After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Certainly had he spent any time in England during the 1920s, and chosen for his company either the intellectuals or the supposedly Bright Young Things, Spengler might have found plenty of data for his notebooks, and yet more people whose antics would have baffled or dismayed Frederick the Great or Louis XIV.

  The war had been fought and concluded by old men, and the rising generation, looking back on what they had just missed, did not feel inclined to share the values of their fathers. If the Eminent Victorians had bred up mass murderers such as Kitchener, Haig, Asquith and Lloyd George, then Lytton Strachey was surely right to have guyed them? Logan Pearsall Smith saw in Strachey ‘a sense equal I think to Voltaire’s sense of the preposterousness of things, a shining sword of wit equal to or superior to his’.8 Harold Acton, an eighteen-year-old Etonian aesthete about to go up to Oxford, saw Strachey as a literally iconic figure. His first glimpse of him had been at Garsington Manor, Lady Ottoline Morrell’s house near Oxford. ‘An Italian gate and avenue of ilexes led up to the house, an Elizabethan structure in stone which had once been a monastery. Behind it a bank sloped down to a pond with a sculptured group in the middle and statues along the side.’ The pair who next enter the picture might themselves be statues in some pagan reredos, or, as Acton himself saw, figures depicted by Renaissance art. ‘Lytton Strachey was standing beside the hostess, dressed, for all her high stature, in a Kate Greenaway costume of heliotrope silk with white stockings and I thought: What a fabulous couple! They should be painted together, hand in hand, like Van Eyke’s [sic] portrait of John [sic] Arnolfini and his wife in the National Gallery. Lytton Strachey’s beard and Lady Ottoline’s hair seemed to have caught fire from the afternoon sun.’9 Acton himself, when still a schoolboy, had achieved mythic status. One of his contemporaries described going to see one of Diaghilev’s ballets at the Alhambra ‘when Brian [Howard] and Harold [Acton] 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 perhaps like a couple of Oscar Wildes. My step-mother was astonished at the sight of them, and thought they must be foreigners. I was much too nervous, at about fifteen, to say that they were two of my very great friends from Eton.’10

  Acton had been mortified, on that first visit to Garsington, when Lady Ottoline’s husband, Colonel Morrell, had sat at a pianola, wearing riding-breeches, and rattling out ‘a version of Scheherazade’. It was a blasphemy to attempt a honky-tonk rendition of the most memorable and romantic of Diaghilev’s ballets. ‘For many a young artist Scheherazade had been an inspiration equivalent to Gothic architecture for the Romantics or Quattrocento frescoes for the pre-Raphaelites. But now I put my hands to my ears and fled, as discreetly as I could.’ Evidently not as discreetly as he had hoped, since, on another visit, when someone offered Acton a lift in their car, Ottoline Morrell sharply observed: ‘Mr Acton prefers to hike.’11 Unlike Englishmen of the period, Diaghilev was not in the least furtive about his homosexuality. It was part of his art. He was one of a whole group of gay artists and writers who led the rebellion against the nineteenth century, taking their revenge on the bourgeoisie for the persecution of Oscar Wilde. Proust had been present in 1910 at the opening night of Scheherazade in Paris in 1910, accompanied by his close friend Reynaldo Hahn.

  Diaghilev was a sort of homosexual-aesthetic missionary, bringing to the new generation the message that Beauty and Love mattered more than the hateful values which had destroyed, and were destroying, bourgeois Europe. His ballets, choreographed by Michel Fokine, were a vehicle for his lover Nijinsky, and the sublime Pavlova. He also organized art exhibitions, and concert performances of great opera singers. It was Diaghilev who introduced the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin to the West. He came to London in 1911, the year of George V’s coronation. Osbert Sitwell wrote in his autobiography that the Ballets Russes’ performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird changed his life. ‘Now I knew where I stood. I would be for so long as I lived, on the side of the arts.’12 It is a strange expression, suggesting that by liking ballet, Sitwell was taking sides – which of course he was. Stravinsky took sides when he composed The Rite of Spring, The Firebird, and his early symphonies, in two very courageous senses: he was on the one hand bravely innovative in orchestration, richly, flamboyantly demonstrating that Romanticism and Modernism need not be opposed; and he was forced to take sides politically. Stranded in Switzerland during the First World War, he made the tragic choice made by so many of his countrymen after the Revolution, not to return to Russia. So it is clear enough what ‘sides’ Stravinsky was forced to take.

  For the English aesthetes, the battles were a little less dangerous, which perhaps explains why they so often resorted to silliness as a weapon against a disapproving bourgeoisie. You certainly could not get much sillier than the Sitwells. Indeed, they could be said to have taken silliness beyond the art form and made it a whole way of life. (When his colonel, in the 4th Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, suggested that the young Osbert Sitwell should smarten himself up by growing a moustache, Osbert replied: ‘What colour sir?’13)

  Edith (1887–1964), Osbert (1892–1969) and Sacheverell (1897–1988) Sitwell were the children of an eccentric Yorkshire baronet. When travelling on the train in the 1860s, their father had been asked his identity and replied: ‘I am four years old and the youngest baronet in England.’14 ‘Sir George is the strangest old bugger you ever met,’ his butler, Henry Moat, told the composer Constant Lambert.15

  The children made a career out of their father’s and mother’s ‘strangeness’, mocking and lampooning them to their friends and in their books. Their childhood was divided, enviably, between three splendid houses. Renishaw was Sir George’s great seat near Sheffield, which served D. H. Lawrence as the model of Wragby in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Montegufoni was a villa in Tuscany with over a hundred rooms, which Sir George had bought at the beginning of the century. And Scarborough was the beautiful seaside resort where both sets of grandparents resided. ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ a friend of her mother’s asked Edith, to receive the inevitable reply: ‘A genius.’16 Such is the human capacity for self-deception, that all three Sitwell siblings believed in their collective and individual genius, though neither Edith nor Sacheverell (‘Sachie’) left anything behind them in written form which was evidence of any particular talent. Edith wrote what she thought were poems, as did Sachie, who also indulged in travel-cum-art books in purple prose, of which Southern Baroque Art was the most popular. Osbert was no genius, but by contrast with his siblings he was a supremely gifted writer of autobiography, and his Left Hand, Right Hand! sequence is a wonderful, sub-Proustian compilation of anecdote and observation. Sir George is, of course, the hero of the story, with his desire to tell everyone their business – whether it was Sargent, painting their group portrait, or telling a knife-maker to soak the handles in condensed milk. ‘Unless you learn to play ping-pong properly, you can never be a leader of men,’ he once told his elder son. And, a good piece of advice for an artist, but of course ridiculed by his children: ‘Such a mistake to have friends.’

  Edith’s greatest work of art was her Plantagenet-style appearance. Elizabeth Bowen once likened her to ‘a high altar on the move’. Harold Acton saw her in 1922 as ‘a rare jewel, a hieratic figure in Limoges enamel … Clamped in some tin biscuit box, but rarer, more hieratic against this background. The pale oval face with its almond eyes and long thin nose, had often been carved in ivory by true believers. Her entire figure possessed a distinction seldom to be seen outside the glass cases of certain museums. Physically, she was an extraordinary survival from the Age of Chivalry.’17 Her most famous piece, Façade, was first put on in 1922, in the siblings’ drawing room in Carlyle Square, Chelsea. It consisted in a series of her nonsensical ‘poems’, set to quite spirited music by Sachie’s young protégé William Walton, and declaimed by Edith and her brothers through a megaphone, or Sengerphone, a papier mâché instrument acquired from a sin
ger called Senger. T. S. Eliot particularly cringed at the Sitwells’ ‘poems’ since, somewhere in the minds of the public, or the Sitwells themselves, there existed a false syllogism. Deep, modern or high-falutin’ verses which mean nothing at all are ‘difficult’. Eliot’s poetry is difficult. Therefore the Sitwells are in the avant garde with Eliot and Pound.

  Eliot appears, in his ‘four piece suit’, at the parties of those who had friends – at Lady Ottoline’s, Virginia Woolf’s, the Sitwells’. But one senses him holding aloof. For Osbert, Edith and Sachie, as for Virginia and friends in the so-called Bloomsbury set, having the idea of oneself as an artist was an illusion which friends were perilously good at fostering and encouraging. That is the peril, for an artist, of ‘sets’. When Tennyson read some of Maud aloud in Benjamin Jowett’s drawing room at Oxford, the Master of Balliol said, in his high squeaky voice: ‘I should not publish that if I were you, Tennyson.’ No such voice in the early decades of the twentieth century was ever heard in the Sitwells’ drawing-room, nor over the other side of London in Bloomsbury. Such a mistake to have friends. The second performance of Façade was held at the Aeolian Hall in the Chenil Galleries, King’s Road. Harold Acton took a boyfriend, Evelyn Waugh, then an undergraduate at Hertford College. All the handpicked audience roared and cheered. On another occasion, Mrs Robert Mathias, patron of the Ballets Russes, had a performance in her drawing-room in the presence of Diaghilev. What can he have thought?

  Of course, as soon as Façade appeared on a public stage it was lampooned and condemned by all the critics. The Sitwells took this as evidence of the philistinism of the bourgeoisie. The British tradition had been firmly established, of talentless ‘arty’ people convincing themselves that exhibitionism was a substitute for talent. It could be said that this had been going on in the nineteenth century to some extent, but in the twentieth century, there came a parting of the ways in England, especially in London, between good popular books, art and music, and ‘highbrow’ versions which only the initiated could appreciate. Within this veiled holy of holies, the initiates could learn to mouth the names of composers or artists they were supposed to admire, without actually possessing any discernment at all. True artists found themselves either alone, or being patronized by those who were ‘on the side of the arts’, a concept which would surely have been alien to Beethoven or Wordsworth.

  One of the first to mock the Sitwells (as ‘two wiseacres and a cow’) was a truly brilliant young man called Noël Coward (1899–1973). A child prodigy, born in the suburb of Teddington to musical parents, Coward had started his professional career aged ten, playing Prince Mussel in The Goldfish alongside the infant Micheal Mac Liammoir (then Alfred Willmore) and Ninette de Valois (then Ninette Devalois). His favourite stage performer at the time was a stand-up comedian called Phil Ray (‘I always abbreve, it’s a hab’). At thirteen he played Slightly in Peter Pan, with Pauline Chase. The Observer noted: ‘The immortal Slightly as acted by Master Noël Coward, is quite a young boy and his grave pretence at wisdom is all the funnier.’ A voracious reader and playgoer, Coward wrote two novels by the time he was eighteen, as well as three plays, and some lyrics and songs. The first play of his own in which he appeared on the West End stage in London was I’ll Leave it to You; it got good notices, but closed within five weeks. In 1922 he wrote a play called The Young Idea, and sent the script to GBS. Shaw wrote back a detailed critique, but concluded: ‘unless you can get clean away from me you will begin as a back number, and be hopelessly out of it when you are forty’.

  That was not part of Coward’s ambition at all. Already he had developed his highly distinctive, clipped manner of utterance (he said it was to make his deaf mother hear what he said), but it was more brilliant than that. Cruel, cold and oddly toneless, the voice was the perfect vehicle for the words. He was the greatest cruel-verse genius in English since Alexander Pope. With his sleek, immaculately combed hair, bony face and sardonic mouth, he could have had an unkind expression, but there was a sense of the tragic in his large eyes. He was relentlessly ambitious, keen to improve his work, and to make contacts in the world. One of his earliest friends was Gladys Calthorn, who was to work with him as a designer for dozens of shows. Stranded in Naples together with no money in 1922, they had to go to the British consul, who agreed to cash them a cheque. ‘Who shall I make it payable to?’ Noël asked. ‘Somers Cox.’ ‘And some ‘asn’t,’ said Gladys.

  The next year, 1923, Coward formed another of his great collaborations, this time with Gertrude Lawrence in a revue of which he was composer and part author called London Calling. Just as the show was in rehearsal, Coward was lunching at the Ivy Restaurant. It was a favourite haunt of his from the days when it had linoleum on the floor, two waitresses and paper napkins until, as happened rapidly in the early Twenties, it became a haunt of famous actors and of le monde. Its inspired owner Abel Giandolini hired an expert cook, and the tables soon filled up not only with famous theatre people, but with Winston Churchill, the Aga Khan, Duff and Diana Cooper (who came for the spaghetti) and Jacob Epstein, all to be seen there regularly. One day Osbert Sitwell stopped at young Coward’s table and suggested he came to Façade. The invitation led to one of the Sitwells’ silly carefully orchestrated feuds. Coward did come to Façade, and instantly added a sketch to London Calling about the Swiss Family Whittlebot. Miss Hernia Whittlebot, says the stage direction, ‘should be effectively and charmingly dressed in undraped dyed sacking, a cross between blue and green, with a necklet of uncut amber beads in unconventional shapes. She must wear a gold band rather high up on her forehead from which hang a little clump of Bacchanalian fruit below each ear. Her face is white and weary, with a long chin and nose and bags under her eyes.’18 ‘Life is essentially a Curve,’ says Hernia, ‘and Art is an oblong within that Curve. My brothers and I have been brought up on Rhythm as other children are brought up on Glaxo.’19 The Sitwells took umbrage and refused to speak to Coward for forty years.

  In 1924 he staged his play The Vortex, about an embarrassing society lady who has much younger lovers, and her son, a drug addict. The first night, cleverly talked up by the fashionable, was in a tiny, hard-seated theatre in Hampstead, the Everyman, attended by Eddie Marsh, Edwina Mountbatten and others of comparable fame. Stella Gibbons wrote:

  I was present at the very first performance of The Vortex in a little kind of converted drill-hall in Hampstead and I remember how shocked I was at the drug-addict boy (he would have been called a Drug Fiend in those days by ordinary people) and ever since I have had such enduring pleasure and laughter from his songs and jokes. He seems to me to incarnate the myth of the twenties (gaiety, courage, pain concealed, amusing malice) and that photograph … with poised fingertips held to hide the mouth, with the eyes delightfully smiling, is an incarnation in another form, even to the extreme elegance of the clothes.20

  The Vortex still ‘works’ on the stage today, especially since they often now include in it his 1930s hit ‘Mad about the Boy’.

  But it is in his lyrics that Coward lives for ever. Throughout the Twenties, a series of revues and plays poured from him. He could be funny, harsh, naughty. He could also get away with being sentimental. ‘I’ll See You Again’ from Bitter Sweet must be one of the most beautiful songs written in that song-filled decade. He could also, without heaviness or pretension, offer haunting commentaries on his times. ‘What’s going to happen to the children, when there aren’t any more grown-ups?’ seems as good a question as any to ask of the decade in which Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Sitwell, Brian Howard and Peter Quennell whooped and roared. ‘It’s very hard on nature when she’s made a lot of plans/To have them all frustrated by a lot of Peter Pans.’21 Or, from the slightly later ‘Bright Young People’ (1931):

  Look at us three,

  Representative we

  Of a nation renowned for virility.

  We’ve formed a cult of puerility

  Just for fun.

  You may deplore

  The effe
cts of war

  Which are causing the world to decay a bit.

  We’ve found our place and will play a bit

  In the sun.

  Though Waterloo was won upon the playing fields of Eton,

  The next war will be photographed, and lost, by Cecil Beaton.22

  17

  The Means of Grace and the Hope of Glory

  If some British observers believed absolutism to be all right for Italians and Russians, the electorate at large was beginning to tire of Lloyd George’s rule by one party of coalition. And if democracy was a long way off in India, it was felt to be time that they experimented with a limited version of it once again in Britain. ‘Lloyd George was the nearest thing England has known to a Napoleon, a supreme ruler maintaining himself by individual achievement.’1 If that is true, then the electorate in the early 1920s, such as it was, decided very firmly that it did not want an English Napoleon, just as it would decide in later years that it wanted neither an English Lenin nor an English Mussolini.

  The very fact that twentieth-century English political history is blander than its German, Italian, Spanish or Russian equivalent is perhaps revealing. Only two political figures, post-Lloyd George, had the charismatic status which could, in differing circumstances, have led to a cult of personality: Oswald Mosley and Winston Churchill. One of these men ended up as a pariah, the other as a national hero. But from the resignation of Lloyd George until the appointment of Winston Churchill in 1940, the British prime ministers are a succession of nonentities. None of the ‘stars’ in any of the three parties, in so far as they had stars, rose to the heights of leadership. This tells us something if we are prepared to watch closely. It would be gross sentimentality to deny the preparedness, in India, in Ireland, and in Britain itself, of the governing class to look after its own interests by violent suppression of dissident groups, races, classes. Equally, however, the refugees over the period 1918–39 have a story to tell. True, some eccentric Britons emigrated to Russia or Germany during these years, but overwhelmingly, the traffic was the other way. Slowly and painfully, a democratic decency did evolve, and though the British population underwent sore economic hardship during these years, it also enjoyed far greater political stability and freedom than almost any other country in Europe. This was partly because its economy was, even at the worst of times, underwritten by US loans, or bolstered by Empire trade. It must also have been, though, that British political institutions, more flexible to change than their Continental equivalents, were able to preserve some of the strengths they had possessed in times past. There were a number of English revolutions and evolutions, but they did not involve, as they did in Russia, Germany, Spain, Italy, the wholesale dumping of the political classes, of the civil service, or of the Establishment.