Dad didn’t forget that Ronald had tried to change his attitude, but he held on to the contested attitude as well as to the friendship with Ronald. He wasn’t ready to be influenced, to entertain new thoughts. As far as he was concerned the subject was as exempt from renegotiation as a birth certificate.
Did he have any personal experience of homosexuals and their ways? He was once, as a young man, on the receiving end of a clumsy pass, though it was more apocalyptic than that in the telling. Unfortunately he gave few details, and didn’t encourage questions. Any actual information value has disappeared under the build-up of competitively distorted versions Tim and I exchanged and found funny. Our final reworking went something like Wallah at the Club bought me a few drinks between chukkas. Seemed a nice enough chap till he tried to slide his filthy paw into my dhoti — laid the blighter out with a chota peg. (Sometimes ‘polo mallet’.) Quite where the Anglo-Indian colouring comes in I have no idea. The incident took place, I think, in Geneva before the War, though Dad never otherwise referred to being in Geneva. The fact that our version ends with violence isn’t part of the distortion. Dad said with a certain amount of righteousness that he had broken a bottle on the man’s head, as if no other form of RSVP was possible.
Dad wasn’t even sufficiently at ease with the existence of homosexuals to tell jokes about them. In fact he hated such jokes more than any other. Even an anti-gay joke gave perversion the oxygen of publicity, when by rights it should be smothered in the sulphur of oblivion.
I remember when Dad treated his brother, David, up from Denbighshire on a visit to the metropolis, to dinner at the Garrick Club. David embarrassed him by telling an off-colour joke on those hallowed premises. A joke about lesbians.
It was about as sweet as such a joke can be. A man in a bar sees an attractive woman and asks the bartender to send a drink to her from him. ‘I wouldn’t bother if I was you,’ says the bartender. ‘She’s a lesbian.’ The man isn’t deterred and insists on the drink being sent over. He waits a little while and then goes over to strike up conversation. ‘So,’ he says, ‘which part of Lesbos are you from?’
I know I’m a bit of a subtext hound, but there’s something very satisfying about this constellation of joke, teller, audience and even setting. In theory David was much more of a Country Mouse than Dad, resistant to anything that was ‘far back’ (his code word, slightly mystifying to me, for ‘posh’), but he chose to tell a joke making mild fun of provincialism and ignorance. And meanwhile Dad was appalled that the word ‘lesbian’ should have been spoken in the dining-room of the Garrick.
The Garrick Club was founded in 1831 (and named after the supreme actor of the previous century) as a place where ‘actors and men of refinement and education might meet on equal terms’, it being taken for granted that actors were unrefined and uneducated. That was certainly the general opinion, and the idea was to improve the position of this raffish line of work (‘profession’ was hardly the right word at the time). The founders hoped that by restricting eligibility to journalists, lawyers and actors, respectability might be leached from those who had more than enough by those who were badly in need.
The club achieved its goal, but the respectability of actors is as provisional as anyone else’s. John Gielgud, for instance, a prominent member, was respectable (to the point of being recently knighted) when he entered a Chelsea public convenience one day in 1953, not so much when he left it in police custody. He had been advised (by Michael Redgrave, was it?) of the crucial importance of giving a false name if arrested. Accordingly he identified himself to the authorities as Arthur Gielgud. He seems to have thought ‘John’ was the bit that gave him away.
It seems thousands of years ago, the time when a vulnerable public figure could behave with such marvellous naivety. It’s only fair to point out that Arthur John Gielgud was his full name, so he may have been trying in some quixotic way to avoid a lie while also masking his identity with an alias. He did dissemble about his profession, describing himself in court as a clerk.
Though worldliness was a very variable quality in those post-war years, when Dad was building his reputation in London, his own innocence and alarm seem hard to credit. Even in Aberystwyth, where he had been heavily involved in student stage productions, there must surely have been at least a few dodgy characters sheltering under the capacious skirts of Dame Theatre. There have been plenty of young men over the years who’ve joined a drama group when the only acting they were really keen to do was acting on their own prohibited desires.
Dad thought that such dark matters shouldn’t be dis-cussed — yet there was no lenience extended to those who were properly secretive. Dad harboured a particular animus towards Gilbert Harding, the 1950s television personality, famous for his rudeness, who broke down when interviewed (for the programme Face to Face) by John Freeman, who asked searching questions about death and his mother. The programme proved that television could be both intimate and intense, even harrowing. The impact was correspondingly greater in a culture more buttoned-up than today’s.
Dad’s logic was hard to follow. Gilbert Harding’s sexuality only became public knowledge after his death, but Dad seemed to feel that there was an element of deception involved in his appearance on the programme. A monster had been allowed to lay claim to recognizable human emotions, things he couldn’t possibly experience given the corruption of his desires. Such a person wasn’t entitled to weep for his mother’s death.
Ideally, crimes against nature should also be ignored by culture. Dad felt it to be appalling that Emlyn Williams, actor and playwright, should willingly address the issue in his autobiographies. One book, George, appeared before the decriminalization of homosexuality, the other (Emlyn) afterwards. A Welsh homosexual was a particular sort of traitor, a quisling between the sheets, a friend who chose to help the enemy. If there was a connection suggested here between the theatrical world and sexual double-dealing then it was all the less welcome for that.
As late as the 1970s Dad could listen with evident pleasure to a radio programme in which a pair of elderly spinsters, spending their retirement in the idyllic village of Stackton Tressel, reminisced about their long-ago operatic careers, without realizing that his beloved Hinge and Bracket were female impersonators. (Admittedly drag on the radio takes gender transgression into the domain of conceptual art.) When informed of the true situation he seemed baffled. What on earth was the point? It was hard to explain to him that however little point there was to the act in question, there was even less if they were really what they claimed to be.
David’s lesbian joke had only made a ripple, but another comic routine caused Dad considerable offence. Since it happened in the 1970s, it gave his sons much joy. We weren’t used to seeing him at a loss, and no pathos attached to the novelty at the time. Whether or not that decade was a difficult time to be a post-adolescent male, it must have been an excruciating time to be the father of such creatures. The occasion was Christmas lunch, displaced from the Gray’s Inn flat for once. The reason was that Sheila was still recovering from the effects of a road accident, and wouldn’t be up to the strain of catering, so the date is likely to have been 1973. The venue was the Waldorf Hotel in the Aldwych, and we went there as the guests of George Walford, a colleague of Dad’s, family friend and in fact godfather of Matthew. On a cryptic-crossword level I enjoyed the fact that we were going to the Waldorf with the Walfords, but there was also a bit of history being invoked, since the Waldorf was where my parents had held their wedding reception. We would be near the very spot where Dad’s father, Henry, had fallen on the sword of his abstinence in the name of family unity. There might be a plaque to commemorate this heroic ingestion of fizz, virtual hara-kiri of non-conformist temperance.