The Brief but Brilliant Lives of Three Noted Englishmen

THE FATAL ENGLISHMAN

Three Short Lives

By Sebastian Faulks

Vintage

314 pages; $14

*

The three doomed and glamorous Englishmen who are the subjects of Sebastian Faulks’ sparklingly written trio of biographies were fair-haired boys in every sense of the phrase: gifted, charming, filled with promise, but fated to early deaths.

Christopher Wood set off for France in 1921 to become (as he hoped) the world’s greatest painter. He died only nine years later, at 29, not the world’s greatest painter, but an original and accomplished artist, nonetheless. Dedicated to his art, oblivious to the political and economic turmoil unfolding around him, Wood hobnobbed in ultra-sophisticated social circles while retaining a touching aura of frankness and innocence.

“Christopher Wood,” in Faulks’ view, “had no historical self-consciousness and was motivated by complicated and utterly personal patterns.” But in telling his story, the critically acclaimed novelist-turned-biographer deftly evokes the historical and cultural background that influenced the young painter’s life in ways he probably never realized.

Paris in the 1920s exposed Wood to artists such as Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso, not to mention the Ballet Russe, Jean Cocteau and a bisexual Chilean diplomat named Antonio de Gandarillas, who became the Englishman’s close friend, lover and chief means of financial support. A “small, exquisite man, who looked like a spider monkey,” Gandarillas “loved food, drink, opium, gambling, travel, art and young men.”

Opium was also Cocteau’s drug of choice, and before long, Wood had acquired the habit. Although Faulks, citing Cocteau, takes pains to convince us that high-quality opium, properly and sparingly used, need not have dire effects, he also shows how Wood, in the throes of the creative excitement that produced his last and most original paintings, abused the drug until he suffered symptoms of derangement that drove him to suicide.

Opium, however, is merely part of the fascinating story, and Faulks’ accounts, both of Wood’s progress as a painter and of his love life (with women as well as men) are absorbing. (The tiny, black-and-white photos illustrating Wood’s work, however, are pitifully inadequate.)

The middle panel of this triptych is World War II fighter pilot Richard Hillary (1919-1943), who not only enacted the courageous deeds that made him a legend, but also wrote a stirring account, “The Last Enemy,” of his own story. Hillary was one of that small band of heroes who managed to defend their country’s airfields against the numerically superior German bombers.

These were the men Churchill was praising when he declared “Never have so many owed so much to so few.” Hillary articulated a pervasive feeling when he wrote that the war had given his “disillusioned and spoiled” generation the chance to prove that “undisciplined though we might be, we were a match for Hitler’s dogma-fed youth.”

Horribly burned in a crash, the cocky, once-handsome Hillary underwent massive operations at the hands of pioneering plastic surgeon A.H. McIndoe, and although not fit enough to fly again, badgered his way back into the cockpit. This woefully impractical decision resulted in a second crash that killed him. Yet here, as in Wood’s case, Faulks portrays a man not in love with death, but engaged in something larger that made him reckless.

The third “fatal Englishman” is Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-1965), considered by many who knew him to be the most brilliant young mind of his generation.

Witty, poised and actively homosexual, Jeremy shrugged off a possible career as an Oxford don to become a foreign correspondent in Paris, Washington and Moscow. (When the KGB attempted to blackmail him with photographs they had taken of him in flagrante, he coolly asked for enlargements.) Ironically, his father, Jack Wolfenden, had been put in charge of the now-famous British commission charged with investigating homosexuality.

Father and son were not close. The former was sober, serious, reliable; the latter hard-drinking, insouciant and all too easily bored. Yet, they shared a certain forthrightness and clarity of intellect. Here’s Jeremy at 18 assessing his future: “I am a queer; so much is ... evident ... I may, I suppose, turn to heterosexuality; but if by a pretty mature ... eighteen I am not attracted by girls either physically or emotionally or aesthetically it seems unlikely.”

Jeremy’s father was not pleased to learn of his son’s inclinations, but when the time came to examine the issue as a matter of public policy, he remained admirably dispassionate: “Jack Wolfenden,” Faulks reminds us, “personally abhorred homosexuality.... However, he.... could not find any respectable reason for a government to interfere with the private behaviour of its adult citizens. His suggestion that homosexuality be decriminalised was a victory for intellectual process over personal distaste.”

Why Jeremy chose the life of a foreign correspondent remains a mystery; so, too, the extent of his possible involvement in the espionage dramas of the Cold War. The evidence Faulks presents strongly indicates that the 31-year-old Wolfenden literally drank himself to death, a victim of neither homophobia nor Cold War intrigue, but of alcoholism.

Faulks offers the stories of these three Englishmen as a means of illuminating English society and culture in their eras. But, although the pictures he paints are richly suggestive in this regard, he has accomplished something far more valuable. Faulks brings to these biographies a novelist’s best gift: He has given vivid and sensitive portraits of men who may or may not sum up the spirit of their eras, but who certainly emerge in these pages as complex individuals, compelling in their own right.