Free Too Close to the Sun by Sara Wheeler Page B

Asquiths, and Desboroughs. The asthmatic Parsons was an intimate member of this group, but he was poor (he was the son of a Surrey vicar), and when he began to court Viola her parents made their disapproval clear. When the pair became secretly engaged in 1908, Denys promised to be Alan’s best man. But he was more interested in Iris.
    Born the same year as Denys, Iris was a dogged bohemian; according to her biographer, “romance was the star she followed until the end of her days.” *8 With red-gold hair and freckles, she described herself, not unreasonably, as
jolie-laide.
She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and in 1913 was one of the first girls in England to appear with bobbed hair after snipping off her long plait on a train and leaving it on the seat. Voluptuous and outré, she puffed at a cigarette in a long holder, wore clunky amber and turquoise beads, and walked with a swagger. Epstein sculpted her, helmet-haired, and she wore dresses designed by members of the Bloomsbury group—Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell even wrote asking her to be photographed in one of their garments. Iris stood out for her reluctance to conform, like Isadora Duncan and the sculptress Kathleen Bruce. She was not especially intelligent or talented. She wrote bad poetry and later tried acting (she appeared as herself in Fellini’s
La Dolce Vita,
reading verse). But she inspired enthusiasm. Iris had been invited to house parties at the Plas, and once Viola became close to Alan, Denys saw more of her. He preferred bohemian women to society beauties. She, according to one of her sons, “was a romantic, and from what I now know about Denys Finch Hatton I can imagine how easily his personality would have fitted her concept of a hero in that epoch.” On warm June nights, he took the train to London and escorted Iris to the opera, where they heard Caruso from the back of the gods for five shillings, and afterward drank coffee behind the louche custard-yellow blinds of the Eiffel Tower on Soho’s Percy Street.
    “Denys has taken a season ticket to London and spends all the time on the train,” Julian Grenfell reported to his mother in 1908. He was already finding the schoolboyish custodial regulations of Oxford too restrictive. Undergraduates were required to be at their billet before midnight, a rule that applied whether they lived in college or in digs. (The last train to arrive in Oxford from London in time to reach one’s room by the deadline was known as the Flying Fornicator.) The punishment for a tardy return was a gating, a period of confinement within college grounds. It was a landlord’s duty to submit a daily time sheet of his tenants’ hours to their respective colleges. After a short round of negotiations, Goodall, the landlord at No. 117, agreed to falsify reports in return for a rent supplement of fifteen shillings a week “for matches.” Denys was therefore able to return from the capital on the last train, known as the Post-Fornicator. Meanwhile, on Saturdays he and Iris went to Belvoir Castle, the ancestral home of the Duke of Rutland, for house parties at which a gong-beater with a waist-length white beard called guests to dinner along corridors still lit by candles, as both electricity and gas were considered vulgar (along with oranges and bananas, and oblong envelopes). Denys found it easy to seduce. He was not promiscuous, leaving instead, in many hearts, the tender pain of unfulfilled possibilities. His temperament was a devastating combination of the poetic and the classically masculine. “With his grand physique and his slow crooked smile, Denys was enormously attractive to women,” Bertie Cranworth observed. “Indeed, nature had presented him with more gifts than were the fair share of one man.” At about this time, however, Denys developed a fixation about the one physical characteristic that pierced his self-confidence: he had gone almost completely bald. His scalp had never recovered from an