As a young man in the 1970s Michael Bloch was the architectural historian and diarist James Lees- Milne’s last (if, we are assured, platonic) attachment, and later became his literary executor. Lees-Milne died in 1997, and Bloch has spent much of the last decade editing the remaining diaries and preparing this book. Not only has he had to deal with his own delicate relationship with his admirer and his admirer’s hostile wife, he was faced with the special problems involved in writing about someone who wrote a very great deal, and famously well, but not altogether truthfully, about himself. Bloch’s solution has been to dig deep and tell all about his indiscreet, emotional, wrongheaded, infuriating yet curiously disarming subject.
Lees-Milne (known by all as Jim) disarms because he knew his own faults and weaknesses better than anyone, and wrote them all down. An unapologetic snob, he preferred to call himself ‘lower upper’ rather than ‘upper middle’ class; his own forebears were minor gentry, whose money came from trade. A self-proclaimed late developer, he did not shine at school or at Oxford; a romantic, arty boy, he was close to his flighty mother and disliked his womanising, horsy father, to whom the term ‘artistic’ denoted ‘decadence, disloyalty to crown and unnatural vice.’
Highly susceptible, goodlooking, attracted to, and by, both sexes, Jim was certainly not a late developer where sex was concerned. A schoolboy passion for Tom Mitford, among others, at Eton was followed by a fling with experienced cousin Joan and calf love for Tom’s most beautiful sister Diana; there were to be other girls, and even a half- baked engagement (to Anne Gathorne-Hardy, who later married Heywood Hill), but Jim’s inclinations were really towards his own sex. Brief adventures — what Bloch calls ‘much discreet romping’ — gathered pace, as well as more intense love affairs; drunken dinners with friends like Desmond Parsons, Alan Lennox- Boyd and Robert Byron and acquaintances like Harold Acton, Brian Howard and John Gielgud, usually ended in bed. By the early 1930s Jim had become a favourite, and for a while a lover, of the foremost married homosexual of his day, Harold Nicolson, who became his mentor and lifelong friend. Bloch’s account of the bisexual network around Nicolson and Vita Sackville West makes Bloomsbury seem simple.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.