Free Too Close to the Sun by Sara Wheeler

to my taste, I thought it silly to exert myself about it just because it happened to be to the taste of others.” A report of Denys’s football skills in the Eton magazine confirms the point, as well as inadvertently catching his character: “The Hon. Finch Hatton, when not charged, is apt to be careless…. When charged, he rises to the occasion and is very hard to getpast.”
    Building on his Eton career as a romantic anarchist, Denys moved out of college toward the end of his first year. He had worked out that it would be easier to circumnavigate the rules governing hours, guests, and entertaining if he did not have to get past the porter in his gatehouse cubbyhole. Inquiries and emollients secured ample lodgings at 117 High Street, a terraced house directly behind Brasenose that was supervised by an unscrupulous landlord by the name of Goodall. Denys filled the bedrooms with friends and, as house scout, installed the aged Feltham, a servant he and Toby had taken over from their father. (Employed as Lord Winchilsea’s butler, Feltham had been sacked after leading a shooting party to the wrong place.) A diligent, if unusual, scout, Feltham was the object of mirth at No. 117, and Philip Sassoon once referred to him with intriguing obscurity as “a tiara of hair and a mixture of Dr Nikola and Sherlock Holmes.” (Dr. Nikola was a popular fictional archvillain.) During all-night gambling sessions, Feltham was on hand with supplies of champagne, caviar, and pâté de foie gras sandwiches, and on Sunday mornings he cleared up the debris while the young men slept it off, oblivious to the bells of St. Mary’s and the dumpy horse omnibuses clattering down the High. Denys’s circle of friends extended far beyond the “gown” sector of Oxford, and the house and its tuneless piano soon became famous for well-oiled gambling sessions. John Langley was a regular guest. A bookmaker and the mayor of the neighboring town of Marlow, Langley was popular with sporting undergraduates, as he allowed them to settle debts with non-cash payments such as fur coats. Denys, who was often short of cash, frequently availed himself of this service. The provenance of the furs remains unknown.
    When Denys grew bored with gambling, he went off to the college chapel alone to play the organ, and when he grew bored with that he went roof climbing, an urban substitute for mountaineering. Under cover of darkness, he maneuvered his long feet around corner tiles to find an accommodating waterspout; glissaded down the pillars of the Ashmolean; and conquered the north face of Trinity clock, commemorating the achievement by setting the hands to a new time. He was invited to join the Phoenix, a Brasenose dining club founded in the 1780s (and credited now as the oldest Oxford dining club still in existence). Eight times a year, twelve Phoenix men and their guests quaffed vintage Pol Roger and expressed their joy by hurling crockery down the stairs. *7 But despite the reckless buccaneering, like Ronnie Knox, Denys felt that “Oxford was always a very poor second best” to Eton. He kept up with school friends spread throughout the university, crossing the cobbled courtyard of the Bodleian to Balliol staircases unchanged since his father’s day to catch Julian Grenfell striding out with his black greyhound, Slogbottom. He dined with Ronnie Knox, and made fun of Charles Lister, who still had his shoulder to the socialist wheel, organizing an Anti-Sweating Exhibition to publicize the plight of industrial workers and marshaling the female staff of the university’s Clarendon Press in a strike. Denys was bored by party politics. He had a naturally speculative mind, but it ran free, yoked only to the wings of imagination, and it could not be trammeled within the cage of theory. In preference to a night of debate at the Union, he went out drinking and fighting. “The only time I saw him rouse himself and that cynical smile leave his remarkably handsome face,”