BURIED TOGETHER
Partner Toni Altmann,
Sandy Baird, Sam Langford, buried together
Queer Places:
Eton College, Windsor SL4 6DW, Regno Unito
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Chemin du Col de Bast, 06100 Nice, Francia
Cimetière de Caucade, 7 Place Caucade, 06200 Nice, Francia
Brian
Christian de Claiborne Howard (13 March 1905 – 15 January 1958) was an English
poet and later a writer for the New Statesman. He was a member of the Hypocrites'
Club. At Oxford, Brian Howard and his friends were known as Hearts, mostly sons of noblemen and aspiring writers. The Isis Magazine wrote "They are rather alarming. They have succeeded in picking up a whole series of intellectual catch-phrases with which they proceed to dazzle their friends and frighten their acquaintances: and they are the only people I have ever met who have reduced rudeness to a fine art."[18] Sir John Betjeman tells the story of a Balliol aesthete called Michael Dugdale who used to walk into Brasenose College, dominated by the Hearts, with a stick and limping, in the hope that the Hearts would be too sporting to attack him.[19]
Howard is credited with coining the phrase, “Anybody over the age of 30
seen in a bus has been a failure in life,” often wrongly attributed to
Margaret Thatcher. According to Daily Telegraph correspondent and
historian, Hugo Vickers, (writing in November 2006), the author was Brian
Howard. The phrase came into wider use when used by Loelia, Duchess of
Westminster, in her memoir Grace and Favour (1961).
Howard was born to American parents in Hascombe, Surrey, of Jewish descent,
and brought up in London; his father Francis Gassaway Howard - son of the
writer Frank Gassaway, known as 'Derrick Dodd'[2]-
was an associate of
James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
He was educated at Eton College, where he was one of the Eton Arts
Society group including
Harold Acton, Oliver
Messel, Anthony
Powell and Henry Yorke. He entered Christ Church, Oxford in 1923, not
without difficulty. He was prominent in the group later known as the Oxford
Wits. He was part of the Hypocrites' Club that included
Harold Acton,
Lord David Cecil,
L. P. Hartley and
Evelyn Waugh.
Railway Club at Oxford, conceived by John Sutro, dominated by Harold Acton. (Left to right) Back: Henry Yorke, Roy Harrod, Henry Weymouth, David Plunket Greene, Harry Stavordale, Brian Howard. Middle row: Michael Rosse, John Sutro, Hugh Lygon, Harold Acton, Bryan Guinness, Patrick Balfour, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, Johnny Drury-Lowe. Front: porters.
At Oxford Howard was part of the Railway Club, which included:
Henry Yorke,
Roy Harrod,
Henry Thynne, 6th Marquess of Bath,
David Plunket Greene,
Edward
Henry Charles James Fox-Strangways, 7th Earl of Ilchester,
Brian Howard,
Michael Parsons, 6th Earl of Rosse,
John Sutro,
Hugh Lygon,
Harold Acton,
Bryan Guinness, 2nd Baron Moyne,
Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross,
Mark
Ogilvie-Grant,
John Drury-Lowe.[3]
It has been suggested[4]
that Howard was Waugh's model for Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. But
Waugh wrote, to Lord Baldwin, "There is an aesthetic bugger who sometimes
turns up in my novels under various names—that was 2/3 Brian [Howard] and 1/3
Harold Acton. People
think it was all Harold, who is a much sweeter and saner man [than Howard]."[5]
At this time he had already been published as a poet, in A. R. Orage's
The New Age, and the final Sitwell Wheels anthology. He used the
pseudonyms "Jasper Proude" and "Charles Orange." His verse also was in
Oxford Poetry 1924. His poetry was admired and promoted by
Edith Sitwell in the
late 1920s.
In the late 1920s, he was a key figure among London's "Bright Young
Things"—a privileged, fashionable and bohemian set of relentless party-goers,
satirised in such novels as Evelyn Waugh's 1930 Vile Bodies where the
character of Miles Malpractice owes something to Howard. Apart from Waugh,
Howard knew all this circle, including Nancy Mitford, Henry Yorke,
Harold Acton, and
especially Nancy Cunard
with whom he shared artistic and political interests, maintaining contact
throughout his life.
In 1929 he was famously involved in the "Bruno Hat" hoax when the
fashionable Hon Mr. & Mrs. Bryan Guinness promoted a spoof London art
exhibition by an apparently unknown German painter Bruno Hat (impersonated by
the German-speaking Tom
Mitford, brother of Nancy and Diana Mitford—the latter at the time Mrs.
Guinness, a socialite, arts' patron and friend of Howard,
Lytton Strachey,
Evelyn Waugh, Boris
Anrep, Dora
Carrington, John
Betjeman and other artistic and literary figures, before her second
marriage to British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley). Bruno Hat's paintings
were the work of Brian Howard.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
was furious when, in May 1929,
Dolly Wilde made a pass at Zelda Fitzgerald. More often, with
heterosexual men, she was something of a cock-tease. According to her
cousin Vyvyan Holland,
Oscar Wilde’s
son, ‘she was always taking her horse to the water and then refusing to
let him drink’. The men who were more at ease with her sense of fun tended
to be homosexual. She was a member of
Stephen Tennant’s circle and
went to Brian Howard’s famous Greek
party dressed as Sappho.
Howard led a very active social life, tried to come to terms with
his homosexuality, and published only one substantial poetry collection God
Save the King (1930, Hours Press). He was active as a poet during the
Spanish Civil War, but did not ultimately invest in his work with seriousness.
He drank heavily and used drugs.
Jean Connolly moved in an
entourage of young male couples that included
Dwight Ripley and
Rupert Barneby,
Tony Bower and
Cuthbert Worsley,
Peter Watson and
Denham Fouts,
Brian Howard and
Toni Altmann. "Drink, night
life, tarts and Tonys," complained
Cyril Connolly, who referred to
the whole entourage as "Pansyhalla." They liked Picasso,
Marcel Proust, and
Francis Poulenc,
favored in architecture the Baroque, admired
Josephine Baker and jazz. Someone
took a copy of Dwight Ripley's Poems to Jean Cocteau, who responded "Quel
néurophate!", a diagnosis that Rupert relayed with wicked relish. When
Gerald
Heard published two books in 1931 to propose that evolution demanded an
evolved human consciousness, Brian Howard called them "the most important that
have ever been written since the Ice Age." In Pansyhalla, a compelling example
was set by Peter Watson, who joined with Cyril Connolly in 1939 to found
Horizon and then financed that influential journal thoughout its career. Until
the WWII, Watson lived mostly in Paris; a portrait of Jean Connolly, by
Man
Ray, was in his apartment. In 1938 he subsized the publication of a first book
of poems by Charles Henri Ford, the young poet who was painter
Pavel
Tchelitchew's lover, and who, back in New York by 1940, would found a
counterpart to Horizon, the trendier but likewise influential magazine View.
It was View that brought
John Bernard Myers
from Buffalo to be its managing
editor, and Myers who, as director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery that Dwight
himself sponsored, acted as impresario for a cast of painters and poets that
seems now, to typify the postwar New York scene.
In 1940, during the autumn height of the Blitz,
Stephen Spender published an
open letter to
Christopher Isherwood in
the New Statesman. "You can't escape," wrote Spender. "If you try to do
so, you are simply putting the clock back for yourself: using your freedom
of movement to enable yourself to live still in pre-Munich England."
Isherwood, who left long before the Blitz, was annoyed. So was
Dwight Ripley.
"It takes in all of us refugees," he complained to
Rupert Barneby, while
implying that there was more than politics at issue. "I shall always think
of the Spenders henceforth as Delight and Inez, How bitter they are, and
no wonder." Earlier, Spender in fact urged Isherwood to emigrate to
America in search of refuge for his German lover,
Heinz Neddermeyer. In
Dwight's circle of friends, Brian Howard
likewise had a German lover, Toni Altmann.
After Hitler was named chancellor, Isherwood spent the next four years,
Howard the next seven, each contending with a sucession of revoked visas,
expired passports, and sudden deportations in their continuing efforts to
find asylum or new citizenship for Neddermeyer and Altmann, respectively,
and so prevent their eventual repatriation and arrest in Germany. Both
Englishmen tried to get their lovers into England, and both were refused
on moral grounds. Erika Mann
married W.H. Auden and became a
British subject overnight. When Neddermeyer was arrested in Paris, it was
Tony Bower who went to rescue him. Isherwood joined them in Luxembourg,
but from there Neddermeyer was expelled into Germany, where he was
arrested, charged with reciprocal onanism ("in fourteen foreign countries
and in the German Reich," remembered Isherwood), found guilty, and
sentenced to successive terms in prison, at hard labor, and in the army.
Brian Howard's efforts on behalf of Toni Altmann were likewise frustrated
at the end. Howard was an early and outspoken antifascist, the first
Englishman to understand the Nazi threat, claimed Erika Mann, who, when
asked to describe his plans for returning to serve England, had responded
in language of persuasive spontaneity: "So, really, I have no plans,
except to do my best for Toni." Altmann was interned by the French in
Toulon in September 1939, then moved to Le Mans, where Howard lost track
of him. Howard remained in France trying to locate his lover until, in
June the following year, he escaped on a coal freighter that departed
Cannes the day before the Germans arrived in Marseilles.
In 1942 Toni Altmann escaped his internment in France and reached the
United States, where he married in order to become an American citizen.
Howard, who was informed of the marriage by postcard, applied soon after
to the Royal Air Force; he spent much of the was in uniform, though his
unit never left England.
During World War II Howard took part in the Dunkirk evacuation and later
worked for MI5 but was dismissed from the War Office in June 1942, after which
he was conscripted to the Royal Air Force and given a low-level clerk's job at
Bomber Command, High Wycombe. An Air Ministry note on his file says he should
never be given a commission. Transferred to another posting, where he referred
to his commanding officer as "Colonel Cutie" (an appellation Evelyn Waugh gave
his rebellious rogue Basil Seal in the novel Put Out More Flags),
Howard was dismissed in December 1944, by which time he had formed a
longstanding open relationship with Sam, an Irishman serving in the Air Sea
Rescue.
Howard had a long affair with
Sandy Baird that he knew from Eton. Baird was killed in action in 1943 at
33 years old.[6]
After the war, Howard drifted around Europe with Sam Langford, continuing to write
occasional articles and reviews for the New Statesman, the BBC and
others, fitfully working on an uncompleted biography of the gay English writer
Norman Douglas
(author of the novel South Wind) and doing no substantial work.
Indiscreetly promiscuous, drinking heavily, taking drugs and behaving
outrageously, they were expelled in turn from Monaco, France, Italy and Spain,
the French authorities noting their "moralité douteuse" (dubious morality).
Not surprisingly, he suffered from bad health in the 1950s, and committed
suicide by taking an overdose of sedatives after the accidental death of his
lover, Sam Langford, an American man, who died suddenly but
naturally in Howard's bath.[7][8]
They were buried alongside each other at Russian Orthodox Cemetery, Nice.
Evelyn Waugh wrote:
"I used to know Brian Howard well—a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In
later life he became very dangerous—constantly attacking people with his fists
in public places—so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate
cause of his death was a broken heart."[5]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Howard_(poet)
- Woods, Gregory. Homintern . Yale University Press. Edizione del
Kindle.