He was world-weary from the beginning. Nowhere was safe. Before he was 25 he declared New York to be a 'giant snake pit', Los Angeles to be 'quel hole'. Naples was 'crooked', London 'a dreary place'. Even Paris, 'a divine city', could be 'colder than a nun's cunt'. Once he had passed the quarter century he hit on Rome: 'a beautiful city, really - though inhabited by a quarrelsome and cynical race'. From Taormina in Sicily, where he was renting the house in which D.H. Lawrence had lived, he wrote to a friend: 'Italians are just niggers at heart.' Portofino, where he spent the summer of 1953 with his boyfriend, Jack Dunphy, was no better:

Everything became too social - and I do mean social - the Windsors (morons), the Luces (morons plus), Garbo (looking like death with a suntan), the Oliviers (they let her out), Daisy Fellowes (her face lifted for the fourth time - the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez's yacht . . . Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward - he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All.

LRB 21 April 2005 | PDF Download