Mad World (7 page)

Goodhart was a classics teacher whose real love was music. The boys in his house were encouraged to sing a hymn at house prayers every night. Goodhart accompanied them on the harmonium. One night he chose ‘Good King Wenceslas’. They reached the verse: ‘Heat was in the very sod/ Which the saint had printed’. Goodhart observed a boy laughing. It was Lord Elmley. He kept him behind and gave him a dressing down. Powell takes up the story: ‘‘‘You were laughing at the word
sod
. Do you know what it means?’’ He was foaming by now. ‘‘It is in vulgar use as short for sodomism –
the most loathsome form of dual vice
’’.’ There was a certain amount of discussion amongst the boys afterwards as to what he regarded as the less loathsome forms of ‘dual vice’.

Powell says that ‘romantic passions’ were much discussed, though ‘physical contacts were rare’. He does nevertheless mention ‘brutal intimacies’ taking place. ‘The masters might look on the subject as one of unspeakable horror; the boys behaved much in the manner of public opinion as to homosexuality today; ranging from strong disapproval to unconcealed involvement.’

Goodhart was also responsible for bringing back theatrical performances by the boys, following a ban that had been in place for fifty years. There was no Eton Drama Society, but individual housemasters began to put on plays. In July 1919, Goodhart’s House Dramatic Society produced
Doctor Faustus
. Harold Acton remembered it as a ‘superlative performance’ of Christopher Marlowe’s play, with Lord David Cecil playing ‘a nervously saturnine Mephistopheles’ and Hugh Lygon as a ‘cherubic Helen of Troy’. The
Eton College Chronicle
singled out Hugh’s performance for praise and the success of this production gave Goodhart the courage to try
The Importance of Being Earnest
. Once again, Hugh played a female role, this time Cecily Cardew. Again, he was singled out for his abilities: ‘he proved an excellent
ingénue
and made more of the part than is usually possible in the circumstances’. The best moment of the play, said the
Chronicle
, was when Cecily filled Gwendolyn’s tea with sugar. Hugh may not have been a sporting boy, or a clever boy, but he was clearly gifted dramatically. His beauty made him a convincing female. A photograph of him cross-dressed as Cecily shows his delicate features.

At the time, Wilde’s masterpiece was considered to be a shocking play, especially when rendered by schoolboys. The author’s reputation had contaminated the comedy. The performance contributed to the whiff of deplorable morals that hung over Goodhart’s house.

Hugh was a good friend of Anthony Powell. They messed together and became a trio with Denys Buckley, a future High Court judge, until Hugh left to travel abroad before going up to Oxford. Boys were allowed to choose their own messmates, who would not be necessarily of the same year: Powell was a year below Lygon. As at Lancing, tea was the most important meal of the day. After Hugh’s departure, Powell messed with a boy called Hubert Duggan, whose glamorous mother (an American heiress) married Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India. The character of the charming, handsome, romantic, dissolute Stringham, who descends into drunken ruin in Powell’s
A Dance to the Music of Time
novel sequence, is
usually said to be a portrait of Duggan. So he is, but he is also laced with a dash of Hugh Lygon.

Hubert and Hugh were two of a kind: dashing and moving in the highest social circles. They were also prone to melancholy as well as auto-destructive drunkenness. They embodied a type that would come to obsess both Waugh and Powell: the charismatic aristocrat who represents a gilded but decaying world, who lacks direction and is displaced by the grey modernity of a Widmerpool (Powell in
A Dance to the Music of Time
) or a Hooper (Waugh in
Brideshead)
. In writing of Eton in his memoir
Enemies of Promise,
Cyril Connolly put forward his theory of ‘permanent adolescence’. He proposed that the experience of public school was so intense that it dominated the lives and arrested the development of those who underwent such an education.

Despite his Eton education, Hugh Lygon needed extra private coaching to get him into university. An Oxford don was brought down to Madresfield to tutor him. Another summons came to a successful actor called William Armstrong who served as a kind of dramatic coach-tutor to the family, though his real job was to keep an eye on Hugh’s drinking and other failings. Armstrong, who later turned from acting to directing and transformed the Liverpool Rep into the best regional theatre in the country, found it humiliating to have to sit at a separate table for dinner, like an upper servant. But he adored Hugh and always kept in touch. His time at Madresfield, which he remembered with the deer cropping the park and afternoon tea under the cedars on the immaculate lawn, remained one of the high points of his life.

Remember that the
Eton Candle
is our challenge – our first fruits –
the first trumpet call of our movement – it is OURSELVES.
(Brian Howard to Harold Acton)

Hugh Lygon’s Eton generation included boys of extraordinary talent and precocity. The Eton Society of Arts was run by sixth-formers Harold Acton, son of a cosmopolitan artist, and Brian Howard, an American boy born in Surrey who believed that he had Jewish blood. They edited the Society’s magazine, called the
Eton Candle
. It had a shocking pink cover. The Society devoted itself to modernism. Acton and Howard were leaders
and rebels. Howard was nearly expelled for taking a toy engine into chapel. Acton was beaten for not knowing the football colours of the various houses: ‘Smack, smack, smack. I shifted round so that the blows might fall in a different place. ‘‘Keep still,’’ he shouted, ‘‘it’s my religion.’’ I said, ‘‘I’m turning the other cheek.’’’

Brian Howard was considered beautiful as well as brilliant. Connolly remembered his ‘distinguished impertinent face, a sensual mouth, and dark eyes with long eyelashes’. Others remarked upon his chalk-white skin and wavy jet-black hair. His eyes seemed to be heavily made-up. He was tall and lean. But it was his speech and mannerisms that made him so unique. Even at the age of thirteen, he seemed like a throwback to another era. He was camp personified, a fop out of a Restoration comedy. Many writers would attempt to capture his character, not only Evelyn Waugh. The Brian Howard voice is unmistakable: ‘My dear,’ he once said to Harold Acton, ‘I’ve just discovered a person who has something a little bit unusual, under a pimply and rather catastrophic exterior.’ Waugh caught the style perfectly in the figure of Anthony Blanche in
Brideshead Revisited
.

His parentage was mysterious. He was grandly named Brian Christian de Clavering Howard, but his friends discovered that his father’s real name was Gassaway. The ‘Howard’ was made up – and rather bad form, since there was no connection with the Howards of Castle Howard. An entirely exotic figure, Brian made no attempt to hide his homosexuality. Yet he was, says Connolly, ‘the most fashionable boy at school’.

Harold Acton was tall, with a long thin nose and a high-domed head that was sometimes compared to a peanut. His eyes were like black olives. He had a slightly swaying carriage. He was formal and courteous, with a touch of impishness. The two boys had similar parentage: American mothers, fathers who were art dealers with Italian affiliations. Acton’s family home was ‘La Pietra’, an exquisite Tuscan mansion stuffed with paintings and antiques. The Actons lived like characters out of a Henry James novel. Figures such as Diaghilev the ballet master and Leon Bakst the avant-garde stage designer visited them at La Pietra. Brian and Harold, then, were extremely sophisticated and precocious, the embodiment of cosmopolitan modernity, a culture that could hardly have been more removed from that of the old English aristocracy with their large, cold, shabby homes and annual routines of hunting and shooting.

The two boys cultivated exaggerated mannerisms of speech and gesture. Both had panache and charm. One of their Eton contemporaries described them at the theatre: ‘Brian and Harold walked into the stalls, in full evening dress, with long white gloves draped over one arm, and carrying silver-topped canes and top-hats, looking like a couple of Oscar Wildes.’ In thrall to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, they danced at Dyson’s to the pulsating tones of Stravinsky’s ballet music. Brian was a wonderful dancer, a worshipper of Nijinsky. They were stylish and elegant – theirs was an altogether far more nuanced rebellion than that of Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Bolshies’ and the ‘Corpse Club’.

They loved modernist painting, read Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau. Edith Sitwell praised their schoolboy writings. They were described as the ‘cream of intellectual Eton’, full of promise, with their plans for theatre trips and magazines. Their American heritage and modernist radicalism liberated them from the constraints of the English. They despised ‘dull frowsy England – awful men in bowler hats and bad tempers trotting up and down wet pavements’. Rebelling against philistinism, as other boys walked up the Eton High Street towards Windsor, they wandered like Parisian
flâneurs,
heading in the opposite direction for Slough in pursuit of the ‘bourgeois macabre’. Howard fantasised outrageously about hidden perversions behind respectable facades.

The Eton Society of Arts’ sacred meeting place was the Studio, a room in the house of the drawing master. It was a retreat from the school, scruffy and stuffed with pots, jars and drawing implements. The Society comprised an extraordinary group of young men. Henry Yorke, who went on to write novels under the name Henry Green, was secretary; Anthony Powell and Robert Byron, who would become a superb travel writer, were also members, as was Alan Clutton-Brock who went on to be the art critic of
The Times
and then Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge.

But they were not all artists and intellectuals. The Honourable Hugh Lygon was a member, more on account of his looks than his intellect. He had no artistic pretensions whatsoever. By now he was a slim but muscular youth, always elegantly dressed. It is easy to see why Howard and Acton wanted him in their club. Some said he had a face out of Botticelli, while for Powell he was ‘fair-haired, nice mannered, a Giotto angel living in a narcissistic dream’. Unlike nearly everyone else in the Society of Arts, he was sporty and masculine, a boxer and an athlete. As a rule, Harold and
his followers set themselves firmly against ‘macho hearties’. The code of aestheticism that they lived by was partly a reaction against the hearty public school ethos founded on games worship. But they were happy to make Hugh, with his beauty and his charm, an exception to their rule. There was a suspicion that he was only there because one of the more influential members of the group – Howard, perhaps, or Byron – thought that he was absolutely gorgeous and that he was not averse to their advances. An aura of raffishness, if not outright scandal, surrounded the group as they met on Saturday evenings and discussed such subjects as ‘Post-Impressionism’, ‘The Decoration of Rooms’ and ‘Oriental Art’.

The shocking pink
Eton Candle
for 1922 was indeed known to its detractors as the Eton Scandal. Extravagantly praised by Edith Sitwell, doyenne of high modernism, it was dedicated to the memory of Eton’s most notorious old boy, the arch-aesthete, prolific poet, republican radical and lifelong flagellant, Algernon Charles Swinburne. Beautifully printed on hand-made paper, with yellow endpapers, the
Candle
included a contribution by a young master called Aldous Huxley and an essay by Brian Howard entitled ‘The New Poetry’, which attacked the staid Georgian poets and praised the innovative verse of Ezra Pound. Like Evelyn Waugh at Lancing, Howard set himself against the ‘old men’ of the pre-war era who had murdered the golden boys of Rupert Brooke’s generation:

You were a great Young Generation …

And then you went and got murdered – magnificently

Went out and got murdered … because a parcel of damned old men

Wanted some fun or some power or something.

As Cyril Connolly put it, if you didn’t get on with your father in those days, you had all the glorious dead on your side.

Having conquered Eton, it was only a matter of time before the two young Turks took on Oxford. Howard once exclaimed to Acton: ‘Do you realise, Harold – please pay attention to this – that you and I are going to have a rather famous career at Oxford?’ Both boys seemed destined for great things, dazzling careers in literature or the arts. But it was Eton that made them. University was to be an enemy of promise: it came to seem something of a let down. Ironically, the person who assured their fame and who immortalised their Oxford turned out to be the Lancing boy.

CHAPTER 3
Oxford:
‘… her secret none can utter’

There is nothing like the aesthetic pleasure of being drunk and if you do it in the right way you can avoid being ill next day. That is the greatest thing Oxford has to teach.

(Evelyn Waugh,
Diaries
)

He was in love with my brother.

(Lady Sibell Lygon)

January 1922. ‘Half past seven and the Principal’s dead.’ Evelyn Waugh was in bed in his undergraduate rooms in Hertford College, Oxford. He was woken by this call from his servant or ‘scout’, Bateson, a melancholy man, whose job it was to change the chamber pots twice daily and bring jugs of shaving water every morning. Evelyn was eighteen years of age, and he had come up to Oxford at a different time of year from most undergraduates. He had won a scholarship to read History at Hertford. His original plan had been to spend time in France before Oxford, but his father was anxious for him to start university life without delay. Evelyn felt that it put him at a disadvantage. He was resentful. His rooms, up a poky staircase above the Junior Common Room Buttery, overlooking New College Lane, were modest. All the best ones had been taken in
Michaelmas (autumn) term. Crockery rattled below and cooking smells drifted up to his rooms, though sometimes that meant a pleasant aroma of anchovy toast and honey buns.