The Man Who Was Norris E-Book

tom Cullen

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The seedy and beguiling Gerald Hamilton was the man who Isherwood modelled Mr Norris on in Mr Norris Changes Train

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Leseprobe

Gerald Hamilton

The Author

Tom Cullen was born in Oklahoma in 1913 and went to France with the U.S. army during the Second World War. He remained there after the war before moving to Britain, having fallen foul of the American authorities for his communist beliefs.

He was the author of several respected biographies, including Maundy Gregory and Dr. Crippen, but his biography of Gerald Hamilton was blocked for legal reasons.

He died in 2001 in London.

The Editor

Phil Baker has written two books for Dedalus: The Dedalus Book of Absinthe and The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley.

He is the author of books on Samuel Beckett, William S Burroughs and the London occult artist Austin Osman Spare, and reviews for a number of papers including The Sunday Times and Times Literary Supplement.

“It’s marvellous… the way you’ve maintained standards of right and wrong and yet left Norris an endearing person. And you’ve made him both silly and witty, like a character in Congreve. He’s awfully good.”

E.M. Forster to Christopher Isherwood, 11 May 1935

Contents

Title

Quote

The Author

The Editor

Introduction: The Importance of Being Gerald

Prologue: October 1954

One: November 1890: Premature and Perfect

Two: November 1915: Raided

Three: April 1916: Good Friday

Four: December 1919: Holy Innocents

Five: May 1924: Jewel Thief

Six: February 1931: King Zog Survives

Seven: December 1930: The Beast in Berlin

Eight: August 1932: The World Congress Against War

Nine: July 1941: Interned Again

Ten: March 1948: Business in New York

Eleven: January 1952: Tangier and the Tangeroids

Twelve: June 1955: Churchill Unveiled

Thirteen: January 1964: Intrigue in Spain

Fourteen: January 1966: Wickedest Man in the World

Fifteen: June 1970: Exit Gerald

Coda: Jury Still Out

Personal Recollections of Tom Cullen by Reed Searle

References

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Copyright

Introduction:

The Importance of Being Gerald

“Uncle Gerald, your charm is a mystery” was W.H. Auden’s 1939 toast to Gerald Hamilton, and Hamilton’s undeniable charm was, indeed, mysterious. Despite his physical and perhaps moral ugliness, he had a strange charisma and he remains a fascinating character.

Hamilton’s old-world charm carried him through a precarious life. One of the few people to be interned in both world wars as a threat to British national security, he became a communist agent between the wars before drifting to the right and recovering his faith in the “sacred cause” of absolute monarchy. Along the way he met everyone from the last Tsar to Aleister Crowley (who kept tabs on him for the British Special Branch when they shared a flat in Weimar Berlin) and he never lost his impeccable manners or his love of wine and food, whatever life threw at him in the way of personal and global crises. “We live in stirring times;” he liked to say, “tea-stirring times.”

Hamilton is most famous, of course, as the inspiration for the seedy but beguiling Mr Norris in Christopher Isherwood’s classic Mr Norris Changes Trains. The present book is emphatically not about the genesis of that novel, and it would be foolish to consider the novel to be simply about Hamilton. The “real” Mr Norris is the fictional one, who lives in the same realm as King Lear, Robinson Crusoe and Sherlock Holmes. Isherwood himself, one of the most nuanced and layered of autobiographical writers, has considered the relation between the man (or rather the mental image of a friend, a sort of “robot”; “Gerald-as-I-choose-to-see-him”) and the character in his Prologue to Hamilton’s autobiography (one of several, and none of them reliable) Mr Norris and I…

It might be more accurate not to say that Norris was Hamilton but, rather, that for the rest of his life Hamilton was Norris; an association he clearly relished, despite occasional protests to the contrary. This book is the story of his life outside the character, a life in which he went on to hobnob with fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and Establishment traitor Guy Burgess, and to scheme schemes undreamed of by Norris, from whitewashing apartheid South Africa to promoting Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China.

There is already a charming but partial picture of Hamilton in later life to be found in John Symonds’s exceptional memoir Conversations with Gerald. This presents Gerald the reactionary bon viveur, pontificating about food and drink, fussing over soups and risottos, and staying in on Saturdays to avoid “football crowds, drinkers of bad beer, and fornicators in general.” Never lost for the right thing to say, Gerald recalls being offered some perilously old 1874 Chateau Lafite which ‘died’ within seconds of the bottle being opened; there were long faces all around, before he brightened the party by observing “It is a privilege to have assisted at its obsequies.” Whether he is condemning the British royal family as merely bourgeois or introducing Symonds to some of his favourite cheeses (“Chambourcy, Monsieur, Le Roy, Boursault, Fontainebleau,” and particularly the goat’s cheese Capricet) Symonds’s Gerald comes over as provocatively opinionated but harmless and oddly endearing.

That was not how everyone saw him. The writer Julian Maclaren Ross described Hamilton as “the last of the dangerous men”, comparing him in that respect to Crowley, and he had a bizarre, unsubstantiated story that a young friend of Gerald, intervening in a dispute on his behalf, had been stabbed to death: when the boy’s parents complained, Hamilton’s unsympathetic comment was allegedly “Goodness gracious me! Young men today seem to want to live forever!”

Hamilton’s friend Robin Maugham received money for blackening Hamilton’s name with a 1966 exposé in The People newspaper, in which Hamilton was described as “one of the most evil men alive today”, but Stephen Spender and John Lehmann were more sincere in their judgment of Hamilton as a bad man, the latter firing a parting shot at him in his poem ‘The Rules of Comedy’, which ends “I’m sorry you died friendless, ugly, broke” (friendless being far from true, while being ugly and broke never cramped his style). There is a more unexpected reference in William Burroughs’s novel The Place of Dead Roads: “An old-queen voice, querulous, petulant, cowardly, the evil old voice of Gerald Hamilton…”

Hamilton was also associated with perversity, in part via the masochistic Mr Norris, whose tastes were the subject of drollery by novelist Kyril Bonfiglioli (“I do have a few bits of equipment myself which other folk might think a bit frivolous. A bit Mr Norris – you know”) and Barry Humphries (“I had written a macabre little song with a sexually perverse undertone. Somehow I had contrived to rhyme ‘plastic rainwear’ with ‘Mr Norris changes train-wear’…”)

More famous in his lifetime than he is now, Hamilton entertained his public with no fewer than three autobiographies (one of them illustrated with a drawing of him escaping from the British authorities disguised as a nun, by the cartoonist and illustrator Ronald Searle). The public were also treated to Robin Maugham’s five-part People exposé of him as “the wickedest man in the world”(“Gerald Hamilton”, ran the first headline: “Traitor, Con-Man and Crook (Even his Name is a Fake)”) which was advertised on prime-time television. Writer and broadcaster Dan Farson had already interviewed Hamilton in Soho’s Caves de France cellar bar for a television programme called Bohemia, and asked him “Is it true that you are the wickedest man in Europe?” “Oh, that’s very kind of you,” said Hamilton, “wittiest man in Europe, well, really…”

*

Tom Cullen’s book was written while Hamilton and his curious celebrity were fresher in people’s minds, less than a decade after his death. It was, however, blocked in Cullen’s lifetime, in part because Robin Maugham seems to have made a bizarre claim that he had been libelled by an allegation that he knew Hamilton’s death was faked, in order to escape his creditors, and that Hamilton had been seen being driven round Sloane Square in a taxi a week afterwards.

Maugham’s real objection, I would suggest, was not to a cock-and-bull story about dead people riding taxis, but to a clear innuendo that Hamilton procured young men for him. He might further have objected to Cullen’s entirely accurate depiction of the People series as a flagrantly insincere potboiler, quite cynically cooked up in cahoots with Hamilton himself.

I learned of this seemingly lost biography while researching Hamilton’s entry for the Dictionary of National Biography, and tracked it to America. I already admired Cullen as a writer and researcher after reading his biography of Maundy Gregory, so I was excited to find that Cullen’s friend Reed Searle had kept the Hamilton manuscript safely after rescuing it from the destruction of Cullen’s more general papers in London.

Like many people who write, I find the idea of unpublished work emotive: a friend of mine was murdered on the night after he had finished his first book, and one of the last things he saw must have been the theft of his computer with the book in it, while my own last thought during a serious car crash was not that I was going to die but that I was never going to publish my book on Samuel Beckett. I felt for Cullen, and felt that his very fine book deserved to exist in the world. In addition to preserving memories of Hamilton himself, it sheds interesting light on various byways of social, sexual and political history, and it is a valuable corrective to some of the legends that have grown up around Hamilton – largely of his own embroidering. It seems that Hamilton did not, in fact, work with the notorious broker of unmerited honours and peerages, Maundy Gregory, despite his own shady endeavours in the same field, and in particular it seems that he was not a friend of the Irish Republican hero and martyr Sir Roger Casement: a cornerstone in Hamilton’s personal myth.

Any biography is necessarily a partial picture. One of Cullen’s angles is to bring out Hamilton’s affinities with the characters of Restoration comedy, following from E.M. Forster’s comparison of the fictional Norris to a character in Congreve – as cited in the epigraph to the book – and the perception of Isherwood, Auden and their circle that there was something “enchantingly ‘period’ ” about Hamilton. I would suggest, however, that although the Restoration comparison works well, the period they were thinking of was primarily Edwardian and late Victorian, with Hamilton’s exquisite manners and elegant walking sticks belonging to the age of wax fruit, antimacassars, and Oscar Wilde.

Forster’s comment that Isherwood had maintained standards of right and wrong, while making Norris endearing, also bears on the perennial question of just how bad Hamilton was, and how we choose to frame and describe his behaviour. Seen from one angle, a man who can defraud the Save the Children Fund while running guns for the IRA and professing pacifism is something more than just a loveable rogue – and yet, to quote Norris, “There are some incidents in my career, as you doubtless know, which are very easily capable of misinterpretation.”

Are there any mitigating circumstances? We could see a formative experience, not dwelt on by Tom Cullen, in the shock of Hamilton being sent away from home and bullied at his first school – he was a boarding-school ‘survivor’, as people might say today – which may have cauterized his character to some extent, and made him unpleasantly self-reliant. He might also have been capable of more loyalty, somewhere in his make-up, than he is usually given credit for. Along with his personal cult of Charles I, royal martyr, Hamilton maintained a more flesh-and-blood fidelity to the memory of his wife Suzy Renou – the second of two paid marriages of convenience – whom he never slept or lived with but remained fond of, and to that of his friend, danceband leader Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson, who was killed when the Café de Paris was blitzed. Their two photographs, in silver frames, sat on the mantelpieces of the various digs, bedsitters and furnished rooms that Hamilton occupied in his later years.

*

Christopher Isherwood not only had a genius for friendship but he was an ethical individual, and his own loyal affection for Hamilton must be a point in Hamilton’s favour. Although he finally judged that Hamilton’s persistent dishonesty was tiresome, “like a greedy animal which you can’t leave alone in the kitchen”, he was remarkably forgiving of Hamilton’s depredations on himself. The most famous of these was Hamilton’s ineffectual but profitably self-interested role in trying to help Isherwood’s friend Heinz escape conscription into Hitler’s army, which involved long-drawn-out and expensive attempts to obtain visas from Belgium and then Mexico: in the event, Heinz was to survive service on both the Western and Russian Fronts. Not long afterwards, with Isherwood and Auden having gone to America in 1939, Hamilton leaked a personal letter from Isherwood to the ‘William Hickey’ gossip column in the Daily Express, which helped to sour British public feeling against the emigrés.

Isherwood nevertheless sent Hamilton money to help him in his old age, even though he had few illusions about him. In Mr Norris Changes Trains he had deftly given Norris his moral come-uppance in the figure of his demonic manservant Schmidt – “quite literally a familiar”, he said in a 1964 interview – and made their relationship an inspired, understated nod towards such doomed pairs as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Dorian Gray and his picture. Seeing Hamilton on television in 1970 (“quite marvellously himself”), Isherwood noted his simultaneous aspects, “so polished and gross and charming and hideous”, and the way he rolled his eyes like something in a horror film: “it’s almost as terrific as the picture of Dorian Gray.”

Isherwood was also generous enough to help Tom Cullen with the present book, answering queries and reading the manuscript in 1980, although he finally found it saddening (he records in his journal that he read it together with a biography of the musician and saloniste Misia Sert, “both of them ultimately downers”). It would have been his first inkling that even Hamilton’s work for the Save the Children Fund was not as blameless as he had always believed, and it would also have put him through an account of his old friend’s death, seemingly in a state of anguished repentance for his misdeeds.

Isherwood’s underlying affection for Hamilton comes out in a dream he had in 1940, when Hamilton was already forgiven over the visa scheme and the leaked letter. As he recounted it to Hamilton a couple of years later:

I had an almost clairvoyant dream in which I sat with you in that park in Amsterdam near the Emmastraat, watching the ducks on the lake. Nothing special happened, but it was unforgettably vivid, with the weeping willow and the sunlight on the water and the quacking of the ducks, and you, elegant as usual in grey, with a soft grey hat and your walking stick with the gold band; and there was a friendly relaxed atmosphere of mid-morning leisure.

It is a dream that brings together Hamilton’s charm and the thoughts of another Gerald, the philosopher and mystical thinker Gerald Heard. In Isherwood’s original account, recorded in his journal:

This morning, lying in bed, half-awake, I had a very strange experience. I remembered – or rather, relived […] – an instant of a certain morning, four years ago. I was sitting in a small park in Amsterdam, with Gerald Hamilton, and looking through the overhanging branches of a willow at a patch of brightly sunlit water, in which some ducks were swimming […] for a couple of seconds, I actually was the Christopher of 1936 […] Now, for the first time, I feel I have some inkling of what Gerald [Heard] is really talking about.

The clairvoyant vividness is that of an almost mystical timeslip, pivoting not around a madeleine but a park and a friendship.

It is on that note of friendship that Isherwood deserves the last word. On first learning of Hamilton’s death in 1970, he wrote that he no longer cared about Heinz’s passport, and the still unclear details of just how far Hamilton might have swindled them, “But I do remember all the fun we had together. He had a very cozy personality and an animal innocence, you felt he was only acting according to his nature.”

Phil Baker

Hamilton’s birthday, 1968: Sibylla Jane Flower; Bevis Hillier; Lady Antonia Fraser; Hamilton; James Pope-Hennessy; James Reeve; Mark Amory.

Prologue: October 1954

Maskwell: “Ha! But is there no such Thing as Honesty? Yes, and whosoever has it about him, bears an Enemy in his Breast… Well, for Wisdom and Honesty, give me Cunning and Hypocrisie; oh, ’tis such a Pleasure, to angle for fair fac’d Fools!”

– Congreve, The Double-Dealer (1694)

Le tout Londres was there at No 34 Tite Street on the morning of Saturday, October 16, 1954, according to the Figaro correspondent, meaning presumably that everyone who was anyone in the arts – poets, painters, writers, actors – was present for the unveiling of the blue plaque on the house where Oscar Wilde had lived. The occasion: the centenary of Wilde’s birth. Certainly the organizers of the unveiling ceremony had tried to make it inclusive, inviting everyone from Allan Aynesworth, who was the original Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, to one of the bridesmaids at Wilde’s wedding in 1884.

“The funny part is that I can’t remember inviting Gerald Hamilton,” Mrs Irena Barton, an attractive woman of French-Russian origin, tells me. “At that time I don’t think I had even heard of Gerald Hamilton.” Without Irena and her husband Eric, a bookseller in Richmond, there would have been no unveiling. It had all started with Irena writing a letter to The Times to suggest that “something should be done” to mark the Wilde centenary, a letter which had elicited some anonymous abuse, but also a 2/- book of stamps from a schoolgirl who wrote that this was all she could afford.

Now, sitting in the front parlour of her home on Richmond Hill, Mrs Barton searches her memory for how Gerald Hamilton first came into the picture. “I think he simply foisted himself on us,” she says; “I think he gate-crashed.” Invited or not, Gerald was to give Mrs Barton more headaches than the other one hundred and nineteen guests combined. “Starting about a fortnight before the unveiling Gerald telephoned almost daily to bombard me with questions.” What was the prescribed dress for the occasion, Gerald wanted to know. Should he wear a lounge suit, or striped trousers and morning coat? If the latter, how could he be certain that he would not be the only male guest so attired? “These were some of the weighty matters on which Gerald sought enlightenment,” Mrs Barton explains, laughing and shaking her head in wonderment. Then, too, Gerald wanted to know the exact order of the day – what was scheduled to take place and when. Did Mrs Barton anticipate that there would be trouble of any sort? A hostile reception by what Gerald referred to as “the rowdier element”?

“Gerald gave me to understand,” Mrs Barton continues, “that, as a pacifist of long-standing, he could not be a party to any event that might end in violence.” “One would have thought that it was Gerald’s reputation that was being rehabilitated,” Mrs Barton concludes. And in a sense this was the case. Gerald, who was in his sixty-fourth year, was coming in from the cold. His isolation was an enforced one: Gerald was not long out of Wandsworth Prison where he had served just one third of a nine-month sentence for a bankruptcy offence; he claimed that, taking advantage of coronation year, he had petitioned the Queen for a remission.

Gerald Hamilton was one of the very few Britons to be interned under the Defence of the Realm Act in both world wars, his presence at large being deemed to be inimical to national security. And now in October 1954 Gerald, whose prison pallor no amount of pancake make-up could hide, was down on his luck. He had left nearly everything he had that was pawnable with Auntie, chez ma tante, which was Gerald’s term for the pawnbroker. He had sold to a rare book dealer the letters he had received from Max Beerbohm, Christopher Isherwood, and Lord Alfred Douglas, plus his copy of Mr Norris Changes Trains which Isherwood had inscribed “To the onlie begetter”.

He had even been reduced to applying to Thomas Cook and Sons for a job as a London guide, but nothing had come of his application. So being an official guest at the Tite Street unveiling and at the Savoy luncheon afterwards, mixing on equal terms with le tout Londres, as it were, held a peculiar psychological significance for Gerald. He needed reassurance. He needed to know that having passed his three score years he had not lost his touch.

*

In appearance, Gerald had not changed much with the decades. He was still the world’s ugliest man in the opinion of many, to whom this was a source of fascination. “I remember taking my two daughters – they were both in their teens – to meet him,” recalls Mrs Gillian Mansel, who typed Gerald’s letters for him, “and they were both appalled that I could work for anyone so ugly. But one forgot his looks when confronted with his charm, his old-world manners.”

Gerald’s wig, which had once held the young Christopher Isherwood spellbound, had long since been discarded. Isherwood describes his guilty reaction when Mr Norris catches him staring at it:

I must have been staring very rudely, for he looked up suddenly and saw the direction of my gaze. He startled me by asking simply:

“Is it crooked?”

I blushed scarlet. I felt terribly embarrassed.

“Just a tiny bit, perhaps.”

Now Gerald’s head was completely bald, though he liked to maintain that it had sprouted “a septuagenarian stubble”. Otherwise his features were much the same as Isherwood had first catalogued them from the “sculpturally white” forehead to the chin “which seemed to have slipped sideways … like a broken concertina”, and not forgetting the eyes, “light-blue jellies, like naked shell-fish in the crevices of a rock”. Gerald’s nose drooped over thick lips which were almost comic in their sensuality. “Really, Gerald should wear a fig-leaf over his mouth,” one of his friends remarked.

What was there about Gerald that attracted Isherwood to him when the two met for the first time in Berlin in the winter of 1930–31? The disparity in their ages (Christopher was twenty-six, Gerald forty) suggests one possible answer; Christopher may have seen in Gerald a surrogate father. Isherwood has written how, as a boy, he revolted because he was never allowed to forget his real father, who had been killed in the First World War. “As an adolescent orphan he was subjected to reminders by schoolmasters and other busybodies of his Hero-Father.” For this reason Isherwood perhaps chose as a father substitute Gerald, who was to play Falstaff to Christopher’s Prince Hal.

Another tie which drew Isherwood and Hamilton together was their sexuality, as Isherwood writes in Christopher and His Kind. Back in Berlin in the winter of 1930–31 both cruised the gay boy-bars with which that capital abounded. “When it came to breaking the laws which had been made against the existence of their tribe,” Isherwood writes, “Christopher was happy to be Gerald’s fellow-criminal.”

But it was not only as a surrogate father and a fellow homosexual that Gerald appealed to Isherwood. “From Christopher’s point of view, Gerald was enchantingly ‘period’,” Isherwood writes. “He introduced Wystan [Auden], Stephen [Spender] and other friends to him, and soon they were all treating him like an absurd but nostalgic artwork which has been rediscovered by a later generation.”1

Gerald was like a fugitive from the Restoration comedy of manners, which has been described as the most licentious in the history of the English stage. His was the amoral outlook captured by Wycherley and Congreve in their comic masterpieces. It was as though Gerald had been caught up in the cogs of some time warp, and had orbited for three centuries, before being deposited in the twentieth century to astound and delight Isherwood and his friends with his queerly-cut toupées, his courtly manners, and his police record. His young friends may not have been aware of the source of their delight but in Gerald they were watching a character out of Congreve, not as a stage reincarnation, but as “the word made flesh”.

Gerald had affinities of his own with the seventeenth century. Even as a schoolboy at Rugby he had made a cult of the Stuarts. “At a very early age I insisted upon wearing mourning on January 30th, the day on which Charles the First was beheaded,” he writes, “and, later, I ate no food but dry bread on that day – not a light undertaking for a very greedy schoolboy.” Then came the day of rejoicing. On May 29th, the day the monarchy was restored, Gerald would invite his school cronies to “an orgy of ice-cream” at Hobley’s, the Rugby pastry shop. And throughout his life, in various Hamilton diaries, January 30th is ringed as the “anniversary of the martyrdom of St Charles”.

*

Saturday October 16 dawned dull, with the sky threatening rain. Gerald was among the first to arrive in Tite Street, which had been roped off, and where chairs had been set up for the official guests. No 34 (which had been No 16 when Wilde lived there) had lost whatever charm it may once have possessed. A sombre, red-brick terraced house of four storeys, it had been requisitioned by the Borough of Chelsea and now housed council tenants.

Sleek limousines (that of Chelsea’s mayor had a pennant flying over its bonnet) drew up and disgorged their equally sleek occupants. As might be expected, the theatre was most heavily represented, among those who had come from the green room to pay homage being Dame Edith Evans (the Lady Bracknell of her generation), Peggy Ashcroft, Esmé Percy, Michael Redgrave, and Micheal MacLiammoir. They were joined by representatives of the other arts such as T.S. Eliot, Sacheverell Sitwell and Augustus John.

To at least one observer the gathering suggested a religious revival meeting, the spirit of reconciliation being as heavy as the clouds which threatened rain. Old friends embraced; old enemies likewise. Vyvyan Holland, Wilde’s eldest son, could be seen hobnobbing with Lord Cecil, descendant of Wilde’s ancient adversary, the Eighth Marquis of Queensberry.

The only discordant voice was that of Gerald Hamilton, loudly complaining because the Union Jack, and not the Irish tricolour, was used to cover the blue plaque. “Well, no, but really my dear fellow, an abominable piece of impertinence,” Gerald muttered to Claud Cockburn. But then Gerald could be more Irish than the Irish when it suited him. Just as he fooled most of his friends into thinking that his name was really Hamilton, so did Gerald gull them into believing that he was a true son of Erin, when in reality his name was Souter and his forebears Scottish. His protests were cut short when Sir Compton Mackenzie pulled a cord, and the Union Jack fell away to reveal “Oscar Wilde, 1854–1900, Wit and Dramatist, lived here”. That night the plaque would be defaced by vandals throwing a pot of paint.

*

In the River Room of the Savoy, where the invited guests were enjoying champagne cocktails before the celebratory luncheon, Gerald could be heard denying for the umpteenth time that he had served as model for the Mr Norris who changed trains. “Really not my style at all, old chap - some of Mr Norris’s mannerisms are mine I admit, some of his obiter dicta likewise – but all that sex and insinuendo, really!” – and at this point Gerald rolled his eyes upwards as though calling on heaven to be his witness. “Do I look like the type who goes in for whips and strumpets in scarlet boots?” Then, as though fearing an answer, he hurriedly remarked that “it was really very naughty of Christopher, the dear boy”.

In the River Room, where chairs had been pushed back, brandy snifters filled, and cigars lit, the guests could congratulate themselves not only on a good meal, but on the fact that so far there had been no mention of the infamy which they had ostensibly been called together to redress. True, there had been one awkward moment earlier when Sir Compton Mackenzie, holding aloft a priced catalogue of the sheriff’s auction that had taken place at No. 34, had told how Lot 237, tin soldiers and other toys belonging to Wilde’s two sons, had been knocked down for thirty shillings. But the awkwardness had been smoothed over with Sir Compton remarking, “We are nicer people today.”

Sir Max Beerbohm, in a message read at the luncheon, chose a safe course by confining himself to Wilde’s table talk, “the most spontaneous and yet the most polished” it had been his privilege to hear. It was a verdict with which Gerald Hamilton, who had pilfered most of Wilde’s epigrams at one time or another and passed them off as his own, might have concurred.

Laurence Housman, whose tribute likewise was read, came closer to treading on dangerous ground when he declared that Wilde, by his unhappy fate, had served the whole of humanity. He had “defeated the blind obscurantists; he had made people think,” according to Housman. Wilde had made people think, yes, but in 1954 the “blind obscurantists” still had things pretty much their own way. The years following the Second World War had seen a fourfold increase in the numbers of persons proceeded against for homosexual offences (but had not Wilde himself warned that the road to sexual law reform was “long and red with monstrous martyrdoms”?). The French cultural attaché, in his tribute, made matters worse by linking Wilde’s name with that of André Gide. It was with relief that the guests rose to drink the toast to Wilde’s memory proposed by Sir Compton Mackenzie and seconded by the Irish ambassador.

They then made their way to the cloakroom, where along with their wraps they had “parked their guilt-complexes”, in the phrase of Claud Cockburn, upon whom none of the irony of the occasion appears to have been lost. Bidden to witness a drama entitled “Oscar Aveng’d”, they had been entertained by a farce entitled “The Tite Street Follies”.

*

At least the Restoration poets were less hypocritical, more honest in their avowals as to what their plays were about, which was sex. Sex in all of its aspects – the coterie audience of aristocrats for whom these poets wrote was obsessed with sex as a reaction against the puritanism of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Not waiting for Freud, they were busy finding out about man’s suppressed desires, the disparity between his inner and his outer nature.

Maskwell is the character in Restoration comedy whom Gerald Hamilton most resembles, and whom Gerald could have played on the stage to perfection – Maskwell, described as a “sedate, a thinking Villain, whose black Blood runs temperately bad”, but whom a modern critic has likened to “a bad dream from the subconscious of the aristocracy”.

Maskwell is the archetypal confidence trickster. “Tis such a pleasure to angle for fair-fac’d Fools,” he cries, and one can almost see Gerald Hamilton nodding approval. Like Maskwell, Gerald had the “fair-fac’d Fools” at his mercy, for Isherwood and his friends had been brought up to believe in personal relationships as representing “something solid in a world full of violence and cruelty”, in the words of E.M. Forster, who went on to say: “One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down.” The trouble with Gerald was that he was always letting one down.

Gerald played by a different set of rules. In vain his friends sought to make excuses for “good old, bad old Gerald”, as they called him. He simply could not be all that bad, they reasoned. After all, he was such a bungler, so inefficient as a crook – everything he put his hand to came unstuck, they argued, forgetting the successful deals he pulled off. “Crime, as he practised it,” writes Isherwood, “…is as demanding and unrewarding as witchcraft.”

Not all who met Gerald were taken in by his Edwardian manners, his air of bonhomie. Some found him to be positively evil. Aleister Crowley, who met Gerald in Berlin in the early 1930s, was terrified of him, believing him to be in the pay of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police (Crowley discovered Gerald’s duplicity by casting the I Ching). Lord Berners refused to dine with Sir Oswald and Lady Diana Mosley when he learned that Gerald was to be one of the company. “Lord Berners was the most broad-minded of men,” Lady Mosley tells me. “He could not have cared less about Gerald’s sexual morals, but he would not sit at table with a man whom he knew to be a crook.” When Maurice Leonard sought permission to bring Gerald to a piano recital given by his friend Marc Anthony he met with a horrified reaction. “Have nothing to do with that man, I beg of you,” Anthony warned him. “He is evil, and everyone who has had anything to do with him has come to grief. One of his friends committed suicide, another Gerald shopped to the police.” The writer Julian Maclaren Ross told Gerald’s friend John Symonds that a young man had been stabbed to death while fighting one of Gerald’s battles for him. Accused by the boy’s distraught parents of being responsible for their son’s death, Gerald allegedly replied, “Good gracious me! Young men seem to want to live forever.”

Gerald certainly had no conception of loyalty. Betrayal was almost a conditioned reflex. It was not just a question of spying on Willi Muenzenberg, the Comintern boss he worked with in Berlin. Gerald’s friends might have been surprised if they had known that starting in 1942, when he was released from Brixton prison as an 18B internee, Gerald was in regular contact with the Special Branch, Scotland Yard. His diaries, in particular, establish the fact that Gerald regularly saw Detective Inspector (later Chief Superintendent) G.G. Smith of Special Branch, the spy catcher credited with cracking the Portland Spy Ring. In addition, the Hamilton papers include letters from Smith, which indicate that the detective’s visits to Gerald’s flat in Glebe Place, Chelsea, were not social calls – the letters make use of some sort of code. Gerald’s employment as an informer by Special Branch is discussed in a later chapter. Suffice it to say here that when Guy Burgess went missing in 1956, one of the first persons sought out by Smith was Gerald.

*

The unveiling of the Wilde plaque marked a stage in Gerald’s climb to position of comfortable notoriety, if not celebrity. His confidence restored by the friendly reception he was given at the Savoy luncheon, Gerald was well on his way to becoming a Public Character. Soon no Foyle’s literary luncheon would be complete without him. When John Gordon of the Sunday Express condemned Lolita as “the filthiest book I have ever read”, Gerald was one of those invited to Graham Greene’s flat in Albany to inaugurate the John Gordon Society, dedicated to “the defence of purity in public life”.

As the years slipped past, Gerald appeared to be living proof that if the British love a Grand Old Man, they love a Grand Old Scallywag more. For in the fifties, long after Isherwood and Auden had settled in America, it was the turn of a new generation – novelists Robin Maugham and Michael Davidson, painter Francis Bacon, journalists Tom Driberg and Maurice Richardson – to “discover” Gerald and to be thrilled by his awfulness. Only it was no longer “good old bad old Gerald”, but simply “PFG”: initials which stood not for “Please Forward Gold”, as his friend Mike Steen would have it, but “Poor Fucking Gerald”.2

In the sixties Gerald was taken up by still another generation, writers James Pope-Hennessy, Lady Antonia Fraser, and Bevis Hillier, and painter James Reeve being intrigued by this “darling dodo” in their midst. As late as 1969 novelist Colin Spencer was telling a friend, “You really must meet Gerald. He’s the ugliest man in the world.”

With Isherwood no longer on the scene to defend Gerald, each succeeding generation took on the task of excusing his worst excesses. For Gerald by now had become the epitome not only of bad taste, but of unfortunate timing. Gerald waits until the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, in which sixty-seven rioting Africans were shot by police, to publish his travel-book apologia for apartheid, Jacaranda (which the South African government subsidized). As if that were not enough, he waits until the bronze statue of Sir Winston Churchill is unveiled at London’s Guildhall to reveal to the world that he – not Churchill – was the model for the statue (“Only the head is Churchill’s, the rest – four-fifths of the statue – is me.”)

What was the secret of Gerald’s hold on his friends? Was it his sheer awfulness? Was his attraction such as makes some people prefer kitsch to good art? Or did his friends simply look upon him as a test of loyalty? Whatever else, they looked upon him as a Life Force. Isherwood, in paying tribute to Gerald’s survival value, writes “Gerald inhabited a world into which Christopher had barely peeped; one might call it ‘real’ for it was without hypocrisy, its ends and means were frankly criminal… Christopher was sometimes shocked and repelled by the glimpses he got of this world. Nevertheless, Gerald’s example encouraged him to live his own life more boldly.”

Awed by his “limpet-like tenacity” and “preternatural vitality”, Maurice Richardson says much the same thing. “When on Judgement Day, at the special session which will have been allotted for the singular case of Hamilton, Gerald, the Recording Angel, hoarse after his long recitation, closes his recital, I shall advise Gerald to make the following plea in mitigation: ‘My zestful hedonism was often an encouragement to others’.”

One

November 1890: Premature and Perfect

“If indeed to be premature is to be perfect – as Oscar Wilde assured the egregious Nineties,” Gerald writes, “then I must have come into the world in a very unusual state of perfection.” Gerald Frank Hamilton Souter, to give him his full name, was born on November 1 1890 at Shanghai, where his father was agent for the China merchant firm of Holliday, Wise and Company of Manchester. Unfortunately Gerald’s premature entrance cost his mother her life, Edith Minnie Holliday Souter dying within a fortnight. Gerald later claimed to believe she died from “postnatal depression that the boy she had brought into the world was not a girl”.

When he was four months old Gerald was bundled off to England in the care of two Chinese amahs, thus permitting him to observe in later life that anything Oriental in his behaviour was due to the fact that he had been suckled by Chinese breasts. Once arrived at Tilbury, the orphan was deposited in the arms of a maiden aunt, Mary Anne Holliday, familiarly known as Aunty May, and whisked off to the country to be reared. Gerald was eight years old when he saw his father again; when Frank Thomas Edward Souter suddenly materialised from nowhere to reclaim his son, like the wicked enchanter in a fairy tale, Gerald was instantly antagonistic. “I nursed a feeling of the most profound dislike towards him,” he writes; “I could hardly bear to be in the same room with him, and I would invariably burst out crying when I was told ‘Father is here’.” On one occasion when his father came to fetch him for a drive in Hyde Park, young Gerald locked himself in the water closet, nor would he come out until assured by his Aunty May that Souter père had quit the premises.

How does an eight-year-old boy set about to destroy the intruder in paradise garden? Does he shoot the father with a poison arrow dipped in curare, or atomize him with the ray-gun he has seen advertised in The Beano? Small boys in their imaginations have availed themselves of these and other means to eliminate the hated rival. One hardly needs Gerald’s favourite author Oscar Wilde as a reminder that “All the great crimes of the world are committed in the brain”. However, Gerald was more subtle. He destroyed his father by substituting a stereotype for the real man.

But first, it was necessary to invent an entirely spurious background for Souter père. “My paternal ancestry was, may I say, faintly ducal,” Gerald writes in his usual arch manner, the duke in question being James Hamilton (1811–1885), first Duke of Abercorn, Privy Councillor, and Knight of the Garter (Gerald maintained that His Grace was so enamoured of his blue Garter sash that he wore it to bed). Gerald’s father, “Francis Ernest Hamilton”, was supposed to be the nephew of this eccentric duke, whose arms and motto (Sola nobilitas virtus – Virtue alone is nobility) Gerald appropriated as his own.

The deception fooled none of Gerald’s friends, who made a guessing game of the father’s true identity. Because Gerald was so anti-Semitic a number of his friends, Maurice Richardson among them, concluded that his father must be a Jew – a South African Jew, according to some. Richardson had a bizarre explanantion for his conviction that Gerald’s origin was Jewish. He referred to the latter’s appearance at a London magistrate’s court. “Poor Gerald was being given a bad time by the prosecution,” Richardson recalled, “and in his desperation he turned to the bench, crying ‘I swear on my mother’s head that I am telling the truth’. Now I maintain that such a strange oath could only have been learned from Jewish parents.” Others thought that the father was central European, while James Pope-Hennessy was certain that he had been a greengrocer in London’s East End.

*

Frank Thomas Edward Souter was born in Bombay in 1864 of a distinguished Indian civil service family with Scottish connections that could trace its ancestry back to Robert the Bruce. Gerald’s paternal grandfather was Sir Frank Henry Andrew Souter, Police Commissioner of Bombay Province, and one of the heroes of the Indian Mutiny (his capture of the rebel chief of Nurgoond earned him his knighthood). Gerald’s uncles were all either civil servants or carved out careers for themselves in the Indian Army, Gerald’s father being the only Souter to opt for a commercial career. One of the uncles, Major Maurice Souter, whose braggadocio earned him the family nickname of “Marbot”, after Napoleon’s boastful general of that name, was to cover himself with glory in the 1914–18 war at Agagia, in Egypt, when he led the Dorsetshire Yeomanry in a charge against the Senussi, and captured their Turkish leader Gaafar Pasha. The exploit earned Major Souter a colonelcy and the DSO, which he maintained should have been the VC. Thereafter he went about, an embittered man, muttering, “Iron has entered into my soul.”

The male Souters were a hard-riding, pig-sticking, polo-playing lot; excitable, talkative, almost incoherent. Drawing upon these male relatives, Gerald painted for the benefit of friends a picture of his father as a hard-drinking, Jorrocks-type country squire, whose culture was limited to a knowledge of claret and of horse flesh. In reality Gerald’s father was abstemious, cantankerous, opinionated. “Frank Souter had a large store of knowledge, which he doled out grudgingly,” observes the Hon Terence Prittie. “He would brook no contradiction, but had the happy faculty of being always right” – right, that is, except when it came to his operations as an investment broker on the stock exchange: his relatives were burned more than once by the dud shares in which he advised them to invest. That Frank Souter also had his human side is evident from his love of ballroom dancing, at which he excelled (Gerald too, despite his corpulence, was surprisingly nimble on his feet.) Souter in fact was a patron of the annual East London Costermongers’ Ball, mingling with perfect ease with the pearly kings and queens of Cockneydom.

At that first encounter between father and son, Mr Souter was dismayed to see that, in his absence, Gerald had been turned into a mollycoddle. For whether or not Gerald’s mother had expired regretting that the son she had borne was not a daughter, Aunty May seemed determined to rectify this. She did so by dressing Gerald as much like a girl as she dared, giving him dolls to play with, and spoiling him outrageously. Gerald was, by his own admission, a sickly-looking, decidedly effeminate youth, and he attracted bullies. “My long hair, my delicate complexion, and my general appearance of being a second little Lord Fauntleroy must have worked a distinct provocation,” he writes.

Horrified by life at Aunty May’s, the father quickly removed Gerald from her care and sent him first to a prep school in Berkshire, where “the organized bullying… was conducted with a refinement and persistence worthy of a greater cause”, and then to Rugby, where Dr Arnold had perfected a system for turning out Christian gentlemen. Mr Souter entered Gerald’s name for School Field House, where Rupert Brooke’s father was Housemaster. The fact that Rugby barred Roman Catholics may also have influenced Frank Souter, who was strongly anti-Papist. But an upright, Protestant English gentleman was exactly what Gerald, with his genius for defying his father, had no intention of becoming. To this Arnoldian ideal Gerald opposed the carpe diem philosophy of Congreve’s Bellmour: “Come, come, leave business to Idlers, and wisdom to Fools. …Wit be my faculty; and Pleasure my occupation.”

*

The only mention of Gerald’s name that occurs in The Meteor, the school’s monthly publication, is in connection with his debut before the Rugby Debating Society on March 7, 1908, when he defended the motion “That, in the opinion of this House, Cromwell injured rather than benefited England”. “Mr G.F.H. Souter made, by way of a maiden speech, a spirited onslaught on certain absurdities levelled against King Charles”, the school magazine reports. “Cromwell”, the write-up continues, giving the gist of Gerald’s argument, “had been called the father of modern Socialism, since he was the first to take the law into his own incapable hands. He was, in fact, an ambitious hypocrite, cloaking his designs under the cover of religious piety.”

The appeal that Stuartism, that most romantic of lost causes, holds for adolescent public schoolboys is an evergreen one. One thinks of Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill’s nephew, who at the age of thirteen journeyed from his prep school at Seaford to London to lay white roses at the foot of Charles I’s statue in Whitehall on the anniversary of the king’s execution – this same Esmond Romilly who later was to become a communist and fight on the side of the Republicans in Spain.