Читать книгу Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from Literary Life - Jeremy Lewis - Страница 7

One of the disadvantages of having been to a rather humdrum public school is the occasional embarrassment of explaining where one went. Charles Sprawson is the only person I know who quizzes complete strangers on their schooldays, but every now and then a beaming Old Etonian of my own age will pop the question, hoping for the best and momentarily deceived by my fruity tones and superficial familiarity with his alma mater, gleaned from my researches into the life of Cyril Connolly, that most nostalgic and agonised of Old Etonians.

‘You won’t have heard of it,’ I reply, lowering my voice to a confidential whisper in case I am overheard and exposed to the world at large, ‘but I went to a place called Malvern.’

‘Marlborough?’ my questioner booms. ‘But that’s a splendid school. What house were you in? Did you happen to know …?’

‘No, Malvern,’ I say, making my voice as quiet but as clear as possible; at which a half-pitying, half-baffled look flits across his kindly features, and the conversation is swiftly hurried in a more wholesome direction.

Part of the problem with being an Old Malvernian is that one’s fellows are a fairly undistinguished crew. Like Malvern, Marlborough in the old days seems to have been a fairly brutal, philistine school, but at least its more literary pupils had the consolation of knowing that John Betjeman, Siegfried Sassoon and Louis MacNeice had also suffered and survived. Malvern, by comparison, offered cold comfort. During my time at the school, the Old Malvernian most admired by the Governors, and held up as a model for us all, was an angry-looking cove called Sir Godfrey Huggins, who boasted bulging blue eyes, scarlet cheeks and a bristling grey moustache. (I have taken some liberties with the colour scheme, since the photograph of Huggins which hung in the place of honour in one of the school corridors was, of course, in black and white.) Huggins had risen to become the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, and when in due course he was made a peer, he assumed the title of Lord Malvern, in gratitude to his alma mater. One of the trains that ran between Paddington and Malvern, and points beyond, was named after him, and bore on either side of its boiler a curved metal plaque to that effect. A photograph of the train’s engine, some five feet wide, had been presented to the school in a handsome wooden frame and nailed up alongside that of the former Prime Minister, rubbing shoulders with former headmasters in gowns and mortar boards, and cricketing elevens dating back to the 1860s.

Altogether more interesting, but less widely advertised within the grounds of the school, were James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s paranoid master-spy, and Aleister Crowley, the bald, pop-eyed black magician who liked to be acclaimed ‘the wickedest man in the world’ or ‘the Great Beast’, and spent much of his time frolicking with naked handmaidens and sacrificing goats in a deserted monastery in Sicily. C.S. Lewis was a balding sage of a more reputable variety, but although he was an old Oxford friend of Mr Sayer, the Senior English Master, he had blotted his copybook by ridiculing Malvern (referred to as ‘Wyvern’) in his autobiography, Summoned by Joy.

Curiously, for such a philistine and sports-mad school, minor literary men loom larger than games players among the old boys of interest. Raymond Mortimer, a most unlikely Malvernian, hated the place and moved on as quickly as possible to Balliol, Bloomsbury and the Sunday Times; John Moore, an affable old countryman who looked as though he should have worn a tweed fisherman’s hat, smoked a pipe and spoke with an Archers accent, was much admired in my childhood for his novels set in a country town based on nearby Tewkesbury, and was involved in setting up the Cheltenham Literary Festival; Sir John Wheeler Bennett was well known in his day as an urbane and well-connected historian, diplomat and, no doubt, secret service agent; Humphry Berkeley, a former Tory MP, wrote The Life and Death of Rochester Sneath, which must be one the funniest books ever published, with the bonus of drawings by Nicolas Bentley. Younger Old Malvernians, or so I’m told, include Jeremy Paxman, James Delingpole, Giles Foden and the historian Dominic Sandbrook.

But the one who intrigued me most was a shady-sounding Irishman called Derek Verschoyle, who like me was not only a Malvernian but had then gone on to Trinity College, Dublin: he had also had dealings with André Deutsch, and had been a friend of Alan Ross. I first heard of Verschoyle nearly thirty years after I had left school, when I began to contribute to the London Magazine, and what Alan Ross told me about him tickled my interest in long-forgotten publishers and minor literary men. Like all the best anecdotalists, Alan liked to tell the same stories, suitably embellished, over and over again; and Verschoyle was one of the figures who regularly resurfaced. I don’t think Alan knew much about his background, but I later learned that the Verschoyles were of Dutch origin, and had settled in Ireland in the seventeenth century. Hamilton Verschoyle had given up the Bar for the Church, eventually becoming the Bishop of Kilmore, and had been admired by Queen Victoria who, spotting him riding in Rotten Row, declared him to be the best-looking man she had ever seen; his son, Frederick, spent most of his life in the west of Ireland, dreaming of his undergraduate years at Cambridge and recalling how he had once played cricket for the Gentlemen of Kent.

One of three children, Derek Verschoyle was born in 1911. His father, an engineer, wrote scientific books and was the inventor of a hand-operated lathe known as the Verschoyle Patent Mandrel, and the family divided its time between London and Tanrago House in Co. Sligo. Derek Verschoyle’s fifth and final wife, Moira, remembered meeting him on a family holiday in Kilkee, on the west coast of Ireland. ‘I had noticed him before,’ she wrote in a memoir, So Long to Wait, ‘because I always noticed colours that were pretty and that looked satisfying when put together, and he was always dressed in lovely mixtures – pale green shirts and dark green trousers, or two shades of blue, and I had seen him once in a primrose shirt that looked simply beautiful with his red curly hair.’ She noticed too that he was ‘very, very neat and tidy and wore a tie, and his shirt had a proper collar like a man’s with a pin in it. He had a nice square face with freckles and he smiled at me, but I didn’t think he could be much fun to play with if he was always going to be so tidy.’ Years later she would have ample opportunities to discover whether or not he was fun to play with, but in the meantime his mother told her that ‘He has been delicate, and he needs a little rough treatment.’

No doubt rough treatment was in plentiful supply when he was sent to Arnold House prep school in north Wales, where he ended his days as head boy. Evelyn Waugh was then briefly employed at the school, and outraged the more conventional masters by turning up for work in baggy plus-fours, an ancient tweed jacket and a rollneck sweater. Verschoyle later claimed that Waugh taught him to play the organ, despite having no knowledge of the instrument himself, and some say that the head boy provided a model for the precocious and worldly Peter Best-Chetwynde in Decline and Fall: in later years he employed Waugh as a reviewer for the Spectator, and lent him his flat in St James’s Place in the summer of 1943. After leaving the model for Llanabba Castle, Verschoyle went on to Malvern: he reached the Classical VI, became a house prefect and a lance-corporal in the Corps and, according to the Old Boys’ Register, was ‘prox. acc. of the English Essay Prize’ before leaving for Trinity College, Dublin in 1929.

Not long after leaving Trinity he resurfaced as the theatre critic of the Spectator. A year later, in 1933, he was made the magazine’s literary editor. According to Diana Athill, who had it from her father, he kept a .22 rifle in the office in Gower Street, and would occasionally fling open his window and, his feet propped up on the desk, take potshots at stray cats lurking in the garden or on the black-bricked wall beyond; but however unpopular he may have been with Bloomsbury cats, his convivial, heavy-drinking ways recommended him to his colleagues. He became particularly friendly with Peter Fleming, who was also on the staff, and beginning to make his name as a glamorous and fashionable travel writer, and with Graham Greene. With Fleming he co-edited Spectator’s Gallery, an anthology of essays, stories and poems from the magazine, published by Jonathan Cape in 1933, and through him he got to know the publisher and man of letters Rupert Hart-Davis. When, some years ago, I wrote to Hart-Davis to ask what he remembered of Verschoyle, he replied that he could recall absolutely nothing about him even though he had been the best man at Verschoyle’s second wedding; he told his son Duff that Verschoyle had been ‘an absolute shit’, but Duff’s biography of Peter Fleming includes a pre-war photograph of a white-clad bounder waiting his turn to bat for a team that included Fleming, Edmund Blunden and Rupert Hart-Davis, then an energetic editor at Cape.

Like Fleming before him, Verschoyle employed Graham Greene as a fiction reviewer, and then as a film critic. Greene, who eventually succeeded Verschoyle as the Spectator’s literary editor, commissioned him to write the essay on Malvern in The Old School, a collection of essays he edited for Cape in 1934 in which Auden, Greene, Stephen Spender, Harold Nicolson, Antonia White, L.P. Hartley, William Plomer, Elizabeth Bowen and others looked back on their schooldays with varying degrees of affection, ridicule, amusement and disdain; maddeningly, Verschoyle’s contribution sheds no light on the school itself or his time there, and although I have read it several times, I have no idea what – if anything – he was trying to say: it is even less revealing than the photograph in the Fleming biography, which gives one little impression of what he looked like.

Verschoyle is said to have published a book of poems in 1931, but I can find no record of it in the British Library Catalogue. Like many of the best literary editors – and all the best publishers – Verschoyle was no writer himself: his literary ambitions may have included editing and introducing The English Novelists: A Survey of the Novel by Twenty Contemporary Novelists, published by Chatto in 1936 and including Greene, Louis MacNeice, V.S. Pritchett, Edwin Muir, H.E. Bates, Peter Quennell and Elizabeth Bowen among its contributors, but that was about as far as it went. According to Alan Ross, he was ‘an impresario rather than a journalist by nature’: he was forever pondering the plays, poems and memoirs he planned to write, but ‘the gin bottle used to come out at an early hour, so I imagine Derek belonged to the company of those who took the wish for the deed’. But if he failed to advance his own career as a writer during his time at the Spectator, he may well have made contacts that would prove useful to him as a spy or double agent: the magazine’s editor, Wilson Harris, was an old-fashioned Tory, but those writing for the Spectator included Graham Greene, Goronwy Rees, later to be implicated in the flight to Soviet Russia of his friends Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt, whom Verschoyle enlisted as the art critic.

Shortly before war broke out, Verschoyle married the willowy, elegant Anne Scott-James, who went on to become a well-known journalist, the mother of Max Hastings, and the wife of Osbert Lancaster. He had taken a cottage in Aldworth, the village in the Chilterns in which Richard Ingrams now lives, and used to invite her down for weekends. ‘In that summer of 1939 there was a fair amount of false emotion in the air,’ she wrote in her autobiography: Verschoyle left almost immediately to join the RAF, working in Intelligence, and ‘later, when we were divorced, it was as though it had never happened’. When I asked her to elaborate, she said she would rather not: ‘although Derek caused me a lot of anxiety one way and another’, she bore him no ill will after all these years; marrying him had been a ‘big mistake’, but she hadn’t had the nerve to back out of it. He had, she went on, ‘made a lot of mischief in his time’, but when, years later, they met occasionally, ‘all his spark had gone, and it was quite heavy going’.

I have no idea what Verschoyle’s war record amounted to, though he is said to have risen to the rank of wing commander; he was also enlisted by MI6, along with Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge. In Coastwise Lights, the second volume of his autobiography, Alan Ross suggests that Verschoyle was somehow involved with a Partisan unit in Rome as the Allies fought their way up the spine of Italy. As such he was forever requesting his superiors in London to send out large sums of money to fund a particularly useful and well-informed secret agent. The information supplied by this mysterious agent was so valuable that it was decided to send out a senior officer to investigate: the senior officer chosen was Verschoyle’s old colleague and drinking companion Goronwy Rees, who soon realised that the secret agent didn’t exist, and that all the information being fed back to London was guesswork on the part of Verschoyle. Alan, who was a good friend of both men, reckoned it was a case of putting a thief to catch a thief, and that once the matter had been sorted out they felt free to spend their time carousing. Bald and with a ‘pinkish complexion’, Verschoyle was, Alan recalled, ‘dapper in appearance, though slightly moist and shifty about the eyes’, and ‘an entertaining fantasist with as little concern for the truth as his friend and contemporary Goronwy Rees’.

The war over, Verschoyle stayed on in Rome, and was the First Secretary to the British Embassy from 1947 to 1950. Theodora FitzGibbon, a colourful chronicler of post-war bohemian life in Chelsea, met him at the time, and remembered in her memoir Love Lies at a Loss how he invariably brought with him a bottle of wine or gin provided by Saccone & Speed, the wine merchants who in those days supplied British embassies with their every need. He was, she recalled, ‘very mondaine and charming, with an unusual face of regular features, a very attractive face and smile. His manners were impeccable, putting people at ease immediately.’ He spoke without seeming to open his mouth, and ‘talked in a lightly muffled voice on a variety of subjects – sometimes, as I was to find out later, Irish-fashion; that is, he tended to please rather than be factually correct. His walk was quick, but with a gliding motion; one almost felt he could disappear at will. His manner too was sometimes guarded, to cause one to think that his life held many secrets.’ He was always very secretive about his work, but one day he asked her if she would do a ‘job’ for him: she was to go to a particular café, carrying with her a walking stick as a means of identification. She went along to the café every day for a week, walking stick in hand, but no one ever approached her or contacted her in any way. At the end of the week she reported back to Verschoyle, who nodded in an appreciative way, told her she had done very good work, and paid her as agreed.

According to the spy writer Nigel West, Verschoyle’s activities as a secret agent took a more dramatic and sinister turn in 1947, when he was involved in an MI6 plan to blow up ships carrying concentration camp survivors to Palestine. Ernest Bevin, as Foreign Secretary, was determined to reduce the flow of Jewish refugees for fear of aggravating Arab sensibilities, and Count Frederick van der Heuvel, the head of MI6’s Rome station, was ordered to set the plan in motion. The man in immediate charge of the operation was Colonel Harold Perkins (‘Perks’), a legendary figure who had worked in the Polish section of SOE during the war, and would, the following year, work closely with David Smiley in an abortive scheme to land anti-Communist Albanians in their homeland as part of an attempt to subvert the regime of Enver Hoxha: all of them were rounded up and shot within hours of their landing after Kim Philby, then working for the Foreign Office in Washington, had tipped off the Russians, who had in turn alerted the Albanian authorities. Among those enlisted by Perks to prevent the Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine was, West claims, Derek Verschoyle. Posing as Adriatic cigarette smugglers, he and another MI6 operative were told to attach limpet mines to the hulls of the rusting and overloaded ships bound for Haifa from Trieste. The whole wretched story eventually inspired Leon Uris’s bestselling novel Exodus: and, in retrospect at least, Verschoyle seemed an improbable figure to find in a frogman’s uniform.

In the early fifties Theodora FitzGibbon and her husband Constantine set up house in Hertfordshire, where they gave weekend house parties famed for their drunkenness and riotous living. Michael Wharton, a regular visitor, described these massive debauches in A Dubious Codicil, the second volume of his funny, melancholic memoirs, and other participants included John Davenport, Nigel Dennis and, in due course, Derek Verschoyle. Every now and then Theodora FitzGibbon would cook a meal to soak up the booze, and so delicious were they that Verschoyle urged her to write a cookery book: he had just set up in business as a publisher, so she need look no further. After leaving the diplomatic service, he had gone to work for Michael Joseph as a literary adviser, and had persuaded the Duchess of Windsor to be published by the firm; he had also commissioned Alan Ross’s travel book about Sardinia, The Bandit on the Billiard Table, and when he decided to set up on his own this was one of the books he took with him, together with Theodora FitzGibbon’s proposed cookery book.

‘Derek’s ideas tended to run ahead of his capacity to deal with them,’ Alan Ross later observed, and Derek Verschoyle Ltd was no exception to the rule. Verschoyle’s partner in the firm, albeit of the sleeping variety, was Graham Eyres-Monsell, a rich and well-connected homosexual whose sister Joan was married to Patrick Leigh Fermor; and their offices were in an elegant, rickety Georgian house in Park Place, a cul-de-sac off St James’s Street. Although the firm lasted for little more than a year, and although most of the titles under contract were eventually published by other companies, the list of authors was extremely distinguished, and included Patrick Leigh Fermor, Alan Ross, Lawrence Durrell, Roy Fuller, James Hanley, Bea Howe, G.S. Fraser, Vernon Bartlett and Christopher Sykes. The firm’s colophon was a bristly boar’s head which looked as though it was about to be served up at a medieval banquet. The staff, many of them part-time, included Francis Wyndham, who joined the firm in April 1953 and remained with it until its collapse at the end of the following year, working as a reader and blurb-writer; John Willett, later to become an authority on East Germany and the works of Bertolt Brecht, who toiled in the attic; and Mamaine Paget, one of the Paget twins, famous beauties of their day, and much admired by Cyril Connolly and his friends. She came in for mornings only: she had been in love with both George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, who had recently left her for his last wife, and she died of asthma while working for the firm. The office manager was Verschoyle’s wife, Moira. Beautiful and given to wearing stylish dresses pinched at the waist with a black patent leather belt, she had previously been married to Humphrey Slater, a seedy and heavy-drinking inhabitant of bohemia who had once edited Polemic, a short-lived but much admired literary magazine. The Verschoyles’ married life was a tempestuous affair, and he would occasionally reel into the office swathed in bandages or sporting a black eye. ‘You’ve been in the wars, I see,’ Mamaine would remark, and he would mutter something about having been hit by a door.

Business life was equally tumultuous and unpredictable: according to Francis Wyndham, the bailiffs would arrive just as he was in the middle of typing a letter, hand over writs to him or to Moira, and whisk away the typewriters, office furniture and any other items of value, leaving any letters to be completed once the outstanding debts had been settled. Verschoyle was a generous employer who couldn’t bear to sack anyone, so the staff, such as it was, survived these turbulent comings and goings: these were the days of long publishing lunches, and Verschoyle enjoyed lengthy sessions at the Travellers or the Garrick with Patrick Kinross or Patrick Leigh Fermor, returning to the office rather red in the face but still in control. Francis Wyndham remembers him as a dandified, plummy-toned, manicured figure, given to wearing dubious Edwardian suits with tight trousers, waisted jackets with double vents at the back and fancy waistcoats; he found him cold, snobbish, conceited and keen on showing off, and was repelled by his pretensions and a whiff of crookedness. Alan Ross was more forgiving and more amused. ‘He was a considerate, genial, generous host, always delighted to purvey information of a kind not ordinarily come by. In this sense he was the reverse of a spy, but with similar instincts for elaborate fabrication,’ he wrote in Coastwise Lights.

Every now and then Verschoyle would invite Alan to lunch at the Garrick, but would sit there in silence, perhaps because ‘his general deviousness or marital problems were weighing heavily’. On other occasions, ‘possibly as a result of an excess of gin, he sometimes looked as if he might explode, his face getting pinker and pinker, his eyes smaller’. Roy Fuller, whose novels were recommended to the firm by Alan Ross, noted how ‘from Verschoyle’s reddish visage, somewhat watery eyes, one might have guessed he had no distaste for the bottle’; and after the collapse of the firm, his drinking reached epic proportions.

Like many small literary publishers of the time – John Lehmann or MacGibbon & Kee, for instance – Verschoyle did his best to pull off the admirable but impossibly hard double act of publishing worthwhile books he believed in while at the same time making a sufficient profit to remain in business. He failed, and had to sell out to André Deutsch, a similar practitioner who managed to keep afloat by a combination of parsimony, shrewdness, monomania and sound literary advice. Deutsch took over Verschoyle’s new offices in Carlisle Street, bang opposite the building that would later house Private Eye. In her publishing memoir, Stet, Diana Athill remembers Verschoyle as ‘a raffish figure, vaguely well-connected and vaguely literary’, and very much the kind of dubiously upper-class Englishman with whom, to her dismay, André tended to become involved. When they moved in, she remembers, the offices had been stripped bare: the only evidence of their previous occupants was an RAF dress uniform, hanging in a cupboard in an upstairs room. For some time afterwards, wine merchants’ and tailors’ bills continued to be delivered to Carlisle Street: more usefully, André inherited Ludwig Bemelmans’ bestselling children’s books about Madeline, Roy Fuller’s undervalued novels, Lawrence Durrell’s Pope Joan, Theodora FitzGibbon’s cookery books, which formed the basis for a list briefly edited for the firm by Elizabeth David, and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Violins of Saint-Jacques, published jointly with John Murray. Francis Wyndham moved too, and with Diana he was responsible for discovering V.S. Naipaul, and rediscovering Jean Rhys. When Deutsch moved on to Great Russell Street, where I went to work in the late Sixties, the Carlisle Street offices were taken over by Secker & Warburg.

Verschoyle’s later years make for melancholy reading. He spent some time in the early Sixties as the managing director of Grower Publications, and edited The Grower, a magazine for vegetable enthusiasts. Even more improbably, he went into partnership making prefabricated doors with the equally bibulous Goronwy Rees, his former colleague on the Spectator, then living in penury in Essex: the business was not a success. By now Verschoyle had left London for East Anglia. He and Moira moved into a large and handsome Georgian house near Framlingham and, with a hard-drinking ex-SOE man who lived in the same village, he set up the Deben Bookshop in Woodbridge; Collins the publishers then backed him when he established the Ancient House Bookshop in Ipswich, later the scene of a mysterious fire. He died in 1973.

‘I am rather surprised that you should consider Derek for a biography, because he is forgotten now except for a very few old people like myself who knew him,’ Anne Scott-James replied after I had written for information about him. He deserves a brief life at best: he is one of those characters who flit through the footnotes of other people’s diaries, letters and biographies, adding colour and comicality to the proceedings; and he was the antithesis of the average Old Malvernian.

A few years ago I thought of writing a literary rogues’ gallery featuring bibulous, rather raffish characters like Verschoyle and based on the post-war years: Julian Maclaren-Ross and Patrick Hamilton, my particular heroes, weren’t minor enough, and had already been written about at length, but possible candidates might have included hardened literary journalists like Maurice Richardson, John Davenport and John Raymond, all of whom fell victim to the enemies of promise. At some stage in the proceedings I went to Bryanston Square to have a drink with Charles Pick, a shrewd old publisher who had started life in the 1930s as one of Victor Gollancz’s reps, moved on to Michael Joseph in its heyday, and ended his publishing career as the managing director of Heinemann. Charles had come across Verschoyle at Michael Joseph, thought him a snob and a poseur, and couldn’t quite understand why I wanted to waste my time on him.

Towards the end of our session, when the gin-and-tonics had begun to take their toll, and a certain exhaustion had set in, I asked Charles who was the worst rogue he’d met in publishing. ‘John Holroyd-Reece,’ he answered, without a moment’s pause. ‘Now there’s a man you ought to include in your rogues’ gallery. Far more interesting than Derek Verschoyle.’ I had never heard of John Holroyd-Reece, and although, over the next twenty minutes, Charles gave a detailed account of his career and his publishing crimes, I was too tired to take it in. I wish I had. A few years later I suggested to Penguin that I should write a biography of their founder, Allen Lane, and during my researches I discovered that Lane had been a friend of Holroyd-Reece, né Hermann Riess, and that part of the inspiration for Penguins had come from Albatross Verlag, a much-admired firm of English-language paperback reprint publishers, originally based in Germany, of which Holroyd-Reece was a founder member: Albatross titles were only available on the Continent, and their plain lettering covers, colour-coded jackets, bird motif and elegant typography were among the qualities shared by Albatross and Penguin.

A pallid, monocled figure clad in a black cloak, Holroyd-Reece had, I discovered, been expelled from Repton after being cited as a co-respondent in a divorce case, had been appointed Governor of Zable and Malloake in the Sudan after World War I, and had taken over the publication of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness after Jonathan Cape had been threatened with prosecution for obscene libel by Sir William Joynson-Hicks, a famously censorious Home Secretary. A rabid pursuer of other men’s wives, Holroyd-Reece sounded a perfect candidate for a rogues’ gallery. Charles Pick, who had done work for Albatross in the thirties, was one of the very few people around who had known him well: but he had recently died, and now it was too late. My biography of Allen Lane would have been that much better-informed if I’d paid more attention over the gin-and-tonics. As for the rogues, I’d have to look elsewhere.

Back in the mid-sixties, towards the end of my time as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, I got to know through his daughter Deborah the Irish writer and man of letters Terence de Vere White, who had recently abandoned life as a Dublin solicitor for the literary editorship of the Irish Times. A sociable, eloquent and kindly character, with a leonine mane of thick grey hair, a distinguished cast of feature and a penchant for lovat three-piece suits fashioned from Donegal tweed, he enjoyed his sporadic forays into London literary life, numbering among his particular cronies Compton Mackenzie, John Betjeman and the publisher Martin Secker. When I told him, in a vague, hesitant way, that I was interested in a career in publishing, he hurried to pull some strings on my behalf. Letters were written to various luminaries of the book trade, all of whom I promised to visit when the summer vacation came round.

Like many undergraduates with publishing pretensions, I had very grand and romantic ideas of what the trade involved. When Leonard Cutts of Hodder & Stoughton, widely revered as the inventor of Teach Yourself Books, suggested that I might like to start work in the Hodder warehouse near Sevenoaks, I was duly outraged. My ardour was dashed by the prospect of trading in my new moss-coloured corduroy suit for a brown cotton overgarment, as worn by ironmongers and middle-aged grocers. I made no effort to conceal my disappointment, and another two years were to pass before I started at the foot of the publishing ladder.

Among the publishers whom I condescended to visit that summer was the old-fashioned firm of B.T. Batsford Ltd, best known for its distinctive and elegantly produced books on English churches, English counties, English inns and the like, and for steady-selling lines devoted to chess and handicrafts. It didn’t sound my cup of tea, but Terence had spoken with particular warmth of its managing director, Sam Carr, a fellow Irishman, so I dutifully arranged an appointment. I made my way to Fitzhardinge Street, off Manchester Square, where Batsford was housed in a black-bricked eighteenth-century house, with a royal coat of arms nailed above the fanlight. Quite why they were entitled to flaunt such a crest I never discovered, but the inside of the office was equally gracious and awe-inspiring. Wider than most, with elaborate plasterwork overhead and a black-and-white marble chessboard underfoot, the hall had been painted in the glowing terracotta fashionable at the time; apart from the familiar publisher’s litter of brown paper parcels, recently arrived from the printers, and battered-looking cardboard showcards, I was left with an impression of gilt and polished wood, with the firm’s recent publications suitably on display. A curving staircase with a gleaming wooden balustrade led to the first-floor landing, off which, I was told, Mr Carr had his lair.

I remember very little about Sam Carr, and nothing whatsoever about my interview. I like to think that he was a short, eager, friendly Ulsterman, akin to a bright-eyed wire-haired terrier in looks and demeanour. No doubt he recommended a spell in the warehouse, or in a bookshop, or in a printing works, and no doubt my crestfallen look and the lack of enthusiasm with which I greeted his kindly suggestions soon made it obvious that I was yet another undergraduate with ideas above his station. I heard no more from him; nor did I give Batsford another moment’s thought during the long years I spent in the book trade. Only once did their name crop up, and then for a lunchtime only.

In the early Seventies I found myself working as a literary agent with the venerable firm of A.P. Watt & Son. I spent much of my time working out how much we should charge textbook publishers to quote lines of Yeats or Kipling, and invoicing them accordingly, but one morning Hilary Rubinstein, a senior partner in the firm, bustled into my office and told me that we were to have lunch with the new and dynamic editorial director of Batsford. We had never done any business with the firm – hardly surprising, given the specialised nature of their list – and this was a chance to put things right and nip in ahead of rival agencies like A.D. Peters, David Higham and Curtis Brown. An hour or so later we set out for Soho, where our host had booked a table at Bianchi’s, an upstairs restaurant much patronised by trend-setting publishers and agents. He was already installed when we got there, and had made hefty inroads on a bottle of house red. He rose, unsteadily, from behind the table, shook us both warmly by the hand, and waved us to our seats. A shock-haired character in his late thirties, he was clad in jeans, corduroy jacket, open-necked shirt and slip-on shoes, a style of dress pioneered by whiz-kids like Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape which, though de rigueur nowadays, seemed bold and unconventional at the time, a deliberate gesture of defiance aimed at the tweeds and chalk stripes then favoured by the panjandrums of the trade – including, no doubt, Sir Brian Batsford MP and his fellow directors.

As he poured us a drink, refilled his own and ordered a second bottle, our host explained that he had been working until recently at Penguin, initially under Tony Godwin, another legendary whiz-kid, keen on open-necked shirts and four-letter words, who had eventually been sacked by Allen Lane after publishing a book of cartoons by the French cartoonist Siné of which Lane deeply disapproved – so much so that, to Godwin’s extreme annoyance, he and some fellow conspirators stole into the Penguin warehouse in Harmondsworth in the middle of the night, removed the entire stock of Siné books, and burned them in Lane’s farmyard nearby. Batsford, our new friend disloyally explained, hastily draining his glass, was run by a load of old farts – kindred spirits to Sir Allen Lane, no doubt – not one of whom had even heard of modish American novelists like John Barth or Thomas Pynchon. His mission as he saw it – here he banged his glass on the table with such ferocity that the stem snapped in two, the contents sprayed across the table, and his diatribe was briefly interrupted while Elena, the maîtresse d’ of Bianchi’s, hurried forward with a cloth and a replacement glass – was to be shot of all those f****** awful books on chess and country churches and make a pre-emptive bid for Norman Mailer’s next! Batsford was awash with cash, he assured us – earned, no doubt, by Scottish Castles, The Cathedrals of England and Embroidery for Beginners – and was in a position to make giant offers such as Tony Godwin (now installed as George Weidenfeld’s right-hand man, and known for his extravagant advances) could only dream of. Yet the old farts were so half-asleep, so unaware of what was going on in the real world of publishing, that not one of them had ever met a literary agent or a paperback publisher, let alone had lunch at Bianchi’s! He was going to make Batsford the leading literary publisher in London, far outstripping Jonathan Cape …

As he raged on, his spaghetti congealing on his plate before him, a fresh glass of wine brimming by his right hand, Hilary and I raised eyebrows at one another and then, when the torrent began to ebb, tried to introduce a note of realism into the proceedings. Had it not occurred to him, we wondered, that although publishing books on bridge and English Alehouses was less newsworthy and less glamorous than publishing Eldridge Cleaver or Kurt Vonnegut, it was also, if well done, more dependable as far as the market was concerned, less expensive in terms of authorial advances, and almost certainly much more profitable? Nor was it possible to change a firm’s reputation overnight. The book trade functioned on the basis of a kind of shorthand: authors, booksellers, literary editors, literary agents, journalists and even a few members of the reading public associated particular publishers with particular types of book, and for Batsford suddenly to lash out and publish Portnoy’s Complaint or Brian Aldiss’s The Hand-Reared Boy would cause the system to short-circuit, as well as inducing apoplexies among senior members of staff, including Sir Brian Batsford. He looked thoughtful for a moment, ordered a third bottle, and resumed his diatribe. As we walked back in the direction of our offices in Bedford Row, Hilary and I shook our heads and predicted the worst. A few weeks later we learned that our excitable new friend had been sacked. I have never heard mention of him since, and Batsford continued to publish books on chess and country churches.

Some twenty years later my interest in Batsford was unexpectedly revived. I became gripped by a demonic character called Charles Fry, who popped up every now and then in James Lees-Milne’s diaries, emitting whiffs of sulphur, while in charge of editorial matters at Batsford in the Thirties and Forties. Described by John Betjeman as ‘a phallus with a business sense’ and by James Lees-Milne as a ‘terrible man, the worst and most depraved I know’, Fry was – if the great diarist is to be believed – a drunk and a lecher of satanic proportions. Like Betjeman, Sacheverell Sitwell, Peter Quennell, Cecil Beaton, Raymond Mortimer, Oliver Messell, Rex Whistler, Dick Wyndham and Christopher Hobhouse, Lees-Milne was one of the bright young artists and writers whom Fry persuaded onto the Batsford list. The two young men were united in their love of English country houses, and during the 1940s, when Lees-Milne was trundling round England in his baby Austin on behalf of the National Trust, his publisher sometimes joined him on his tours of inspection of run-down ancestral homes and their often demented proprietors. ‘I really think Charles is Satan,’ Lees-Milne noted after an uneasy encounter with the Duchess of Richmond. En route to their appointment, Fry insisted on ‘gin or whisky at every stop’, on top of which he ‘chain smokes, splutters and coughs with every breath’ and ‘loses his temper with waitresses at luncheon and in the tobacconist’s shop’. Although the Duchess turned out to be ‘a very sweet, simple old lady’, Fry quickly turned the conversation from her house to less wholesome matters. ‘He makes me say the most outrageous things,’ Lees-Milne went on, ‘and even makes a dear old duchess talk about brutish indelicacies.’

Not only was ‘that horror Charles Fry – it is the only word for him – drunken, dissolute and destructive’, but he was prone to sexual boasting as well. He informed the bookseller Heywood Hill’s wife Anne (unasked) that he had slept with three of her cousins, two male and one female; when Lees-Milne met him on his return from one of his frequent publishing trips to New York, he tossed back seven whisky-and-sodas before announcing that he had slept with forty people during his time away; towards the end of the war Lees-Milne remembered how

I had lunch with Charles Fry at the Park Lane Hotel. He was late, having just got up from some orgy à trois with whips, etc. He related every detail, not questioning whether I wanted to listen. In the middle of the narration I simply said ‘Stop! Stop!’ At the next table an officer was eating, and imbibing every word. I thought he gave me a very crooked look for having spoilt his fun.

I longed to learn more, but suspected that, like Derek Verschoyle, Fry survived only as a footnote in the memoirs of better-known friends and acquaintances. And then, poking about in a second-hand bookshop, I came across a handsomely produced book, edited by Hector Bolitho and published in 1943 to celebrate the centenary of B.T. Batsford Ltd. Not only did it contain a full-length photograph of the young Fry – a chinless, moon-faced character with thinning hair, leaning pensively against some bookshelves, an open book in one hand and a cigarette dangling from the other – but from it I learned that he was a member of the well-known Quaker family, and was a great-nephew of Admiral ‘Jackie’ Fisher of Jutland fame. He had himself started out in the Navy, but decided to try his hand at publishing instead, and joined the firm in 1924 as the assistant to its Chairman, Harry Batsford. Cecil Beaton met him at about this time, and thought him ‘frightfully nice-looking, all very fine and smooth and pale – a gorgeous complexion, and very pale yellow hair brushed right back’. On another occasion, Beaton joined Fry, Brian Howard, Raymond Mortimer and Eddie Gathorne-Hardy for dinner and noted how, after the meal was over, his companions suddenly whipped out powder-puffs and set out to ‘find a man’.

‘Pink and plump, hatless and without a waistcoat’ – or so his new employer described him – Fry presented himself for work at the Batsford offices in April 1924. He made his way to a large Georgian house, long since bombed or demolished, on the north side of Holborn, overlooking Red Lion Square. After he had rung the doorbell three times, a wicket door opened and ‘I was confronted by an elderly crone,’ Fry remembered, ‘whose sparse wisp of grey hair haloed a lined and battered face. A ruined mouth produced an unholy leer. “Come in, ducks,” said a cracked, hoarse voice, “Mr Arry’s not ere yet.”’ Such was his introduction to the firm: Mrs Murphy, the housekeeper, very occasionally ‘bestowed a whack with her duster on a book or a chair’, and liked to buy the staff their cigarettes. Every now and then the stubs from Fry’s ashtray were passed on to her ‘for the old man to fill his pipe with’.

Like other old-fashioned publishers, Batsford continued the eighteenth-century tradition whereby publishing and bookselling were combined under one roof. The firm specialised in producing hefty, ornate and handsomely illustrated volumes on architectural history and interior decoration. These were edited and designed from the first floor up, while the ground floor was occupied by a bookshop selling their own and other firms’ new publications as well as second-hand books. The directors’ office was on the first floor, a dark, dusty room crammed with yellowing first editions, the removal of any one of which left a patina of black dust on the fingers.

Mr Harry, Fry’s new boss, had succeeded a brace of uncles as the man in charge. A jovial, scholarly bachelor with a bald pate, he was, in Lees-Milne’s opinion, ‘the dirtiest, yet the sweetest old person I ever saw. He smokes, and coughs, and shakes incessantly, while the cigarette ash spills down his front, and not only ash. Saliva also. His eccentricities are Dickensian. He adores cats, and fills his coat pockets with the heads, tails and entrails of fish. As he stumbles down the pavement he distributes these remnants to the congregating cats. The smell of his clothes is overpowering. Charles is devoted to him.’

Hector Bolitho was equally fond of Mr Harry, but ‘the chaos of his office quickens my blood into real temper, for I cannot abide the idea of my manuscripts joining such a muddle’. Apart from the mounds of paper on his desk, the clutter in his office included a family of stuffed hedgehogs in a case, a cat basket for the use of passing strays, a huge West Indian knobkerry, referred to as the Authors’ Welcome, a thick coating of dust, and a broken thermos flask brimming over with cigarette ends. ‘And here sits my friend Harry Batsford,’ Bolitho recorded, ‘drinking tea, shouting Hell! Damn and Blast! – yet slowly forming with his authors such friendships that calling upon him becomes a delight. He never ceases to be surprising. The last time I called on him he lifted a copy of “Way Down in Old Kentucky” from the table and asked me to sing. I obliged, in a bronchial voice, and he listened with polite delight.’

‘Once one realised the “point” of what one was doing, one’s working hours were gay, unconventional and wildly interesting,’ Fry later wrote, adding that ‘we all let ourselves go and, when working under high pressure, we have had some tremendous tiffs, with explosions of highly coloured language all round.’ Fry’s desk became, in due course, as chaotic and heavily piled as Mr Harry’s, with two telephones into which he shouted rather than spoke, and a brimming-over ashtray. According to Bolitho, ‘Charles’s praise for an author is guarded, so that the slightest compliment from him is to be treasured. His scorn is like a hive of bees let loose.’

In the late Twenties the firm moved from Holborn to a late-eighteenth-century house in North Audley Street. Sir Albert Richardson, an architect and historian of eighteenth-century England, and the man responsible for the post-war efflorescence of ‘Post Office Georgian’ buildings, designed an elegant shopfront, the coat of arms was nailed up over the door, and – on the surface at least – life went on as before. But the Depression of the early Thirties took its toll on a firm rooted in the Edwardian era, so to save money Mr Harry decided that they should dispense with the services of writers and illustrators, and do the work themselves: he and Charles Fry would write and edit the books they needed, while his nephew Brian Cook would provide line-drawing illustrations and the jacket artwork. The three men took to touring the British Isles in Mr Harry’s cube-shaped Morris. In the evenings, their researches done, Fry and Cook would search out a suitable pub and install themselves in the bar, while Mr Harry, suitably clad in trilby, plus-fours and rustic tweeds, went on making notes and inspecting buildings until nightfall drove him indoors.

Of the three, Brian Cook was the quietest and, in terms of what he achieved, the most interesting. A slim young man with a domed forehead and a widow’s peak, he had enjoyed the benefits, while at Repton, of a remarkable art teacher named Arthur Norris, whose other Reptonian protégés included Anthony Gross and Anthony Devas. After school, Cook joined the family firm, simultaneously studying at the Central School of Art. The line drawings he provided for the insides of the firm’s books were pleasantly old-fashioned, very much in keeping with its dusty image, but the jackets he produced in the thirties were very different – dazzling and audacious works of art, as redolent of the period as the Chrysler Building or a Bugatti, Peter Jones or a silver cocktail-shaker.

As the Depression lifted, and with it the need for the editorial staff to write as well as publish their books, Fry persuaded Mr Harry that Batsford should extend their architectural and topographical interests to embrace a less specialised and scholarly kind of reader; the books should be shorter, less freighted with academic paraphernalia, and more dashingly presented. By taking a gamble and printing 8,500 or even 10,000 copies of new titles, they could afford full-colour jackets; by having one artist responsible for all the books in a series, it should be possible to create a distinctive ‘Batsford’ look, of a kind that appealed to collectors, in much the same way as Allen Lane and Victor Gollancz were creating distinctive ‘looks’ for their firms. (Although we tend to think of ‘branding’ as a modern phenomenon, it found nimble practitioners in the Thirties, from huge corporations like Guinness and Shell to publishers like Lane and Gollancz, who sold and promoted the image and reputations of their firms quite as keenly as those of their authors: novices and famous names alike were expected to don the magenta, black and tulip-yellow lettering jackets designed by Stanley Morison for the Gollancz list, and the same egalitarian approach applied to Penguin’s bird and famous horizontal bands, designed originally by Edward Young, later to become the bestselling author of One of Our Submarines, and refined by the great Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold: nowadays Penguins only differ from other conglomerate publishers by the persistence of Penguin Classics, and an elegance of design that harks back to the days when Lane employed men like Tschichold and Hans Schmoller.) It was here that the youthful Brian Cook came into his own. Now collectors’ items, the jackets he painted for the British Heritage and the Face of Britain series must be among the most beautiful ever commissioned by a London publisher, rivalled only by Berthold Wolpe’s lettering jackets for Faber in the Fifties and Sixties, and they were revolutionary in the way the painting carried round onto the spine and the back panel, and were bled to the edge of the paper. They were printed in four or even five colours by the Jean Berthe method, using water-rather than oil-based inks. His silhouette shapes and bright, flat, often unexpected colours – trees might be mauve, a church tower royal blue – were reminiscent of the great railway or steamship posters of the time. As Hugh Casson remarked in his introduction to The Britain of Brian Cook, ‘you could spot them a mile off’.

Whereas Charles Fry, for all his liking for country houses, was irremediably urban, decorating his office with Rex Whistlers and a drawing by Walt Disney in preference to a family of stuffed hedgehogs, Mr Harry pined for country life; and after the Munich Crisis he decided to move the main body of the firm to Malvern Wells in Worcestershire, leaving Fry to run a rump in London. It was in Malvern Wells that, at many removes, I came across Sam Carr’s name once again. At the fag end of the Thirties, Cyril Connolly’s marriage to his American first wife, Jeannie, began to unravel. Both parties had become overweight and overfond of the good life: Jeannie drank too much, while Connolly had become involved with a young art student and, unfairly, blamed Jeannie’s addiction to ‘footling’ and nightlife for his own failure to get down to the writing of books. Shortly before she finally returned to America, Jeannie went on a tour of the West Country, and in March 1939 she found herself taking the waters at Malvern Wells with two sulphurous prima donnas: Denham Fouts, a drug addict from the Deep South and, according to Christopher Isherwood, ‘the most expensive male prostitute in the world’, whose lovers had included Prince Paul of Greece and the margarine millionaire Peter Watson, soon to put up the money for Connolly’s Horizon; and Charles Fry, whom Mr Harry associated with ‘a pair of spectacles worn awry, a gift for fiery anger which trumpets through the house, a chirping sort of wit, and great knowledge of the business’, though Jeannie remembered him becoming ‘pedantic, irrational and sentimental’ after the first drink of the day. Later they were joined by Sam Carr and Brian Cook. They discussed the possibility of Jeannie getting a job with Batsford, but instead she and Fouts borrowed a fiver off Sam Carr, hired some bicycles, and headed off to the Brecon Beacons.

And with that, it could be, the great days of Batsford were over. Brian Cook succeeded Mr Harry as Chairman in 1952, and changed his name to Brian Batsford; in due course he became Tory MP for Ealing South, was knighted, retired to live in Lamb House, Rye, once the home of Henry James, and incurred the short-lived animosity of my overcharged lunching companion. As for Charles Fry, he seems to have gone from bad to worse, with James Lees-Milne cast in the role of recording angel. ‘God help him!’ Lees-Milne exclaimed when he learned that ‘Sachie’ Sitwell was planning a month-long tour of the Netherlands with Fry and Mr Harry; as for Fry’s suggestion that they should visit New York together, ‘I would sooner die than do such a thing.’ ‘Lunched with that fiend Charles Fry at the Ritz,’ Lees-Milne noted in July 1948. ‘He launched into a paean of praise of himself and his business successes. Conversation then lapsed into his drink and sex prowess, which disgusts and bores. During the hour and a half I was with him he consumed five gins and tonics.’

A year later, even Mr Harry had had enough. He had once compared ‘Charles’s deep and abiding attachment to the firm with that of Ulster to the British Crown and Empire’, and claimed that ‘it is impossible to imagine a time when he was not one of the vital, integral parts of the firm’, but in June 1949 Sam Carr told Lees-Milne that Fry had become ‘quite impossible’ and was being sacked. Sent out to open a New York branch of the firm, he had – or so it was rumoured – bought a house off Fifth Avenue, crammed it with Aubusson carpets, and sent his London HQ a bill for £57,000. Enough was enough. For all Fry’s awfulness, Lees-Milne couldn’t help but feel ‘sorry for this clever and deplorable man, losing his livelihood in middle age’.

Four years earlier, a young Hungarian named André Deutsch had set up as a publisher under the name of Allan Wingate (he worried that the name Deutsch might excite anti-German prejudice so soon after the end of the war). Unwisely, as it turned out, he offered Fry a job, and in due course they were joined by a rich young man named Anthony Gibbs, the son of the middlebrow novelist Sir Philip Gibbs, and himself the author of novels about men in sports cars. He was also a useful source of funds – too useful, in fact, since he ended up effectively owning the firm. When I asked André about Fry, he said that he could remember nothing about him except that he was permanently in tears. Diana Athill remembered the tears, but added that, like Gibbs, he was ‘absolutely useless’. In Stet, Diana recalls that Fry – whom she refers to as ‘Roger’ – was often drunk in the afternoons, and that ‘occasionally he came in with a black eye, having been roughed up by an ill-chosen boyfriend’. It may be, she continues, ‘he had thought he would work gently, between hangovers, on elegant books about eighteenth-century chinoiserie or Strawberry Hill Gothick, but he never got round to signing up any such work and made no contribution to what we had on the stocks’.

Then as always the workaholic all-round publisher, André, when not designing display ads or delivering copies in the back of his car, signed up Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, which no other publisher dared to touch, the works of his compatriot George Mikes, and the wartime stories of Julian Maclaren-Ross, who, being permanently broke, sometimes chased his diminutive publisher round his desk in search of funds, waving his silver-topped cane. But André was eventually pushed out of the firm by Messrs Fry and Gibbs, and set up a new business, this time under his own name, once again with Diana and Nicolas Bentley as his partners.

By the time Gibbs got to know him, Fry was a ‘confirmed alcoholic’; he was also ‘the most civilised man I have ever known’, with a vast knowledge of architecture, painting, food and ‘royal bastardy’ and a huge range of first-name friendships ranging from ‘Willy Maugham to Tom Eliot, John Betjeman, Bob Boothby, Dylan Thomas, Gerald Hamilton and Gerry [the Duke of] Wellington’. He had ‘flaming red hair’, and was given to sudden rages: ‘When he began to rap on the table at a mounting tempo, which meant that an explosion was imminent, people ran at the double to execute his lightest request.’ After André, Diana and Nicolas Bentley had left, Allan Wingate limped along somehow without its energetic and enterprising founder. Its offices were in Beauchamp Place, opposite a pub called The Grove: by ten in the morning, according to Gibbs, Fry had begun to tremble so much that ‘the ash tray would set up in sympathetic vibration’, and as soon as The Grove opened, at 11.30, the thirsty publisher hurried over the road, drained three double gins in a matter of moments, and returned to the office in a mellower mood. Lunch at The Belfry, off Belgrave Square, was lubricated by martinis, wine and Armagnac, and by half-past five in the afternoon, when the pubs reopened, Fry was standing impatiently outside The Grove, peering in through the windows and angrily rattling the letterbox. Once installed – and joined by Dylan Thomas, René Cutforth, Peter de Pollnay or Lord Killanin – he might down twenty whiskies before hailing a taxi home to his flat in Nell Gwynn House in Chelsea. After one lunchtime session, Fry is said to have reeled back to the office and announced that he had offered Dylan Thomas £1,000 for what became Under Milk Wood. Gibbs was horrified by this display of extravagance, and cancelled the offer at once.

Apart from commissioning Persona Grata, an anthology by Kenneth Tynan and Cecil Beaton of one hundred living people whom they jointly admired as ‘unique human beings’, Fry’s most dramatic contribution – or non-contribution – to the fortunes of Allan Wingate allegedly involved an elaborate and suitably shady scheme to smuggle his old friend Guy Burgess back from Moscow. Other participants included the writer James Pope-Hennessy, later murdered by a rent boy, an Italian-American Mafia man, and the editor of the People, who promised large sums for serial rights if a book eventually emerged. It never did; and despite the success of Leon Uris’s Exodus and a cheap reprint of The Naked and the Dead, run off by Hector Bolitho on the presses of the Jersey Morning News, the firm began to lose money heavily – so much so that towards the end of the Fifties Gibbs had to lay off members of staff, Charles Fry among them.

He took it like a man, but the reprobate’s spirit was broken at last. Michael Wharton records in his memoirs how a sozzled Fry tried to pick him up in a Fleet Street pub; and late one afternoon Gibbs was rung at the office to be told that Fry was dead. His body had been found in a house off the Fulham Palace Road, and beside it were two empty bottles of gin, a bottle of whisky and an empty box of phenobarbitone. A note nearby suggested that ‘if you wish to enquire further into the reasons for my action, I suggest you get in touch with Brian Cook-Batsford and Mr Anthony Gibbs’. Gibbs went down to identify the body. ‘He was unrecognisable,’ he wrote later. ‘He lay with his face turned sideways. He was bloated and blotched and three little runnels of dried blood ran from his nostrils and one corner of his lips,’ and his hair was now ‘snow white’. With any luck he was already happily ensconced in one of the loucher wings of Heavenly Mansions, W1, every now and then whipping out his powder-puff before setting out to ‘find a man’.