed that he had written a word of the great novel he was always talking about. It was virtually completed, Alan protested, and he summarized there and then a Kafkaesque plot he had devised around the life of Geoffrey Madan, a brilliant eccentric who had devoted himself to writing aphorisms. I was completely convinced that he could not have improvised so circumstantially on the spur of the moment, but Mitzi was right.
SEVEN
Money! Money! Money!
With weekends in the country and holidays in France,
With promiscuous habits,
