The Ben and Basil story
Rupert Christiansen
AS I SAW IT: BASIL DOUGLAS, BENJAMIN BRITIEN AND THE ENGLISH OPERA GROUP, 1955-7 by Maureen Garnham St George's Publications, 8 St George's Terrace, London IVW1 8X1, £7.99, pp. 128 This is a quaint, readable memoir of the genteel 1950s, redolent of a world of con- firmed bachelors, separate w.c.s and Roneo machines. Its author, Maureen Garnham, has apparently total recall of conversations and physical minutiae: she writes primly and precisely from a position of firm moral rectitude, and her version of superficial events may be absolutely trusted. Whether she is right in her sense of deep wrongs I am less sure.
Her main purpose is to vindicate Basil Douglas, a loser in the slippery game of emotional snakes and ladders in which Benjamin Britten involved his associates. The evidence is based on Miss Garnham's two years as secretary to the English Opera Group, a small-scale organisation of which Britten was artistic director and Douglas, a former BBC man of charm and decency, the dogged administrator. The EOG may have been altogether admirable in its dedication to reviving and developing native traditions of music theatre, but dur- ing the period of Douglas's rule it seems to have made an excessive number of poor commercial decisions and brought itself to the brink of bankruptcy.
At whose feet the blame for this should be laid remains unclear, but in Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Britten a letter is quoted in which the composer bemoans Douglas's feeble grip on the problems 'the poor dear gets out of his depth easily'. Nothing the staunchly loyal Miss Garnham (she and Douglas went on to be partners for many years in a moderately successful concert agency) relates leads one to doubt the truth of this.
Anyway, the upshot was that the sweet- natured, bungling Douglas was summarily dumped, as sweet-natured, bungling people usually are in this beastly world. What made the drop doubly hard is that the kick came not from Britten himself, but from the EOG's unpleasant chairman and it came without weasel words of gratitude (though there was adequate financial com- pensation). The hurt was further compounded when an agreement to allow Douglas to oversee the orchestra for the Aldeburgh festival was reneged on, at the insistence of Douglas's successor Stephen Reiss (who himself later fell, more spectac- ularly, from Britten's favour).
`I have never met a more ruthless person than Ben,' Douglas told Carpenter, but I don't think the facts of the matter here bear that judgment out, and even Miss Garnham can't quite bring herself to hate him as she might. 'He was well disposed and in no way stand-offish, but had a reserve which only his closest friends could penetrate', she explains, ascribing the latter quality to his homosexuality and the discretion that necessarily surrounded it in pre-Wolfenden days.
What else could Britten have done in such a situation? After all, he was not just a homosexual but an artist of genius who needed first-rate deputies both to protect his private creative space and to execute his music. Douglas, a nice man, seems to have proved himself second-rate and in dismiss- ing him Britten was being loyal to his art, as genius is entitled to be. But there was nothing vindictive about him: the fact that he asked a legitimately involved third party to do the dirty work may have been cowardly but it is understandable, and it did at least mean that he and Douglas could maintain civilities in later years. Miss Garnham is too decently English to descend to the now customary below-the- belt sniping at Britten — she discounts the paedophilic speculations and insists that to her knowledge Britten never laid his hand on boys 'in any improper way' — but her defence of Douglas is ultimately more a loyal encomium to a beloved friend than a piece of objective historical analysis.
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