How extraordinary to read long after the publication of my In Search of the Fourth Man (Ambit 193, 2008) that, according to Brigid Brophy, Anthony Blunt’s ‘... hospitality was multifarious but his own consumption [of alcohol when dining with him was] nil.’
Agreed, Blunt’s tastes were ‘austere’, as Brophy observes, but not in the matter of alcohol. Even when granted hindsight of Blunt’s public exposure as a Soviet spy (1979), Brophy misreads certain other character traits when she writes in 1986: ‘He spoke in a charming upper-class drawl that was neither an affectation nor quite an Edwardian relic, and he seemed forever on the verge of utter exhaustion.’
‘The wine is drawn, it must be drunk.’
‘Utter exhaustion?’ No wonder, when you consider that Blunt’s decades-long dependence on barbiturates (Seconal) was complicated by his
alcoholism. Seconal can cause daytime drowsiness but this effect invariably worsens when the drug is taken with alcohol. Blunt would start drinking at 11 o’clock in the morning, and his
alcoholism almost certainly inhibited the anaesthetic activity of his brain’s
barbiturate receptor sites. These co-existing counteractions would have
significantly increased the anxiety neurosis that his chronic alcohol ingestion
sustained, a conflict that was manifested in the jaded, unrousable manner I describe as evident when meeting him at the Courtauld Institute.
I heard the voice – a mellifluous modulated drawl ... I observed Sir Anthony surreptitiously beneath lowered lashes while I pretended to examine a small maquette on his desk, an ill-carved figure he evidently used as a paperweight among his card index boxes.
‘One can see with half an eye it’s a fake,’ were Blunt’s first words.
In his own eyes, I thought, there is nothing written he allows you to read.
They were eyes of palest Cambridge blue, set in the face, I assumed, of a jaded critic nothing could rouse.
There were wine bottles on the table and he poured me a glass ...
Blunt took a sip of wine and his nose wrinkled. That acidic downcast mouth reminded me of a turbot with a lemon slice in it.
‘The wine is drawn, it must be drunk,’ he observed sorrowfully.
We were drinking a four-year-old Château Mouton Rothschild and it tasted of rotten mushrooms. The label of naked dancing Bacchantes, I later learned, was designed by a noted Surrealist painter and sculptress, which was distinctly odd since Blunt’s biographer tells us that he abhorred le Surréalisme (or ‘Superrealism’, as he referred to it) and, besides, that Bordeaux we drank that night was one of the worst vintages of the last two centuries.
As you’re no doubt aware, Brigid Brophy was married to Sir Michael Levey, Director of the National Gallery in London, so her insights into the intimate domestic arrangements of Anthony Blunt’s top floor flat at the Courtauld Institute in Portman Square are to be relished for their candour. ‘Whenever we went there, the evening was tattered by brief incursions of young men introduced by first name only, who might have been sailors or might of been students of Poussin or were very likely both.’
What then, drove Brigid Antonia Brophy to identify so completely with her host of those tattered evenings as to write a gender-bending satire in which the Anthony she knew became the Antonia of her sapphic alter ego? Answer: ‘What my imagination did, when it picked him up by the scruff of his neck, was change his sex and make him the headmistress of a finishing school for girls. Perhaps it was the hell he had imagined for himself.’
The Two Antonias.
Were
any evidence needed that Brigid Brophy, that remarkable
Firbankian pastichiste, was possessed of a wit of outshining
intellectual brilliancy then the following passage from her girls’
school fantasia, The Finishing Touch (1963), set on the Riviera, would bear out the claim:
Twenty-six heads bent over the school’s die-stamped paper … At least thirteen tongue tips protruded in concentration.
Scurrying pens on the paper made a noise like cicadas.
Outside, as the sun rose to zenith, cicadas made a noise like scurrying pens.
Just think. Ten years earlier, aged twenty-four, she was writing schoolgirl adventure fiction in my sister’s Collins Magazine for Boys & Girls, a feat of recall that seemingly allows me to pluck ephemera out of the air yet is explained by our crammed family attic, where our childhood favourite reads still remain stowed.
Quite by chance, a yellowed Collins Annual fell open the other day at the first page of Brophy’s Story of an Old Master and a Very Old Umbrella. It is a strangely resonant text that presents us with an unusual opportunity to observe, in a seemingly innocent text for children, nascent epigrammatic locutions stirring in those transgressive preoccupations that were to shape her idiosyncratic mature prose. The gallery she describes in the yarn, by the way, is pretty certainly the National.
‘But it can’t possible rain to-day,’ protested the boy, looking up at the blue sky.
‘Aunt Sarah,’ explained his sister, ‘is an alarmist. She probably sees our quiet visit to the gallery as a reckless adventure fraught with perils.’
‘I wish it were,’ her brother said gloomily. Then his spirits seemed to brighten. ‘Perhaps it will be,’ he added, and used the umbrella to hail the ’bus.
I shall not spoil the fun for those coming fresh to Brophy’s Bluntian satire, but, as she wrote in her review of Myra Breckinridge, ‘The trans-sex fantasy explodes, I suspect, at a level even deeper than the one from which it liberates the homosexual imprisoned in every heterosexual and also, of course, the heterosexual in every homosexual ...’
Not that these insights would necessarily have conditioned my own perceptions of Blunt’s character, which have been mediated latterly through my studies of graphology; studies that have revealed in his handwriting a hunted, haunted, inherently secretive man whose every pen stroke appears to express the intense anxiety and caution underlying his warped purpose.
So how close was Brophy to the truth of Blunt’s character in 1963, sixteen years before the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures was publicly exposed as a Soviet spy
reporting
to his masters in the Soviet Intelligence service, the NKVD? Let us, then, examine common features of resemblance in The Finishing Touch where the traits of francophone headmistress Antonia Mount and francophone institute director Anthony Blunt coincide.
Alcohol.
‘My dear ... It’s a night, perhaps, for Chartreuse?’
‘Yellow or green?’ ...
‘...put out both, my dear, if you would ... I am a person,’ said Antonia,‘who all her long life has been unable to decide whether she prefers green or yellow Chartreuse.’
...
Antonia poured a glass of madeira from a decanter strangely stoppered.
Bilingualism.
Non, elle me ferait une scène, Antonia thought, hating, above all things in life, scenes ... I am tired. I am, even, old … I am—utterly—excédée.
Exhaustion.
‘Have you,’ Antonia exhaustedly enquired, ‘had another parcel of instructions from the Palace?’
‘I have, my dear. Such impossible things they seem to require. Their mind seems to run on lavatories.’
‘What,’ asked Antonia, ‘from the Keeper of the Privy this and the Privy that, can one expect ...?’
Fondness for English sailors.
O dreadful, dreadful tropical kit, the white socks long and the white trousers short ... [a] uniform one would expect to see directing the traffic from a white tub in Morocco ... And yet ... there was ... A charm, even, in the absurd uniform, in revealing the knees (could they be made to blush?). Pleasure could be derived from these northern complexions (so easily blushing for one thing) which took so ruddily to southern sun ...
And finally, and devastatingly, here is virtually an entire chapter from Brophy that spookily (in 1963) foresees a future of denied honours (Antonia Mount’s fictive Damehood thwarted, and Anthony Blunt’s very real knighthood stripped from him) ... and, moreover, daringly touches upon the BIG SECRET that MI5 had kept the lid on for more than a decade ...
Treason and Communism.
(Opening paragraph of Chapter XI)
‘I say. get me some background on this [Antonia] Mount woman, will you?
‘Right. I’ll look through the files. You’ll have to tap the old boy network.’
‘Right.’
‘Find out if she’s that kind of woman.’
‘Right you are. If she’s a communist, you mean?’
‘No, no, no, no, no’ (agacé).
‘Beneath Brophy‘s sparkling and perfumed prose lay deeper rococo corruption.’
Sir Peter Stothard (introduction to 2013 reissue of The Finishing Touch).
Blunt’s
zigzagging signature is composed of lots of sharp points, so he is likely to
have been waspish in his comments. The sharp angle on the A shows hardness and
probing. This seems to be rather resentful writing, there are lots of
sharp angles, which means that he possibly took things personally and
saw slights where none was intended. And note, also, his arrow-shaped flourish is pointing Leftward.
Evidently,
there was strong need in the signatory to see his name much sharpened, and his
signature gives the whetted edge to what was hereditarily Blunt.
(From In Search of the Fourth Man, 2008, Ambit 193.)
For further remarks recording Blunt’s views on Social Realism in art, see . . .
