Brideshead Revisited
Adapted by Roger Parsley
Theatre Royal, Bath, 1995
EVELYN WAUGH’S MAGNUM OPUS
By the start of 1944 the Second World War was proving a great disappointment to Evelyn Waugh. From the outset he had shown himself willing and eager for the fray, had served with No 8 Commando in the disastrous battle for Crete, and achieved the rank of captain. But while his courage and commitment were above reproach, his manner and attitude were not. By 1943 he was regarded by his superiors in the Marines as a total misfit. In July of that year his father died suddenly, further delaying any possibility he had of getting back to the front line, and in October he damaged a knee during parachute training with the newly formed 2nd Special Air Service Regiment. Taken all together these frustrations and misfortunes had been steadily shortening his temper, increasing his paranoia and deepening his melancholy. What’s more, he hadn’t written a book in two years – Put Out More Flags had been tossed off in a mere six weeks, as much to relieve the tedium of the long sea voyage home from Crete as anything else. So when he put in for leave to write a novel ‘of no propaganda value’ which would, he guessed, take him three months, the army, with a sigh of relief, granted his request. The end of January 1944 found Waugh settled in his favourite writing place, Easton Court Hotel in Chagford, Devon, “full of literary power” and impatient to get started.
As soon as he began writing he knew he was onto a winner. He cheerfully informed his wife Laura, “it is v. high quality about Col. Cutler and how much I hate the army”, while to his agent and friend A D Peters he wrote more soberly that, wartime restrictions permitting “I should like this book to be in decent form because it is very good.” Not that the thing actually wrote itself. Stylistically the book relies much more on metaphor and richness of detail than any novel Waugh had previously written, and his only other attempt at a first-person narrative, Work Suspended, had been abandoned unfinished at the outbreak of the war. Normally a fluent writer, with Brideshead Waugh found himself becoming “spinsterish about style”: the opening section alone required several drafts before he was satisfied with the time sequence. Still, his enthusiasm for the subject matter carried him forward until by the end of the month he was well into his stride having completed three chapters or 33,000 words. Then the army suddenly decided to cancel his leave. A General Thomas wanted an ADC and Waugh had to break off work long enough to travel to London in order to convince the man he didn’t really need him after all. This the author did by appearing drunk in the mess and telling the otherwise tolerant general he “could not change the habits of a lifetime for a whim of his”.
Unfortunately, no sooner had Waugh escaped the clutches of one commanding officer than another was produced for him “like a rabbit from a hat”. This time a General Graham extended Waugh’s leave for a further six weeks on the Saturday then cancelled the arrangement again the following Monday. This was precisely the kind of pointless messing about that had so disillusioned Waugh in the first place. For the rest of that month he was kept on tenterhooks, forging ahead with his book as swiftly as he dared, while expecting to be called away at any moment. By the end of March he had completed 62,000 words, then on Saturday 1 April he was again recalled to London for duty. After spending another couple of weeks kicking his heels, mostly drinking with friends in White’s Club, Waugh’s patience finally snapped during an interview at Hobart House when a well-meaning colonel told him the War Office needed an educated officer for the Chemical Warfare department. “My education was classical and historical,” Waugh replied. “Oh, that doesn’t matter. All they want is education.” It was only his friendship with the founder of the SAS, William Stirling, that saved Waugh from the completely anomalous posting and secured him a further six weeks’ leave in which to finish his most ambitious novel to date.
Although it was the biggest project Waugh had ever tackled, he stuck by the compositional procedures which has always stood him in good stead. Writing in long hand, as each section of the book was completed he would send it off to be typed up while he plunged ahead with the next. His youthful boast that he could hold a whole book in his head and write it out with the minimum of revision was evidently less true than it had been, partly due to the constant interruptions but also because of his growing recourse to bromide and chloral to help him sleep. Otherwise his normal routine was unaffected. Notwithstanding his preoccupations with the novel, he continued to spend pleasant weekends with his wife now heavily pregnant with their fourth child. He dined out with friends, he continued writing his bread-and-butter reviews for the newspaper, and read for pleasure. At the start of May, for instance, he records in his diary: “Work at a standstill. Reading Pride and Prejudice which is not the stuff to work on.”
The diaries in fact provide a fascinating running commentary on the creative process. Even on the day Waugh wrote a staggering 3,000 words in three hours (and needed to take the following day off to recover) he still found enough energy to record that fact for posterity. But with one eye on the reader to come, he always had the other firmly fixed on himself. “English writers, at forty, either set about prophesying or acquiring a style. Thank God I think I am beginning to acquire a style” (2/3/44). “Alternate despondency and exultation about the book… I think perhaps it is the best of my novels rather than the last” (21/5/44). Sometimes we see the artist as tyrant: “An Air Force honeymoon couple over my head made work impossible all day (yesterday). Today I had the couple removed” (5/6/44). At others the artist even overwhelms the family man: “Telephone message that Laura has had a daughter and is well. A dull day’s work…” (13/5/44).
On Tuesday 6 June the Allies landed at Normandy and Waugh “wrote a fine passage of Lord Marchmain’s death agonies”. The final pages were quickly disposed of (“last dialogue poor”) and the completed typescript was delivered to his agent by 6 July. Shortly after this, Waugh was despatched to Yugoslavia with Churchill’s son Randolph on a mission to the partisans where the author nearly caused a diplomatic incident by calling Tito a lesbian.
The first published copies of Brideshead Revisited were distributed among friends whose opinions Waugh valued and eagerly canvassed. Nancy Mitford welcomed it as “a great English classic”. Other responses were less fulsome than he had anticipated: from the depths of a Yugoslav winter he wrote wretchedly to Laura, “Can you not see how it disappoints me that this book which I regard as my first important one, and have dedicated to you, should have no comment except that Eddie is pleased with it?” Lady Pansy Lamb supplied perhaps the most balanced assessment of the fiction in relation to the facts upon which it had been based. Comparing the 1920s society she knew to the richly embroidered tapestry Waugh had woven out of it, she said “nobody was brilliant, beautiful and rich and the owner of a wonderful house, though some were one or the other… You see English society of the twenties as something baroque and magnificent on its last legs… I fled from it because it seemed prosperous, bourgeois and practical and I believe it still is.”
When the novel was officially published on 28 May 1945, however, the public was in no doubt. After six years’ grey privation, Waugh was offering his readers the chance to wallow unashamedly in nostalgia for a recent past whose colours, albeit heightened by hindsight, dazzled like a jewel box and celebrated anew an aspect of England that could so easily have been lost. Dissenting voices condemned the book for its perceived snobbery, its politically incorrect crying up of society highlife at a time when Socialism and the New Puritanism were in the ascendant. Waugh had no time for such political bandwagons: “sucking up to the lower classes” he called it, and while he was sad to lose such esteem as he had once enjoyed among his contemporaries, he was deeply gratified to have so successfully brought off a major work on such a closely personal theme – “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters”, as he put it in his preface.
In the winter of 1947 the writer and his wife travelled to Los Angeles to discuss a film version which MGM planned to make. In the end nothing came of it, as the studios were merely interested in turning it into a conventional love story, and the only alternative title Waugh would countenance them using was A Household of the Faith. But if the film project came to nothing, the trip was useful in other ways: “I found a deep mine of literary gold in the cemetery of Forest Lawn and the work of the morticians and intend to get to work immediately on a novelette staged there”. The resulting book, The Loved One, is, with Brideshead Revisited, among the three or four best works Waugh ever wrote. The author at the height of his powers was responding better than ever to the immediate inspiration of the life he saw around him. Still to come was the huge Sword of Honour trilogy which would detail Waugh’s war experiences and take up the last ten years of his creative life. Ironically, in the end the army had proved its worth to the author. After all, if he hadn’t hated it so much he would never have felt impelled to start Brideshead Revisited.
WHO’S WHO AT BRIDESHEAD
“I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they”
Author’s note, Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh despised the lazy reviewer’s trick of talking about the author rather than the book. In his diary for Saturday 2nd February 1946 he notes: “The magazine Life blithely proposed to publish a series of photographic illustrations of my books based on the originals from whom the characters were drawn. I answered threatening them with imprisonment.” For all that, he was the most transparently autobiographical of novelists and had that Life article ever appeared, these are some of the people and places it might have mentioned as having inspired his most famous work.
The Flyte Family
Like his narrator Charles Ryder, Evelyn Waugh had first-hand experience of becoming deeply involved with several members of one family. While at Oxford he was close friends with David and Richard Plunket Greene. Their sister Olivia was one of the Brightest Young Things of her generation and the abject Waugh, unsure about his future, his early artistic ambitions thwarted, fell hopelessly in love with her. His feelings were not reciprocated. During a holiday on Lundy with the family in 1925 he wrote in his diary of the “insistent sorrows of unrequited love”, and this failed affair possibly contributed to his abortive suicide attempt some months later while he was a schoolmaster in Wales. Both Olivia and her mother were very devout, however, and supported Waugh’s later decision to join their church.
He had a happier time with the Lygon sisters whom he got to know after the success of his first two books. Again he had known the brother Hugh at Oxford, and developed a cheerful bantering relationship with the girls Mary and Dorothy (alternatively called Maimie or Blondy and Coote or Pollen). In his letters to them he signed himself Bo or Boaz and frequently addressed them in the tones of a rakish uncle. Their father Lord Beauchamp was, like the Flytes’, also an exile from England, though under circumstances somewhat different from those which keep Lord Marchmain in Venice. Outed for homosexuality in 1931, it was of Lord Beauchamp that George V remarked, “I thought men like that shot themselves”, while his unworldly wife, out of her depth, couldn’t work out why people were calling her husband a bugler.
Sebastian
Childhood personified, Sebastian is not surprisingly an amalgam of several friends from Waugh’s hard-drinking, high-spirited university days – among them Hugh Lygon and Richard Pares. The teddy bear Aloysius come from the poet John Betjeman who carried with him a childhood toy named Archibald Ormsby-Gore (Archie for short) and/or a scruffy toy elephant known as Jumbo. But in looks and manner Sebastian’s main inspiration was Alastair Graham, whom Waugh has referred to as “the friend of my heart”. In his fragmentary autobiography, A Little Learning, Waugh wrote of him, “I could not have fallen under an influence better designed to encourage my natural frivolity, dilettantism and dissipation.” In 1926 the two travelled extensively together and Waugh further had the opportunity to witness at first hand a young man with a pathological aversion to his mother. Alastair also introduced Evelyn to country house life and took him to visit his old nurse. So close was the identification of these two characters in hr author’s mind that Alastair’s name sometimes appears in place of Sebastian’s in Waugh’s hand-written manuscript.
Julia
“…just eighteen… thin… flat-chested, leggy; she seemed all limbs and neck, bodiless, spidery…” Thus Julia in Charles Ryder’s description of her, but also a fairly accurate thumbnail sketch of Laura Herbert, Waugh’s second wife when they first met in 1933. Like Julia, Laura’s father was not Catholic by tradition, and both their fathers were absent (Laura’s was dead). But beyond the physical similarities, Julia is courted by the older, more sophisticated Rex Mottram, just as Laura found herself being pursued by the 30-year-old Waugh, and some of Lady Marchmain’s anxiety about Rex’s hastily adopted faith may be a legacy of how Waugh feared he must appear to the Herberts – he was only a recent convert to their church himself. But here Julia’s identification with the quiet, self-effacing Laura Herbert ends. As Waugh was to write later to Diana Mosley about Work Suspended, when she accused him of painting an unflattering portrait of her as the hero’s love-object in that story, “It was… a portrait of me in love with you.” The model here is more spiritual and figurative than actual.
Lord Marchmain
In a letter to his friend the cleric Ronald Knox (whose official biography Waugh was to publish in 1959), the author confided Brideshead Revisited “was, of course, all about (Lord Marchmain’s) death bed”. This celebrated scene, its emotions, the calling of the priest and the last-minute granting of absolution, are all derived from the death the previous autumn of Waugh’s friend Hubert Duggan. Indeed the whole episode, adapted only insofar as the fiction demanded, was taken direct from the author’s diaries. “It was,” he continued to Knox, “profoundly affecting and I wrote the book about that scene.”
Anthony Blanche
Surprisingly, perhaps, the exotic Anthony Blanche had equally exotic predecessors in life. One of these was Brian Howard, a flamboyant homosexual in the forefront of the aesthetic movement in twenties Oxford, who was to commit suicide in 1958 following the death of his lover in an accident. His were the “large saucy eyes”, the dandyish clothes and the verbal tic of calling people “my dear” – physical details which were only inserted in the 1960 revised version of the ovel after Howard’s death. But in terms of intellectuality the truer model for Anthony Blanche was Harold Acton, another Old Etonian and Christ Church undergraduate, and the leading aesthete during Waugh’s university days. Many incidents ascribed to Anthony Blanche in the book originated with Acton – like, for example, his declaiming of The Waste Land through a megaphone. Although the narrator’s tone towards Anthony in the book is ultimately cool, it was this character, shared between several individuals in the riotous, sophisticated and largely homosexual Hypocrites’ Club in Oxford, who helped the shy and uncertain Lancing schoolboy Waugh out of his self-conscious shell.
Mr Samgrass
Physically, Samgrass is Maurice Bowra, warden of Wadham College and enthusiastic sponsor of promising undergraduates – “a short, plump man… with sparse hair brushed flat over an over-large head”. But there was never more than this brief description to link the fiction with the fact. Nevertheless, Bowra took a perverse delight in drawing people’s attention tohis “portrait” in Brideshead Revisited: “I hope you spotted me… What a piece of artistry that is – best thing in the whole book.” This subtle and unjustified self-aggrandisement irritated the author, especially since at other times the don considered Waugh “a very bad fellow” with “no moral beauty at all”, even though he also acknowledged “he was the best writer of his generation”. Bowra’s knighthood in 1951 caused Waugh even further indignation and envy. “They’ve made Maurice a knight,” he complained, “for translating poetry out of languages he doesn’t know.”
Rex Mottram
Waugh confessed to his biographer Christopher Sykes that Rex Mottram is the only character fully drawn from life. The model was Brendan Bracken, wartime Minister of Information and in Waugh’s view the “embodiment… of power and prosperity”. Waugh was reluctant to admit the derivation as the unkindness of the portrait shows ingratitude for an acquaintance who had helped secure his release from army duties long enough to write the book. On the other hand, Waugh the artist would not have baulked at using a real-life personality if that character fitted his fiction. Bracken, in short, stood for everything Waugh hated – big business, philistinism, opportunism, politicking. Making Rex Canadian was a small cosmetic change which did little to disguise the source. Significantly, Bracken is said not to have recognised himself.
Mr Ryder
Waugh’s relationship with his father was frequently complex and difficult. As a youth he felt let down by this “unaggressive, benign… urbane” man who usurped his mother’s attention, and in an early article he blamed the hedonism of his generation on parents who refused to instil rigid discipline and qualitative standards in their offspring. As a consequence, father-figures in his books are rarely without flaws. Before his own father Arthur Waugh died in June 1943, Evelyn had attempted to come to terms with eccentric fathers in Work Suspended, and the first fully sympathetic one didn’t appear until Mr Crouchback Sr. in the post-war Sword of Honour trilogy.
But in another sense Mr Ryder is very much a prefiguring of the kind of father Waugh was in the process of becoming himself – loving but distant, seemingly selfish and sometimes wilfully awkward. This character, like the persona the author adopted to make his diaries more interesting when reality didn’t come up to scratch, was only half a pose.
Celia
Charles’s distinctly cool attitude towards his wife, a result of her adultery, mirrors Waugh’s own experience. His first wife, also called Evelyn, left him barely a year after their marriage in June 1928 for the writer John Heygate. “I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live,” he wrote at the time. The sense of betrayal informed much of Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust five years after the fact, and is obviously still present here. Charles goes to South America to paint for two years on the strength of his cuckoldry; Waugh similarly undertook difficult and dangerous journeys into uncivilised corners of the world to seek escape, solace and inspiration.
Hooper
Much has been made of Hooper, the quintessential Common Man. Waugh was convinced that England after the war would turn into a nation of Hoopers, which is one of the reasons he wrote Brideshead Revisited, in order to encapsulate the pre-war world before it vanished forever. The truth is that until his military service, Waugh had had very little contact with anyone outside his immediate class, and it is unlikely he would have been sufficiently interested in any individual to choose a real-life Hooper to immortalise. Waugh himself made even less effort to bridge the gap than does Charles. He frequently used his intellectual and social superiority to bully and intimidate those under him. As an officer this made Waugh so unpopular as to render him virtually unemployable. In 1943, his commanding officer Brigadier Robert Laycock wanted to use the author somehow on his staff in Operation Husky, the allied invasion of Italy. Another mutual friend, Colonel Brian Franks, advised against it: “Apart from anything else, Evelyn will probably get shot.” “That’s a chance we all have to take.” “Oh, I don’t mean by the enemy.”
Ma Mayfield
The owner of the Old Hundredth can be traced back to Mrs Rosa Lewis who used to run the Cavendish Hotel drinking den in Jermyn Street. Mrs Lewis was famous for puncturing pomposity, being deliberately obtuse, and confusing her customers’ identities at will. Oe of her favourite tricks was to order champagne all round then send the bill to whichever of her customers she thought was flush at the time.
Charles Ryder
Of course, the story of Charles’s conversion to Catholicism must be, to some extent, Waugh’s own. The circumstances are very different but the magnitude of the theme and what it meant to him are obviously of central importance.
Nancy Mitford told Waugh that Charles “seemed to me a tiny bit dim”, which is not a charge anyone could have made (or would have dared to make) against Waugh. Waugh’s reply in this instance was “he is dim, but then he is telling the story and it is not his story.” Still, other similarities are less superficial. Both Charles and Waugh were captains in an army they no longer had any love for, and both in consequence have plunged voluptuously into a hedonistic recollection of their recent pasts.
There is also an element of wish-fulfilment in Charles’s chosen profession. The architectural painter Charles Ryder is highly successful, technically adept and lionised by society, all things the Waugh of the early 1920s wished for himself. Incidentally the artist John Piper was also coming to prominence in the late 1930s and although he liked the man personally, Waugh was not a great fan of Piper’s work; nevertheless, when an illustrated version of Brideshead was mooted, Waugh conceded he could think of no one better to provide the pictures.
Brideshead Castle
Like most identifications in the book, there is no single source of inspiration for the eponymous mansion; rather, it combines elements of several. Waugh was familiar with Castle Howard in Yorkshire and certainly the general feel and layout of the fictional castle is similar. But Vanbrugh’s actual dome is slightly later than the book’s baroque version which is “by” Inigo Jones, and the fountain around which so many key scenes occur “represents” (according to a memo Waugh wrote when MGM were contemplating a film version) “the worldly eighteenth-century splendour of the family” and is “a combination of three famous works of Bernini at Rome”. The art nouveau decorations of the chapel recall Madresfield Court, the Lygons’ family seat in Malvern, Worcestershire, though Brideshead’s geographical setting is meant to be more southwesterly than either of these originals. In Waugh’s mind Brideshead ultimately represents the possibility of earthly perfection, man’s route to God, and his ideal English country house which was, like himself, a late but fervent convert to Catholicism.
IN ARCADIA
Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford of the twenties, so fondly and famously evoked in Brideshead Revisited as a “a city of aquatint”, began as a Saxon settlement called Oxenford where the drovers herded their cattle across the Thames. The ground plan of the city was laid down in the late 9th century by King Alfred – who had been born in nearby Wantage – but it wasn’t until the 12th century, when Henry II ordered all English students resident abroad to return home, that the academic nature of the place took root. Halls or hostels, under the direction of a scholar, were set up to accommodate this sudden influx.
The unique college system (later also adopted by Cambridge) developed from the 13th century onwards as each institution was separately endowed and permitted to adopt its own rules and privileges. University College and Balliol were the first, closely followed by Merton and Worcester.
New College, founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham as a place of higher education for pupils from his own Winchester School, was the first to build a quadrangle, the basic design format that all the other colleges were to emulate as they expanded. While Oxford University itself comprises all these separate bodies taken as a whole, the thirty or so colleges which were to come into existence over the succeeding centuries are self-sufficient in terms of staff, teaching facilities and amenities – most have a refectory, bar, buttery chapel, common rooms and gardens, as well as accommodation for the students. Magdalen eve boasts its own deer park called The Grove, where herds have roamed since 1700.
Christ Church is one of the most famous of all colleges. Its cathedral is one the site of St Frideswide’s monastery of the 8th century, and is in fact the Cathedral Church of the Oxford diocese. Sir Christopher Wren’s 1682 gatehouse houses Great Tom, a bell which chimes 101 times at 9:05 every evening, once for each original scholar as a warning that the gates were about to be closed for the night.
Apart from the colleges themselves, other buildings are rich in architectural interest. Another Wren edifice, the Sheldonian Theatre of 1669, was based on the idea of a Roman theatre and is ringed by a series of monolithic stone heads whose meaning is now lost to history. The University awards its degrees here throughout the spring, taking several months of Saturdays to get through the entire student population which these days numbers around 12,000. The Bodleian Library is second only to the Vatican’s in size, and its three million volumes include a manuscript of the Acts of the Apostles used by the Venerable Bede in the 7th century. Bronze statues of King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria adorn the Canterbury Quadrangle of St John’s, recalling the city’s role as a Royalist stronghold during the Civil War, while Evelyn Waugh’s own college, Hertford, is distinguished by its “Bridge of Sighs” – the North and South quads are separated by New College Lane, but the gap was spanned early last century by Sir T G Jackson’s graceful arch, named after the original at the Doge’s Palace in Venice but in appearance based more on the Rialto.
On the ground, the High Street offers a continually revealing panorama of architectural styles as you proceed along its gentle curve from the ancient crossroads at Carfax eastward to Magdalen Bridge. Broad Street these days houses most of the bookshops and a very jolly museum called The Oxford Story which takes you on a time-travelling journey through the city’s history while sitting at an old two-seater wooden desk, but in the mid-16th century it was the site of the burning of the martyrs Latimer, Cranmer and Ridley whose memorial now stands around the corner in St Giles.
Women were confined to only five single-sex colleges until the 1970s. Michaelmas term 1974 marked the beginning of the transition to full co-education when five men’s colleges admitted women undergraduates for the first time. Not that distinguished women hadn’t already – against the odds – manged to benefit from an Oxford education: Margaret Thatcher studied chemistry at Somerville, Lady Antonia Fraser graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, and in 1968 the actress Diana Quick, who would later play Julia Flyte in Granada TV’s adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, became the first female president of the famous Oxford University Dramatic Society.
The academic year’s three terms last eight weeks only, as opposed to the ten of most other universities, which means the work is demanding and the pressures correspondingly high. But those of a romantic spirit who succumb willingly to the magic of Oxford will always recognise and celebrate with a huge pang of nostalgia Waugh’s own lush recreation of the place: “her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days… when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth.”
PS
I rather went to town on this one – after all, Waugh is among my very favourite authors, I was familiar with the biography and the letters and the diaries, and the monumental Granada TV adaptation had been a firm favourite since it first appeared in the early 1980s. And the writing process has always fascinated me: where does the inspiration come from? How do they do it, what’s the day-to-day process? So I wrote three articles for the same programme. As the editor I always felt it would look a bit vulgar to have my own name scattered throughout the thing like a rash, so on those occasions where I had to provide more than one piece myself, I invariably ascribed the others to my children – Peter William and Julia Frances became Peter Williams and Julia Francis respectively, and thus preserved their proud father’s false modesty. (The weird hybrid Julien Robbins also seems to figure occasionally, but quite where they came from or what advantage they conferred, I can no longer recall.)
Much as I admire his work, I’m pretty sure that had we ever met, Waugh would have despised me; I fear I am probably his Hooper to a T – bourgeois, unintellectual, well-meaning, lacking rigour. And any fan letter would presumably have received the same chilly response novelist John Plant gives one of his admirers in Work Suspended. In his Face to Face interview in 1960 John Freeman asked him what he thought about criticism and the novelist replied, “I’m afraid if someone praises me I think what an arse, and if they abuse me I think what an arse,” which is probably the most sensible attitude to take. And he was quite prepared to admit that his worst fault was “irritability”. But on the other hand he was keen to have the good opinion of his friends when Brideshead first came out, and in a preface he wrote to the 1959 edition he claimed that the work “lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers”. Nice try, Mr Waugh, but this is surely disingenuous; he had sought success all his life. So perhaps he wasn’t quite as impervious to people as he liked to make out. As a man he may have been difficult to put up with, but as well as his titanic talent, which would have set him apart anywhere, he obviously had his little weaknesses too, just like the rest of us.