NOBODY TALKS LIKE THAT
Robin Simon finds it hard to recognise
the Anthony Blunt he knew in Alan Bennett 's recent play
I WRITE as one of only three people known to have played table football with Anthony Blunt. You probably know the game — it is still a familiar sight in French cafes, although I confess that I prefer the lighter weight of the English version (made by the Brighouse Company) to that with the heavy pottery men you find in France. It enjoyed a great vogue among the more discerning Courtauld Institute postgradu- ates around 1970, and Blunt was apparent- ly delighted to be invited to join in. We were not entirely surprised to see that he was unable to resist placing an exploratory arm of congratulation around the shoul- ders of his partner, an attractive young man who is now a happily married Inspector of Ancient Monuments. For my part, I had a more wily ally in the form of the deputy director.
The occasion was one of the excellent annual garden parties which took place on the lawn behind the great Adam house in Portman Square. The Courtauld has now moved to Somerset House but the Portman Square building was used, quite correctly, as the setting for the appropriate scenes in the recent television adaptation of Alan Bennett's stage play A Question of Attribu- tion. This choice was itself evidence of the usual television search for authenticity, something stressed in the preceding public- ity, and so it is worth recording that in almost every other respect the portrayal of Blunt was grotesque.
Perhaps I am in a good position to judge, for the reason that it is chiefly on outward appearances that I am able to do so. My acquaintance with Blunt was not in any sense an intimate one. He admitted me to the Courtauld; I heard him lecture; but apart from the table football encounter my only insight into anything other than the public persona came as the result of my attempting to operate the Institute's 1930s switchboard at weekends. In fact, despite being paid to do so, I was never able to work this anthropomorphic monster, which was made up of an intestinal tangle below and numbered porcelain discs above which flicked up and down like eyelids. As a result, for anything but the most direct communication between operator and the director's flat at the top of the house, Blunt had to come down four floors in order to receive any incoming calls.
Remarkably, he remained unfailingly tolerant and courteous, amused rather than annoyed, and, more astonishingly, I retained my occasional post in its strategic position just inside the front door. The comings and goings were intriguing to wit- ness and the `goings-on', as my colleague the Irish cleaning-woman called them, even more so. On these lonely mornings she was the only other person in the main part of the building. She had some sort of lair in the crepuscular basement from which she would emerge at intervals to mutter furi- ously about naked youths — 'wearing just an earring' — who scampered up and down the main staircase in the early hours. The rest was silence, for Blunt was discreet, and to me the sole give-away about the 'goings- on', apart from the irregular stream of gentleman callers, was the gin.
Every Saturday morning Blunt would sidle out — and a key point missed by the television was his lop-sidedness, in face, mouth, body and hands — soon after open- ing time, shortly to struggle back laden with 'Trick or treat?' carrier-bags stuffed to bursting with gin. When I finally saw inside Blunt's flat after his departure I was baffled to work out how it had contained so many for so long, espe- cially as Blunt's regular partner, a nice for- mer soldier, was in residence throughout.. Hints of orgies apart, those inept hours oi mine at the switchboard principally revealed a humorous and gentle aspect of Blunt to add to his consistent kindness to myself and to other students. Conflicting reports sugest that he could be both a bully and a bitch in private and a cynic might say that he had nothing to lose by being so nice to insignificant students. Yet I still cannot see that he had anything to gain. Certainly, any suggestion that he possessed such ami- able qualities was missing from the televi- sion impersonation, but here we are in deep waters, and the programme was full enough of problems on the surface.
The most glaring and unpleasant inaccu- racy in the television portrayal of Blunt was the voice. It was one of his most attractive and well deployed features, 'ever soft and low', an upper-class accent of genuine refinement. In its place we were treated to an extravagantly affected kind of Queen's English as if uttered through a mouthful of Toffo. I was at first reminded of Jack Lem- mon's response in Some Like It Hot to Tony Curtis's devastating take-off of Cary Grant — 'Nobody talks like that'. But then I realised that somebody does, and that the strangulated vowels we could hear were those of none other than the ubiquitous Mr Brian Sewell.
The actor playing Blunt was James Fox, who had been reported in the advance hype as having turned to Mr Sewell in the course of his 'research' for the part. He had evidently taken the fatal decision to mimic Mr Sewell as a reasonable substitute for the real thing and his ear is, alas, perfect. If one turned away from the screen, as too often one felt impelled to do, the effect was unbearable. In addition to the weired accent, it was painful to hear 'Blunt' talk of a painter by the name of Joe Varney Belli- ni — and then there was the crass lecture. littered with further solecisms. Blunt, although amusing and possessed of a ready wit, was far too fastidious, intellectually at least, to crack jokes in a lecture and was quite incapable of the relentless puns and trite innuendoes that this script assigned to him.
The extraordinary wardrobe that Fox had to wear must have been as much an embarrassment to the actor as it would have been to the living Blunt. Those jack- ets! Blunt was indeed much given to sports jackets, but here we were offered bookies' checks and a cardboard fit in place of the exquisitely well-cut and well-worn style of the genuine article. It was as if an image of a well-bred Englishman had been devised by an urchin with his nose pressed against the window of Burton Tailoring. The hair was apparently courtesy of Mr Whippy via the Spitting Image puppet of Douglas Hurd.
In life it was a wispy affair surmounting an aesthetically cadaverous face and figure. On all counts, James Fox was simply far too well fed.
There were other howlers which would have been obvious to those who had no direct knowledge of Blunt, although more so to those with even so slight a knowledge as my own. In a crucial scene he was shown enjoying a drink in the National Gallery — backed by paintings from the Berggruen Collection which only arrived there this year. Other pictures in shot at the same location could not have been seen in Blunt's time for the very good reason that they were not then on view. Dramatic licence, perhaps, must be the excuse for this prolonged parody, and a play, of course, is a play is a play and not history, but after watching this one I was reminded of a troubled voice I heard on emerging from the stage performance of Shaffer's scatalogical Amadeus — 'I never knew Mozart was like that'. He wasn't, and nor was Blunt.
• In respect purely of outward appear- ances, in the matter of which the television production strove so hard to be accurate — this representation of Blunt got it all wrong. And yet . . . Blunt himself appears to have been a master of deception, not least amongst those who thought they knew him best. In its bizarre way this misleading film may be as apt an epitaph as any.
Robin Simon is editor of Apollo.
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