Remember that the Eton Candle is our challenge – our first fruits – the first trumpet call of our movement – it is OURSELVES. (Brian Howard to Harold Acton)
Hugh Lygon’s Eton generation included boys of extraordinary talent and precocity. The Eton Society of Arts was run by sixth-formers Harold Acton, son of a cosmopolitan artist, and Brian Howard, an American boy born in Surrey who believed that he had Jewish blood. They edited the Society’s magazine, called the Eton Candle. It had a shocking pink cover. The Society devoted itself to modernism. Acton and Howard were leaders and rebels. Howard was nearly expelled for taking a toy engine into chapel. Acton was beaten for not knowing the football colours of the various houses: ‘Smack, smack, smack. I shifted round so that the blows might fall in a different place. ‘‘Keep still,’’ he shouted, ‘‘it’s my religion.’’ I said, ‘‘I’m turning the other cheek.’’’
Brian Howard was considered beautiful as well as brilliant. Connolly remembered his ‘distinguished impertinent face, a sensual mouth, and dark eyes with long eyelashes’. Others remarked upon his chalk-white skin and wavy jet-black hair. His eyes seemed to be heavily made-up. He was tall and lean. But it was his speech and mannerisms that made him so unique. Even at the age of thirteen, he seemed like a throwback to another era. He was camp personified, a fop out of a Restoration comedy. Many writers would attempt to capture his character, not only Evelyn Waugh. The Brian Howard voice is unmistakable: ‘My dear,’ he once said to Harold Acton, ‘I’ve just discovered a person who has something a little bit unusual, under a pimply and rather catastrophic exterior.’ Waugh caught the style perfectly in the figure of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited.
His parentage was mysterious. He was grandly named Brian Christian de Clavering Howard, but his friends discovered that his father’s real name was Gassaway. The ‘Howard’ was made up – and rather bad form, since there was no connection with the Howards of Castle Howard. An entirely exotic figure, Brian made no attempt to hide his homosexuality. Yet he was, says Connolly, ‘the most fashionable boy at school’.
Harold Acton was tall, with a long thin nose and a high-domed head that was sometimes compared to a peanut. His eyes were like black olives. He had a slightly swaying carriage. He was formal and courteous, with a touch of impishness. The two boys had similar parentage: American mothers, fathers who were art dealers with Italian affiliations. Acton’s family home was ‘La Pietra’, an exquisite Tuscan mansion stuffed with paintings and antiques. The Actons lived like characters out of a Henry James novel. Figures such as Diaghilev the ballet master and Leon Bakst the avant-garde stage designer visited them at La Pietra. Brian and Harold, then, were extremely sophisticated and precocious, the embodiment of cosmopolitan modernity, a culture that could hardly have been more removed from that of the old English aristocracy with their large, cold, shabby homes and annual routines of hunting and shooting.
The two boys cultivated exaggerated mannerisms of speech and gesture. Both had panache and charm. One of their Eton contemporaries described them at the theatre: ‘Brian and Harold walked into the stalls, in full evening dress, with long white gloves draped over one arm, and carrying silver-topped canes and top-hats, looking like a couple of Oscar Wildes.’ In thrall to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, they danced at Dyson’s to the pulsating tones of Stravinsky’s ballet music. Brian was a wonderful dancer, a worshipper of Nijinsky. They were stylish and elegant – theirs was an altogether far more nuanced rebellion than that of Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Bolshies’ and the ‘Corpse Club’.
They loved modernist painting, read Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau. Edith Sitwell praised their schoolboy writings. They were described as the ‘cream of intellectual Eton’, full of promise, with their plans for theatre trips and magazines. Their American heritage and modernist radicalism liberated them from the constraints of the English. They despised ‘dull frowsy England – awful men in bowler hats and bad tempers trotting up and down wet pavements’. Rebelling against philistinism, as other boys walked up the Eton High Street towards Windsor, they wandered like Parisian flâneurs, heading in the opposite direction for Slough in pursuit of the ‘bourgeois macabre’. Howard fantasised outrageously about hidden perversions behind respectable facades.
The Eton Society of Arts’ sacred meeting place was the Studio, a room in the house of the drawing master. It was a retreat from the school, scruffy and stuffed with pots, jars and drawing implements. The Society comprised an extraordinary group of young men. Henry Yorke, who went on to write novels under the name Henry Green, was secretary; Anthony Powell and Robert Byron, who would become a superb travel writer, were also members, as was Alan Clutton-Brock who went on to be the art critic of The Times and then Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge.
But they were not all artists and intellectuals. The Honourable Hugh Lygon was a member, more on account of his looks than his intellect. He had no artistic pretensions whatsoever. By now he was a slim but muscular youth, always elegantly dressed. It is easy to see why Howard and Acton wanted him in their club. Some said he had a face out of Botticelli, while for Powell he was ‘fair-haired, nice mannered, a Giotto angel living in a narcissistic dream’. Unlike nearly everyone else in the Society of Arts, he was sporty and masculine, a boxer and an athlete. As a rule, Harold and his followers set themselves firmly against ‘macho hearties’. The code of aestheticism that they lived by was partly a reaction against the hearty public school ethos founded on games worship. But they were happy to make Hugh, with his beauty and his charm, an exception to their rule. There was a suspicion that he was only there because one of the more influential members of the group – Howard, perhaps, or Byron – thought that he was absolutely gorgeous and that he was not averse to their advances. An aura of raffishness, if not outright scandal, surrounded the group as they met on Saturday evenings and discussed such subjects as ‘Post-Impressionism’, ‘The Decoration of Rooms’ and ‘Oriental Art’.
The shocking pink Eton Candle for 1922 was indeed known to its detractors as the Eton Scandal. Extravagantly praised by Edith Sitwell, doyenne of high modernism, it was dedicated to the memory of Eton’s most notorious old boy, the arch-aesthete, prolific poet, republican radical and lifelong flagellant, Algernon Charles Swinburne. Beautifully printed on hand-made paper, with yellow endpapers, the Candle included a contribution by a young master called Aldous Huxley and an essay by Brian Howard entitled ‘The New Poetry’, which attacked the staid Georgian poets and praised the innovative verse of Ezra Pound. Like Evelyn Waugh at Lancing, Howard set himself against the ‘old men’ of the pre-war era who had murdered the golden boys of Rupert Brooke’s generation:
You were a great Young Generation …
And then you went and got murdered – magnificently
Went out and got murdered … because a parcel of damned old men
Wanted some fun or some power or something.
As Cyril Connolly put it, if you didn’t get on with your father in those days, you had all the glorious dead on your side.
Having conquered Eton, it was only a matter of time before the two young Turks took on Oxford. Howard once exclaimed to Acton: ‘Do you realise, Harold – please pay attention to this – that you and I are going to have a rather famous career at Oxford?’ Both boys seemed destined for great things, dazzling careers in literature or the arts. But it was Eton that made them. University was to be an enemy of promise: it came to seem something of a let down. Ironically, the person who assured their fame and who immortalised their Oxford turned out to be the Lancing boy.
CHAPTER 3 Oxford: ‘… her secret none can utter’
There is nothing like the aesthetic pleasure of being drunk and if you do it in the right way you can avoid being ill next day. That is the greatest thing Oxford has to teach.
(Evelyn