The Fatal Englishman

by Sebastian Faulks

  At almost exactly this time the Russians detonated their first hydrogen bomb, rendering almost all the Navy’s assumptions invalid. The Third World War was never going to need the kind of specialists in decoding shipping messages that the Russian Naval course had produced, though this was of no concern to those who passed a profitable two years on it. Their low-level introduction to military intelligence work meant that most of them received approaches from members of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS – or MI6, as it was also sometimes known), though Wolfenden never mentioned contact at this time. He later told friends that he had spurned their advances in the Navy, but succumbed out of a bored curiosity while an undergraduate at Oxford.

  Having done two years in the Navy, Wolfenden was twenty when he went up to Magdalen to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics in October 1954. Many undergraduates did national service after university: it is not difficult to imagine what a daunting figure Sub-Lt. Wolfenden in dark glasses, black shirt and OE tie ironically aslant must have appeared to an eighteen-year-old freshman.

  When Philip Howard first saw his old schoolfriend Jeremy Wolfenden at Oxford he was shocked. Jeremy had always been dangerous company at Eton, but only in a small-time, schoolboy way. Now he looked as though a cloud had come over him. He was unshaved, he smoked all the time; his fingers were stained an oak-brown colour; there was something sinister about him.

  When he arrived at Magdalen it was at a College where his father had been a fellow, to read a subject his father had helped to launch at Oxford, and to study under his godfather. There is no evidence that these were the wrong choices for him, but the self-avowed emotional nomad, the intellectual gypsy, the disembodied thinking machine must at least have been aware of the cosy connections.

  He was taught logic in Magdalen by a man called Oscar Wood who gave three-hour tutorials in his over-heated room in College. Wood liked to place his hands flat against the wall or crawl about on the floor to help him think. Harry Weldon’s technique was to ask the undergraduate to read an essay, then say: ‘That’s not a bad first move. Now, my move is this… What’s your second move?’ The conversation would then take in Descartes, Locke and the rest; but no name and no reference could upset Weldon: it was as though all stages had been mapped out in advance. He was prepared to go on for as long as necessary. ‘Very well, that’s not a bad fourteenth move. Now my next move is this …‘ By this time only Wolfenden would be hanging in there.

  PPE was the dominant school in Oxford, and Jeremy Wolfenden was, from the moment he arrived, its fieriest star. Also in Magdalen at the time were A.J.P. Taylor and his fellow-historian Bruce McFarlane. Wolfenden became friends with Taylor and sometimes spent all night drinking in Taylor’s rooms; their friendship was not affected by Wolfenden’s eerily precise imitation of Taylor’s voice, in which he loudly held forth at dinner within earshot of high table.

  The intensely competitive and destructive atmosphere of Oxford affected McFarlane and Taylor in different ways. McFarlane became so perfectionist and so frightened of the smallest footnote inaccuracy that he could never believe he was ready to publish. He brought out only one book, though his reviews of others’ were enough to silence their authors for good. Taylor took the opposite line: he decided to defy the pedants by publishing pretty well everything – books, essays, BBC chats and ‘why-oh-why’ articles for the Sunday Pictorial. When Wolfenden went up in 1954 Taylor had just published his most admired book, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe. Taylor and McFarlane were responding to an environment that was bitchy, complacent and scared of itself; the tone was embodied in the character of the college president, Tom Boase. When David Marquand decided to go to the University of Berkeley in California for a year, his teachers suffered a seizure of affected ignorance along the lines of ‘I believe, President, it is an establishment somewhere in the United States of America.’

  The Magdalen fellows had driven the college up the Norrington league table of academic results while at the same time managing to look down on colleges, such as Balliol, that were too earnestly competitive. The Magdalen attitude was that people good enough to get firsts had to get them, but should do it languidly, giving the impression of doing the occasional essay only in their spare time. Wolfenden told his fellow-undergraduate Philip French, ‘You can get a First between five and seven in the afternoon.’

  Wolfenden was undoubtedly driven on by Weldon, but, as an undergraduate, was not badly affected by the small-mindedness of some of the dons. His enemy, as usual, was boredom; and work, whisky, friends and sex were the weapons with which he fought it. Wolfenden struck his fellow-undergraduates as not only clever but extraordinarily even-tempered; he was never angry or even, at this stage, mildly out of sorts. This permanent amiability was a remarkable feature of his life. If he was bored, as he often was, he did not in the Oxford manner try to belittle the person who was boring him. He used his range of reference and reading to mock the circumstances he was in and to draw playful analogies, not to exclude or threaten those who were less erudite. This cheeriness was not necessarily a reflection of his moral character; it seems to have been more a matter of temperament: since his need for amusement was so all-consuming, it was a waste of time to sulk or to put down people who could not help him satisfy it.

  He was happy to befriend people from different backgrounds, of which there were a good number in Magdalen. Two of his best friends, Mike Artis and Rod Prince, came from state grammar schools and had never met an old Etonian before; his contemporary Philip French found most of those he had met ‘distressingly boring, snobbish and stupid’. National Service had increased the class discrepancies. Rod Prince, who had been a corporal in a Transport company, would have had to call some of his fellow-undergraduates ‘sir’ if they had met in the services. Wolfenden’s position was that he was above all these petty distinctions: as a ‘nationless, mercenary intelligence’ he could make friends with anyone he chose; and his charm and joie de vivre allowed him to do it.

  His closest friends in college were all committed left-wingers. Mike Artis used to wear black jeans and red socks with a jacket that looked as though it had graduated more than once from Oxfam. He cultivated the pinched, industrial pallor of a boy from some rickety slum. Colin Falck was a tall, unsmiling man who looked as though he might have been happier at a recruiting station for the Spanish Civil War. Rod Prince was a CND supporter who resigned from the Communist Party over Hungary. They were in the right place. Magdalen did not admit much of any changes in the world since 1937; the clock had stopped with the fall of Léon Blum’s Popular Front. In love with the melodrama of fellow-travelling, the college turned out young men of impeccable left-wing opinions who were nevertheless trained to say the right things to the right examiners in Finals.

  Or so it seemed to some of Wolfenden’s Etonian friends. Artis, Falck and Prince were not in fact as solemn as they seemed. A long night in Wolfenden’s room was lubricated by quarts of brandy; conversation was not always about new developments in Marxist theory, but more often full of gossip and lewd speculation. The background music might be Shostakovich, but usually Wolfenden set the gramophone arm to infinite repeats of Frank Sinatra singing Songs for Swingin’ Lovers. He enjoyed the theories of the Left, but never gave the impression that he was truly committed. This annoyed some of his companions, particularly those who felt more passionately but were outflanked by him in argument. His own beliefs had to be refined to the accompaniment of flirtation and hard liquor.

  At the same time he was drawn to the idea of journalism, and particularly to what he thought of as the ‘hard news’ side of it. As a reporter on the university paper Isis, Wolfenden met Philip French, who had somehow constructed for himself-improbably in the immature and sexually repressed Oxford of the early 1950s – a hard-bitten, journalistic persona. It suited Wolfenden to encourage French in these attitudes; French later came to believe that Wolfenden ‘was re-inventing me as an image of his ideal self. In the tough, no bullshit, foreign correspondent vei
n of journalism previously represented by Neal Ascherson and now also by Philip French, Wolfenden seemed to see something he might do for a living. His self-consciously ‘intellectual’ friends were alarmed because Jeremy, if he were to dirty his hands at all with journalism, should surely write commentaries, leaders or ‘think-pieces’. But he had seen through all that. He told people that the Guardian was ‘not a serious paper’ because it had too much opinion and not enough news; the Telegraph, however, was ‘serious’ because it had extensive foreign news coverage. A newspaperman was a gritty, unintellectual thing to be – a gratifying way to épater le bourgeois yet, with due regard to the Wolfenden paradox, to stay just within the pale. What Wolfenden admired about his fellow-old Etonian Neal Ascherson was this: ‘Neal travels light … he takes only a typewriter and a revolver.’

  Writing in the London Review of Books 40 years later, French recalled Wolfenden’s journalism for his in the summer of 1956: ‘I think he wrote better than any of us, in a style we aspired to… I doubt if any Oxford undergraduate – and I include Peter Fleming and Kenneth Tynan – has written so wide-ranging, witty and intelligent a group of pieces as Jeremy wrote for his that summer.’ These included articles on the homosexual in literature, on T.E. Lawrence, on the right-wing journalist John Gordon and a presciently titled short story called ‘So I Never Saw Paris’.

  In 1956, at the end of Wolfenden’s second year at Oxford, the National Union of Students sent twenty-five people on a tour of the Soviet Union. Among them were five graduates of the Naval Russian course: Robert Cassen, Rex Winsbury, David Shapiro, David Marquand and Jeremy Wolfenden. The tour was loosely organised: it was open to the first students who could raise the £100 or so required. Four or five interpreters were attached to the party in Russia: one was a genuine student, who spoke lamentable English; three of the others were dull Soviet types in ill-fitting clothes, with dirty fingernails. The fifth was an altogether different character: smartly dressed, sophisticated, amusing. His name was Yuri Krutikov.

  He took a special interest in the five Naval Russian graduates, who in turn assumed he was a high-grade KGB operative. David Marquand was preoccupied by a Dutch girl, but the others found Yuri congenial company. He was relaxed and clever; like Wolfenden, he was easily bored and constantly on the look-out for amusement. On a train journey from Yalta to Leningrad the two of them talked smut for several hours, trying to find appropriate translations for various phrases. However, Krutikov’s family was from the heart of the Soviet establishment; and, despite his frivolity, Yuri never wholly neglected his work.

  The students’ itinerary took them from Moscow to Kiev and Odessa; thence to Yalta and Leningrad on the way back to Moscow. In Odessa they were taken by bus 50 kilometres on muddy roads to see a ‘show’ collective farm. Along the way they passed several desolate collectives that fell a long way below the required ‘show’ standard. When they reached the selected farm the contrast was so absurd that it was barely worth the journey. Yuri was happy to join in the game, especially on the way back, when the party was incapacitated by a huge quantity of collective new wine.

  In his sober and serious moments Yuri Krutikov’s job was to look at the young Englishmen and see what use they might be to the Soviet Union. Marquand was unavailable, with his Dutch girl; Shapiro and Cassen were the sort of solemn right-wing social democrats who actually fought the Cold War; Winsbury was not much of a prospect. This left Jeremy Wolfenden. He was flirting with the Left at Oxford, but was no fellow-traveller. His intellectual arrogance, however, made him interested in totalitarian means and contemptuous of the niceties of Western liberalism. Krutikov would have seen some grounds for hope in Wolfenden’s perverse originality, though Wolfenden could obviously not take state communism too seriously after what he and the other students had seen.

  In any event, the KGB was at this stage not really looking for political sympathisers. The happy days when such men as Burgess, Maclean and Philby could be recruited because they actually believed in Communism were long gone. Wolfenden could not be persuaded, but he could be entrapped; and the way in which this could be done was through his obvious weak point: his homosexuality. Wolfenden of Eton and Oxford was already working at The Times [slogan: ‘The Top People’s Paper’) during his vacations, and probably told Yuri in the course of their drink-assisted chats that his ambition was to be its Moscow correspondent. Yuri, like all KGB officers at the time, assumed all British correspondents in Moscow were working for SIS. If Wolfenden, as a Russian speaker, were to come to Moscow as a correspondent in the near future, then it would clearly be worth Yuri’s while to pay him some attention. He was unlikely ever to have information in the course of his work that would be of much use. The nature of any entrapment would not in the first instance be practical; it would be mechanical: it would be done because it could be done. But if Wolfenden’s career flourished as everyone expected then there could be long-term benefits. To have as editor of The Times a KGB agent of influence would be more than a coup; it could be useful.

  Did Yuri Krutikov sleep with Wolfenden in 1956? If so, neither mentioned it to the other students on the course; but they in turn didn’t rule it out. They put nothing past Jeremy, or come to that, past Yuri. In the room at Yalta where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt signed the Conference Agreement, Yuri put a flowerpot on his head and pretended to be a caryatid. Yuri kept in touch with his English student friends; his career flourished, though it had a hiccough when he was sent by one of the UN agencies to the new republic of Zaire (formerly the Belgian Congo) and had to be hastily withdrawn on the grounds that he looked ‘too Belgian’. He was back in Moscow by the time Wolfenden arrived there as a correspondent in 1961.

  While the NUS delegation was actually in the Soviet Union in 1956, Khrushchev made his denunciation of Stalin. It was the summer of the Suez crisis; in November the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary. By the time the students were back at College for their final year, the post-war world had become a very frightening place.

  Philip French and Jeremy Wolfenden both duly became editors of Isis. A curious custom meant that the outgoing editor became the subject of a profile in the next edition. On 25 April 1957 Wolfenden was depicted in the usual pose – cigarette dangling, dark glasses, wicked half-smile – above an anonymous article that mixed undergraduate bombast with remarkable insight. The author of the piece was Robert Cassen, his ex-Navy colleague. Without naming it as such, he quickly put his finger on what Jeremy had called ‘the Wolfenden paradox’:

  A desire to shock fights with an unwilling conformism which, through uncertainty or survival instinct, he has rarely abandoned publicly in the way that those who know him privately might have expected.

  Such profiles appeared under the general heading ‘Isis Idol’, or in this case, ‘Press Idol’, and Cassen’s account of Wolfenden was certainly, sometimes embarrassingly, admiring. In his estimation of Wolfenden’s likely future, however, Cassen was acute:

  There is no mistaking the value of the material… he has a gifted, fast-working intellect, an endless facility for coining epigrams, and a well-documented memory; on the job he is as reliable as concrete. All this, unfortunately some will say, is coupled to an emotional make-up which is not necessarily intent on making the best use of it…a deep contempt for most of the exterior things of life, like good food or clothes… he bristles at the mere mention of words such as ‘simple pleasures’ or ‘taste’ or ‘gracious’; and an analogous contempt for the liberal ideas of the West – a similar effect is produced in him by the words ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘love’. This is not an assumed outlook, a mask of ‘toughness’, an artificial cynicism; whether defensible or not, whether permanent or not, it is a genuine and consistent attitude: wherever else he may appear at ease, his true atmosphere is Paddington Station, a room in Ladbroke Grove, the self-service café, urban, rootless. If it were not for the intellectual dishonesty involved, one could imagine him happily employed by the Soviet machine; but for true contentment, on
e need only give him a supply of cigarettes, a few bottles of whisky, and a small war to run, or get killed in. And an audience.

  Nevertheless it looks as though he will end up a journalist…he will sell his soul for less than its real price, or go away thinking that there is nothing for him to do but harden himself into a mercy-bullet for the sick conscience of the age.

  Student magazines are not usually a reliable source of anything beyond sexual gossip and film listings, but in this case Isis may be an exception. Undergraduates who had done their National Service were more advanced than today’s average student; Wolfenden was both sexually and intellectually precocious, thus closer to maturity at twenty-two than most. He would have enjoyed the bit about ‘the self-service café, urban, rootless’ and the ‘mercy-bullet for the sick conscience of the age’; all that Cassen seemed to miss, or perhaps play down, was what fun he still was.

  Wolfenden’s circle included various female undergraduates, who spent as much time as possible in Magdalen because it was more interesting than their own austere institutions. His acknowledged but still illegal homosexuality added to his mysterious glamour in the eyes of these girls. Heterosexual male undergraduates looked on in despair as Oxford’s few eligible young women were drawn away from them to this doomed cause. Wolfenden was inclined to lead people into relationships deeper than they had expected, and to mobilise in them feelings he had no intention of matching. While one young ‘dish’ was being lined for a ‘bunnymoon’ (his word for a weekend away) others were wandering around perplexed and cast off. In Anthony Page, later a theatre and film director, and in Kit Lambert, who became the manager of The Who, he had gay friends who were ‘out,’ and with whom he joked about homosexuality.