BOOKS

Lost behind the mask

Bevis Hillier

OSBERT: PORTRAIT OF OSBERT LANCASTER by Richard Boston Collins, £17.50, pp.256 The cliché thing to say about Osbert Lancaster was that he looked like one of his own cartoon characters. This book shows that he lived like one, too.

He created, over a lifetime, the persona of a preposterous Edwardian clubman. Even by the 1940s he cut an archaic figure. By the Seventies, he was like an effigy of ,3 English gentleman' on a French carnival float. Bulging eyes, bulbous nose, buffalo- horn moustache, bald head, striped shirt, pinstripe suit from Thresher & Glenny, and old-fashioned shoes with rounded toes. (His second wife, the writer Anne Scott-James, suggested that these shoes were 'almost stubby'. 'On the contrary,' he replied, 'this pair is tremendously pointed by my standards. As pointed as a gentle- man can go.') Lilliput in 1950 called him `fruity as a Victorian plum cake'.

Richard Boston knew him well and describes him well: Osbert . . . spoke fairly quietly, slowly and with great deliberation, the chief characteris- tics being to put enormous emphasis on certain syllables while at the same time widening his eyes even more than usual, raising his eyebrows, bristling his moustache, and announcing the end of his sentence with something between a chuckle and a laugh which sounded like a small bark.

This only omits to mention Lancaster's stentorian sniff — a sniff of baroque emphasis rather than of disdain — like the sound of an unchecked brat sucking up the last drops of an ice-cream soda at Fortnum and Mason's.

. If Lancaster had been what he looked like, he would have been a monster. In fact, he was lovable. You could not help suspecting that the carapace had accreted to protect a vulnerability from some out- ward threat — but what vulnerability, what threat? Lancaster's near-contemporary, Sir Hugh Casson, formulated the inevitable question (and Boston quotes him, but from what source and date we are not told — he gives few footnotes and no bibliography). Osbert, it quickly became clear', Casson wrote, 'was a performance, meticulously practised and hilariously inflated and at tunes disturbing.' What, he wondered, was behind this 'elaborately woven yashmak of subsidiary clauses, this defensive portcullis of anecdotes cranked into place at one's .approach?' Even Casson didn't find a satisfactory answer; and Boston disappoint- ingly excuses himself from looking for one: 'It would be facile to assume that Osbert's sense of privacy and careful con- struction of a public persona were a self-protective device.' So why did he do it? Just for the Lord George Hell of it? Evelyn Waugh's similar assumption of a squirearchical patina, or upper crust, can perhaps be explained in terms of social insecurity. Both Waugh's and John Betje- man's affectation, in early middle age, of old-mannishness can also be explained away: both had been enfants terribles, and both were now realising that the Bright Young Thing pose could not be much longer sustained — so they decided to be Grand Old Men of English Letters instead. Homosexuality can also cause palisades of personality, but Boston wants us to be in no doubt that, among Lancaster's Oxford contemporaries, 'Osbert was unusual in steadfastly and resolutely remaining where he always was, a Church of England conservative heterosexual.' It is a pity, by the way, that Boston does not quote what I once heard Lancaster tell a television interviewer: 'And then sex reared its beautiful head.'

Boston met Lancaster by accident. He rented a thatched cottage in Aldworth, Berkshire, and found that his next-door neighbours, who were also the landlords, were Osbert and Anne Lancaster. They became good friends, wearing funny hats `He's been attributed to the Earl of Oxford!' together at Christmas parties and pre- arranging visits between them `by a few words spoken (in the manner of Pyramus and Thisbe) through the yew-hedge which separated their lovely and impeccably cared-for garden from my jungle of docks and bindweed.'

Boswell notwithstanding, good friends don't always make good biographers. The Boston-Lancaster friendship must have been an attraction of opposites. Where Lancaster was ceremonious, dandified, a city boy with provocatively right-wing opinions, Boston was a Green long before it was fashionable. He founded and edited the magazines Vole and Quarto. His books include Beer and Skittles and Baldness Be My Friend. He is a regular Guardian contributor, and sometimes falls into a style that Wallace Arnold might call 'jar- gion'. Lancaster, we are told, escaped `sexual harassment' at school; his first wife Karen was 'always very supportive of him'; the cartoonist's comic vision is 'reduction- ist'; Karen's 'nuclear family' was by any standards odd; and 'It is quite possible to deduce all we need to know from what Osbert tells us without invading his priva- cy.' Sorry if it's an indelicate question, but how does one invade the privacy of a corpse? No wonder the dust is angry.

In many respects, it is hard to think of a less appropriate biographer of this gin-and- French lounge lizard than this beer-and- skittles, real ale man. Boston might almost be describing himself when he writes of Lancaster's drawing, in Here, of All Places, of 'the bald, bespectacled, bearded Fabian' hiking in knickerbockers past a whimsy art nouveau cottage. Boston is bbb, if not necessarily F. Perhaps this open-air guy with his wild garden would have been happier writing Burt Lancaster's life than Osbert's. However, there are also advan- tages in having someone so different from Lancaster looking at him. Though indul- gent to Lancaster's political views, Boston does not altogether disguise his Guardian- like disapproval.

Within the rather cramping limitations that Boston has set himself, the book gives an enjoyable résumé of Lancaster's life. He was born in 1908, the same year as President Johnson. His grandfather, Sir William Lancaster, founded the Prudential Assurance Company. Osbert, an only child, was to inherit plenty of money. His father was killed in the Great War. The infant Lancaster was fascinated by an old scrapbook which showed European sovereigns in all their decorations. In later years he loved dressing up as a befrogged Uhlan and his favourite novel was Vanity Fair: spiritually, he belonged to the mid- 19th century. He was a chronic nostalgic. As Boston says, he was one of those people for whom the act of looking back was more intense than the original experience. Again, this trait needs examination, and it doesn't get much from Boston. Was it just that Lancaster found the contemporary world so bloody that he bought a one-way ticket on the Time Machine?

Lancaster went to the usual hellish prep school and to Charterhouse, where three great caricaturists had preceded him: Leech, Thackeray and Max Beerbohm. `Any fag but Lancaster,' was the cry — he was so inept at shoe-shining, running baths and making toast. At Oxford he was taken up by John Betjeman, a lifelong friend, and joined the Maurice Bowra and 'Col- onel' Kolkhorst sets. Lancaster's best friend at Lincoln College was Graham Shepard, son the the Wind in the Willows illustrator, E.H. Shepard. Graham had been at Marlborough with Louis Mac- Neice, 'whose regular visits to his rooms [Lancaster wrote] generated in Lincoln, a college where aesthetes were almost un- known, a constantly renewed and not wholly appreciative excitement.' Perhaps Jon Stallworthy's forthcoming biography of MacNeice will reveal more about Lan- caster's apparent dislike of the poet at that period. Lancaster read English Literature and took 'an honest Fourth'.

Then there is rather a gap in the Lancas- ter story, which Boston assigns to a chapter tactfully titled 'Entr'acte'. John Piper re- marked that 'It was like a bird flying Osbert doing nothing.' Lancaster half- heartedly studied Law and gave it up; sketched at the Slade where he met his first wife, Karen Harris; and travelled abroad (he met Paul Valery at Roquebrune). But in 1936 Progress at Pelvis Bay began the long sequence of Lancaster's satirical books. And on 1 January 1939 the first of his pocket cartoons appeared in the Daily Express, Tom Driberg's 'William Hickey' column.

Boston introduces the main phase of Lancaster's war service with a portentous trailer: 'The war was approaching its end when Osbert was abruptly called upon to serve his country in a totally different and unexpected manner.' After that, the least we expect is that Lancaster should be parachuted into occupied France dressed as a nun, with microfilm secreted about his person. In fact, he was sent to Greece as a Foriegn Office press attaché. The British ambassador was getting too stroppy with the press, and Lancaster was expected to smooth things over. He did so very effec- tively: `Mr Lancaster has done well,' Anthony Eden wrote on the report Lancas- ter sent in. Boston lightly and expertly sketches in the background to this Greek adventure. On Christmas Day 1944 Chur- chill and Eden arrived, to meet Archbishop Damaskinos, a possible choice for Regent. The meeting was to take place on HMS Ajax, and its prelude is one of the most richly comic episodes in the book. It was still Christmas Day and the crew of the Ajax were in fancy dress as Chinese, Red Indians, blacks and clowns. Most were drinking gin.

The Archbishop was astonished to find that one of His Majesty's ships had been taken over by a multi-racial crew of drunkards playing a discordant variety of musical in- struments [Boston writes]. For their part the sailors made the equally understandable mistake of thinking that the towering Archbishop with his massive beard and flowing robes was all part of the fun. They leapt about enthusiastically, whooping 'with joy and making mock obeisances.

The Archbishop now decided that the whole thing was a deliberate, calculated insult. He was only prevented from returning to shore in an archiepiscopal huff by the arrival of the acutely embarrassed captain of the Ajax who somehow managed to explain what was going on . . .

One of Richard Boston's main difficul- ties in writing Lancaster's life-story is that Lancaster had already done the job him- self, in his books of illustrated reminis- cence. At times the effect is of His Master's Voice. What, then, is new in this book? First, Boston has unearthed an uplifting work by Lancaster's muscular prep-school head- master, Stanley Harris, called The Master and His Boys (1924), with chapters on swearing, schoolboy honour and creative spirit. Second, expensive as it may seem, the book is worth the full £17.50 for the first printing between hard covers of Lan- caster's 'Ode on the Wedding of Thomas Driberg, Esq. MP'. Those attending this unexpected event included

Labour friends who're gratified At being allowed to kiss the bride.

Artistic friends, a few of whom Are rather keen to kiss the groom.

Friends from Oxford, friends from pubs And even friends from Wormwood Scrubs.

Osbert being Osbert, the book has a good ration of jokes — some of them familiar, some of them new. When Sir John Summerson's wife had triplets, Lan- caster said they were sure to be known as `the Georgian Group'. When shown over the house of the avant-garde architect Wells Coates, a well-known womaniser, Lancaster murmured: `Ah, a machine a co-habiter.' Lancaster, reviewing the new Duveen sculpture gallery at the Tate: 'Few pieces of sculpture are calculated to appear to the best advantage in the surroundings of the Pennsylvania Railroad Station.' Lancaster entertaining his colleagues at the Daily Express with his imitation of George Robey: 'Picking up the Financial Times, he would study the stocks and shares and say, "Just to be safe I'm going to put my little bit in rubber."' The most convincing parts of Boston's narrative are those in which he recalls the Osbert Lancaster he knew. He is clearly cut out to be an autobiographer rather than a biographer. He affectionately recon- structs a typical Lancaster day, as the old crustacean moves from bath to boiled egg to club to office. Actions of a slightly vaudeville absurdity are made moving:

As I come into the room Maud [the dachs- hund] jumps down, wagging her tail dreami- ly, her long nails tick-tacking on the wooden floor. This sound alerts Osbert to my pre- sence. He looks up and says 'Dear boy', and makes a token getting-up gesture which consists of putting his hands on the arms of his chair before sinking back into the cushions. 'Find yourself a drink. Anne is . . somewhere.'

I wish Boston had used his access to Lancaster to find out who the original or originals of Maudie Littlehampton were. Next to the identity of Widmerpool (Anthony Powell once gave me an elabo- rate explanation which included not a word about Lord Longford), it is the most tortur- ing puzzle of our times. It is generally believed that, like Baron Charlus, she was an amalgam — Ann Fleming may have been one of the spicier ingredients. Now, I would trust Richard Boston to write an entertaining book on The Real Maudie• That's before he gets round to his auto- biography, Sixty Years a Green.