I’VE REWOUND, fast-forwarded and paused but I still can’t find him. At one point I thought I’d spotted him in the closing circus scene of 8½. Or was that him, the man with the slicked-back hair and the hanky in the top pocket, sitting at a café table in Nights of Cabiria? I’m just not sure.
Who I’m looking for is Angus Heriot (1927–1964), music lover, multilingual gossip, novelist, sometime Guardian critic and exquisite man-about-town who one day managed, by being in the right place at the right time, to get himself a close-up in an early Fellini film. I’m sure he’s there in the thousands of frames of Fellini that I’ve scanned—but where? Fifty years after he died, Heriot is a little piece of gay literary history that has gone missing. Blink and you’ve missed him.
If you’ve heard of Angus Heriot at all, it’s probably thanks to his first book, The Castrati in Opera (1956), which has had a modest, cheerfully camp following since the day it was published. The Castrati is a cross between a serious scholarly study of castrated male singers in baroque Italy—and a long, gently smutty story. It’s an amusing, sophisticated read, despite (or perhaps because) it is disconnected, rambling, gossipy, and smartly rude. The full details of who was castrated (children of the poor, mostly), how (after a hot bath), on what excuse (allegedly to defeat a childhood illness), and where (mostly Norcia, in Umbria) combine with chunks of history—and Heriot’s wonderful sense of the absurd. This is adult fun, fizzy as champagne, as well-bred as the passengers on le train bleu, and as enjoyable as a month in Tangiers—all experiences that Heriot enjoyed. What matters about Heriot, and what explains his omission—or erasure—from gay literary history, is class. Class made Heriot who he was, but posthumously he has been its victim. He was born in London into a segment of the complicated English class system that could be called middle-upper-middle. Decoded, this means they were doing well, but not that well, certainly a very long way from Downton Abbey grandeur. True, there was some family money, they lived at good addresses, and they were in no danger of being mistaken for shopkeepers. But the essential dynamic was that this branch of the Heriot family was vaguely on the way down. It was a common experience in the inter-war years. His great-grandfather had been a self-made merchant banker and lived in some style, with a cook, two parlor maids, three housemaids, and a kitchen maid. But he was born in Dalston—never a smart London address—and his children were born at a variety of London locations, some better than others, suggesting that he moved around a bit socially and geographically on his route to comfort and success. That he lived grandly in Paddington—a liminal zone in the London class map—suggests that he still wasn’t quite top drawer, and knew it. By the mid 1920s, the Heriot family’s social place was insecure. For instance, Heriot’s father and grandfather were listed as bankers, but, by the time Angus’ father registered his marriage in 1926, he was described merely as a bank clerk (and Angus’ mother also worked, as a secretary). An ultra-modern couple, they lived in a newly built apartment block, also in Paddington. They were by no means poor, and Angus would be the means by which they reclaimed their social status. Thus the family spent lavishly on his education. After a Surrey prep school, he was sent to Eton College in September 1940. He quickly demonstrated a facility with languages, winning prizes for French and Latin verse. He left school at Easter 1945 to join the army (60th Rifles) and then drifted for a while into jobs that put his language skills to good use, either in London or mainland Europe. The Castrati is still read, but Heriot’s novels—a series of angst-ridden guilt trips filled with cocktail parties and camp humor—have been totally forgotten. And that’s a shame. Heriot wanted to be taken seriously—to be more than a beautiful person glimpsed in a Fellini film—and some of his novels manage to achieve that, although perhaps not in the way he wanted. His first novel, Orphan’s Progress, published in 1957, was a gay daydream/nightmare, full of period misery, wish fulfillment, and good manners, and, like so many first novels, largely autobiographical. Nicholas Bristow is an orphan, like Heriot, and his social position is insecure. Like Heriot, he inherits a fortune but, unlike Heriot, Bristow also inherits a title (perhaps something Heriot felt the lack of?). What makes The Orphan’s Progress important—almost unique in the anxiety-fueled gay fiction of the 1950s—is that it’s a novel with a clear gay theme written under the author’s own name and not under a pseudonym. (Rodney Garland’s 1953 best-selling The Heart in Exile is a conspicuous case in point. The author was in fact Adam de Hegedus.) The hero’s gay journey begins with the obligatory cruising scene at Piccadilly Circus—Nicholas doesn’t take up the offer and, puzzled about his sexuality, he goes with a cheerful (female) tart instead, then with several less cheerful tarts, until he begins to feel that sex with women is rather a chore. He moves into a gay lodging house run by his splendid Aunt Sylvia and, thoroughly enjoying the gossip and innuendo, he begins to feel that “he has at last the key to a certain code.” At one of Sylvia’s lovely parties, an attractive thirty-something man kisses him, and he discovers (“after a moment of revulsion”) that fooling around with men is quite good fun. After much heart-searching—and lots more parties—he is introduced to the handsome Ernest Allsop, who invites him out for dinner. They begin an affair, but the sex doesn’t go well: Nicholas is emotionally drawn to men but can’t stop sleeping with women. Then it all goes right and wrong simultaneously: Nicholas inherits a peerage and a fortune, but his private life collapses into a kind of breakdown: “he was like a mirror with nothing to reflect.” Ernest sensibly dumps Nicholas for a nice gay boy who knows what he likes, and Nicholas is devastated. In the end, Nicholas pretty much gives up sex of all kinds and writes books instead. To today’s readers, the novel offers an appealingly retro cold bath of misery and quaint period charm—doesn’t “queen’s moll” sound nicer than fag hag?—but Orphan’s Progress is an important book. That’s because, in its strange, constipated way, it makes a powerful case. In the character of Nicholas, Heriot shows what happens to gay men who, in the language of the 1950s, don’t have “integrated personalities.” In Ernest, he shows how nicely things can work out if you do—provided you get the closet cases out of our life. Heriot himself was never a closet case. He lived openly with his partner, Neil Macmillan, throughout the 1950s, eventually moving from London to Paris in 1956 (although they kept a London address until 1959). Emigration was a smart move, given the anti-gay police activity and prosecutions in London presided over by Home Secretary David Maxwell-Fyfe and Metropolitan police commissioner John Nott-Bower. Historian Matt Houlbrook has documented the extent of the persecution and shown that gay life carried on regardless; but the old war-time mood of tolerance was finished. Kensington and other West London neighborhoods that Heriot knew well had already become too hot for comfort, thanks to the commissioner’s vigorous campaign to remove gay people from public spaces. Heriot left England, declaring with a high camp flourish that he wouldn’t miss much because most Englishmen looked like ducks. Heriot’s next three novels are best ignored: in Zenobia (1958), Penelope’s Web (1961), and Four-Part Fugue (1962), he’s confused about his themes and techniques and often totally out of his depth. He’s trying too hard to be clever. There’s also some racism, particularly in Penelope’s Web. But his last novel, The Island is Full of Strange Noises (1963) stands apart. It could—if you squint—be compared with the work of Ronald Firbank, or perhaps to Muriel Spark on a massive dose of Benzedrine. But it is probably best approached as a kind of suicide note for the urbane, hanky-in-the-pocket world of gay dinner dates and shabby-smart bachelor pads that Heriot represents—a world that is now long gone. The Mediterranean island of the title is owned by a rich sophisticate (another peer, in fact) who enjoys wild parties, the kind at which opera singers get drowned and the host secretly drugs all his guests. Eventually, this party world crumbles and everything else around him self-destructs (including the island, thanks to an earthquake). The text, too, falls to bits in a bewildering series of book-within-a-book framing devices, which undercut whatever purpose or sense the novel ever had. “Everything declined, tailed away, like a genie returning within its bottle,” Heriot writes toward the end, which seems to suggest the novel’s crumpled pointlessness was indeed the point. On the face of it, such a deflating end seems out of character. Heriot was a witty, chatty soul who moved in a laughing, giddy, elite people’s world. It was a life of parties and Riviera holidays, weekends in Paris, good-looking companions, and languid months in Rome. His close friends included novelist Sir Angus Wilson and the dandy Philippe Julien (whose works he translated), and we can be pretty sure he enjoyed all that gay London, gay Paris, gay Rome, and gay Morocco had to offer. Yet, for all that sparkle, Heriot’s work is full of a very British 1950s queer pessimism. His characters know that life is a farce, they do not expect to grow old, and often they don’t want to. They are made furious and then exhausted by life’s banalities. The central character of The Island is a novelist himself, and such is the novel’s exhausted sense of hopelessness that the narrator says he is lucky to have died young. This throw-away line about dying young would become an eerie foreshadowing of Heriot’s own fate. Ever in the vanguard of fun, he had traveled to Marrakesh and found himself a Moroccan boy. No one is sure quite what happened, but on January 26, 1964, he was killed, aged 37, when his hire-car wrapped itself round a tree on the road between Marrakesh and Safi in the south of the country. It wasn’t suicide, but there was speculation that he was suicidal. The annihilating mood of The Island leaves the prospects wide open. Norman Shrapnel, writing in The Guardian fifty years ago, called one of Heriot’s novels “a long disorderly gossip,” and, for better or worse, that description suits everything Heriot wrote. In his historical essays, where the facts provide some kind of discipline, the result is amusing in a high-pitched and slightly filthy-minded way. In his fiction, however, the result was disastrously hit or miss. At their best, Heriot’s novels approach a kind of groggily hung-over version of the work of Ronald Firbank. At its worst, overloaded with ideas he lacked the skill to develop, his fiction is sad nonsense. And yet, Heriot matters. Orphan’s Progress deserves to be recognized as pioneering gay literature, as valuable as The Heart in Exile as an entrée to gay life in 1950s Britain. His better novels represent a middle-class version of queer life that was robust and even dominant in its day. In this version horizontal relationships with one’s social equals mattered as much as time spent “horizontally” with other men. It was a world in which masculinity was broad enough to embrace clean cuffs, witty conversation, and well-polished shoes. This class-bound version of queer was first weakened by the leveling popular culture of the ’60s. It was then dealt a deadly blow by the gay liberation culture that emerged from Stonewall, a culture that preferred to interpret life through shared sexuality rather than class affiliation. Thus we enter a world in which to be straight-acting is to act like a working-class man—not a rather fancy, rarefied middle-class man like Heriot. Like the island of The Island and Nicholas Bristow’s sex life, Heriot’s middle-class vision of queer masculinity either self-destructed or simply petered out. Perhaps you will have better luck than I spotting Heriot in Fellini’s films. Sleek dark hair combed back from a high forehead, a thin elegant face with a laughing, quizzical look, a smart suit and a decent hanky in the top pocket—you’ll know him when you see him, a face from an age that is now as prehistoric as the dinosaurs.
The death of his parents left him in the care of an aunt, but he was soon free of restraint and very nearly wealthy. His London life after the war was racy. He lived smartly, either renting a room, or discreetly sharing a flat with gay friends, and mixed with interesting people on the unconventional fringe of the elite. Close friends and acquaintances included a Conservative Member of Parliament notorious for refusing to marry his (female) partner, the eccentric hostess Viva King (a voyeur famously obsessed with underwear), and the man who more-or-less invented the modern idea of preserving architectural heritage. Eton-educated, smart, and handsome, Heriot was a man-about-town, comfortable in any European capital and a notch or two above the social position of his parents. It was in this period that he wrote his fiction.
David Thame is a literary historian currently working on gay novelists of the 1950s. He lives in the rural Welsh borders.
