The other Life of Brian

In 1968 I was introduced to Gerald Hamilton, the figure of comic evil on whom Christopher Isherwood based the title character of his 1935 novel Mr Norris Changes Trains. When he died in 1970, I rang the obituaries editor of the Times to ask if he would like me to write about the old rogue. He replied that he thought Hamilton too minor a figure. The following morning the Daily Telegraph published a long obituary of Hamilton which revealed that he had once been on the staff of the Times. The obits editor telephoned me and said he would like a piece after all. In it, I suggested that Hamilton, like Alice Liddell, had gained almost all his réclame not from any achievement, but from being turned into fiction.

The same is even more true of Brian Howard. As D. J. Taylor writes in an acute introduction to this book, ‘he ended up as a tragi-comic turn in works by other people’. He was ‘Johnnie Hoop’ in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies; the Wandering Jew in the same author’s Helena; and (with aspects of Harold Acton thrown in) the sublimely camp Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited — played in the 1981 television adaptation as to the stammer born. Howard also claimed that he and a German boyfriend were attacked in Put Out More Flags. As might be divined from all this, Waugh detested Howard. In his memoir A Little Learning he described him in Lady Caroline Lamb’s words about Byron — ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. Howard also appears in Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise and Daphne Fielding’s Mercury Presides. He is the central figure of Connolly’s marathon parody ‘Where Engels Fears to Tread’. W. H. Auden dedicated a poem to Howard, ‘Ischia’.

Howard was the quintessence of camp. He made almost a profession of his homosexuality — certainly he made a profession of nothing else.