6.3: Identity: posing under the hat of genius

It is now my concern to examine certain episodes which seem to underscore the sense of an identity in me that was emerging over this period. And there was undoubtedly some feeling in me that I was an embryonic genius, and that I expected people to recognize this. So it is a subject that I must treat seriously, whatever its absurdity.

If I had been questioned fiercely upon the grounds that I might base such an evaluation, I would have admitted straight away that I did not regard myself as more intelligent than many another student, nor even more gifted in artistic skills. It was more a question of the restless discomfort inside me in supposing that I had to discover an identity within any ordinary stratum, which sent me swirling up into self-vaunting heights, where I was always in danger of betraying my own inner conceit. For I never doubted within my innermost thought that I must be something closely akin to genius. I saw no necessity to define to myself what precise manner in which such excellence might ultimately be achieved. I just knew that nothing less could ever feel satisfying to me. I needed such an accolade for my own inner sanity.

Such doubts as there were inside me fed the tendency towards melancholia, that was particularly noticeable when I first started to work as an art student. It was almost unthinkable to me that I would not eventually make the grade, but a fear of the prospect that would then be in store for me, coloured my emotions, making me withdraw into a recurrent state of depression - concerning potential that remained unfulfilled - whilst I continued urging myself forwards into resilient resurgence. It could well be that my demeanour was melancholic at such times. Nor did I give free rein to the more extrovert manic tendencies which could easily take over, when socially at ease in more festive company. I felt bottled up, and restricted within my present sense of inadequacy - while never doubting that I’d eventually discover my own time and my own way to establish my ultimate worth.

Sensing all this within me, Henry’s reaction was to dismiss it as juvenile conceit, and something that should be killed with ridicule. It was a question of not perceiving my own place in life, and a lack of modesty in my non-alignment with the mediocre degree of eminence, such as was expected of the Thynne family. But it may be of interest to take note of the way that [X] viewed his efforts to hold my ambitions in check, after I had broached this subject to her. And it is evident that she was prepared to encourage me in such conceit, however cautiously.

Sometimes it was all too evident that I was goading Henry to pass a lowly judgement on my potential, either as a painter or as a writer, so that I might fling it back at him once I had proved my worth. But the tone which I adopted in such letters was partly facetious, and partly braggadocio - almost as if I was courting the humiliation in not succeeding. This one was written on 2nd July 1953, when I was enquiring what Henry and Virginia might like as a wedding present.

I may even present you with one of my masterpieces of modern art, to mark the occasion! But as I know that it would end up in the darkest corner of some upstairs lavatory, I very much doubt if I shall be giving you one.....

I am now finishing the last chapter of my novel - the first of a long series of future classics. After that I shall get it typed, and it should be in the publisher’s appreciative hands by about October. I should be a famous young man by about my twenty-second birthday. You are lucky having such a genius for a son!

It was as if I was trying to tell him that I was not prepared to back down in my assertion that I could succeed in both fields of art and literature, but the humour in my statements was dubious. Still, I was clearly concerned to present myself to the widest possible public in this image, and the press too came in on the act. It was Daphne who had spoken to Nicholas Phipps, who was currently working for the Ephraim Hardcastle column on the Sunday Express, to tell him about some of my recent exploits on the Left Bank. An item then appeared on July 19th, under the heading: The Viscount startles the Left Bank.

Dark aquiline good looks of Viscount Weymouth, 21, heir to the Marquess of Bath, have created something of a flurry in the Left Bank bop-shops of Paris, where he is an art student. So of course has his title. Weymouth has been working in two well known studios since February. He is sufficiently talented to have been solemnly warned against the dangers of dilettantism by his professors. He paints somewhat in the style of Matthew Smith. His behaviour frankly puzzles fellow students. There he is in a cheap sixth-floor room near the slaughter-house, eating in student restaurants, bicycling round Paris with huge canvasses strapped to his back. And yet why for instance should he refuse to carry them as a parcel through the streets? The answer is plain to me. As a former subaltern of the Life Guards, he is still fettered by the curious, but stern social code of his regiment.

The gist of what was being put over to the public maybe, was that I was an eccentric personality, far more than that I might be a talented artist. As gossip items go, it was not unflattering. But it did gall me to find that I was just fodder for the gossip columnist’s mill, rather than making my debut on the art pages. And it worried me too, that it was impossible to blend in with the life of other art students if I was to be singled out so conspicuously as a subject for people’s attention. I was discovering how anonymity was hard to preserve, for someone who came from my kind of background. And while I was irritated to find that this flattered me, I was still unnerved in my anticipation of all the intrusions into my privacy which I already guessed how life might have in store for me. Not that this discouraged me too greatly. It was after all some manner of beginning to the ultimate need that others should start reading about me in the papers. I just hoped that I’d find the right way of upgrading the level of their interest in me as time went by.

While I had now dedicated the best part of a year displaying all the zeal that was necessary to become an artist, and learning a great deal about painting in the process, I was still painfully aware of my inadequate appreciation of culture as a whole. I could never hope to conceal how little I knew, when it came to discussion on the directions that art, literature or music were taking. My vulnerability had been spotted all too quickly by the likes of [J], for example. But it was worse than that. There was a lack of sophistication in evidence whenever I opened my mouth on these subjects. From beginning to end of such conversations, I was hoping to get by on minimal utterances of specious profundity. And in my awareness of this vacuum in my knowledge, I often wriggled in embarrassment at what I heard myself saying.

This deficiency had come very much to my notice when I mingled with Laurence Fleming and his friends - John, Jane, Eve and David. He was my fellow lodger in Mme Pla’s apartments in the Rue Falguière, and his friends were Cambridge graduates like himself. A couple of them were holding a small dinner party one evening, to which Laurie invited me. I think he had previously enthused to them about my paintings which he had seen, so I was being introduced to them as someone whose career they should watch. And I certainly liked the deferential tone of their enquiries as to my influences, and the methods I used to construct my paintings. But it sank home to me that evening just how wide a gap existed between what I had already absorbed about Western culture, and the level at which they were discussing these matters. I perceived all too clearly that what I still so badly lacked was the finesse of a university polish to my education. And until I had acquired it, I would remain an intellectually impoverished ignoramus. I felt impatient to get the Oxford experience behind me, for I was now at long last ready for it.

The enthusiasm which I had acquired for painting had by now unsettled my former intent to become a diplomat. There was always the precedent example of Rubens who had managed to combine such two careers successfully, but it really wasn’t very likely in this day and age that one would have the time to develop both activities simultaneously. I was now perceiving that if I was going to be serious about my painting, then I’d best drop any idea of applying to join the Foreign Office. And besides, I was becoming aware how they would require good honours in the degree that I obtained, before they might even consider such an application. As a diplomat, it was dubious that I was of the right material. But as an artist, I might be just what was required, with sufficient intelligence for originality, an intensity in my temperament, and a soaring ambition to attain the highest peaks of achievement - plus all the perseverance and stamina that might prove necessary as additional assets.

Nor would the careers of painter and writer conflict badly. It might even work out that they complemented one another - living the life of an artist, and then writing about it at the same time. And Duff Cooper’s advice to me that I should start keeping a journal, as something instrumental to authorship, had struck me as being my best possible approach to that profession - in the light of my scant knowledge concerning what the rest of English literature might already have covered.

But there was this discomfort inside me that I didn’t really have the right background to be an artist. There might be a long tradition of contribution to English literature from the British aristocracy, but this hardly held true where the world of art was concerned. Aristocrats had made a mere dilettante contribution where painting was concerned. And the same might be said if one opened the field of study to people who had been educated at Eton. There was evidently something in an Upper Class upbringing which didn’t quite lend itself to such bohemian excellence. Or that was the obvious deduction to be made from any present examination of our cultural heritage.

Despite the general parsimony of Henry’s own attitude, which rubbed off to some extent upon all of his offspring, I felt cluttered and inhibited by the sheer opulence of my background; but at the same time in two minds as to whether I ought to keep it hidden, or thrust forward on display. It wasn’t that I was consciously employing subterfuge; it was simply that I had been brought up to consider myself as belonging to an impoverished aristocracy, which was having the greatest difficulty to survive in a harsh modern world. I had constantly heard Henry declaiming upon the injustices of the British system of taxation and how, nowadays, we had no money to spare upon luxuries. Not having any personal knowledge of comparative incomes, I accepted too readily that his pronouncements on the subject were accurate. I was well aware that, like Lita’s father, he drove round in a Bentley which was kept spotlessly clean by his chauffeur. But it was also noticeable that he did wear his sports’ jackets until the cuffs began to fray. And I could remember him declining to let us have some magazine sent regularly to the house, in order to economise upon the stationers’ bill.

I have mentioned previously how Lita’s family were dwelling at the Hotel Bellman in the Rue Francois 1er. But when my father passed through Paris - a story that I’ll be recounting shortly - he booked in at a relatively banal hotel in the Rue du Rivoli. I noted how Lita then enquired where he was staying, and that her expression denoted that she was unimpressed at his choice. She had also indicated previously how - on a visit that she herself had made to London several years ago - she had been recommended what she had found to be a terrible old-fashioned hotel. But it turned out that this was the Cavendish, which my own parents’ aristocratic circle had revered for its Edwardian eccentricity. It was this kind of difference in our values which made me aware of the cultural divide between us, and which brought home to me how I had been raised to revere a cruder bracket of elegance, where impoverished life-styles were something you could admire, and even hope to emulate.

There were also some more personal psychological aspects to the development of my attitude in these matters, which I may just have touched upon previously. It was almost as if I disliked spending money because I felt as if I was unworthy of luxury. The general squalor which I was apt to cultivate was also a symbol of revolt against Henry’s standards. It was also a rejection of all that easy comfort in my upbringing, which may have been linked up with some notion that I had been tainted with a dandified tendency towards homosexuality in my youth. Living rough seemed the antithesis of all that. I couldn’t stand the idea of looking like a neatly groomed Nancy-boy, nor even like a rich man’s son. It was from a combination of all these factors that the full complexity of my behaviour emerged.

But from anyone like Lita’s viewpoint, it must have seemed a trifle curious, for the credibility of my poverty-image had long been undermined since her discovery that I was the heir to one of Britain’s most illustrious of stately homes. She could forgive me for confusing Bach with Beethoven; but my deliberate uncleanliness - when I could well afford the soap - was something that she found difficult to discuss with equanimity. In fact we never discussed it at all, although it was perfectly obvious that the subject was in both of our minds. And I’m sure that she never regarded my uncleanliness as enhancing my bohemian image in any way at all. The concepts of dirt and genius had never been linked up together, in her mind.

Sometimes I did ask myself how I could make so bold as to venture into this territory, vaunting myself as a potential genius, when the likelihood of such success was statistically minimal. I needed to feel that I was different from that crowd. They were the clean, well-manicured crowd; and I somehow identified these concepts quite closely with my father. I needed to break away from all that, and to become instantly identifiable as a bohemian - unwashed in appearance, and shabbily attired. Such were the prevalent tendencies which coloured my behaviour over this period.

To some extent however, it may be that I was simply romanticizing such imagery. It is true that I didn’t have money to spare, nor would have until the transfer of capital had been fully implemented by the family lawyers, but I might question whether I really needed to economise on my restaurant expenses to the extent that I actually did. The meagreness of my diet was in fact indicative of my endeavours to achieve the lean and hungry look. And I enjoyed letting my friends know that my belly was empty. Camilla Crawley was even in the habit of bringing me scraps of bread and cheese, which she had swept surreptitiously into a paper bag from the de Castignacs’ affluent table, on her personal assumption of responsibility for my better nourishment. I never had the heart to tell her that I found these morsels to be singularly unappetizing.

It wasn’t just a voracious unkempt appearance that I was cultivating. It was the aroma too. Now that no one any longer shared my company within their family embrace, I began to miss out on my baths until I had reduced it to one per week. And on such occasions, I was apt to take all of my clothes which were in need of a wash into the bath with me, so that I could launder them at the same time. And I managed to persuade myself that these were good bohemian habits, and that I was benefiting in spirit, the greater the distance I managed to set between my present way of living, and all those superfluous refineries of my upbringing.

The parsimony in my outlook had perhaps long been there, but it certainly wasn’t diminishing now that I was out here in Paris. I was trying to do everything on the cheap. It was as if psychologically, I wanted to feel that I could crack the problems of life from the basest of depths; that I didn’t need any manner of cosseting from others, and I certainly didn’t offer it to myself. I’d win through to my goals, regardless of no matter what.

It might have been anticipated that, politically, I would veer to the left over this period. But this was not the case. Various episodes come to mind which may be indicative of the complexion of my bias at this time.

I remember the hostility I felt when a German youth at the Alliance Francaise, which I attended briefly to see if my grasp of the French language might improve, was occupying the discussion floor in speculation as to how the world might now be a different place if Germany had won the war. He had been hogging the floor on the day prior to this, as well. And I felt there was an arrogant contempt for others in the way all the discussion was centred on himself. He was conversing with the French teacher, (an attractive young woman,) and with his fellow nationals. But the rest of us weren’t making much of a contribution. And I was suddenly smitten by the idea that this was Germany calling, and telling us how it had been sad for the world that they had lost the war. And if anyone was going to stand up to him, indicating that this gathering of Europeans had no intention of following where he led, then that role must fall to myself.

These were tense moments, with only a minimum of remarks actually uttered. But I took the hard line that the outcome of the war was never in serious doubt, because Germany was gradually over-extending its authority to the point where it could no longer control the areas which it had over-run. But he found that this dismissive attitude to his nation’s war effort irked him, and we were sitting there for several seconds glaring daggers at each other, while the teacher stirred uneasily. "Vous croyez ca vraiment?" he enquired. "Oui, je crois ca vraiment," I repeated. Then the tension was released by someone contributing to the discussion in a lighter vein. But I was aware how a Yugoslav student in the row just behind mine took the trouble to lean forward and to pat me on the back.

Politically, there had been a consciousness of all that Nazi Germany had stood for, and all that democratic Britain had stood for, encapsulated into the hatred in our glaring faces, even if only for such a brief period of time. We were never to clash again. In fact I don’t think I put in more than a couple of further attendances at the Alliance Francaise. But the incident had made me strangely aware how the two of us represented different trends within the same European culture.

Even if I was aware of the distinction however, I was not yet fully distanced from all the fascist views which Henry had preached to me over my upbringing. My gut reaction to Jews, Arabs or Negroes was still faintly hostile and irrational. Instances come to mind. There was the youth who came up to sit in the portion of the Salle Richelieu at the Sorbonne which I regarded as the territory for my harem. He promptly introduced himself as "a Jew from Liverpool", and followed this with a lot of talk with crude expletives - like ‘fucking’ - thrown in for good measure. The language itself didn’t encourage me to feel at ease with him. But I was also conscious of the thought that here was a Jew attempting to break in on my harem. The lack of warmth in my response quickly persuaded him that I was a racist, and he never came back.

There was another instance when Lita had introduced me to an Arab friend who had accosted her while she had been waiting at the café. He was full of talk about us all going on together - with Martha, June and some others, to a jazz club. But my expression displayed how I was enormously ill-at-ease, that such a man should be chatting in almost intimate vein with a girl that I regarded as my own. And I realized at the time how my hostility towards him wasn’t quite rational, and owed something to him being an Arab.

The worst instance of all arose just after this. Having managed to lose the Arab, I accompanied both Lita and Martha to Le Vieux Colombier, where we spent the afternoon dancing to a jazz band. While I was dancing with Lita however, Martha was approached by a Negro, whom she must have given offence by her manner of declining to dance with him. Anyway, the first thing that we knew about it was that he was slapping her around the face and calling her "Saloppe!" I behaved correctly as I still think, by stepping between them and enquiring of him what the matter might be - also indicating that she was with me. He was shouting abuse at her now for being English - as he had understood from my own accent. And this led to explanations from others that she was Argentinean. In the meantime Lita had hustled Martha out into the street, so it was now wisest for me just to follow them. But in the analysis of the situation afterwards, with Martha claiming that the Negro had touched her breast when asking her to dance, I felt a fury of indignation against such behaviour. And it was his colour which had made the act seem so foul.

I think it does need to be registered that I was still of a racist disposition in all such matters. But it needs to be stressed that I had yet to meet anyone whom I could regard as a friend, who was of a different race to my own. Such widening of my acquaintance was yet to come.

The Rosenbergs were executed in America during this summer. And there was strong feeling amongst Parisian students, against the Americans for not commuting the sentences to terms of imprisonment. They had been offered their lives in exchange for revealing all details about the spy ring, where they had played a relatively small part; but with considerable bravery, they had refused to inform on their accomplices - so were executed. The Communist party was highly active over these days, collecting signatures for their reprieve. And I was asked for my signature on more than one occasion, but declined.

At this distance in time, it strikes me as curious that I should appear to have been in favour of their death sentence. I really don’t think that my reluctance to participate in the campaign was concerned with the fact that the Rosenbergs were Jewish. I think it was just that I wanted no part in a campaign that was so evidently organized by the Communists, who were as authoritarian in their outlook as ever the Fascists had been.

I think that those who ran the student restaurant at the Beaux-Arts may have regarded me as suspiciously right wing - as an informer for the CIA, or some such group. I was someone who was nearly always on his own, seldom mingling or conversing with any of the other students - seeming perhaps as if I had been planted there to observe who mingled with whom, or who the politically active young students might be. Anyway that is one possible explanation for the fact that I observed one of their staff snapping photographs of me one day, as I carried my tray from the food counter. He was snapping me with an air of insolence on his face, as if he wanted me to perceive what he was doing. For if I was such an informer, I might take fright. As it was, my snap-shot probably just circulated round such restaurants which the Communists regarded as their recruiting-ground, with a query as to whether they too had evidence of any suspicious behaviour from the likes of me.

The way that I didn’t readily make friends, keeping myself withdrawn from others whose exact motivations I neither knew nor trusted, combined with an effort to put a definite personal stamp upon my own style of behaviour, meant that I did strike people as being eccentric. This was mainly in a determination to be my own kind of person - without the assistance of any others to assist me in discovering what that might entail. It wasn’t that my behaviour was really that odd, but I’ll try to indicate some instants when I noted how others were viewing my behaviour as odd.

There was an occasion for example, when I had left a number of the canvasses I had painted rolled up together behind the counter of a café, while I went off on some errand. In the manner that I’d learnt was necessary - so as to avoid any cracking of the pigment - I had been careful to see that the canvasses were rolled with the painted surface on the outer side. Yet by the time I returned, the scroll had been reversed so that the painted surfaces were now on the inside. And because this might cause the pigment at a later date to crack, I had become angry with the proprietor of the café for opening the scroll without my permission. But the crosser I became, the broader grew the smiles on the faces of the proprietor and his family. In their eyes my anger was absurd from start to finish. And I suddenly perceived how I was seen by them as the stereotype of a mad young artist, giving vent to an irrational anger that wouldn’t arise in more normal people. I realized how I was getting nowhere at all with such irascibility, so picked up my roll of paintings and flounced off.

Or there was another occasion when I was aware how the attractive Norwegian girl I had accosted at the Sorbonne, and taken to have a coffee with me, soon decided that I was far too inelegant to accept as an agreeable companion; a matter of being too absorbed in my own preposterous identity. I had in fact met her previously in that she had modelled at the Academie Julien for some sketching sessions, so it was with some delight that I observed her in attendance at some of the lectures in the holiday course at the Sorbonne. But I had no realistic understanding of how to bridge the communication problems, as we sat in a café - wondering if we wanted to know one another any better.

As we were sitting there, a fight broke out between a couple of men some way down, over on the far side of the road. I stood up from a genuine curiosity to see if I could discern what might have been the cause of their antagonism. And I did actually regard boxing as one of my specialist subjects, so I was hoping that my observations on this street brawl might produce an area where I could interest her with my conversation. But I suddenly realized how I had taken a wrong step. She was irritated by my desire to observe two men brawling. She was muttering that I should sit down - which I chose to ignore. And when I informed her that neither of the contestants knew how to box, she exclaimed softly enough that if I thought I could do better, then I ought to take it up with them.

I was always quite useless at slipping into an appropriate tactical position for the purposes of revealing whatever prowess might be attributable to me. Any such endeavour would seem clumsy and, as in this case, frankly incredible. I was ending up not enhanced in her eyes, but now perceived as someone whose boastfulness was without foundation, and quite simply absurd. The Norwegian girl terminated our incipient romance by getting up to leave. And on a subsequent occasion when I suggested she might like to come and have a coffee with me, she merely shook her head and walked away.

I was indeed aware how other people sometimes judged that there was something fraudulent in the image I presented to people. Taking my example this time from my career as an artist, some of the English people who were at the Sorbonne with me evidently supposed that my pose as an art student was a mere sham. I learnt this many years later when reencountering Sarah Jewson - after she had married David Nickerson. They were both in attendance at the Cours de Civilisation Francaise, but Sarah was to tell me that her particular friends supposed that the paint smears upon my grey flannels and Tweed jacket were placed there with a sense of deliberation so as to give people the impression that I was painting in my spare time. It seems to me that no one would ever suppose such a deception was so laboriously being enacted, if it wasn’t for the fact that they knew about my aristocratic background. It was that much of a disadvantage, coming from a stately home, that people should regard it as incongruous that I might sincerely be striving to emerge as an artist of merit.

On the other hand, that wasn’t always the image that I gave to people. I have described previously how [K] identified me with Larry in The Razor’s Edge. In any case her regard for me was certainly romanticized. Romantic or phoney, both images were held of me at this time, and yet neither were strictly engineered by myself. Those who perceived the naivety in me were perhaps getting somewhere nearer the truth. But I can remember feeling mortally offended when I was trying to convey to Martha and June, who were sitting at a café with an Italian friend of theirs, that kissing was regarded as quite permissible during first encounters nowadays in Britain, and he murmured softly to the others: "Once I inhaled a cigarette!" It had the effect of reminding me that I was still only a juvenile in an adults’ world.

In my own way however, I was gearing myself up towards the formation of an attitude to life. In philosophical terms, the trend of thought with which I was endeavouring to acquaint myself was the Existentialism of the Parisian Left Bank. Not that this was really in evidence in any of the circles that I frequented. But it was a fashionable talking point which represented many of the subjects in life where I appreciated that an evolution was required within my own more traditional ideas. And in terms of literature, I had now read several books by the likes of Henry Miller and Jean-Paul Satre.

It might be said that I had already broken away from the naivety of Henry’s and Daphne’s positions - which might be summarized as a post-war reversion to the pre-war values of gentlemanly gallantry towards flapper individualism. I supposed that there must be a definite rationale to be unearthed, which could justify all the current trends - in whose origin they themselves had been participants - towards an effervescent enjoyment of life, even if their staider friends might regard such behaviour as libertine, or even promiscuous. I felt criticism for such conduct myself, if those words were to be applied. But there remained a strong desire in my heart to find my place within a society that had been loosened up from the rigours of such restraint. And I was aware how Britain - perhaps through the experience of winning rather than losing the recent war - was now lagging behind France in the exploration of such new positions.