Just like a young writer
Between the wars.
WILLIAM PLOMER, “Father and Son: 1939”
THE VILE BODIES of the 1920s were pioneers of a contemporary art of attracting fame by being infamous, acquiring social status by appearing to mock it, altogether transforming unconventionality into convention. Like others in this London set, Alan was sure that he could make his way abusing privilege as much as he liked and never have to pay a price. A slim young man, he had good looks and an appealing manner that made friends and got him invited wherever he wanted. A slightly odd feature was that in an age before orthodentistry both his canine teeth stuck out slightly, adding a touch of vulnerability to his smile. At that stage he had no money, and put a great deal of his natural talents into getting in with the right people.
Homosexuality was Alan’s early passport to social and literary success, and I used to wonder to what extent, if any, it had been formed by his mother’s possessiveness, her wildly over-the-top praise for everything he did, and in contrast his father’s withholding of emotion. At a time when homosexuality was criminalized, Vere and Harry had received enough information from Alan himself to know that the way he was behaving was not a matter of style but part of his self-discovery. Poppets indeed! Their second son, Adrian, Din or Gruffy to his parents and to Alan, was brought up almost as though he were an invalid. Sent to preparatory school and then Eton, he wrote letters home almost daily in an unmistakable spirit of dependency. As an adult he was a friend of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and had been present at parties with boy scouts and RAF servicemen in the beach house at Beaulieu, which led to scandal and prison sentences for Lord Montagu and a friend of his. In the manner of Oscar Wilde, Adrian ran away to France to lie low for a while. Unworldly as Harry and Vere were in some respects, they can hardly have helped drawing obvious conclusions from the conduct of their two sons. It stretches credulity to breaking point to suppose that they never asked themselves whether responsibility for the sexuality of their two sons lay with them or in the genes.
After Evan Morgan in pre-Oxford days, another of Alan’s lovers was Harold Nicolson. According to his biographer James Lees-Milne, Nicolson was only attracted by younger intellectual men of his own class, and he furthermore “believed that homosexuality should be a jolly vice, and not taken too seriously.” Nicolson is quoted saying of Alan, “I like him more than I care to think.” He was the first to put about the word that Alan was the new literary star in London, and a masterpiece, probably in the form of a travel book, could be expected from him. The book should be such, Nicolson suggested, that a suitable title would be “An Exhibitionist in Asia.”
In the south of France in the summer of 1929 Somerset Maugham was next to take him up, inviting him to the Villa Mauresque. On boating trips and parties around the swimming pool there were up to a dozen naked young men. On 24 March 1930 Alan was writing with more introspection than jauntiness: “My atmosphere is lunching with John Banting and Brian [Howard] and Eddy Sackville-West in Charlotte Street, or spending the weekend with Maurice Bowra at Oxford, or staying with Hamish [St. Clair Erskine] at Sussex. Other things I hate … except that I want success, tremendous success and lots of money.” (Then a young Oxford don, Bowra was already well on the way to becoming what might be called the general secretary of the Hominform, collating and spreading gossip to the like-minded.) Alan again:
When I am with Sandy [Baird] or Brian or Eddy I am a quite different person. Instead of being a young, brilliantly promising poet, a sort of solitary yet kind creature, I become a very shy, rather ineffectual eccentric, a person trying to attract attention by wit and by ballet movements, by light colours and lithe motions. I become rather old, rather silly and inarticulate, a tangle of inferiority. That kind of collapse is only mitigated [by people] who take me gratis as a first-rate, scintillating character, a genius, a handsome wit.
Robert Pratt-Barlow, known as Bobby, was the unlikely individual who more than anyone else established Alan. Born in 1885, he was in many ways a representative late Victorian. Outwardly he was correct to the point of stuffiness, as when he once refused to respond to someone in a hotel paging a telephone call for Mr Barlow: “My name is Pratt-Barlow.” He looked like Harold Nicolson, that is to say a stocky figure whose cheeks were pink and moustache whitish. Through his family’s interest in John Dickinson, the paper manufacturers, he had inherited a fortune. One friend was D. H. Lawrence, and the collection of his letters edited by Aldous Huxley ends with one to Bobby.
No sort of intellectual, he divided his time between living in Taormina in Sicily and going on extended travels. Quite often he seems unobservant. For instance, writing from Hamburg in August 1930, by which time Hitler and the Nazis were only some thirty months from taking power, all he had to say was that Germans “make the best use of the open air [and] know how to dress properly. They are healthy, unhypocritical and constructive…. What a difference between now and before the war.”
A Coldstreamer in the First War, Bobby had become a family friend through Harry and Guy and Alan Dawnay, brother officers. When the latter committed suicide in 1938, Bobby wrote to Vere: “I loved him more than anyone I have ever known, and for all that time I have always wondered why…. When he decided to get married, I thought the bottom of my life had fallen out, so conceited was I, I imagined that no one understood him like I did.” He repeated himself to Alan, first saying, “You have certainly done wonders for me,” and going on, “As for Uncle Alan why I loved him so I don’t know. From the first moment I saw him from another table in Magdalen Hall, I knew something of a most remarkable kind had entered my life.”
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