The Fatal Englishman

by Sebastian Faulks

  It was a major liberal cause of the time because the police were active in prosecuting ‘offenders’. John Gielgud was arrested after an incident in a public lavatory. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and two friends were set up with two young airmen who subsequently gave evidence against them: all three went to prison. A novel called The Philanderer by Stanley Kaufman ran into trouble; the novelist Rupert Croft-Cooke was sent to prison. A discreet gay novel called Finistère by Michael Fitzpeters became notorious when its publisher, Victor Gollancz, took an advertisement on the leader page of the Observer to describe it as the best novel about homosexuality since Proust. Bookshops in the Charing Cross Road put up cardboard arrows saying ‘Novels on a “Finistère” theme this way.’

  One response to repression was simply to drink more. On the day before May Day Wolfenden determined to stay up all night drinking so that he could hear the choristers at dawn. At noon the following day he consulted his watch and found that he had been drinking for twenty-four hours. In dreary post-post-war Oxford everyone was more manic and more dissolute than today; no one had heard of jogging or health clubs; everybody smoked. But however dissolute they were, they could be sure that Jeremy Wolfenden would be a little bit more so.

  Drugs were hard to come by, but he managed. It was the time of Aldous Huxley’s books on his experiences in California, and Wolfenden succeeded in extracting some mescaline from the science laboratories, which he took on one occasion with his cousin Sally Hinchliff, herself an undergraduate, and two others. Sally found she had lost the willingness to move and spent the night in Magdalen new building, marvelling at the ‘profound’ insights that the drug induced, such as Jeremy’s apparent assertion that ‘language is not horizontal.’ She misheard him; what he actually said was ‘Be careful, the landing is not horizontal.’

  With the aid of Alka Seltzer (known to him in a phrase of Colin Falck’s, after the rifle-cleaning cloth, as a ‘pull-through’) and the five-till-seven afternoon work stint, Wolfenden duly won a formal or congratulatory first. Its distinction from a normal first-class degree lay in the fact that when you went for your interview the examiners were supposed to stand up and applaud. Wolfenden was given straight alphas throughout his papers, though they were not altogether happy about his attitude. One examiner made the frightening comment: ‘We had to give him straight alphas, but frankly I didn’t enjoy doing it. He wrote as though it were all beneath him; he wrote as though it were all such a waste of his time.’

  Wolfenden’s reputation was at its height. It was more substantial than that of bright graduates at other times because he was older. One or two of his more astute friends began to worry about his recklessness and lack of any instinct for self-preservation. His life, his attitudes and his intellect seemed to embody their own aspirations in some dazzling form; his existence seemed to demonstrate what happens when a rage for the life of the mind is taken to the limit. It was magnificent, but it was frightening. What would become of him?

  Other killjoys noticed that while Jeremy was undoubtedly brilliant, he didn’t have an aptitude for anything in particular. The word ‘brilliant’ recurs in all contemporary descriptions of him, but it is not an adjective of unlimited admiration; compare Proust’s biographer George D. Painter on the fantastic Comte Robert de Montesquiou: ‘He invented and kept his own astonishing rules of life: he was … by far the most remarkable and original person in the empty milieu of the Faubourg St Germain; he was witty, and brilliantly though not profoundly intelligent.’ Substitute any one of the closed English institutions in which Wolfenden lived for ‘Faubourg St Germain’ and the limiting description works for him too. He could take in philosophy, music, art, Greek, theatre, maths, history, any subject you might care to mention, with astonishing ease and virtuosity, but he didn’t, for instance, have anything that you might call a talent.

  Two months after leaving Oxford, Wolfenden had found himself a job on The Times as what he described as a ‘general apprentice-cum-dogsbody at £5 a week’. This had been secured by his impressive work for the paper during vacations and by the support of a journalist called Peter Nichols, for many years the Times’s correspondent in Rome. ‘However,’ he wrote to Robin Hope, ‘it’s all a great victory … especially as JFW [Jack Wolfenden] had no part in it – and gives me something to go on for the future.’ He planned to keep his academic options open by sitting the All Souls exam in due course.

  He moved from Cheyne Walk in Chelsea to Arundel Gardens in Notting Hill, but the gallery of exotic characters – ‘A. had sex last night with a transvestite sadist from Reading clad entirely in black, including a crash-helmet’ – stayed the same. Wolfenden’s own intrigues were usually with respectable types who needed to be smuggled through the Cage aux Folies atmosphere of his various flats. One such object of desire was ‘rather like Bamber Gascoigne only a bit butcher (Imagine!)’, though when Wolfenden got him home he found Kit Lambert and a friend called Roger halfway through a four-hour conversation about each garment they would be taking with them on holiday to Greece. After two and a half hours of ‘solid camp of a rare vintage’, the dish in question was ‘so tired that we could only play teddy bears’.

  Kit Lambert was almost as dissolute as Jeremy Wolfenden, but at this stage a close ally. He was the son of Constant Lambert, with whom Christopher Wood had had his unfortunate cooperation for the Russian Ballet. Constant Lambert held no grudge, however. Four years after Wood’s death his son was born and he needed to find a name; and so it was that Jeremy Wolfenden’s friend was named after Kit Wood.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ Wolfenden wrote, ‘I work for this aged newspaper, which creaks in every joint, accept all the drinks I’m offered by Public Relations Men … I’m the smallest office boy here really – which makes me think I should have an affair with the smallest office boy – but it would really be too difficult. The place is full of dishes, but they would really be so much more use to me any place else.’

  Newspaper foreign desks stay open late into the night in case stories come in from parts of the world in different time zones. It is expensive to remake pages and move stories around, and was especially so at this time, when printing was done on site using hot-metal presses. Although more advanced technology was available, the British print unions had successfully resisted it; when the linotype machines that set the print went wrong the management sometimes had to look for spares in Victorian museums. An organised racket in the print room meant that many printers on the payroll never turned up for work; some were paid under imaginative aliases such as ‘Mickey Mouse’. Many of the scams had been written into the contracts by a blackmailed management, desperate not to lose a night’s production. One of the most hilarious was an agreement by which linotype operators were paid to correct mistakes in the typesetting for which they were responsible. Proofs therefore seldom arrived on the editorial floor without their quota of ‘errors’. The expense and the hostility meant that as few editorial changes as possible were made between editions and that journalists who stayed late on the night shift had time for drink and intrigue.

  Wolfenden, even at the height of his promiscuity, declined to have affairs in the office. He enjoyed danger but always seemed to know how far he could go. He was almost thrown out of Eton, but he survived; at Oxford he never quite, as Cassen’s piece for Isis noted, made his public life into the full-scale revolt that those who knew him privately expected. It was the apparent loss of this sure instinct later in his life that so perplexed his friends.

  While Jeremy Wolfenden’s sexual life in London and Oxford was reaching its rackety peak, his father was chairing a Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. The Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, outlined two problems. The first was that there was too much brazen soliciting by prostitutes in London: innocent passers-by had to be protected. The second was the feeling that homosexuality was on the increase and that something should be done to stop it. The Government thought that the two subjects should be considered by the same committee and were re
ady for the same treatment. The homosexual problem was not, like soliciting, thought to threaten the public directly; it was said by the Home Office to be an ‘unnatural vice’ that degraded the individual and society. It also led to crime in the shape of blackmail.

  According to Jack Wolfenden, most people were unaware that homosexuality existed. Of the few that knew about it, most thought it distasteful, and only a handful were tolerant. Buggery was illegal anyway, whether the second party was a man or woman. Lesbian activity had never been against the law, while the Act that made any gross indecency between men an offence was a legislative accident – a spin-off from a hastily passed bill introduced by Labouchère in 1885 and designed to protect women and girls. Certainly the law was due for reform; though whether trying to stamp out the practice altogether was the Home Secretary’s best response was open to doubt.

  Jack Wolfenden never found out why he had been chosen for the job. At first he worried about his children. ‘What,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘might they have to put up with in comment from their contemporaries if their father got involved in “this sort of thing”?’ What indeed? Jack Wolfenden was being disingenuous, since he had known for sure for at least two years (longer if he was informed of the incident with the first year scholar) that his elder son was devotedly homosexual. But he accepted the Home Secretary’s offer and set about forming a Departmental Committee (it was not a Royal Commission, because such commissions publish all evidence, and the Wolfenden Committee felt it might lose the evidence it wanted if it was not ‘off the record’). It says a great deal for Jack Wolfenden’s personal ambition that he was prepared to risk it. It is difficult to imagine more than forty-eight hours lapsing in today’s press before the first story – ‘Vice Man’s Son is Gay’ – appeared in print. Jeremy had never made a secret of his sexual life; he was a famous figure in the small world of Oxford, and an active one in the larger sphere of London: his preferences were known about by hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. Either Jack Wolfenden had an overmastering desire to chair the committee or a deep trust in the tact and voluntary discretion of the British public.

  Jeremy Wolfenden used to say that his father wrote him a letter at this time which went roughly as follows: ‘Dear Jeremy, You will probably have seen from the newspapers that I am to chair a Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. I have only two requests to make of you at the moment. 1) That we stay out of each other’s way for the time being; 2) That you wear rather less make-up.’

  The Vice committee met, like Winston Smith and his rats, in Room 101. Their deliberations took two years and the Report was not published until 3 September 1957. Its main recommendation was that homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence. There was outrage in the press: John Gordon in the Sunday Express called the report ‘The Pansies’ Charter’; the Daily Express called it ‘cumbersome nonsense’; even the Evening Standard thought the recommendations ‘bad, retrograde and utterly to be condemned.’ The Government, which had commissioned Wolfenden from a feeling that homosexuality ought, in its own words, ‘to be curbed’ was now in difficulty. In November 1958 Rab Butler, then Home Secretary, opened a debate by saying that any change in the law regarding homosexuality might be regarded as conferring some sort of tacit approval; on the other hand he was happy to implement Wolfenden’s tame new legislation for fining prostitutes more heavily, and this became law the following year.

  As for the homosexual law reform, the Government did what it did best: it did nothing. Labour friends told Jack Wolfenden they would have done the same. In 1960 a free vote on an Opposition motion to implement the recommendations of the report was heavily defeated. In 1965 Lord Arran set the business in motion again in the Lords; in 1967, on the initiative of Leo Abse MP, the Commons did the same. In the summer of 1967 the Sexual Offences Act came into effect, almost ten years after the Wolfenden Committee reported.

  Jack Wolfenden personally abhorred homosexuality: he thought it was a disgusting abomination. However, he viewed the recommendations of the Committee as a philosophical exercise. He could not find any respectable reason for a government to interfere with the private behaviour of its adult citizens. His suggestion that homosexuality be decriminalised was a victory for intellectual process over personal distaste; it was a vindication of the disinterested mental disciplines of Oxford PPE.

  By the time the law was passed in 1967 Jeremy Wolfenden was dead. For the whole of his adult life his father’s report was either in progress or lying in a heavy pile, ticking powerfully, on a shelf in the Home Office.

  Meanwhile, there was the All Souls exam. As the candidates stood waiting to go in Wolfenden remarked to David Marquand: ‘You realise I’ve been competing with these people all my life, since I was seven.’ He didn’t mind competing, though, because he always won. Most of the candidates had flu, but contrived to make it a reasonably pleasant social experience.

  Wolfenden sent a ripple of panic through his fellow-competitors when he strode out of one exam after half an hour. He handed in a single sheet of paper only two-thirds full. The question was ‘Liberty, equality, democracy – three beautiful but incompatible ideals.’ Wolfenden did not write an essay, but merely jotted down a string of aphorisms. He won a prize fellowship.

  All Souls gave Wolfenden a base in Oxford with few teaching obligations in return. He would go back to Oxford at the weekends and hold soirees long into the night. It was on one such occasion that Colin Falck noticed that the conversation had taken a peculiar turn. Beneath the banter Wolfenden apparently had a serious purpose: he was attempting to recruit Falck to the Secret Intelligence Service.

  Both of them were drunk and the approach was made obliquely, but Falck was quite certain what Wolfenden was suggesting, and quite certain that he was serious: even when drunk he had an inner mental gyroscope that kept him balanced. The man that Falck should go and see, said Wolfenden, was Robert Zaehner, someone to whom he had already gone to considerable lengths to introduce Falck. He was Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics and a fellow of All Souls. Born to Swiss parents but raised in England, he was a short, fair-haired man with very thick glasses who, despite his myopia, had managed to join the Army as a press attaché and had been in Teheran from 1943 to 1947, returning to be acting counsellor in 1951-2, before settling in at All Souls for the rest of his life. Falck understood that Zaehner had been Wolfenden’s own Oxford conduit to SIS, even though initial contact had been made in the Navy. Falck declined, and nothing more was said of it. His impression was that Wolfenden thought it all a game: he had himself signed up as an anti-boredom measure and because he was quite certain he could keep two steps ahead of any plodder from British Intelligence.

  He was fascinated by a man called Whitaker Chambers, a Communist agent who left the Party to become a writer on Time magazine and later named Alger Hiss to the House Un-American Activities committee. Wolfenden saw playful applications of such duplicity to university life and was drawn to the idea of ‘respectable’ (frequently Old Etonian) diplomats playing a double game. It was connected to his feelings about his homosexuality, which had required him to assume to some extent a false role in society, and to his pleasure in walking the fine line of acceptable revolt. His enthusiasm for espionage extended to the novels of Ian Fleming, of whom he was an early admirer.

  Meanwhile younger undergraduates such as Brian Wenham and David Murray, a handsome Canadian Rhodes scholar, joined the inner circle and enjoyed the combination of drink, flirting and shocking conversation. Wolfenden never seriously contemplated a career in Oxford. He was too impatient to live a life like Bruce McFarlane’s; something like A.J.P. Taylor’s might have been within his grasp, but there was the question of his homosexuality, which he neither wanted, nor knew how, to conceal.

  In London The Times appointed him Night Foreign News Editor, which he enjoyed because ‘The Times is nicer when there aren’t quite so many old men in the building, and when it is actually in the
process of being a newspaper, and not just an institution, which is what it is in the daytime … I’m doing so much work one way and another, what with The Times, and teaching, and two books I’m supposed to be writing (which don’t get anywhere very fast) … I must say I rather look forward to going abroad, if and when I get the chance … The attractions of England are strictly limited, especially when half the people in it aren’t in it, because they’ve gone abroad, or else are in a state of congenital depression (usually justified).’

  Of many London addresses, 27 Oakley Street in Chelsea was the longest lasting. It was a flat inhabited at various times by Kit Lambert, Philip French and his Swedish wife Kersti, Michael Sissons, Godfrey Hodgson and his first wife Alice Vidal, Sally Hinchliff, Michael Connock, a Financial Times journalist later caught in a ‘honey trap’ by Polish secret police, and a respectable but high-living lawyer called David Edwards. On quiet days Wolfenden would return from The Times at about midnight and would do the crossword in the next day’s paper with his cousin. The days were seldom quiet. The drinking was riotous and so was the sex; Wolfenden often came home with a black eye or bleeding lip from some rough encounter. Anthony Page would use the house to rehearse John Arden’s Live Like Pigs when there was no room at the Royal Court.

  Gay life in London revolved around well-known clubs, such as the Rockingham or the Arts and Battledress, which was situated in an alley between the Strand and St Martin in the Fields. They were essentially pick-up joints that would be especially crowded on Friday and Saturdays nights. Compared to the defiantly ‘out’ discos of London today, or the bars that sprang up in Manhattan in the 1970s, these were genteel places: there were no shaved heads, nipple rings or dungeons, but men dressed in suits, cavalry twills and cravats. Attached to this scene was a more sardonic, queeny world that did not appeal to Wolfenden – ‘the shallow emotions and the casual, treacherous, cynical sort of love I now associate with the homosexual underworld in London … an atmosphere in which sordid homosexuality is the only practicable form of self-expression … the catty cynicism of the queer bars and camp little flats in Earl’s Court Road.’ He always wrote of his own sex life as though it should be, however anguished or sordid, a source of entertainment and laughter – a major bulwark against the tide of boredom.