JKL Walker
THE FATAL ENGLISHMAN: THREE SHORT LIVES by Sebastian Faulks (Vintage, R57,95)
AFTER the success of his Great War novel Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks has turned aside from fiction to present, in The Fatal Englishman, a biographical triptych of three young men of apparent brilliance and promise who met early deaths in mysterious and tragic circumstances. The painter Christopher Wood, the airman Richard Hillary, the journalist Jeremy Wolfenden – each rebelled against comfortable English middle-class backgrounds, each fell victim to the peculiar pressures of his era, each generated a romantic myth. But in the raddled 20th century, the heroes came to their ends in complex, self-destructive ways, with their promise, perhaps, already spent.
Homosexuality was one factor that guided Christopher Wood’s footsteps, as it was later to do with Wolfenden. In Paris, where he arrived in 1921 at the age of 19, fired with ambition to be the world’s greatest painter, it gave him an entry into the more louche sections of the beau monde and the patronage of a rich Chilean diplomat.
In appearance, he was the quintessential public-school Englishman, more golfer than artist. With the Jermyn Street shirts, however, went a limp, the relic of a protracted illness that had brought him home from Marlborough to be nursed by his mother. Gratitude to her shaped his future; success as a painter would be his way of repaying her devotion.
Success was slow in coming. Wood saw art as essentially self-expression, a view which, like his figurative technique, was out of place in the Paris of Dada and Surrealism, despite his adoption of some of the tricks of Modernism. Parisian high society threw him into contact with Picasso, Cocteau and Diaghilev, but the endless round of parties, and long Mediterranean holidays with his patron, constantly interrupted his work.
Agonised love affairs – heterosexual now – were a further distraction; so, too, was an increasing opium addiction. In England, things were better. He painted with Ben Nicholson at St Ives and they later exhibited together in London and Paris, though with little critical success. Retreating to Brittany, Wood, in one frenzied month, June 1930, produced 40 canvases of startling originality. He returned to England, lunched with his mother at Salisbury and immediately afterwards threw himself under a train.
Wood had burnt himself out. Yet to friends such as Winifred Nicholson and Max Jacob, he was a hero who had led a daring life of high endeavour and died to achieve his vision.
Richard Hillary was a hero of a more public kind, a Battle of Britain pilot who was badly burnt when his Spitfire was shot down in the Channel, and achieved national fame with his memoir, The Last Enemy, published in 1942. The book remains a classic account of the perils and exhilaration of wartime flying, but had a particular impact at the time with its unsparing descriptions of the aftermath of heroism, the plastic surgery that Hillary and others like him underwent.
Hillary himself saw The Last Enemy as equally an account of his own moral growth, of the abandonment of his pre-war Oxford arrogance and a conversion to a view of the war as a moral crusade. Not everyone was convinced by this, some critics detecting self-admiration in the apparent conversion. The doubts were renewed when the still obviously unfit Hillary bulldozed his way back to flying duties and killed himself and his navigator in a crash. The critic and pacifist John Middleton Murry, in a debunking article, saw Hillary as trapped in a phoney literary role from which the only escape was death; even Hillary’s friend Arthur Koestler saw him as conniving, to some extent, in the public expectation of a heroic end.
Jeremy Wolfenden cuts a shabbier figure, like Wood and Hillary only in a reckless disregard for his own welfare. A brilliant scholar at Eton and Oxford, he was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Moscow at the height of the cold war, fell victim to KGB blackmail and became a minor spy for the Russians, later doubling for British Intelligence.
By a dangerous irony, Wolfenden’s open homosexuality threatened, if publicly revealed, to undermine the path-breaking reforms proposed by his father, John Wolfenden, in his 1957 report. In the end, though now married and working in Washington, Wolfenden collapsed under the pressures of his life and drank himself to death. There is a bitter modern flavour to this exemplary tale, but, compared with Wood and Hillary, Wolfenden was no Icarus: he left nothing behind. Brilliant, yes; a victim, of a sort; but what became of the vision thing?
If the urge towards romantic self-destruction appears to link these three young Englishmen, Faulks is careful to leave this implicit. Written in clipped, vivid prose, which occasionally lapses into journalese, it hurries the reader past the pitfalls of poignancy and sentiment. The Fatal Englishman is an absorbing account of three lost lives and the eras in which they were spent.