A smile on the face of the tiger
Alastair Forbes
THE PASSION OF JOHN ASPINALL by Brian Masters
Cape, £12.95, pp. 360
Mr Masters is a prolific writer with 15 books to his credit over the past 20 years, the last of which, an investigation in considerable depth of the creepy mass- murderer Dennis Nilsen, deservedly won him an important prize as well as the punning tribute from Beryl Bainbridge that it was 'a bloody masterpiece'. But I doubt if she, or indeed any other writer of her sex, is likely to lavish much praise on this sycophantic-going-on-for-hagiographic bio- graphy of a man to whose pen he admits to owing many of his 'felicities of style' as well as most of his information.
For Aspinall, he stresses, is not only `proudly misogynistic', but 'still cannot stand the presence of a woman with intellectual pretensions', though, speaking of his own hesitant start in animal husban- dry, he asserts that 'it is a huge advantage to know nothing'. And this self-confessed neo-fascist 'abhors liberal political views at the best of times, but when held by a woman his responses are not rational'.
Hardly rational either are most of the other views attributed to him in the 360 pages of this book. I have often thought the author's surname to be something of a misnomer, so servile has in the past been his approach to some of his subjects, starting with his study of the coal-rich Londonderry family and their stately Tees- side home since sold by the present music- loving marquess. Though his recent Nilsen investigation has clearly steered him to- wards fascination with personality dis- orders wherever they are to be found (and where, I sometimes wonder, are they not to be found?) he has by no means lost his bourgeois capacity to be epate by the many he sees as his social superiors. When he breathlessly informs us that the mem- bership of the Clermont Club, where so much of Aspinall's first fortune from gambling (itself a largely harmless passion in all classes of most Western European countries) included 'five dukes, five mar- quesses, nearly 20 earls, one royal etc' or, having judged that 'Old Etonians compel attention all their lives,' and that the successful restaurateur and patron of Annabel's, Harry's Bar and Mark's, Mark Birley is 'a perfect example of the Eton- bred English gentleman', he seems audibly and almost visibly transformed into a white-gloved, liveried footman, or at best a `gentleman's gentleman'.
He informs us that pretty young Aspi- nall, 'born to the wife of a middle-class doctor in India' though not begotten by the latter, at Rugby, after an enthralled read- ing of Rider Haggard's excellent tale Nada and the Lily began to identify with the Zulu hero Umsloppagaas and to dream of a private Bantustan of his own in which he could play the dominant male. Masters, author of earlier works on Sartre and Camus, also reveals that it was at Oxford that he first discovered that he was 'the existentialist card-player par excellence', and surmises that it was there that he and a much younger new friend, the 'Franco- German' Jimmy Goldsmith, first 'saw each other as some kind of libermensch' , which could explain much, if not all, about both. It must have been about this time that I heard Frank Goldsmith, in Paris, proudly predict that his younger son would 'either run the world or end up in jug'.
The trouble about Masters giving carte blanche to his subject to supply the mate- rial is that Aspinall's recollections do not always coincide with those of other people. I am quite prepared to concede the interest and value of Aspinall's experiments as the Piaget, so to speak, of the infant gorilla on the way to full growth, and to salute his successes in creating in England breeding environments for so many threatened spe- cies. Yet I cannot help recalling that in the long history of the Zoological Society (now to be jazzed up a la San Diego with a generous government gift of cash) it has lost only one keeper, a temporary part- time volunteer at Whipsnade who did a gatecrash jump into the lion's den and failed to have Daniel's luck there. Yet in its first 20 years Howletts Zoo lost two keep- ers in short succession to the same notor- iously tricky tigress. Whatever Aspinall's avidly social-climbing mother, Lady Osborne, may have said at the time, I know and agree with what Lady Bracknell would have exclaimed (and so indeed should Aspinall, Masters revealing that for much of his time at Oxford it was Oscar Wilde he was aping). Already in 1959 Aspinall himself broke every rule in the book and was lucky to escape with his life after his insatiable gout-du-risque had driven him to go along Tom-a-peeping on a pair of large bears engaged in sexual foreplay in their walled enclosure. In 1969 his half-brother, left in charge and admit- ting later that he was 'showing off' had been responsible for further foolhardiness and had been the cause of a pretty 19-year- old 'female model' (Masters scripsit) suf- fering 'horrible injuries', losing most of a hand and arm to the tigress sister of the one who was to do for the two keepers. But a year later it was Aspinall himself who perpetrated the almost incredible folly of taking Mark Birley's wife Annabel and her two young sons (the youngest, Robin, a handsome and sweet-natured boy of then only 12, I knew and liked well as he was a friend and playmate of my own son, his exact contemporary) into the sleeping den of a pregnant tigress, though he was well aware that all tigers 'have an unaccount- able distrust and fear of human children', reactions intensified if such children are involuntarily giving off the bad vibes of understandable nervousness such as Robin admitted to feeling that afternoon. Aspi- nall and his then wife Min were lucky to succeed in prising from the animal's jaws the still conscious lad's head, or what was left of it, 'a gaping hole where his mouth had been and the bottom jaw dislodged, hanging by a strand', and in rushing him to hospital for 'the first of numerous opera- tions he has since endured to repair the damage of that one second's lack of vigi- lance'. (Masters does not say whose.) Some of his bones were so crushed that one side of his face was never to grow again .
his face was to become lop-sided and his jaw-line irregular as he grew to maturity, the right side developing normally while the left remained stuck at its adolescent stage.
Of the 'disfigured Robin' Masters claims that 'he felt no bitterness or animosity either then or since' and was 'grateful to be spared an avalanche of pity' and 'put the episode down to fate and wiped from his mind any incipient temptation to apportion fault. . . . He will, however, always be wary of the essential unpredictability of animal behaviour (sic). . . . His feelings of loyalty to John Aspinall and his admiration of his work with animals have not dimi- nished.' Yet, much later, Aspinall, after absurdly repeating that tigers are 'good stable citizens' and that 'if an animal savages anybody it is usually the fault of the human being' nevertheless went so far as to admit, on oath, that Robin's accident had happened because he, Aspinall, tad overlooked the fact that the tiger was in an advanced state of pregnancy'. Knowing myself of the understandably despairing tears with which the unlucky Robin heard the verdict of the East Grinstead surgeon that he could do no more for him, my own eyes misted up to read Masters's unimaginative if not actually disingenuous complacency. Of Aspinall's own regrets (`Those who saw him in the Clermont the next day were surprised to find him in such good humour and apparently unmoved') he writes that, 'he was quite unable to reflect these emotions in his demeanour or behaviour'. I could not help recalling what he had written in his prize-winning piece of criminology: 'It is Nilsen's intense detachment . . . that makes him frankly unrecognisable,' and his quotation of the by no means mad words he had used of his victims' parents: 'Words like "sorry" hold little comfort for the bereaved.'
Robin Birley and his mother make a reappearance as a consequence of the dis- appearance, after killing his nanny in mistake for his wife (he had told Aspinall's mother of his intentions and heard her accomplice-like reply that he should do as he thought fit), of the one-time Clermont employee, the unbelievably pompous silly ass Lord Lucan, whom Masters incompre- hensibly describes as 'a man of enormous presence and beauty'. The Sunday Times Magazine published an article on the sub- ject by the Old Etonian American journal- ist James Fox in which he had allowed his passion for conspiracy theories to run riot. Jimmy Goldsmith told his own recent biographer that Dominick Elwes, the witty and companionable friend and cousin of Lady Annabel as well as much more than the slight acquaintance of his own he later pretended, had instigated the article. This was not so. The article was heavily illus- trated, in part by a rare impression of the interior of the Clermont commissioned for £200 from Elwes (who, though better born and educated than the rest, always lacked a silver spoon long enough to sup regularly on the Clermont Coterie's caviar), but chiefly by a number of holiday snaps, one of which, showing a very bronzed and bosomy Annab-1 cheek by jowl with the `Wanted for Murder' peer, made an entic- ing cover. Annabel's instantaneous reac- tion was to rage uncontrollably against poor Elwes, whom she obstinately ac- cused, without an iota of proof, of selling that picture and all the others to the newspaper and whom she excoriated, in private and in public, in a fashion quite foreign to her natural character which is that of a warm-hearted friend as well as an adoring and adored mother. Masters fails to disclose that, faced with and sharing his mother's indignation, young Robin (who to his great credit has grown up to create a very successful business of his own feeding fast food to City yuppies) forthwith deli- vered an anathematising letter to Elwes, who shortly thereafter received another, excluding him for life from his never entirely happy and far from admirable hunting grounds among the haute-demi- monde, from Mark Birley himself, Lon- don's upmarket Langan. None of the three — four if one includes Goldsmith — gave an opportunity to Elwes, up to then an intimate member of their circle, to explain that he was, as Masters has to admit from the facts that have stared the bullying clique in the face ever since, completely innocent of the charges laid against him by the Birleys and Goldsmith, though not, Masters shows, by Aspinall himself. The latter chose in this instance to extend his somewhat morbid sympathy to Elwes the underdog. (More of that sym- pathy was later to be posthumously ex- pressed in one of the embarrassingly inter- minable, ad-libbing pulpit 'eulogies' to which Aspinall it seems is unfortunat- ely addicted, one that in this case was to earn him an exasperated punch in public from an Elwes cousin.) As for Fox, he continued to pray in aid of his surely culpable silence the supposedly ironclad rule that a journalist may disclose neither his sources nor even his non-sources; at any rate until after Elwes was dead. The pictures, like most of the contents of the piece, part correct part incorrect, he had of course got from the unfortunate Lady Lucan herself. Elwes's pathologically deep depression at the frozen mitts plus knuckle-dusters offered to him by his former buddies must have been known to Fox, because his own enchanting cousin, Melissa Wyndham, was Elwes's girlfriend at the time. Three months after the article appeared, she found him dead next to a suicide note cursing Birley and Goldsmith `from beyond the grave'.
I got a crawl-on part in Ironweed.'
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