FIRST NIGHT

Our destination after the Lehmann party turned out to be a charmingly situated house in Egerton Terrace, a quiet cul de sac off the Brompton Road. “Our Lord,” as Douglas called Basil Amulree, owner of the Rolls as well as the house, had recently become Liberal Whip in the House of Lords, and was away on Parliamentary business. The genteel decor—cream paint, beige moquette, and forgettable furniture—did less than justice to the cubist masterpieces cramming the walls. However, the sheer quality and profusion had more of an impact on me than any previous exposure to modern art. Delighted that I shared his taste for cubism, Douglas described how he had built up his collection, sometimes spending years in pursuit of a specific item, so as to give the fullest possible account of the movement as represented by its two inventors, Picasso and Braque, and its other two major exponents, Léger and Juan Gris. There were also a dozen or so Klees and a few fine small Mirós.

Douglas liked nothing better than showing off his collection. He turned into a genial sorcerer, immensely informative and enthusiastic and occasionally very, very funny. What he enjoyed even more than showing his paintings to fellow experts and connoisseurs was opening receptive young minds to the glories of the movement he regarded, with some justice, as the principal begetter of modernism. Hitherto I had found the work of Fernand Léger crass and simplistic, but on the strength of Douglas’s magnificent series of Contrastes de Formes, which lined the stairs, I had a change of heart. Douglas enjoyed converting people to Léger. That very evening he found a promising neophyte in me, and I a potential mentor in him.

At one point I accepted the offer of one of “Our Lord’s” cigars. To Douglas’s embarrassment, the box was empty. Instead he got me drunk on framboise. And then came the inevitable pass. Out of courtesy and curiosity, I lurched upstairs after him. I was twenty-five (thirteen years younger than Douglas) and, in those days, extremely insecure and out to please.

Alcohol overcame my initial revulsion. A kiss from me, I fantasized, would transform this toad into a prince, or at least a Rubens Bacchus. However, Douglas turned out to be as rubbery as a Dalí biomorph. No wonder he was mad at the world. This realization triggered a rush of compassion, which enabled me to acquit myself on this ominous night. It was not until I read Stefan Zweig’s sentimental but unforgettable novel, Beware of Pity, that I realized what mischief pity could unleash.

For better or worse, my fantasy worked. Overnight, Douglas’s disposition brightened; his capacity for affection tempered his capacity for enmity; his tongue lost its awful lacerating edge and became honeyed. There was something that the fairy tale failed to reveal, however: the moment the kisses cool, the Prince turns back into a toad or, in Douglas’s case, a bad, bad baby, who requires a lot more affection to be cured of his tantrums. For the next twelve years Douglas would play on my compassion, alternating cajolery with brute force, psychic cunning with infantile bellowing. The tension was often excruciating, but the Tolstoyan bond that developed between us—a bond forged out of a passionately shared experience of works of art—made it all worthwhile. There would be another key aspect to our relationship: that of father and son. My father had been seventy when I was born and I was five when he died. I would miss this doting, handsome, seemingly all-powerful man. Although I did not realize it at the time, my affection for Douglas must have been at least partly filial.

On returning to my mother’s flat in the morning, I was pestered with calls from friends who had heard about the Lehmann party—How could you? How was it? What next?—questions I was unable to answer. It was not until Dunhills delivered a box of Monte Cristo cigars, enclosing a note of amorous apology, that I realized I had sparked a blaze that might be hard to extinguish. Even more embarrassing was the arrival of an expensive bunch of flowers. In my family, nobody ever got flowers unless they were very ill or dead. My sister sniffed; my brother sneered; my mother sighed and said in a tiny, woebegone voice, “They’re awfully pretty, dear, but what on earth have you done to deserve them? Nobody ever sends me flowers.” And then came the crunch: a call from Douglas asking me to go to Amsterdam with him. An exhibition of medieval treasures was about to open at the Rijksmuseum, and there were to be three days of festivities: medieval banquets in medieval castles, get-togethers with van Gogh’s nephew, trips to the Kröller-Müller Museum, and so forth. What is more, fresh raw herring fillets were just coming into season. Douglas knew how to bait his hook.

No sooner had we arrived at Schiphol airport than Douglas tried to impress me with an embarrassing show of officiousness. A mob of press photographers had surrounded a prosperous-looking American couple—a corporate husband with a hard-faced wife in a mink-lined raincoat—who were brandishing a large rectangular package, evidently a painting. Douglas had instantly realized who they were: Bill and Edie Goetz. “What passes for royalty in Hollywood; he’s a producer married to a daughter of Louis B. Mayer. New collectors, my dear, and very poorly advised.” They had just spent a fortune on a dubious, newly discovered van Gogh, which they had brought to Amsterdam to be authenticated. Douglas puffed himself up like a pouter pigeon and informed me that he was going to advise the Engineer—as van Gogh’s nephew was known—to have it condemned and, “as fakes must be,” destroyed. Sure enough, a day or two later he pushed his way into the Stedelijk Museum’s restoration studio, where the painting was being examined, and tried to muscle in on the proceedings. The Engineer—so frighteningly like his uncle’s self-portraits—and the Dutch experts had no need of Douglas’s remonstrations. They had already denounced the painting and paid no attention to the suggestion that it be destroyed. Instead, the Engineer steered us to a relic that had been found among his uncle’s effects: a ball made up of countless odds and ends of different-colored knitting wool. The artist would juxtapose these lengths of wool in one aleatory combination after another, until he found the one that worked for this or that painting. This was the key, the Engineer said, to van Gogh’s innovative color harmonies and dissonances.

In the course of this trip, Douglas rekindled my feelings for van Gogh. When I was eleven, his Yellow Chair in the Tate Gallery had opened my eyes to modern art. All my pocket money had gone on reproductions of his paintings. After discovering Picasso two years later, I had disloyally shut the van Gogh reproductions in a closet, in adolescent shame at having had such a predictable penchant, also at having cried my eyes out over Irving Stone’s shlock biography Lust for Life. Douglas set me back on the right track. He showed me that what I admired in Picasso—the visceral power of his vision—corresponded to what I had admired in van Gogh. “Why else is van Gogh one of Picasso’s favorite painters?” he said. “Take the Dutchman back into your little pantheon, and expunge Irving Stone from memory.”

Studying the van Goghs or, for that matter, the Rembrandts or Vermeers, with Douglas on this, the first of so many similar trips, was eye-opening. If Douglas was at his best—didactic, challenging, and refreshingly quirkish—it was probably because he was in love, insofar as someone so consumed with self-hatred could be in love, and I was passionately responsive.

Visits to museums or historic buildings with Douglas were a revelation; on occasion they could also be embarrassing. As a matter of principle, he insisted on being allowed in before or after these places were officially open, or on days when they were shut; allowed, also, into galleries or other such areas that were off limits to the general public. Harassed curators were forever rescuing us from queues or mobs, ushering us into cordoned-off areas or through doors that said Private, No Entrance, or Staff Only. I was mortified by the string-pulling that this necessitated, especially when the exhibit had little or no relevance to Douglas’s spheres of interest. In his efforts to impress me, Douglas could not resist putting the museum directors he knew to a lot of needless trouble. He badgered Baron Roël, director of the Rijksmuseum; he badgered Bob de Vries, director of the Mauritshuis; and he badgered Jan Heiligers, a charming, partly Indonesian curator (known in certain circles as “the Chinese Washerwoman”) at the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam. Amazingly, none of them seemed to mind.

Back in London, my hitherto humdrum life became a round of pleasure: operas, concerts, plays, dinners as good as postwar shortages allowed. Little by little, Douglas took over my life. He included me in everything he did: outings in the country, visits to exhibitions, evenings with an assortment of surprisingly loyal friends—mostly art historians of one kind or another—who appreciated his prickly intelligence and Falstaffian jollity and did not necessarily take his malice to heart. Like many another bully, Douglas was careful to stay on the right side of his more formidable colleagues. John Pope-Hennessy, already internationally celebrated for his studies in Florentine and Sienese art, was a case in point. John contrived to be almost as well informed about his friends’ fields as he was about his own. In the presence of “the Pope,” as he was known, Douglas was unusually circumspect. I was terrified of him. Willie King had told me about visiting John and his brother James when they were barely out of nursery, and finding them dismissing Proust. One of the most daunting things about John was his oratorio hoot of a voice, which brooked no contradiction and could sometimes put a damper on conjecture. And then one day John wrote to congratulate me on a critical review of Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage. Nothing could have given my precarious sense of assurance a greater boost. Awe turned to admiration, and admiration to affection.

*James and John Pope-Hennessy, London, ca. 1950*

Douglas would have been delighted by John’s eulogy of him in his memoir, Learning to Look. “I liked his outré clothes and his malignant and extremely funny sense of humor, and I admired his written work. However mendacious he might be in life, his concern as an art historian lay with truth. Addiction to truth can make one many enemies, especially if it is combined, as it was in Douglas, with a witty and exceptionally astringent tongue. It was to his enemies and not to him that preferment invariably went. An excellent linguist, he was less quarrelsome in Italian or German than in English or French. Difficult as he was, in his own field he represented standards—not only visual standards but intellectual standards too—and in a world peopled with limp critics and sequacious art historians the ruthlessness with which he used the battering ram of talent invariably earned my admiration and almost invariably my support.”

John’s younger brother, James Pope-Hennessy (the biographer of Queen Mary and Monckton-Milnes), was also a very close friend of Douglas’s. From their Malaysian great-grandmother, both brothers had inherited the faintly oriental look—those heavy-lidded, slightly protuberant eyes—that had earned their military father the unfortunate nickname “Puff-adder.” In James’s case it made for a certain beauty. He was also prodigiously charming: urbane, humorous, and flirtatious with upper-class women and working-class men. Douglas doted on him, as did a number of besotted ladies, whom James allowed to catch tantalizing glimpses of his dark side and its denizens. James’s compulsion to tempt fate, the cause ultimately of his death, was a source of prurient amusement to some of his friends, and worry to others, not least his brother. One summer, when he was assistant editor at the Times Literary Supplement, James became obsessed by the sight of a bare-chested laborer sweating away in a hole in the road outside the TLS office in Printing House Square. Unable to keep his mind on his work, he tore a twenty-pound note in two. He gave the laborer one half, on which he had written his telephone number, and told him to come and collect the other half. The strategy worked.

Over the years, James would gradually do himself in. A disastrous mix of self-aggrandizement and destructiveness would take over his once-beguiling character. So would drink. His sense of reality, such as it was, would evaporate. After having tea with old Princess Alice at Kensington Palace, James would rush to the pubs of Shepherd’s Bush and chat up Irish laborers in his languid, supercilious voice. Although so extravagant that he was often reduced to penury, he would titillate them with hints of large sums—advances for a biography of Noël Coward—secreted in his flat. One lunchtime in February 1974, a young Irishman called Sean Seamus O’Brien, who did odd jobs for some of James’s grand friends—and was described by one of them as “a beautiful woodland creature who found birds’ nests like a water diviner finds water”—called on him with two of his mates. Since James knew O’Brien well, he let them in; whereupon they tied him up, gagged him (there was a police station across the road), and demanded cash. They refused to believe that there wasn’t any, and proceeded to torture him. In the course of doing so, they killed him, at which point James’s servant returned and set upon a blood-soaked murderer with a kitchen knife. The murderer fled on a bus, but was soon apprehended. Lord Goodman, a powerful lawyer, saw to it that the killing was played down in the press.

I asked a friend who had met “the beautiful woodland creature” what had triggered the violence. He blamed James’s de-haut-en-bas tendency to pull rank when “the lower orders” got out of hand, and say things like “How dare you!”—enough to touch off anyone’s fuse. Francis Bacon, who also drank too much and tempted fate in the form of “rough trade,” would never have found himself in James’s predicament. But then Francis had the nerve of a lion tamer and always managed to manipulate his brutes into doing what he wanted.

Another great friend of Douglas’s was a charming man called Francis Watson, Keeper of the Wallace Collection. Before Watson’s marriage, he and Douglas had had a brief affair, which is probably why when Douglas went off to war he gave Francis the mews house in Belgravia he had been using as a pied-à-terre; also probably why his affection did not extend to Francis’s Gibraltese wife, Jane. “If she looks like a monkey,” he used to say, “it’s because she’s the last descendant of the apes of the Rock.” I liked Jane: she had the courage of her eccentricity. Francis reveled in his wife’s mischief. The first time Douglas and I went to dine with them, we were greeted by the acrid smell of burning rags that I associate with Gypsy encampments and the backstreets of Naples. “Francis has been naughty,” Jane announced, “so I’m burning all his hats.” And there she stood in front of the fire, poking away at a flaming derby—a scene Magritte would have relished—while dense black smoke poured from the top of a top hat as if it were a chimney. Her infinitely good-natured husband egged her on: “While you’re about it, you might as well burn the homburg.”

Francis told us with some pride how Jane had recently avenged herself on a neighbor for parking his car outside her door. Finding the trunk unlocked, she had filled it with the kitty litter generated by her numerous cats over the previous month. Jane spent most of his salary, Francis claimed, on housing the strays that she could not resist adopting. “It’s not just the cost of boarding them in the cat’s Ritz,” he said, “it’s the cost of all the advertisements she puts in The Times.” The bedridden gentlewomen, homeless divorcées, and orphaned twins seeking “good homes” for their “adorable pussies” would all turn out to be Jane. As Francis was a leading authority on French furniture, he frequently visited Paris. While he worked away in the Louvre, Jane would be off cat-catching. If successful, she would take the animal to a crooked vet for knockout shots, then would smuggle it back to London in her capacious bag, to avoid quarantine. “It’s my old fur,” she would say, if questioned by customs officials.

Of all Douglas’s women friends, the one who meant the most to him was the utterly fascinating, utterly charming, utterly unscrupulous Baroness Budberg, a hefty sixtyish woman with a large, flat, intelligent face. Moura had been the mistress of Robert Bruce Lockhart (the principal British agent in Russia at the time of the Revolution), Maxim Gorki, and H. G. Wells. She is said to have spied for the British and the Russians, and heaven knows who else. After World War II, she had gone to work for Alexander Korda, the movie producer; she also did translations. Writers and actors and journalists and Russians of all persuasions—Benckendorfs, Ustinovs, Pasternaks—congregated in her large, scruffy flat and talked and drank and plotted as if they were members of the Moscow intelligentsia in a Joseph Conrad novel. When we were in London, Douglas and I would see Moura two or three times a week, and she would pay us regular visits when we moved to France. We were very fond of her. And then, decades after her death, I met the expatriate writer Nina Berberova, who had known Moura well in her early days and had also written a book about her.

*Baroness Budberg and her daughter Tania Alexander, ca. 1960*

Moura turns out to have played a far more questionable role, politically, than any of us could have imagined. In 1933, when Gorki was about to return to Moscow from Italy, where he and Moura had been living in exile, he entrusted her with his famous trunk, which was full of letters from anti-Stalinist dissidents. She was to hand it over to nobody, not even back to Gorki, if he asked for it to be sent to him in Moscow. Despite these injunctions, Moura seems to have given in to an ultimatum from Stalin. His agents told her that if she wanted to return to Russia to see Gorki before he died, she had better take the private train Stalin was putting at her disposal and bring the trunk with her. If she failed to do so, his goons, who had already taken Kerensky’s and Trotsky’s papers by force, would not hesitate to seize Gorki’s trunk and quite possibly murder her in the process. Although Moura always denied having returned to Russia, she evidently did so, trunk and all, in 1936. Possession of Gorki’s papers greatly strengthened Stalin’s hand in his show trials of Bukharin and many others. Another fact about Moura that emerged only after her death: She was a direct descendant of Peter the Great. Her ancestor Count Zakrevsky had been a son of the Empress Elizabeth and her morganatic husband, Alexis Razoumovski. It figured.

My friends were an altogether younger, wilder, less academic lot. Douglas made himself as agreeable to them as he could. At first they were not very amenable, but in due course most of them came round to him, except of course Cuthbert, who continued to edit me as dutifully as before. He was as woebegone as ever, thanks in part to John Lehmann, who had taken it upon himself to castigate rich, evil Douglas for taking me away from poor, virtuous Cuthbert. In fact, my feelings for Douglas stemmed from much the same need as my feelings for Cuthbert. I wanted to learn how to write—above all about art. I needed Douglas’s knowledge just as I needed Cuthbert’s skills. It would be hypocritical to pretend that Douglas’s money was not a factor; it made everything much, much easier, but thank God I had a little of my own.

Earlier in the year, Cuthbert and I had planned to go to Italy together in August—to Ischia, to stay with his old friend Wystan Auden, a poet I revered but had never met. After that, I had arranged to spend a couple of weeks in Switzerland with my dearest friend, Geoffrey Bennison. Geoffrey had been the most gifted student at the Slade: a fine academic draftsman with perfect pitch in his use of color. He was also a born comic. Professional actors flocked to his performance as Bottom in an undergraduate production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Tragically, Geoffrey contracted TB and had to give up being a painter. For the last five or six years he had been a patient in various sanatoriums, culminating in the Waldhaus at Davos, the place that had inspired Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. He had undergone a pneumothorax, but was now on the way to being cured by the newly discovered antibiotic Aureomycin. Most summers I would go and stay with him and would have a walk-on part on the Waldhaus’s sad little stage.

Nothing would induce me to forgo these visits. And so, when Douglas decreed that he and I would spend the summer traveling around Europe together, I explained that I was not all that free. Chuck these people, he insisted. “I’ve worked out a wonderful Grand Tour for us.” I refused: “No Ischia or Davos, no Grand Tour.” Douglas grudgingly accepted my terms. For his part, Cuthbert hoped that exposure to Wystan would exorcise the baleful influence of Douglas. Meanwhile, he went on trying to make a writer of me. “Don’t let any of Douglas’s sneering and backbiting sour your style,” he said. “Spite stems from failure.”