A talent to amuse
Evelyn Waugh had nightmares about him. When in Pinfoldian mood, vi- sions would flash across the great novelist's imagination of a conceitedly handsome young Bostonian who now says, 'The only reason Evelyn disliked me was because he was so jealous of my success with women.'
For those not privileged to move in his circle, Alastair Forbes is a name chiefly associated with lengthy book reviews in the TLS or the Spectator. Whether Mr Forbes is nominally surveying the life of an author or a royal grandee, his readers may be certain that he will boast of a more intimate knowledge of the subject than any soi-disant expert. What is more, he will boast of knowledge normally only vouch- safed to lovers or surgeons. From his reviews, we learn that Mr Forbes has been the intimate friend of such luminaries as John F. Kennedy, Noel Coward, Randolph Churchill, Diana Cooper, Daisy Fellowes, Sir Frederick Ashton and any Mitford you care to name. Unlike the man in the song who was deterred by the injunction 'this passage is reserved for Peerage', Forbes gives us to understand he has been on close terms with most of the ducal, not to say royal families of Europe. Moreover, the articles in which he casts himself in this role of upper-class Silas Wegg are fashioned in an extraordinary macaronic prose in which every name is encrusted with tan- gential allusions, polyglot puns and mysteriously knowing epithets. Prince Phillip cannot, in Mr Forbes's scale, simply possess a father. It has to be his `no more than usually womanising father'. Lord Lambton comes out as the `no longer coroneted milord inglese'. Nicholas Mosley is said still to be haunted by his `countless-times cuckolded Curzon-born mother', and so on.
Those who dislike Mr Forbes, either as a man or as a writer, would say that he was self-trumpetingly prurient, and snobbish. His malicious turn of fancy has plunged more than one London editor into un- necessary libel cases. And he has shown a persistent tendency, throughout his grown- up life, to bite the hand which has tried to feed him, to insult friends and patrons, to tease (on the occasions when he has had them) employers, and to torment his seniors. Princess Margaret is said to have referred to 'that odious Ali Forbes'.
Yet there is much more to Forbes than his prose, which he himself describes as Henry James translated into German and then back again into translator's English. Though some of the things he says and writes are wounding, their primary inten- tion is to amuse. He is that almost 1920s thing, a tease. (To Lord Longford: 'The trouble with you, Frank, is that you've got stuck in the missionary position'.) For every apoplectic hostess, furious with him for leaning over dinner tables and saying, to the prettiest girl in the room, something unpardonable about her father, there will be another who dotes on Ali. That is not merely because he is handsome and funny. When he comes into a roomful of people, it starts to fizz; everyone speaks faster; jokes and puns fly about. At every word a reputation dies, but beneath all the hilarity ('Where never was heard an intelligent word, Sloane, Sloane on the Range') Ali is an extraordinarily kind person. When one thinks of the appalling things he says, and his 'little unremembered acts of kindness and of love' to his friends when they are ill, or fall on hard times, one realises that he is a mystery.
Ali remains as mysterious as his name- sake Baba and as elusive as the 40 thieves. Even his place of birth has been the subject of dispute. Algy Cluff always says that Ali was born in China, whereas Auberon Waugh has asserted that Forbes, far from belonging to the sort of Bostonian world where the Lowells speak only to Cabots, is really a Canadian. The truth is odder. He was born in Surrey, not far from Croydon, the third son of distinguished Americans. He is a cousin of the Roosevelts and
collaterally related to Ralph Waldo Emer- son. Childhood (he has ten brothers and sisters) was spent largely in Brittany where the family had a house, and where, pre- sumably, he learnt his highly idiolectic drawly French. His thrillingly fierce puri- tan mother frequently chastised him with a strap and excited in him a lifetime's desire to irritate his elders and betters. By con- trast, his multitude of sisters gave him the sense that girls can also be chums; but always chums to be teased. He remains on friendly terms with an impressive number of ex-girlfriends. He was given a conventional English schooling. After Winchester (where it was said that Willie Whitelaw was so stupid that he was reduced to cribbing off Forbes) he went to King's College, Cambridge. And after that, there was what, in the life of another Bostonian, was called 'The Conquest of London'. War had come. The accident of his American parentage freed him from active service, and his French upbringing meant he was well placed to pass intelligent comment on the international scene is France Libre or the Sunday Times. The comparative emptiness of London at that date perhaps explains why his unques" tioned talents and qualities were spotted and seized upon so fast and eagerly, by hostesses and editors and female predators of other sorts. The 1940s were really Forbes's decade mirabilis. A key figure of the period is the woman who died as Annie Fleming, but who at this period was Lady Rothermere. She made sure that his poll" tical acumen and journalistic flair were rewarded by employment in the Rother- mere empire, first as political columnist of the Sunday Dispatch, and subsequently of the Daily Mail. Ali himself made equallY sure that by a series of intolerable insults to his editors these periods of employment were of limited duration. Meanwhile, he got to know 'everyone', became a favourite of the Duchess of Kent and recalls,
a little wistfully, that in 1948 he wore a boiled shirt five nights a week.
But any Who's Who-style definition of what Ali has done in life would fail to convey his essentially evanescent qualities. One could list the fact that he has been twice married, that he is the father of the inventor of that boardgame Kensington (students of Forbes prose enjoy the blurb on the box), that he once stood for Parliament in the Liberal interest or that he has a preoccupation, bordering at times on obsession, with the descendants of the last great Liberal prime minister H. FL Asquith. One could speculate about the unimportance, or otherwise, of his, friendship with Jack Kennedy. One could survey his many gifts and decide that be had merely been a failure. (Attempts bY friends to make him into a television personality, for instance, were a disaster-- the flow of words dried up as soon as the arc-lights were switched on.) Such all account of things would be ludicrously far from the truth. The pages of Saint-Simon's Memoires, rather like the conversation-pieces of many an 18th-century painter, reveal a multitude of characters who are not achieving any- thing in the modern sense, but whose urbane, civilised, malicious, witty manner of living is entirely self-sufficient. Ali Forbes is a throw-back to this pattern of life. A few years ago, after a monumental, and slightly dotty row with his harmless old landlord in Sussex, Ali went to live per- manently abroad, and now spends much of his time at Château d'Oex. He likes to Compare himself with Daisy Ashford's immortal Mr Salteena (`Could I be any- thing at Buckingham Palace said Mr Sal- teena with flashing eyes') who was 'very fond of fresh air and royalties'. Like that character he is also `rarther a presumshious man', but his friends might have feared that he would 'grow very morose as the years rolled by', surrounded by all those dull mountains. Something which prevents this happening is his wide-ranging qualities of sympathy. He makes new friends as easily as he can offend the old. A high proportion of the old forgive him his intrusive and censorious remarks about their private lives, or his sometimes pre- sumshious postcards. In Paris, and the Tuscan hills, in New England, and old England, he still keeps alive plenty of `laughter and the love of friends', which are the two things he lives by.
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