The Fatal Englishman (36 page)

In any event, the KGB was at this stage not really looking for political sympathisers. The happy days when such men as Burgess, Maclean and Philby could be recruited because they actually believed in Communism were long gone. Wolfenden could not be persuaded, but he could be entrapped; and the way in which this could be done was through his obvious weak point: his homosexuality. Wolfenden of Eton and Oxford was already working at
The Times
[slogan: ‘The Top People’s Paper’) during his vacations, and probably told Yuri in the course of their drink-assisted chats that his ambition was to be its Moscow correspondent. Yuri, like all KGB officers at the time, assumed all British correspondents in Moscow were working for SIS. If Wolfenden, as a Russian speaker, were to come to Moscow as a correspondent in the near future, then it would clearly be worth Yuri’s while to pay him some attention. He was unlikely ever to have information in the course of his work that would be of much use. The nature of any entrapment would not in the first instance be practical; it would be mechanical: it would be done because it
could
be done. But if Wolfenden’s career flourished as everyone expected then there could be long-term benefits. To have as editor of
The Times
a KGB agent of influence would be more than a coup; it could be useful.

Did Yuri Krutikov sleep with Wolfenden in 1956? If so, neither mentioned it to the other students on the course; but they in turn didn’t rule it out. They put nothing past Jeremy, or come to that, past Yuri. In the room at Yalta where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt signed the Conference Agreement, Yuri put a flowerpot on his head and pretended to be a caryatid. Yuri kept in touch with his English student friends; his career flourished, though it had a hiccough when he was sent by one of the UN agencies to the new republic of Zaire (formerly the Belgian Congo) and had to be hastily withdrawn on the grounds that he looked ‘too Belgian’. He was back in Moscow by the time Wolfenden arrived there as a correspondent in 1961.

While the NUS delegation was actually in the Soviet Union in 1956, Khrushchev made his denunciation of Stalin. It was the summer of the Suez crisis; in November the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary. By the time the students were back at College for their final year, the post-war world had become a very frightening place.

Philip French and Jeremy Wolfenden both duly became editors of
Isis.
A curious custom meant that the outgoing editor became the subject of a profile in the next edition. On 25 April 1957 Wolfenden was depicted in the usual pose – cigarette dangling, dark glasses, wicked half-smile – above an anonymous article that mixed undergraduate bombast with remarkable insight. The author of the piece was Robert Cassen, his ex-Navy colleague. Without naming it as such, he quickly put his finger on what Jeremy had called ‘the Wolfenden paradox’:

A desire to shock fights with an unwilling conformism which, through uncertainty or survival instinct, he has rarely abandoned publicly in the way that those who know him privately might have expected.

Such profiles appeared under the general heading ‘Isis Idol’, or in this case, ‘Press Idol’, and Cassen’s account of Wolfenden was certainly, sometimes embarrassingly, admiring. In his estimation of Wolfenden’s likely future, however, Cassen was acute:

There is no mistaking the value of the material… he has a gifted, fast-working intellect, an endless facility for coining epigrams, and a well-documented memory; on the job he is as reliable as concrete. All this, unfortunately some will say, is coupled to an emotional make-up which is not necessarily intent on making the best use of it…a deep contempt for most of the exterior things of life, like good food or clothes… he bristles at the mere mention of words such as ‘simple pleasures’ or ‘taste’ or ‘gracious’; and an analogous contempt for the liberal ideas of the West – a similar effect is produced in him by the words ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘love’. This is not an assumed outlook, a mask of ‘toughness’, an artificial cynicism; whether defensible or not, whether permanent or not, it is a genuine and consistent attitude: wherever else he may appear at ease, his true atmosphere is Paddington Station, a room in Ladbroke Grove, the self-service café, urban, rootless. If it were not for the intellectual dishonesty involved, one could imagine him happily employed by the Soviet machine; but for true contentment, one need only give him a supply of cigarettes, a few bottles of whisky, and a small war to run, or get killed in. And an audience.

Nevertheless it looks as though he will end up a journalist…he will sell his soul for less than its real price, or go away thinking that there is nothing for him to do but harden himself into a mercy-bullet for the sick conscience of the age.

Student magazines are not usually a reliable source of anything beyond sexual gossip and film listings, but in this case
Isis
may be an exception. Undergraduates who had done their National Service were more advanced than today’s average student; Wolfenden was both sexually and intellectually precocious, thus closer to maturity at twenty-two than most. He would have enjoyed the bit about ‘the self-service café, urban, rootless’ and the ‘mercy-bullet for the sick conscience of the age’; all that Cassen seemed to miss, or perhaps play down, was what fun he still was.

Wolfenden’s circle included various female undergraduates, who spent as much time as possible in Magdalen because it was more interesting than their own austere institutions. His acknowledged but still illegal homosexuality added to his mysterious glamour in the eyes of these girls. Heterosexual male
undergraduates looked on in despair as Oxford’s few eligible young women were drawn away from them to this doomed cause. Wolfenden was inclined to lead people into relationships deeper than they had expected, and to mobilise in them feelings he had no intention of matching. While one young ‘dish’ was being lined for a ‘bunnymoon’ (his word for a weekend away) others were wandering around perplexed and cast off. In Anthony Page, later a theatre and film director, and in Kit Lambert, who became the manager of The Who, he had gay friends who were ‘out,’ and with whom he joked about homosexuality.

It was a major liberal cause of the time because the police were active in prosecuting ‘offenders’. John Gielgud was arrested after an incident in a public lavatory. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and two friends were set up with two young airmen who subsequently gave evidence against them: all three went to prison. A novel called
The Philanderer
by Stanley Kaufman ran into trouble; the novelist Rupert Croft-Cooke was sent to prison. A discreet gay novel called
Finistère
by Michael Fitzpeters became notorious when its publisher, Victor Gollancz, took an advertisement on the leader page of the
Observer
to describe it as the best novel about homosexuality since Proust. Bookshops in the Charing Cross Road put up cardboard arrows saying ‘Novels on a “Finistère” theme this way.’

One response to repression was simply to drink more. On the day before May Day Wolfenden determined to stay up all night drinking so that he could hear the choristers at dawn. At noon the following day he consulted his watch and found that he had been drinking for twenty-four hours. In dreary post-post-war Oxford everyone was more manic and more dissolute than today; no one had heard of jogging or health clubs; everybody smoked. But however dissolute they were, they could be sure that Jeremy Wolfenden would be a little bit more so.

Drugs were hard to come by, but he managed. It was the time of Aldous Huxley’s books on his experiences in California, and Wolfenden succeeded in extracting some mescaline from the science laboratories, which he took on one occasion with his cousin Sally Hinchliff, herself an undergraduate, and two others.
Sally found she had lost the willingness to move and spent the night in Magdalen new building, marvelling at the ‘profound’ insights that the drug induced, such as Jeremy’s apparent assertion that ‘language is not horizontal.’ She misheard him; what he actually said was ‘Be careful, the landing is not horizontal.’

With the aid of Alka Seltzer (known to him in a phrase of Colin Falck’s, after the rifle-cleaning cloth, as a ‘pull-through’) and the five-till-seven afternoon work stint, Wolfenden duly won a formal or congratulatory first. Its distinction from a normal first-class degree lay in the fact that when you went for your interview the examiners were supposed to stand up and applaud. Wolfenden was given straight alphas throughout his papers, though they were not altogether happy about his attitude. One examiner made the frightening comment: ‘We had to give him straight alphas, but frankly I didn’t enjoy doing it. He wrote as though it were all beneath him; he wrote as though it were all such a waste of his time.’

Wolfenden’s reputation was at its height. It was more substantial than that of bright graduates at other times because he was older. One or two of his more astute friends began to worry about his recklessness and lack of any instinct for self-preservation. His life, his attitudes and his intellect seemed to embody their own aspirations in some dazzling form; his existence seemed to demonstrate what happens when a rage for the life of the mind is taken to the limit. It was magnificent, but it was frightening. What would become of him?

Other killjoys noticed that while Jeremy was undoubtedly brilliant, he didn’t have an aptitude for anything in particular. The word ‘brilliant’ recurs in all contemporary descriptions of him, but it is not an adjective of unlimited admiration; compare Proust’s biographer George D. Painter on the fantastic Comte Robert de Montesquiou: ‘He invented and kept his own astonishing rules of life: he was … by far the most remarkable and original person in the empty milieu of the Faubourg St Germain; he was witty, and brilliantly though not profoundly intelligent.’ Substitute any one of the closed English institutions in which Wolfenden lived for ‘Faubourg St Germain’ and the limiting
description works for him too. He could take in philosophy, music, art, Greek, theatre, maths, history, any subject you might care to mention, with astonishing ease and virtuosity, but he didn’t, for instance, have anything that you might call a
talent.

Two months after leaving Oxford, Wolfenden had found himself a job on
The Times
as what he described as a ‘general apprentice-cum-dogsbody at £5 a week’. This had been secured by his impressive work for the paper during vacations and by the support of a journalist called Peter Nichols, for many years the
Times’s
correspondent in Rome. ‘However,’ he wrote to Robin Hope, ‘it’s all a great victory … especially as JFW [Jack Wolfenden] had no part in it – and gives me something to go on for the future.’ He planned to keep his academic options open by sitting the All Souls exam in due course.

He moved from Cheyne Walk in Chelsea to Arundel Gardens in Notting Hill, but the gallery of exotic characters – ‘A. had sex last night with a transvestite sadist from Reading clad entirely in black, including a crash-helmet’ – stayed the same. Wolfenden’s own intrigues were usually with respectable types who needed to be smuggled through the
Cage aux Folies
atmosphere of his various flats. One such object of desire was ‘rather like Bamber Gascoigne only a bit butcher (Imagine!)’, though when Wolfenden got him home he found Kit Lambert and a friend called Roger halfway through a four-hour conversation about each garment they would be taking with them on holiday to Greece. After two and a half hours of ‘solid camp of a rare vintage’, the dish in question was ‘so tired that we could only play teddy bears’.

Kit Lambert was almost as dissolute as Jeremy Wolfenden, but at this stage a close ally. He was the son of Constant Lambert, with whom Christopher Wood had had his unfortunate cooperation for the Russian Ballet. Constant Lambert held no grudge, however. Four years after Wood’s death his son was born and he needed to find a name; and so it was that Jeremy Wolfenden’s friend was named after Kit Wood.

‘Meanwhile,’ Wolfenden wrote, ‘I work for this aged newspaper, which creaks in every joint, accept all the drinks I’m offered by Public Relations Men … I’m the smallest office boy here
really – which makes me think I should have an affair with the smallest office boy – but it would really be too difficult. The place is full of dishes, but they would really be
so
much more use to me any place else.’

Newspaper foreign desks stay open late into the night in case stories come in from parts of the world in different time zones. It is expensive to remake pages and move stories around, and was especially so at this time, when printing was done on site using hot-metal presses. Although more advanced technology was available, the British print unions had successfully resisted it; when the linotype machines that set the print went wrong the management sometimes had to look for spares in Victorian museums. An organised racket in the print room meant that many printers on the payroll never turned up for work; some were paid under imaginative aliases such as ‘Mickey Mouse’. Many of the scams had been written into the contracts by a blackmailed management, desperate not to lose a night’s production. One of the most hilarious was an agreement by which linotype operators were paid to correct mistakes in the typesetting for which they were responsible. Proofs therefore seldom arrived on the editorial floor without their quota of ‘errors’. The expense and the hostility meant that as few editorial changes as possible were made between editions and that journalists who stayed late on the night shift had time for drink and intrigue.

Wolfenden, even at the height of his promiscuity, declined to have affairs in the office. He enjoyed danger but always seemed to know how far he could go. He was almost thrown out of Eton, but he survived; at Oxford he never quite, as Cassen’s piece for
Isis
noted, made his public life into the full-scale revolt that those who knew him privately expected. It was the apparent loss of this sure instinct later in his life that so perplexed his friends.