Members of the Hypocrites Club were Oxford undergraduates, and those with whom David Fleming’s book is chiefly concerned were born between 1903-5. It had originally been a respectable club, founded in 1921, its two most mentioned members being L.P. Hartley, the novelist, and David Cecil, the biographer and historian. But all that changed when Harold Acton arrived, closely followed by many of his fellow Etonians. Acton himself was always fastidiously polite, and spoke in a curiously hesitant way; but his friends were not, and shouted. Soon the club became celebrated for drunkenness and homosexuality, and closed in 1924.
It would be impossible to depict the whole circle, and Fleming does not try. I had hoped to discover more about figures such as Billy Clonmore (later described as a saint), John Sutro, a brilliant mimic, and Peter Quennell, the historian who made the comparison with the 18th-century Hellfire Club – which lends the book its slightly over-dramatic title.
Instead, the author concentrates on a handful of members, with Evelyn Waugh at their centre, and follows their later careers, adding Tom Driberg, who was too young at the time to be a member but seems a suitable inclusion. They were not really a group, but certain characteristics recur: they were often idle and witty; they had rows with their fathers, and were forced into some sort of subsequent literary work by being broke; and they had thoughts of suicide – but perhaps most young men share some of these traits.
Acton made an impressive leader of these aesthetes with his umbrella and broad-pleated trousers (he invented ‘Oxford bags’), his Florentine background and his recitations of The Waste Land through a megaphone. His friend Brian Howard, also a poet, wrote: ‘Do you realise, Harold – please pay attention to this – that you and I are going to have rather a famous career at Oxford? We are genuinely gifted people.’ And they did both acquire fame, though they failed as writers. Acton published his first novel just as Waugh was having a success with Decline and Fall in 1928. He called it Humdrum, and the critics agreed. Howard had great trouble getting anything down on paper at all.
Waugh, who had been teaching after leaving Oxford, while hoping to become an artist (‘my meagre gift had been overpraised at home’), swiftly started Vile Bodies, which caused even more of a stir on its publication in 1930. Henry Yorke, who wrote under the name Henry Green, had a father who’d read Homer in the original at the age of seven and went on to make a lot of money. Henry was also precocious, publishing a novel when he was 19, then pausing before producing one of his best, Living, in 1927.
Robert Byron, another member of the circle, was loud, intolerant and aggressive, but somehow exciting, though Waugh called him a clown. He travelled to Greece, and then further east, and wrote several books before finding acclaim with his masterpiece, The Road to Oxiana. Going on further still to China, he met Acton again, and also the love of his life, Desmond Parsons, who very soon died. In spite of fights, and nights spent in foreign prisons, I found his story the least compelling.
Fleming writes of Driberg: ‘If ever there was a Hypocrite manqué, Tom Driberg was it. If there were two, John Betjeman was the second.’ Betjeman said of himself a few years later that he belonged to ‘the silver age of aesthetes’. Driberg had been at Lancing with Waugh, while Claud Cockburn, another character in the book, was Waugh’s first cousin. Both became journalists, and are therefore almost forgotten now. Perhaps because I have not read the biographies of either, I found these two the most fascinating.
Driberg was a shameless homosexual from the start. (It was spotted by two fellow pupils at Lancing that he couldn’t whistle – and struck a match away from his body, whereas a real man strikes it towards himself – apparently sure signs.) Already a communist, he was eventually reported for making advances to boys and expelled. He introduced The Waste Land to his friend Auden (who seems to have missed Acton’s performance). When his first examination at Oxford looked threatening, Driberg poisoned himself to avoid it; he turned up for the second, still wearing white tie, having been to a ball the night before, and fell asleep: ‘Oxford had finished with me,’ he said. He went on to transform the William Hickey gossip column in the Daily Express, and ran it for ten years. A homosexual incident that might have landed him in jail was suppressed by the proprietor Lord Beaverbrook. Driberg eventually became a Labour MP.
Cockburn was also a communist. Destined for the Foreign Office, he managed to attach himself to the Times, and by 1928 was working in Berlin; but he was only paid for pieces that were published, and then they only appeared under someone else’s byline. He was in New York for the Wall Street crash, and had been warned that it was coming. He interviewed Al Capone there. Back in London in the 1930s he won a competition for the dullest headline to be printed: ‘Small Earthquake in Chile: Not Many Dead.’ He invented The Week – a one-man forerunner of Private Eye, too poor to be worth suing – which became famous after Ramsay MacDonald abused it. He only ended up reporting the Spanish civil war because he happened to get on the wrong train.
After this, Hellfire becomes a little more serious – and more about Waugh. Families, and the second world war, feature, while drink and ill-health catch up with some of the group. But Fleming writes just as adroitly as the gaiety recedes. He is fortunate to have such a subtle observer as Anthony Powell popping up and recording shrewd comments in a stream of novels and diaries. Indeed, the whole book reads rather like a Powell novel, with unexpected meetings and reversals. If the centre cannot quite hold, it is a constant pleasure.
Comments