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April 26,
2003
A Reminiscence of
My Cousin
Evelyn Waugh's
Ear Trumpet
by CLAUD COCKBURN
When the London Observer started to publish extracts
from the Diaries
of Evelyn Waugh, a television producer had a flashy idea.
The first installments, relating mainly to Evelyn's contemporaries
at Oxford, in the 1920s, had already achieved a succes de scandale.
They conveyed to many readers the impression that the lives of
those young men bad been dominated by alcoholism and homosexual
excesses. And who were those people? Some were titled. Many had
become figures of national repute or notoriety. Others, identified
only by initials and asterisks, were assumed, in some cases rightly,
to be well known public men, with respectable characters to defend
and hair-trigger libel lawyers to do the de defending. So why
not, the television man thought, ap proach as many as possible
of the survivors of Evelyn Waugh's Oxford, bring them together,
fifty years on, in a suitably Waugh-world setting such as a private
dining room at the Savoy Hotel where, overlooking the Thames,
they would lunch luxuriously and chat reminiscently for the enlight
enment of viewers?
There were times when the producer must
have recalled George Jean Nathan's warning to playwrights that
a great idea for a play is not necessarily an idea for a great,
play. Two or three of those invited regretted they had to be
in Ischia, Bar bados, or the Hebrides on the suggested date.
Oth ers made cautiously elaborate stipulations about the guest
list and the themes to be discussed. One, a former member of
the government, repeatedly referred to by initial and asterisks,
blatantly denied that he had ever had more than the most casual
acquaintance with Evelyn, and would sue for slan der anyone who
said otherwise. Another, who at flrst had, been, willing, cried
off when I chanced to mention that I understood the program was
to be entitled Vile Buddies.
What with one thing and another, only
five of us sat down to talk "intimately and informally",
we were urged, as the television lights probed our faces hopefully
for whatever traces of dissolute liv ing might still mark them
and thus make more real to the viewers the Oxford of the Diaries.
In his volume of autobiography A Little Learning, published in
1964, Evelyn wrote, "It seems that now, after the second
war, my contemporaries [at Oxford] are regarded with a mixture
of envy and reprobation, as libertines and wastrels." All
present at the Savoy lunch were conscious that publication of
the Diaries had reinforced that opinion. Several postures of
self-defense were visible. And some were clearly trying to recall
whether life had really been so uninhibitedly libertine as that.
I have forgotten most of what we all
said, but I recall that Tom Driberg, a Labour M.P. and, prominent
character in the Diaries, interrupted some statement I was making
to remark, "Of course you know that Evelyn always spoke
of you as 'my mad cousin Claud.'" This probably lowered
my credibility with the viewers, but it was true and agreebly
illuminating of Evelyn's attitudes.
He dubbed me "mad" because
I lived, except during Oxford terms, in Budapest. This, as an
awkward incident of life, seemed, to him explicable, given that
my father was in the foreign service. My madness consisted in
taking the politics of Central Europe seriously. At our first
meeting he said to me, puzzled: "You talk as though all
that were quite real to you." His attitude toward what he
unaffectedly referred to as "abroad" was only slightly
caricatured by Mr. Pennyfeather in Decline
and Fall, Mr. Pennyfeather thought that Love was like Abroad
inasmuch as if people had not hap pened to read about them both
they would have no interest in either. Since in Evelyn's view
England, a partially imaginary England, was the center of the
world, all unEnglishness, such as finding Abroad real, was in
the literal sense of the word, eccentric: slightly, in fact,
mad.
But mad or not, a cousin was a cousin,
and he took family relationships and obligations seriously, Just
how seriously I realized for the first time one morning as we
sat in his rooms in Hertford Col lege, looking at the rain, drinking
whisky against the enervating climate of Oxford, and listening
to intrusive sounds of patter and thump from the rooms above.
The rooms, Evelyn explained, were those of his enemy, the dean
of the college whom Evelyn, as a blow in the feud, accused of
having sexual relations with his dog. "Now he's raping the
poor brute. And at this hour in the morning."
"No hope,'" I said, "of
it being just a falty vac uum cleaner?"
"No, no. You don't know that man
as I do. It's him, no doubt of it. How I pity that unhappy dog."
The depression of the climate having
momentary ily counteracted the cheer of the whiskey, I fell to
lamenting my financial condition. Evelyn, a year senior to myself,
lectured me gently on my im providence. I had, he pointed out
made the mis take of not buying enough, on account, from tai
lors, wine merchants, booksellers, and others. He suspected that
when they sent in bills which were beyond my means to pay I had
panicked, sought to economize, stopped buying. His own debts
were greater than mine: but he kept the creditors quiet in the
traditional Oxonian manner of the day by simply ordering more
and more goods.
"Naturally," he said, "Iiving
abroad you couldn't know about that. And how much do you urgently
need?"
I said I thought I could make do with
two hun dred pounds--a small sum today,but worth in those times
at least four times its present value.
Evelyn suddenly brightened, "If
that's all it is," he said, "stop worrying. You must
get it, from my brother, your cousin Alec."
I said, "But." I reminded him
that I scarcely knew Alec; had met him briefly when I was a schoolboy
and he a young soldier on his way to the Western Front of World
War I. How, five or six years later, would I suddenly write to
him ask ig for a loan of two hundred pounds? Evelyn stiffened
with an air of surprise and shock such as might be provoked in
a priest by a seminarian disclosing ignorance of an article of
faith.
"But my dear Claud, he's your cousin.
Of course he must lend you what you need."' "How, if
it comes to that, do I know he has two hundred pounds ready to
lend me?" "Of course he has two hundred pounds. He
writes for the papers--magazines. People publish his books. He
makes money out of writing."
In the Oxford of the day, that last was
a serious charge indeed. It implied vile philistinism, betrayal
of all artistic principle, Evelyn, who had feelings of warm affection
for his brother, regarded him, in this respect the way a delicately
nurtured girl might have regarded an elder sister who made good
money as a whore. One still was as fond of her as ever. Probably
she had done the best she could. But the least she could do was
to use the money for the benefit of worthier, finer members of
the family.
It has from time to time occurred to
me that some assessors of the works and career of Evelyn Waugh
are inadequately aware of how potent, how absolute that way of
thinking was when he was nineteen or twenty and at Oxford.
Resuming his lecture, Evelyn soon convinced
me that it was not only my right as a cousin, but my literary
duty to get those two hundred pounds from Alec. I would be doing
him a good turn by giving him a chance to act in a cousinly way
and simultaneously devote to a good, cause money got by sordid
means.
"You must write immediately."
I did so. And, under the influence of
Evelyn's eloquence, my tone was peremptory, Alec's reply was
a brief, courteous and complete refusal. Reading it calmly by
myself I found it natural enough. Why should Alec lend such a
sum to a person whose existence he had certainly forgot ten in
the years since he trained as a soldier at Berkhampstead?
But at the disappointing news Evelyn
became first rigid in incredulity, then vehement in outrage.
He had a need and a capacity--later vividly dis played In his
novels--to see the details of life and human behavior exemplifying
the clash of general beliefs and tendencies, virtues and vices,
as in a morality play. He felt now, and so stated, that his own
brother had monstrously identified himself with Evil, He had
not only callously spurned the obligations of family relationship.
He had not only for years betrayed the cause of literature by
mak ing money with his writings. He had even refused to mitigate
this offense by handing over a small part of his gains to a more
deserving and scrupulous person. For although neither I nor Evelyn
had at that time published anything other than a couple of small
contributions to school or univer sity magazines, it was Evelyn's
conviction that we were writers, artists, in the true sense of
the word which could by no means be said of Alec. We had offered
that hardened hack a chance to pay out consience money. He had
neglected the opportu nity.
"That baldheaded lecher," said
Evelyn sternly, "needs a lesson in how a gentleman should
com port himself."
Alec in his mid-twenties was in fact,
pre maturely bald. Evelyn had picked up somewhere, and pretended
to believe, the theory that excessive sexual activity caused
a man's hair to fall out. Alec, living the normal life of a reasonably
successNOT ful young writer in London, had, I suppose, the normal
number of love affairs. Evelyn, whose attit tude to women was
at the time ambiguous, often veering between romantic passion
and alarmed contempt, chose to regard his brother's way of life
as vulgar, at the best crudely bourgeois. This esti mate seemed
confirmed by the fact that, Alec had a cozy apartment in, I think,
Kensington or some equally bourgeois district. In any case, no
garret.
Following the refusal of the loan, the
lesson in gentlemanly comportment was quickly organized. Evelyn
and a couple of friends took to making trips to London for a
purpose described as "mocking Alec." They spied on
Alec and dogged him. Sometimes they would be lying in wait just
as Alec and some young woman got out of their taxi. They would
then rush forward shouting, "Boo to Alec the baldheaded
lecher! "Once, according to Eve lyn, they hid just outside
the windows of the apart ment, waited until the girl was reclining
on the couch while Alec lowered the lights, and then burst in
with their offensive slogan. "Alec's women,'" Evelyn
said, "are the kind apt to be rendered frigid by anything
unconventional."
Much later, he wrote of Oxford in his
day that "it was a male community. Except during Eights
Week girls were very rarely to be seen in the men's colleges.
The late train from Paddington was by tradition known, as The
Fornicator but it was not, much frequented for that purpose.
Most men were well content to live in a society as confined as
it had been before the coming of the railway, and to indulge
in light flirtations during the vacations and deep friend ships
during the term."
This situation, particularly the deep
friendships, naturally caused a lot of loose talk among outside
observers. Learning that this kind of talk was harming the interests
of a club we belonged to. Evelyn characteristically exerted himself
to rebut it. The club was the New Reform. It had been finan cially
founded by Lloyd George, who desired to mobilize the youth of
Oxford in the interests of his own wing of the Liberal Party
and wreck the old Liberal Club, which supported the Asquithian
wing.
Lloyd George, so astute in all other
matters, had a strange belief that young men, particularly upper-class
young men, were ingenuous and naive. On letting it be known that
he was thinking of re leasing substantial, sums of money from
his secret funds for the purpose of founding a club in Ox ford,
he was pleased to note the simpIe-minded, idealistic enthusiasm
for his brand of liberalism displayed by several of the undergraduates
who at once hurried to see him. The young men said they felt
that such a club was what was needed, to re generate the political
life not only of Oxford but of England. They indicated their
readiness to dedicate themselves unstintingly to such a cause.
They did not have to ask the indelicate
question, "How much?" because, unknown to Lloyd George,
they had already found out approximately how much, he was ready
to put up. It was a lot. Some of these ingenuous and naive young
men, immedi ately started to spend it on obtaining and fitting
out commodious club rooms in the center of Ox ford, hiring a
good chef, and buying the most ex pensive champagne, this being
then sold to mem bers at half-price. "To encourage the old
boy," as one of the founders put it, a part of Lloyd George's
money was secretly used to bribe mem bers of other political
clubs to join the New Reform. "No political obligations,
of course. Just a question of showing L.G. that the club's a
worth while investment."
With all these inducements the club soon
be came a lively social center, frequented mainly by people who,
even, if they chanced to be aware of the difference between Lloyd
Georgian and Asqui thian Liberals, were certainly not going to
be of much political use to either.
There were, inevitably nasty moments
when some sneak would report to Lloyd George that he was wasting
his money: membership of the club, such reports said, was largely
composed of men who had no intention at all of furthering his
inter rests and were a pretty raffish lot anyway, Coincidentally
with one of these nasty moments, two elder statesmen of The Lloyd
George faction happened to be in Oxford I think in connection
with some University business. One of them was a former Cabinet
minister, the other a grim leader of Lloyd George's still large
Welsh nonconformist following. Naturally enough they lunched
at the New Reform. Someone suggested to Evelyn that their real
business in Oxford was to spy upon the club and estimate the
worthiness of its members to enjoy Lloyd George's subsidies.
On being introduced to them after lunch,
during, which his indignation at their supposed objective had
been fueled by at least a bottle of that expensive champagne,
Evelyn addressed them sternly.
"I hope," he said, "that
you and your leader have not been listening to any slanders brought
to you by prurient talebearers concerning the club at which you
are at present being entertained." He went on to refute,
at some length, any allegations that might have been made regarding
frivolity lack of serious purpose, or excessively high living
among its members, "I have even," he said, "been
told that ill-wishers have sought to suggest that this club is
a meeting place of homosexuals. Let me tell you gentlemen that
there is hardly a man in this room who does not have a complete
orgasm every time he passes a woman in the street." The
former Cabinet minister took offense because he supposed this
was some oblique, satirical jibe at Lloyd George's own sex life.
The nonconformist leader was shocked for more obvious reasons,
and both walked out of the club, no doubt to report adversely
on its tone.
In his unfinished autobiography, Evelyn
describes and documents on several pages the political ignorance
and indifference of himself and most of his contemporary friends.
He was unaware for instance, of the Greco-Turkish war, the advance
of the Turks across Asia Minor, and the threat of a new world
war. "So little did I follow the news that at the beginning
of one term I blithely greeted a man in Balliol with what seemed
a pleasantry: 'I suppose all your sisters were raped during the
vacation,' to which the sad and candid answer was simply; 'Yes.'
For he came from Smyrna." To Evelyn Smyrna and Budapest,
the Middle East and Central Europe, were about equally far from
the natural center of things, equally difficult to consider as
realities. To read or hear about them was to him like reading
a review, or listening to some film fan's account, of a picture
one had no wish to see: not, certainly, a picture it could possi
bly be important to see or have seen. And this more or less contemptuous
indifference, to serious political events was almost equally
evident when the events, occurred not Abroad, but at Westminster
or in the coalfields, cotton towns and shipyards of Great Britain.
Older people, whether deploring or excusing
such an attitude, agreed in attributing it simply and conveniently
to what was called the "aftermath" of World War I.
A lot of readers of the Diaries have offered the same explanation,
of the Oxford atmosphere of the period. Several guests at that
Savoy lunch explained the frivolous goings-on of Evelyn and his
contemporaries by depicting them as a natural reaction of young
men brought up amid the horrors and austerities of the war years,
a joyous acceptance of the blessings of peace together with a
conviction that since it was the serious old politicians who
had got the world into that mess, they and their policies were
not worth bothering about.
It is an easy-to-serve piece of instant
explanation, with some ingredients of truth. But it is a distortion,
and one that could be bewildering to any person anxious to understand
the lives and works not only of Evelyn Waugh but of a whole range
of the young Oxford intelligentsia of his time. For it obscures
the realities of that war's traumatic effect upon that generation.
Nobody is surprised by evidence of that
trauma In the writings and attitudes of those young intellectuals
who fought in the war and survived it. It is to be seen in innumerable
novels, memoirs, and poems published in England in the middle
and late 1920s. And as many comments on the Waugh Diaries show
there is a wide assumption that the characteristic central fact
about young men of Evelyn's age that they escaped the war. Nobody
born in England before 1912 escaped the War. Evelyn and his Oxford
friends were not killed or maimed in it. And in that there was,
naturally, cause of relief and even rejoicing. But you cannot
grow up in a period during which nineteen thousand of your fellow
countrymen are shot dead a few miles from your classroom on a
single day and escape conscious or subconscious effects. That
particular day was July 1, 1916, at the battle of the Somme.
By the end of 1918 all the British dead numbered three-quarters
of a million. Of his schooldays in 1917-1918 Evelyn, recalls,
"The boys in authority were too young, the masters too old.
Everything was of necessity a makeshift, the clothes we wore,
the food we ate, the books we worked with, the masters who should
have taught us. We were cold, shabby and hungry in the ethos
not of free Sparta but of some beleaguered, ener vated and forgotten
garrison." And those direct, material impacts of the war
were less deeply traumatic than the intangible, pervasive smog
of gloom, frustration, reiterated horror shot through with lunatic
hopes, which seeps, into the lungs of everyone living through
a war like that.
The effects remain in the aftermath.
There were certainly loutish types who,
unaware of their own conditioning in their childish war years,
really did proclaim that the thing to do was to forget the bloody
war and have fun. They too suffered, without knowing it, from
the trauma of the war. And they were responsible for the coarse
ness, triviality, and insensitivity which were such marked features
of the British upper and middle classes during the 1920s.
But such was by no means the attitude
of Evelyn and the majority of his friends, though, one must say,
even among them there was a thick-skinned lout here and there.
But for sensitive young men of Evelyn's generation--the generation
that had, by the skin of its teeth, escaped the carnage of the
Western Front--there was no sense of escape, of relief, or of
painless return to the imaginary normalities of Edwardian and
early Georgian days. Their emotional attitudes were better, and
significantly expressed by Father Rothschild in Vile Bodies when,
in the midst of a hilarious party scene, he spoke to the ludicrous
Prime Minister Outrage of the war to come and the shadow it cast
upon the youth of its day. The whole comedy of Vile
Bodies is played against a backcloth prophesying doom, and
its climax previews the squalid catastrophe of a Second World
War.
Vile Bodies was not written until several
years after Evelyn's time at Oxford, and the previewed catastrophe
was another few years ahead. But nobody who knew Evelyn at Oxford
and in the years immediately following could be unaware of the
sense of inexplicable doom to come which so op pressed. and strained
that sensitive young man, driving him to many extravagances very
shocking to his father and some of the elders among his acquaintance.
I never kept a diary, but I did write occasional notes recording
sharp impressions made upon me by events or personaIities. After
my first encounter with Evelyn, I wrote that my cousin, whom
I found immediately attractive and stimulating suggested, with
his eager, chaIlenging, yet bewildered stare, a boy who has just
been told simultaneously that his pet rabbit has been lost but
that, on the other hand it is known for sure that there is a
pirate's cave full of treasure somewhere in the garden if one
can onIy find it.
I did not at the time understand the
exact nature of the rabbit. Later, the shape and appeal of the
creature emerged with increasing clarity from Evelyn's novels
and, in its most clear definition, from A Little Learning. Like
all such largely imag inary creature, it changed shape from time
to time according to the moods and needs of its owner. In its
simplest form it was the England in which Evelyn believed himself
to have existed as a child. That cleaner, greener land of his
exclusive recollection and compulsive imagination bore little
resemblance to the England of unprecedented and as yet unparalleled
Sturm and Drang, in which, by 1914, syndicalist revolution and
civil war were but nar rowly averted by the outbreak of the international
conflict.
Later, the rabbit grew in size and symmetry.
During its struggle for preservation in the mind of Its original
owner, it grew finer fur, longer ears, and taught itself to roll
and flash its eyes. The little patch of old England which Evelyn
partly knew, and partly invented, became identified with religions
and spiritual values: ultimately with civilization. Any creative
artist so vigorous, so dedicated to the techniques and purposes
or his art, as Evelyn was, is impelled to seek to impose a pattern
upon apparent chaos. It was a peculiarity of British education
at that period, and of the general situation of Britain between
the wars, that the patterns, the lines to be drawn against chaos,
were, in, the thinking of most young men, grotesquely limited,
To my fellow students in Budapest, so unreal to Evelyn, it would
have seemed incredible that there could exist a place such as
Oxford where, for instance, Marxism, had been barely heard of.
That did indeed appear to them an unreal dream worid. Whether
Marxists or antiMarxists, Catholics or Calvinists, they, after
defeat and civil, war, saw the world and the possible patterns
of the world in quite other terms than those visible to the dominant
intelligentsia of Oxford. They saw more possible locations for
the pirates treasure than Evelyn could possibly envisage.
This sense of England, simultaneously
sharp and even ludicrously undeveloped, produced that flamboyant
snobisme which so often startled, amused, or offended observers.
He grew to identify England with the British upper class, and
the upper class (more and more rigidly restricted to the Roman
Catholic section of the upper class) with civilization.
These fantasies may have been in part
the result of a peculiar social insecurity from which he seems
to have suffered at an early age. At the age of fifteen he would
walk all the way across Hampstead Heath in a snowstorm to mail
a letter in order that it should bear the Hampstead postmark
rather then that of Golders Green. There was a mailbox a couple
of hundred yards from his home in Golders Green. But, at least
at that time, Golders Green was deemed grossly, laughably inferior,
as an address, to Hampstead.
News of such procedures by my then unknown
cousin naturally amazed me, and I asked questions. I was given
a strange explanation. I was told that Evelyn, from sources unknown,
had somehow acquired the notion that his mother, a connection
of the Cockburn family, had, as the saying went "married
beneath" her when she wed Arthur Waugh who, if one faced
facts, was nothing more or less than a publisher: a man in trade.
Even then I found it difficult to see how the Cockburn family,
half of whom had for a hundred years been coining money out of
the port business, could be regarded as so aristocratically superior
to people who tried to make some money out of publishing.
Preposterous as the whole notion may
today appear, I am inclined to think that this absurd report
of some kind of mesalliance really did affect Evelyn as a boy
and thus fueled the snobbery which was evident at Oxford and
became obsessive in his later life. Evelyn was not attracted
by money or power. Indeed, as parts of Brideshead
Revisited indicated, the merely rich and the merely powerful
increasingly repelled him. He saw them as barbarically inimical
to truly civilized standards and values. He was continuously
attracted and stimulated by people who, however lacking in other
qualities, could be seen by the light of his eager imagination
as embodiments of an aristocratic civilization and elegant traditions.
This snobbery was feverish, like a fever,
it could have contrary effects, It could heighten his satiric
awareness of the nuances and the absurdities of the peculiarly
English type of class-ridden society under his observation. It
could also (see Brideshead, passim) lower his vitality and enfeeble
his powers of observation to the point where his vision was clouded
by a ludicrous sentimentality: the naked emperor appeared very
smartly dressed.
His ostentatious, self-dramatizing rejection
of reality required, in middle life, an equally ostentatious
symbol. He found it in the form of an enormous ear trumpet. He
must, I suppose, have had it specially custom-built. For although
in shape and general design it resembled the ear trumpets depicted
in Victorian cartoons, it seemed larger than any ear trumpet
anyone had ever used before. Whether he was in fact slightly
deaf, or even deaf at all I never knew. If he was, he could have
fitted himself out with some unobtrusive modern aid to hearing.
But an instrument of that kind would not have suited his book.
For the function of the ear trumpet was not simply to assist
hearing. Oft the contrary, it was to emphasize and portray, in
an unmistakable physical manner, the laborious difficulty its
owner had in under standing any communication the modern world
might be seeking to make to him.
It was both an advertisement of his personal
attitude, a form of rebuke, and a weapon: I once saw it thus
used, inflicting terrible wounds. My recollection of the occasion
is one of the last memories I have of Evelyn, for I saw nothing
of him during the latter part of his existence as the ghost of
an eighteenth-century squire in the west of England. He had come
to London to attend some very high-toned literary lunch or dinner.
The guest of honor and principal speaker was some pompous statesman;
a member I think, of the cabinet, with unjustified pretensions
as a scholar and writer. It was understood that he was going
to use this feast, as the vehicle or sounding board for major
pronouncement on the future of civilization or something of that
kind. Evelyn, as we drank before lunch, had already spoken to
me of "that fellow" with aversion and savage opprobrium.
The chairman's table was richly garnished
with celebrities, literary, artistic, and political. But as the
meal progressed, the attention of the couple of hundred guests
was increasingly concentrated upon Evelyn and his gigantic ear
trumpet, which was by some means clamped to his head, leaving
his hands free for the business of eating and drinking. The movements
of the instrument, as Evelyn turned its gaping mouth this way
and that to catch the words of whoever might be addressing him
from one side or another, or from across the table, were fascinating
and nearly hypnotic.
The chairman, spoke briefly, and the
trumpet seemed to be devouring his words. Then the guest of honor
rose to speak, with all the confidence of a man who had won much
acclaim for wit wisdom, and polished oratory. The receiving end
of the trumpet was trained upon him. He had been speaking for
perhaps a minute when Evelyn, was seen to be unscrewing the thing
from his head. He removed it from his ear, placed the great bulk
on the table cloth in front of him, and sat gazing intently at
his plate. The guest of honor could have dealt easily with some
rude heckler. But the gesture with the trumpet utterly dismayed
and discomfited him. He stared at the contraption with incredulity.
He paused and slightly stammered. Probably for the first time
in decades of public speaking, he lost the thread of his discourse.
His pronouncement to the nation rambled almost incoherently.
The reporters present stopped taking notes. He sat down after
speaking for less than half the time allotted to him. As be did
so, Evelyn picked up the trumpet and began adjusting it, once
more to listening position.
Claud Cockburn,
1904-1981, was the most renowned radical journalist oif his generation
on the eastern side of the Atlantic. Aside from his famous newsletter
of the 1930s, The Week, he wrote hugely popular memoirs, excellent
fiction and histories. The memoirs were first issued as In Time
of Trouble (1956 ), published in the US the same year as A Discord
of Trumpets; Crossing the Line (1958) and A View from the West
(1961). Somewhat revised , these were published by Penguin as
I Claud in 1967. Again revised and shortened, with a new chapter,
they were republished as Cockburn Sums Up, shortly before he
died. Among his novels were Beat
the Devil (originally published under the pseudonym James
Helvick), made into a well known film, directed by John Huston
with script credit to Truman Capote, though the characters, scenes
and best lines are from the novel or from the script done by
Cockburn; The Horses; Ballantyne's Folly (much acclaimed by Graham
Greene) and Jericho Road. His exploration of English popular
fiction, Bestseller, is uproarious and his history of the 1930s,
The Devil's Decade, one of the most vivid and politically sympathetic
accounts of that time. Claud Cockburn was married three times,
to Hope Hale Davis, with whom he fathered the late Claudia Flanders,
to Jean Ross (part model for Isherwood's Sally Bowles,) with
whom he fathered the late Sarah Caudwell Cockburn author of highly
esteemed detective stories, and to Patricia Cockburn, (author
of her own fine autobiography Figure of Eight) with whom he fathered
Alexander, Andrew
and Patrick. The reminiscence of his cousin Evelyn was first
published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1973.
Copyright, Claud Cockburn's literary
estate.
Copyright, Claud Cockburn's literary
estate.
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