The chances were high that Alan would think his early life had been a strait-jacket from which he had to escape by whatever means there were. In 1926, he talked his way out of Eton and was allowed to spend that summer and autumn in France. As the train moved out of Victoria Station, he records unconsciously a family tableau in the diary that he now began to keep: “Mummy walks quickly besides, a little tearful and Daddy waves in the background.” The impatient departing schoolboy arrived in Paris as the fully-fledged adult he was to be for the rest of his life, just as a caterpillar emerges in the new unexpected form of a butterfly. In the Ritz Bar he met up with Lord Tredegar (writing as Evan Morgan), “dear darling Evan, whom I love more deeply every time I look at him,” and Hugh Lygon, the original of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, not to mention “a dear little German boy, Gustav. All the Queens were there.” Without introductions or preliminaries of any kind, suddenly this escaped schoolboy is in Touraine, the guest of hospitable French dukes and counts and their cosmopolitan neighbors, appreciating châteaux and possessions with the total confidence of a connoisseur.
That November, telegrams from Harry urgently recalled him to sit for his entrance examination to Oxford. Sir Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen College and a renowned snob, interviewed him and noted his testimonials: “I liked what I saw of him.” Going up to Oxford in October 1927, Alan wrote regularly to his parents. In Magdalen’s New Buildings (elegantly eighteenth-century in fact), he had “charming rooms, both panelled in a rather decadent cream-beige” which he had improved with a few alterations and the hiring of a piano. “I have five tutors but only very few lectures a week, so that I can easily do a few Newdigate poems.” He tells them about dinners with Peter Watson and Graham Eyres-Monsell and George Harwood, friends richer than him.
In his second term, he opens one of his letters, “Lest you think too badly of me, I enclose a chronicle of my late doings.” And chronicle it is, with names and places. On the back of one envelope is a scribble whose pay-off is in French, “I propose to have the Imperial Coronet stamped on my paper. Bel effet?” He has been to parties in houses as grand as West Wycombe and Sezincote. Cecil Beaton “walks like an exhausted pendulum,” his orbit getting smaller and smaller until it swings up more violently than ever. A leaving party for Lord Clonmore was followed by “a fancy dress dance for which I wore a ballet skirt and tights and ropes and ropes of Woolworth jewellery and had rather a success.”
John Betjeman also had rooms in New Buildings at the time. Summoned by Bells, his autobiography in verse, catches similar highlights of camp showing-off. (Kolkhorst was a university lecturer in Spanish, an eccentric, a Colonel in Betjeman’s imagination just as Alan was Bignose: “Dear private giggles of a private world,” as that poem has it.)
Alan Pryce-Jones came in a bathing-dress,
And, seated at your low harmonium,
Struck up the Kolkhorst Sunday-morning hymn
“There’s a home for Colonel Kolkhorst” – final verse
ff with all the stops out …
There Bignose plays the organ
And the pansies all sing flat …
In Alan’s old age, the university and the college used to appeal to him for donations as though he were the loyal alumnus that he made sure not to be.
He didn’t care for anyone or anything that made demands on him. At the end of February 1928 he told his parents, “All is exceedingly well between me and the Dean. The authorities are easily pacified, being by nature loving and utterly obtuse and before long I shall be President of the Junior Common Room and sink into an unparalleled depth of academic superiority. Seriously, don’t worry.” What he had sunk into was debt. Here was the first instance of an attitude that was to shape his life, that he could be as extravagant as he liked because somebody was bound to turn up and pay the bills. He knew it of himself of course. “If one can’t afford something the moment one wants it,” he wrote in his diary just three years later, on 24 May 1930, “one must just arrange for someone else to pay for it.” This time, Harry came to Magdalen and after a meeting with the college authorities signed the cheques without apparently demurring. Immediately afterwards, by way of imposing discipline, the Dean of the college gated him, meaning that he had to be in by nine o’clock at night. On that very same evening, Alan went in a white tie to a ball, was caught returning, and rusticated, that is sent down for the rest of the term, rather an indulgent punishment in the circumstances.
According to Alan, his father had no idea how to cope with him at this point, and could only say that there could be no question of returning to Magdalen. Alan was unemployable but could no longer live off his father, he could never marry, he had no future. But that same afternoon, Alan continues, fortuitously a friend contrived a meeting with J.C. Squire, editor since its inception in November 1919 of the The London Mercury, a monthly for those whose literary taste stopped well short of T. S. Eliot and The Criterion. Squire apparently had heard of the prizes Alan had won at Eton and offered him a job as assistant editor, to start the following Monday.
Harry and Vere and friends of theirs had long been sending out Alan’s poems in the hope of attracting attention. “Dear darling” Evan Tredegar was a writer whom they knew and they had introduced Alan to him. Writing on Times notepaper with the date 5 January 1926, that is to say well before Alan’s first term at Oxford, an acquaintance by the name of R. I. H. Shaw says that he has been talking about Alan to Bruce Richmond, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and also to A. P. Herbert. The latter thought that an approach to J.C. Squire was “excellent advise.” To meet him, “you have only to drop me a line.” Sure enough, ten days later Alan had an appointment at 4:30 in the afternoon with Squire.
Squire and The London Mercury, then, had been hovering in the wings for some time before Alan’s misadventure. A few weeks after his father had made it clear that rustication meant being sent down from Oxford, Alan returned to France. Cast in exaggerated self-congratulatory mode, a series of letters home begins on 5 June and gives no clue that there might have been family tension about his prospects. On entering France, trouble with the customs over his typewriter had left him “mentally a broken fountain with no drop of water” but this passed soon enough. He rejoiced to be starting his novel. “Harvest And The Ruin” was the title of one of the poems he posted to his parents, jotting on the typescript, “The thing is very fine.” On his behalf, a friend had approached J. L. Garvin, influential editor of The Observer, and Alan was critical for fear this might be seen as an embarrassing put-up job. Another contact led to Blanche Knopf, an eager talent-spotter and founder with her husband Alfred of the New York firm that still has their name. She asked to see what Alan had done so far, which he thought “impertinent,” even “damnable insolence!”
Three weeks later, on June 26, he sent a postcard from Montbazon in Touraine. “As for Sir Herbert Warren, I consider that the privileges of dotage can be carried too far. Boo to him!” Uncle Guy Dawnay had taken sides with Alan because, in Alan’s words, “He knows a genius when he sees one. I have just finished the first section of my novel…. I have written a very remarkable poem. I am a Clever Young Man!” In the margin a caricature of himself thumbing his nose at Sir Herbert illustrated his feeling. By July 5 he was informing them that he had written 1,617 words more of the novel. “Bless you, poppets,” he addressed them, ending with spoof signatures, C. B. Cochrane, A.A. Milne, Noël Coward, and Queen Mary.
“For Ever Grey” is the title of another poem sent home on August 11. The opening lines are:
Nothing