My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (31 page)

I have an idea that our guests were sometimes bored by the ‘ceremonious buffoonery' of initiation evenings and by the heavy-handed facetiousness with which some of the brethren introduced their wives on Ladies' Night; I know I was. But an Odde Volumes evening always led to something else and I enjoyed the back-stage politics, the small lunch and dinner parties that members of the Sette gave each other when they were plotting a palace revolution, smoothing out a difficulty or electing the next year's officers. These parties because they were convened for a purpose created a genuine link between the four or six men who were grouped round a table. We shared a fraternal bond. During the 1930s I became friendly with several men of eminence in the law and medicine whom otherwise I could scarcely have hoped to know as other than chance acquaintances. In particular I am grateful to the Odde Volumes for having converted a pleasant acquaintanceship with Vyvyan Holland into a friendship that has become one of my most dear possessions.

In 1954 Vyvyan Holland described in
The Son of Oscar Wilde
how his father's tragedy affected him. It is a moving story told with restraint, dignity and warmth. It had a large sale on both sides of the Atlantic and I can
assume that anyone who reads these pages will have read or have read about it. In it Vyvyan limited himself to his subject, writing about himself only as ‘the son of Oscar Wilde'. He told us nothing about himself apart from that. This restraint gave his book a special unity.

His book closes in 1914, and it was not till nine years later that I met him in January 1923 on the evening of my election to the Savile Club. It was a friendship of pleasant but slow growth, possibly because he is not a cricketer and I had not yet started to play golf, and it was in the ‘thirties that with the Odde Volumes as a link, we found how much we have in common. We like the same kinds of person, we played the same kind of golf—though he would not confirm this—we each have a collector's taste in first editions, we enjoy the pleasures of the table. I have had many of my best times with him.

He is a man of many interests. After leaving Cambridge he was called to the bar and though he never practised, when Roland Oliver became a judge, he travelled with him on circuit, as a Judge's Marshal. He has worked off and on in publicity with Richard Temple. He has translated a number of books, but except during the Second War when he was employed in the foreign section of the B.B.C. he has never been a man who went to an office after breakfast. He has worked hard, but intermittently, a man of apparent leisure.

Between the wars when his father's books and plays were in copyright, he was comfortably off financially. He had married young, but his wife died tragically in a fire while he was in France with the R.F.A. He returned to peace-time with an O.B.E. and the resolve to enjoy himself.

He did it as thoroughly as anyone that I have known. There was no reason why he should not have. He was in his early thirties, he was popular, witty, unattached, he had money, he had good health, and tastes that it was not
difficult to indulge in post-war London, particularly in post-war Chelsea.

H. G. Wells said that the two essentials for gallantry were leisure and convenient premises. Vyvyan Holland had both. He was a generous and skilful host and he gave every kind of party in his house in Carlyle Square. I remember a dance there. I remember many luncheon parties. I remember men's dinners and ladies' dinners. I remember dinners for those who were especially interested in wines, when you would sit down at a table faced with three or four glasses, each one numbered, and four decanters of red wine that had taken the room's temperature, so that you could drink one wine against another. And how many evenings elsewhere did not conclude with Vyvyan's invitation to ‘finish it in Carlyle Square', On such occasions he would produce from his cellar a sparkling wine which he called ‘Cutie Champagne': to the discerning he would whisper out of the corner of his mouth ‘I recommend the whisky'; every kind of party except a cocktail party.

He did everything with grace and elegance. He was always involved in some romance and, as his friend, I have received many confidences from the ladies who were involved with him. I have never heard one say a spiteful or revengeful thing against him, though I heard one say wistfully, ‘It's too bad really, I think I'd have been right for him, but I've known all along that marriage was not his game.'

He enjoyed the pleasures of the table, but he was temperate in their indulgence. The early ‘twenties was a wild time in Chelsea but he had his own technique. Going to an evening party that began at nine o'clock, he would ‘case the joint'. If the party appeared likely to continue until 4 a.m. and if he saw a girl there who attracted him, but had an escort, he would return unobtrusively to
Carlyle Square, go to bed, sleep for five hours, wake up fresh, take a shower and shave and return to the party. More often than not the escort of the girl who had attracted him would be on the verge of passing out, with she herself ready to welcome anyone capable of a practical appreciation of her charms.

When I left for the Middle East in September 1941 I felt I knew Vyvyan Holland as well as I have ever known any human being. I knew him in terms not only of what he had told me about himself, but of what a number of his friends had told me; nothing would have surprised me more then than to have been told that fourteen years later one of the best-selling books of the 1954 autumn season would be
Son of Oscar Wilde
.

I had scarcely heard him mention his father's name, and was surprised when going over an old guestbook of the Odde Volumes, to have him pause as he turned a page and point without comment to his father's signature. He had a passion for anonymity, which anyone who has read his autobiography will readily understand. He detested notoriety as much as his father had delighted in it. On the title-page of his translations he sometimes reversed his own initials—appearing as H.B.V. He hated having to be explained. He declined the presidency of the Odde Volumes because he did not want to have guests saying, ‘Who on earth is that fellow sitting up in that big chair?' He was erudite and witty. The paper that he read to the Odde Volumes on
The Mediaeval Courts of Love
is one of the very best in its archives, but when his friends urged him to attempt a larger task he would shrug, and mumble something inaudible out of the corner of his mouth. It is natural for the son of a highly successful writer to be diffident about following in the same profession and inviting comparisons. But he carried his love of
anonymity to an extreme point. His friends carefully avoided a mention of his father.

Part of his reluctance was a form of self-defence. No one could be more completely normal and he resented being pestered by homosexuals, foreigners for the most part, who wanted to pay their respects to the sacred memory of ‘Oscar, the martyr'. There was another point too. He had adored his mother, he had seen the misery which the case had brought on her. He resented his father's having inflicted this misery upon her. Yet loyalty would not allow him to speak a word against his father. Better remain silent. Perhaps, we would think, he would have liked to talk about him. He seemed the least inhibited person in the world, but this refusal to discuss a subject that must have been constantly on his mind may have created barriers inside himself. But it was not for us, we felt, to bring up the subject.

When I returned to London in the summer of 1945 after very nearly four years in the Middle East, I found changes in many of my friends, but nothing surprised me more than to find Vyvyan talking freely about his father, without embarrassment, with affection, with wit, treating the sudden vogue in Wilde as a piece of comedy that would have made his father chuckle.

During the war he had married Thelma Besant, a very attractive Australian woman who is one of the chief figures in Cyclax. Thelma, who is several years younger, had grown up when the scandal of the ‘nineties was half forgotten; to her the name of Oscar Wilde was one to be acknowledged proudly. Gradually and with great tact she broke down the barrier.

If that barrier had not been broken down,
Son of Oscar Wilde
would not have been written and the world would have been the poorer. The Wilde saga would have lacked its coping stone.

The King Cole Room in the St Regis Hotel, New York, is open at lunchtime to men only. On most days of the week during the early 1950s the table on the left of the desk was occupied by a small thin man in his later fifties, with a short clipped moustache and closely cut hair that was turning grey. He wore a dark suit that had been cut for him in Savile Row, a stiff white collar with a plain silk or satin tie and a pearl pin. He had a Continental air.

He arrived at a quarter to one, alone. He would order a dry martini and light a cigarette which he smoked through a long holder; four places were laid at his table, and by the time he was half-way through his martini, one or two of those places would have been filled. His table was a club where each man paid for his own drinks and food, and his friends rang up a day or so before to ask if their presence would be convenient. If no one had rung up by ten o'clock he would take steps to assure that he would not lunch alone. He did not need to often; he had a large acquaintance and was excellent company. There was constant laughter at his table. He was a good listener, who could appreciate good talk, but the loudest laughter came when he himself was talking.

A few years earlier as a result of a motor accident he had been forced to carry a walking stick and as he told a story, he would lean forward on it. When he was a very
young man, the first Lord Birkenhead gave him this advice on public speaking: ‘If your hands are right, everything will be all right. Get a chair or table in front of you and hold on to it.' He now used his walking stick as a lectern and gesticulated with his cigarette holder. You were reminded of those oriental tale-tellers of the marketplace, whose hands were as eloquent as their voices.

He ordinarily took three martinis before he ordered lunch. Half past one became half past two. The room was now almost empty. Quite often at about quarter to three, a waiter would whisper, ‘Your wife's outside, sir.' She was small, neat, and dark, with a short, pointed aristocratic nose. She too had a foreign air. She had looked in on her way to her hairdresser to ask if anything had happened during lunch to change the plans that they had made that morning. He would talk to her for a couple of minutes then return to his table. A newcomer to the King Cole Room would think, ‘That must be somebody.'

The newcomer would be right. It was Michael Arlen. And the story of the long journey that had brought him to that corner table in the King Cole Room is as romantic as any of those which brought him fame and fortune in the 1920s.

I met him for the first time in 1920. Heinemann was then advertising a book by an unknown writer with a quote from the
Daily Express:
‘All reading London is guessing at the authorship of a slim book entitled
The London Venture
. Some clever people think that Mr George Moore has recovered his dead youth in this extraordinary little volume, half essay, half novel, wholly delightful.' Reviewing it in
John O'London's Weekly
I gave my reasons for not believing that it was by George Moore. A few days later W. L. George, at an afternoon party, brought up to me a quietly but exceptionally
well-dressed young man. ‘It's as well,' George said, ‘that you didn't try to pretend there was no such person as Michael Arlen because here he is.' George amplified his introduction. Arlen, he said, was an Armenian born in Bulgaria and christened Dikran Kouyoumdjian who had prudently rid himself of a name no bookseller could pronounce.

Of that first meeting I can recall one thing only, but it was symptomatic. George showed me a copy of
The London Venture
that Arlen had inscribed on the title-page ‘
Per ardua ad astrakhan'
. From the start Arlen knew whither he was bound.

Four years later
The Green Hat
was a top best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic. Subtitled ‘A Romance for a Few People,' written in a highly mannered, almost precious style, peppered with allusions that the general reader could scarcely catch, it was presented to the public as belles-lettres rather than a novel in the genre of Max Beerbohm and George Moore; yet it caught the public fancy like a dance tune.

Today, forty years later, it is easy to see why it did. It was set in the post-war London of fast cars and expensive night clubs, and its heroine, Iris Storm—a woman with ‘a pagan body with a Chislehurst mind' (perhaps ‘Boston' is the nearest American equivalent for that), star-crossed in her first love by a parent's intervention—stayed faithful to that love ‘in her fashion'.

‘What I said at eighteen is true now at thirty. I have never said I loved him to any man but Napier for it hasn't been true. I have given myself in disdain, in desire, with disgust, with delight, but I have kept to that silly childish boast of mine.'

In
The Green Hat
Michael Arlen was the spokesman of a new type of woman who was demanding a man's right to live her life in the way she chose. Several recent
books—
The Far Side of Paradise
, for example—have accepted Iris Storm as a symbol of the 1920s. And in telling her story Arlen was also the spokesman of a disenchanted generation that after four years of the trenches was eager to welcome extravagance, frivolity, and display.

The story is told in the first person, with the narrator constantly in the centre of the stage, so that the personality of the author was an essential ingredient in the book's success. Every discussion of
The Green Hat
became a discussion of Michael Arlen.

His Armenian birth gave him an air of mystery. He rarely lifted the curtain on that foreign background, even to interviewers. Only once, in
Confessions of a Naturalized Englishman
, which appeared in his collection of short stories
Babes in the Wood
, was he autobiographical. In that story he told how he was brought to England at the age of five, and spent his boyhood in Southport, where there is a large Armenian colony. For three years he was ‘instructed in team work and pulling together at Malvern College in Worcestershire', a school that is famous for its cricketers. At the age of seventeen he came to London on a weekly allowance of £2.