The Fatal Englishman

by Sebastian Faulks

  In the school holidays he wrote letters to his friends that showed a precociously developed style, a self-consciously decadent attitude, a clear knowledge of himself and an obsession with the beauty of boys. Philip Howard was considered good-looking, as was Robin Hope, while Wolfenden was no more than average. He was of medium height, strong, but with sloping shoulders; his spectacles gave him a froggy look, for which the verve of his conversation worked hard to compensate. He did not really grow into his looks until his late twenties, when, with a heavier jaw, dark glasses and cigarette at an angle, he traded his gawkiness for a kind of louche glamour.

  In the holidays he read D’Annunzio, André Gide (‘a notorious homosexual’), Wilfred Owen (though it was not then well known that Owen was also gay), Naomi Mitchison’s short stories about Sparta (‘extremely reminiscent of the Boy Scouts’), various manuals on adolescent psychology (‘all more or less pornographic, and all more or less inaccurate’) and ‘some of the more lurid bits of Walt Whitman’, who was also ‘a notorious homosexual’.

  ‘I know I am not a good mixer,’ he wrote to his close friend Robin Hope in the summer of 1950, aged sixteen. ‘The essence of good mixing is lowering oneself to the level of those around you, a feat which you perform skilfully and seldom, and I only for some vast ulterior motive … Do you loathe teen-ager parties? All the girls here are very ugly, and all the boys ivory-headed (inside) Apollos. Which is very putting-off for a type like me. It is all I can do to control my natural – or rather unnatural – inclinations … My father, aflame with the Muse, is writing a tedious novel about education problems. It excites him but not me. All the helpfully enlivening suggestions I make are immediately quashed with the words. “This has got to be published by the Clarendon Press, you realize.”’

  The letters he wrote were dangerously frank, though in January 1951 he tried to reassure Robin Hope that they would not be intercepted. ‘Neither you nor I are going to be compromised for some time yet. I am too clever and you are too cautious.’ He also reflected on what he called ‘the Wolfenden paradox’ – by which he meant the tension in his character between a need to épater le bourgeois and an odd desire to please. It was in the question of family that this paradox was most evident. He had more or less concealed from his schoolfriends the fact that he had brothers and sisters on the grounds that the thought of himself as a ‘family man’ was something at which ‘most imaginations boggle’.

  In his last two years at School Wolfenden studied Russian, and this duly brought him the Newcastle Russian Prize in December 1951. He won various other school prizes, including the Rosebery History Prize twice, in 1951 and 1952. In his final term at Eton, Lent 1952, the Register shows him as listed behind Richard Layard, Kit Welchman, Philip Howard and Stephen Aris; but his reputation for brilliance was undimmed and unsurpassed. It was spectacularly confirmed when he was awarded an open scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford in history – a subject he had perversely chosen against the wishes of his teachers who believed all scholars should read classics. He left a term early because he was bored and a danger to the younger boys; he was anxious to move on and discover what the world had next to offer.

  This was in fact pretty clear: National Service. Wolfenden had decided to go on the new Russian interpreter’s course in the Navy, but was too young to sign up in the spring of 1952 so went to live in Cambridge House at 131 Camberwell Road, London SE5, where he worked as a youth club helper. Being out in the world at last brought the expected dividends. ‘My love life is seething with incident,’ he wrote to Robin Hope. He kept close contact with various boys at Eton and made a flirtatious return visit. In London he showed a preference for heterosexual men, though not exclusively. He commented on all his affairs with a wry romanticism; he enjoyed the sensation of being in love, and was happy to lose his heart even to someone in whom he knew his interest to be superficial.

  At this time he was exercised less about what he would do than about who he was. He clearly saw the difficulties. ‘Where do we go from here? … I am not going to end up as Anthony Blanche arty-tarting around the art galleries … I am a queer; so much is physically evident. But I have a lot more important things to do than waste my time hunting young men. It is a charming hobby, and for the sake of physical and emotional well-being a certain amount of it is of course necessary. But it is not an essential part of my life, and the more “self-fulfilment” I achieve in my work and my thought and my writing, probably the less I shall need it. I may end up with an undemanding and unsensational ménage with a single boy-friend; I may end up unsatisfied except for an occasional Sloane Street tart … I may, I suppose, turn to heterosexuality; but if by a pretty mature (physically) eighteen I am not attracted by girls either physically or emotionally or aesthetically it seems unlikely. One can but wait and see, and not get too involved, or waste valuable time. Waste of time is the one mortal sin.’

  It is hard to remember that this is written by a boy of eighteen at a time when all homosexuality was illegal. A few weeks later he predicted: ‘I think I shall end up a mental acrobat with no physical life at all. Which might be a pity.’

  Neal Ascherson, a scholar in the year above Wolfenden’s at Eton, advised him to ‘Be queer, but not a queer.’ As schoolboys the two of them determined to ‘travel light’ and put down no roots; Ascherson felt that if Wolfenden became ‘officially’ homosexual it would inhibit his freedom of personal and intellectual movement. They were less concerned with achieving particular goals than about the kind of outsiderish but intellectually honest figures they would strike in the world. They had absorbed the lessons of Sartre and Camus. Wolfenden said his ‘formative’ books were Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann, Hemingway’s short stories, To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson, Bevis by Richard Jefferies, The Crapes of Wrath, The Quest for Corvo by A.J. Symons, ‘and, alas, Tolkien’; but the French existentialists also had a bearing on the way he viewed himself.

  At school Ascherson and Wolfenden had formed a ‘People’s Section’ in the Cadet Corps, which elected its own corporal, saluted with clenched fist and moved in partisan single file. It reflected their adolescent respect for the Maquisard way of life: rootless, uncommitted, ready to move. Ascherson later wrote: ‘At one level, [Jeremy and I] were just rebellious boys looking for an ideology of independence. But these were the years when Existentialism was powerful. Without realising what we were up to, we too were trying to identify and obey the laws of our inmost nature as individuals, to “do what we were” and act out our subjective identities.’

  Wolfenden regarded his coming naval service with apprehension. There was one last fling with the Boys Club on their summer camp – ‘The week was really made by the next-door camp: a glorious collection of pederasts funnier than anything in Evelyn Waugh. A terrific fat man with whisky breath and a bogus army rank, a funny little man with shorts like a bell-tent and a spotted bow-tie, and innumerable cadaverous young men in flowered bathing trunks. It was all enough to disgust me with pederasty, if I wasn’t already’ – and then it was off to RN Victoria Barracks, Southsea.

  He was pleasantly surprised. The petty officers were sensible, the food was good and the others on the course were interesting. He most appreciated the men who had already been to university, but he also gave the public- and grammar-school boys high marks for intelligence and desirability.

  Robin Hope and Jeremy Wolfenden in turn astounded their grammar-school colleagues on the course, with their savoir-faire as much as their brains. Wolfenden was not conceited about his abilities, but he was realistically arrogant. His friends from school, and those he was to meet at Oxford, told him he was the cleverest boy in England and he saw no particular reason to demur. The accolade did not make him happy; it was merely something he lived with. All this was dazzling to some of the eighteen-year-olds who were away from home for the first time. It seemed to some of them that the flow of Wolfenden’s epigrams was simply continuous. One of his fellow students was a very tall, angular young man called Robert Cass
en, who appeared to have a surplus joint in his extended, awkward frame. ‘The Anglepoise’, Wolfenden called him; and when Cassen bashfully appeared in a new petrol-blue suit of which he was shyly proud he was met with the greeting, ‘My God, Robert, you look like a Finnish power station!’

  The Naval Russian course has gained a certain mystique in the years since National Service ended. From the outset it was seen, rather self-consciously, as the intellectual’s option. It was a demanding course and those who failed any part were discarded. Although it was possible to study Russian in either of the other two services, only the Navy was sure to keep its linguists at their chosen task for the full two years, without at some stage moving them on to general officer training. When Wolfenden joined up in 1952, his was only the third quarterly intake since the scheme began. The course had not had time to develop a reputation, but its attractions were immediately obvious. There were only three weeks’ basic training before they began to study Russian at a camp at Coulsdon, near Caterham in Surrey. This contrasted favourably with the amount of drill and boot-polishing required by the Army and the RAF.

  In September Wolfenden went to Devonport Signals for a two-week cryptography course and by this time seven of the seventeen had already left. Devonport turned out to be a ‘Nissen Nirvana perched on the hills behind Plymouth’, while learning the codes was ‘like playing “double the number you first thought of” with the Marx Brothers in four dimensions.’ But, he wrote, ‘being almost a mathematician, 1 am rather good at it, much better than anyone else, even the Petty Officer who teaches us.’ Wolfenden found another homosexual in his group often, but he was ‘sadly “camp”’ and Wolfenden preferred to seduce womanisers. He and his new friend had an excursion one evening to ‘a pub renowned as one of the “queer” centres of Plymouth’ where they were bought drinks by a drunken Petty Officer with whom they managed to avoid going to bed. Wolfenden found the evening memorable chiefly for the fact that he was able to get drunk on an outlay of less than ninepence.

  After Devonport came the sea itself, and HMS Shipstone. ‘Afloat! Afloat!’ wrote Wolfenden. ‘I know I have queer tastes but I’m rather enjoying this.’ It was particularly better than being in port, where the regulars laughed at the clueless young National Servicemen and they in turn were fed up with the endless hanging around: the general atmosphere was that of ‘a Central European third-class waiting room … just like Ljubljana, but without the VD posters.’ Aboard HMS Shipstone Wolfenden was taught more cryptography, but found his thoughts, as always, straying to romance: ‘The fascinating thing about this lark is that one meets people, likes them a lot, perhaps falls in love with them, and then is swept away from them by sheer force of circumstances. It’s a tip and run sort of life.’

  In December 1952, while he was at Coulsdon, Wolfenden’s continued playfulness with the lives of boys still at Eton led to trouble. On a visit in November he had been consulted by a boy about his violently erotic feelings for another. Wolfenden advised him to rely on his own conscience, and not to think he was abnormal. The boy consulted the chaplain, and, on this man’s advice, decided to keep his friendship for the other boy on a ‘pure’ level. He then wrote to Wolfenden asking what he thought of his decision and how he should behave towards the boy in question. Wolfenden wrote back and told him he had come to the right decision (the two were not well suited) though for the wrong reasons (fear, prudishness). The Master in College, Stephen McWatters, acting on a hint from the leaky chaplain, made inquiries and managed to get hold of Wolfenden’s letter. He wrote an explosive one to Wolfenden: ‘I was foolish enough to trust you … absolutely intolerable that you continue to come down and make trouble… who are you to presume to advise… exhibit a malice and selfishness I had not expected … callous indifference to his welfare … little trace of anything but arrogance and self-interest.’ McWatters banned Wolfenden from College premises and forbade him to communicate with any boy there.

  There would be nothing to this schoolboy incident were it not for what happened next. McWatters contacted Jack Wolfenden, who reacted badly. It was his own fault, according to Jeremy, ‘because he hates being out of anything yet complicates the issue by trying to act as a go-between. So I had to have a set-to with him out of which I emerged with honour, but little else, and all my cards on the table. With the result that between us now is a tense uneasy artificial peace that makes home intolerable.’

  And so it was, as Jeremy Wolfenden laid his ‘cards on the table’, that the chairman of the committee whose report would lead to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain learned about the sexual inclinations of his own son.

  Jeremy Wolfenden was philosophical. ‘On mature consideration it is a good thing. It forces me to do what I had long lacked the courage for – to distil what I want of Eton, abandon the rest, and proceed deracinated. And since at the same time he has heavily undermined my home life, I am more of an emotional nomad, a nationless, mercenary intelligence, than ever. So be it.’

  Such phrases would, on the lips of almost any other eighteen-year-old, be merely self-dramatisation. In Wolfenden’s case they were also accurately predictive. He passed the next naval interview and was sent to Sussex Square, near Lancaster Gate in central London. They lived two or three to a room, but quite comfortably compared to the average officer cadet, and were given a season ticket on the tube to Russell Square, where the real work began. Each student was given a stressed text of Crime and Punishment and told to prepare fifteen pages a day; failure to keep up meant relegation to the rank of ‘coder special’, return to uniform, and despatch to RAF Withall. Even clever young men found the work demanding, and had to stay up till one or two each morning. ‘The amount of work one has to do here is overrated,’ Wolfenden wrote to Robin Hope. ‘Of course we can’t all be brilliant, but I find it helps.’ In a later letter, however, he admitted that there was a ‘hell of a lot’ of work, and even he did not finish before midnight. ‘We have had 350 words to learn in the last two days and I am exhausted. All Russian words are the same; some are grimmer than others, none are more attractive.’

  Wolfenden nevertheless found it all a bit of a lark until a naval ophthalmologist told him his eyes were quite unsuited for study and he should take up pig-farming. Wolfenden told the story as a joke, but in fact it had serious consequences. A sensitivity to light made him attach fold-down shades to his prescription glasses, though his resulting resemblance to a film noir bandit was some compensation.

  If he was not to be allowed to use his eyes in the evenings – no reading, no cinema, no writing – the question of boredom arose with some urgency. After study and young men, the passion of his life was talk with friends, though even the brightest of them could not entertain him all the time. He discovered that whisky dulled the anguish caused by his craving for intellectual stimulation and by the limits of even his most amusing friends. As an eighteen-year-old midshipman he developed the drinking habits of a storm-grizzled bosun.

  Soon after arriving in London he saw a film of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles. ‘Terrific. What is this book? It has not yet appeared … I am going to be a film director anyway.’ Cocteau was the kind of writer who appealed to him. ‘I dislike Jane Austen not only because I am bored by the unextraordinary social life and priggishness, but also because all the manifestations of love are such as can be observed, mutatis mutandis, and with a little speeding-up, any day in the suburbs of Reading. Of course it is a revolt. But my life is all a revolt.’

  While admiring, consulting and above all listening to him, one or two of his naval colleagues did see even at this stage that beneath the fountain of amusement, somewhere at the dead centre of Jeremy Wolfenden’s life, something was wrong. It seemed a serious defect of character that someone so clever should be so bored. Many of them assumed that his homosexuality made him anxious and was turning him towards drink, but the evidence of Wolfenden’s own letters suggests that he was quite happy about his sexual feelings; in fact he complained of the naive attem
pts made by Robert Cassen and others – who believed sexual preferences were a matter of conscious choice – to ‘talk him out of it.’

  Wolfenden did well on the Russian course, naturally, although his accent was far from perfect. ‘I don’t speak pure Russian,’ he explained, ‘I speak the language of the Moscow race track.’ They raced ahead in their work, and within six months they were doing papers set for Oxford finals. Each day they had seven hours of classwork, twenty-five words of vocabulary to learn and two hours’ homework. Wolfenden enjoyed examining the teachers, who were mostly émigrés attached to the School of Slavonic Studies. Their life stories seemed unimaginably tragic to the privileged boys they taught, who became aware of the fragility of circumstance: they understood how different their lives would have been had they been born a few hundred miles further east.

  The interpreters’ course also gave many of the young men, including Jeremy Wolfenden, a fascination for Russia. David Shapiro determined to be a Sovietologist, to know all there was to be known about Russia; Robert Cassen made an after-dinner speech in Russian of such virtuosity that even the most dubious interpreters were laughing. Wolfenden was already thinking of newspapers.

  At the end of the year the Naval interpreters were sent to Bodmin in Cornwall where they joined those from the Army and the RAF, who had done their training in Cambridge under Dr Elizabeth Hill. At Bodmin they were given final instruction in the particular vocabulary and needs of their service. The Navy hoped to have a well-trained Reserve it could immediately call up in time of war. Such a war was to be fought – it went without saying – against the Russians. It was also assumed that it would be a ‘conventional’ war, something like the one that had ended a few years before.