As an aside, it is interesting to note how during the 1930s the ‘eccentric’ behaviour of Cecil Beaton and his close circle of high-society friends such as the composer Lord Berners, the art collector Peter Watson, the actor John Gielgud or the artistic, outrageous dilettante Brian Howard would be tolerated with humour by the public, and even a young left-leaning set around Auden, Isherwood, Spender and Britten would gain some public respect for their work, but <strong>Vaughan</strong> does not seem to have had an entrée into either of these homosexual circles. The Lintas team may have been seen as an ‘eccentric’ group within the conventional norms of the Unilever workforce, but <strong>Vaughan</strong> could well have been intimidated by the sort of vicious – we would call it ‘homophobic’ today – reaction that, for example, was met by some critics in 1933 to a play addressing the theme of homosexuality. Mordaunt Shairp’s The Green Bay Tree featured as a central character ‘a screaming and thoroughly nasty creature who “corrupts” a young Welsh boy he has adopted. Even though he gets his just deserts and is murdered at the end, the critics were in uproar.’ 22 Under headings such as ‘Plays that ought to be burnt’, ‘Play of the abnormal. Repulsive topic …’ the critic J.C. wrote ‘the whole thing must be repugnant to the normal individual, and therefore I can only deplore the presentation of this play’, although another critic conceded the playwright’s skill but could only ‘commend his play to all who do not find his theme irreparably distasteful’. In the light of the punitive Labouchère amendment, better therefore for a shy gay man like <strong>Vaughan</strong> to remain closeted, unless one enjoyed a level of fame and recognition like that of the Beaton set, or the level of acclaim bestowed on intellectuals of the Auden set. Such was <strong>Vaughan</strong>’s dissatisfaction with his twenties that he dismissed them as merely ‘years of dilettantism, piano playing, writing, ballet, reading. There was no system, no real progress.’ 23 In spite of this, he evidently continued to read widely, including French and German in the original, as well as other foreign authors in translation. Vann mentions Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Proust, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. 24 Touchingly, in the midst of the darkest year of the war, 1941, among sketches of human suffering and scenes recording bomb destruction, <strong>Vaughan</strong> inscribed lines in German from Rilke’s ‘Duineser Elegien’: ‘Nirgends, Geliebte, wird Welt sein, als innen’, ‘Eines ist die Geliebte zu singen. Ein anderes, wehe’, ‘Gib ihm die Nächte Übergewicht – verhalt ihn’, and ‘Die Szenerie war Abschied. Leicht zu verstehen’. 25 These masterpieces of twentieth-century poetry are acknowledged to be difficult fully to fathom, even in the original German, and virtually impossible to do justice to in translation. <strong>Vaughan</strong>’s discerning choice of lines hint at love, longing and loss, pain and suffering, and the shrouding weight of night. 14
Bather and biplane [P14] printed on postcard paper 8.7 x 13.8 cm Bather fastening sandal [P16] printed on postcard paper 8.7 x 13.8 cm A male figure in silhouette holding wet cloth [P15] printed on postcard paper, with pencil marking 8.7 x 13.8 cm Young man at water’s edge [P17] printed on postcard paper 8.7 x 13.8 cm 15
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