When I interviewed Brian Sewell, Britain's most famous and famously tetchy art critic, in 2005, I asked if he would ever write his memoirs. "I think about it," he said. What was stopping him? "I don't have George Melly's vanity," he replied, in that improbably delicate voice of his (he sounds, as I duly noted, like a dowager duchess carefully recalling a large turd she was once mistakenly served during tea at Claridge's). But there was also, he told me, the "problem" of Anthony Blunt, his former tutor at the Courtauld Institute. Sewell has always denied that he and Blunt were lovers, but it was he who spirited Blunt away from the press in 1979 after his exposure as the "fourth man" in the Burgess-Maclean spy scandal. "No, I do not want to revisit Blunt," he said. His eyes then momentarily filled with tears.
Six years on and Sewell has finally published his memoirs, neatly skirting the issue of Blunt by ending them in 1967, just as the author leaves Christie's, where he worked in the picture department. Will there be a second volume? We must hope so.
Outsider is a delicious read and the few glimpses of Blunt it does afford are tantalising: his involvement with the forger extraordinaire, Eric Hebborn; his deep upset on first seeing the "great and unprecedented" Poussin exhibition at the Louvre ("I was wrong," he muttered over and over). In May 1951, Sewell was leaving the Courtauld at the same moment as a man he'd often seen exiting Blunt's chill quarters in the attic. The two fell into step and the man, who had egg on his tie, suggested a drink. A day or two later, the man invited him to dinner and then on to his club, a cellar dive where Sewell – hard to imagine, this – danced with him. In the end, blenching at his bad breath, Sewell fled. Days later, so did the man – to Moscow – for he was Guy Burgess. "There cannot," writes Sewell, "have been a student who had not seen him in the Institute; there was not a student who did not suppose the Director [Blunt] to have been in some way involved in his flight with Donald Maclean. Yet none of us was dismayed, appalled or outraged at the thought – we simply took it in our strides."
Sewell was born in 1931, the illegitimate son of Jessica, a sometime painter who knew Walter Sickert, Paul Nash and William Coldstream, to whom she sent the artistic Brian for tuition. Adamantly refusing to divulge his father's name, she led a ramshackle existence in the shabbier parts of London and Whitstable, Kent, until, when Brian was 11, she suddenly married. How did they get by? Sewell acknowledges that she received financial help from relatives, but he also asserts that she "may have been something of a prostitute", even if his only evidence for this is the fact that she often went out late at night having first drugged little Brian with cherry brandy. As for his father, Sewell was in his 50s before he found out he was the son of the composer Peter Warlock, who gassed himself seven months before his son's birth. What did this discovery mean to him? Very little. Unlike Warlock, Sewell apparently has no interest in flagellation.
There is something self-dramatising, almost histrionic, about Sewell's accounts both of his parents and of his stepfather, Robert Sewell, a good man whose goodness the young Brian failed to recognise (though his marriage to Jessica turned out to have been bigamous). Once our hero leaves home, though, his tone grows cooler, more clear-eyed. He enrols at the Courtauld, then to be found at Home House in Portman Square, a Robert Adam building so beautiful "that chaining my bicycle to its railings seemed an act of worship", but his studies are soon interrupted by national service.
Readers may be surprised to hear that Sewell regards his time in the army as his most important educational experience and thinks of it fondly still, for all that he was the victim of a "shrewdly calculated rape" by a burly corporal. (Keen to receive his commission, he kept quiet. "And what had I lost? – not my virginity.") He learned to shoot and ride a motorbike and acquired the habits of neatness and economy. It was infinitely preferable to dancing lessons.
Back at the Courtauld, Sewell confesses to Blunt his doubts about his intention to become a priest (yes, really). Blunt tells him he should do a PhD, but no one seems terribly keen on his plan to write on the then wildly unfashionable Lawrence Alma-Tadema, so he joins Christie's instead.
Thus begins the most fascinating section of the book, taking the reader swiftly back to a time when the art world was altogether dustier than now. Christie's, as Sewell describes it, was a den of amateurism and low-level corruption, its profits feeble enough to dictate that one's Christmas bonus consisted of a turkey. One member of staff was so culturally illiterate that he described a 17th-century Dutch panel not as Christ with the pilgrims on the road to Emmaus, but as "three men going for a walk in a wood".
Sewell was frustrated at every turn. When, for instance, he told his masters that he wanted to treat the clearance of John Minton's studio – the artist killed himself in 1957 – with all due respect, their response was that Christie's "did not sell contemporary art". The ensuing sale was hurried, no decent catalogue prepared, and Minton slipped into three decades of obscurity.
In the end, though, it was a different kind of shabbiness that led to Sewell's departure from the auction house: it was made clear that as a gay man he would never be a partner. Ah, yes. Let me now correct the mistake I made when I wrote, in 2005, that Sewell lost his virginity aged 20 to a 60-year-old woman whose butterfly-wing spectacles got caught in his pubic hair. Outsider reveals this to be an untruth. Sewell had lots of sex with boys at public school. There then followed a period of determined chastity until, in 1959, he asked God for a "sign". No sign being forthcoming, he stopped going to mass and embarked on an epic sex spree – though his visual sense being what it was, some men defeated him at the last (eg the "butch little toughie" who turned out to be wearing a woman's scarlet underclothes).
Why such disinhibition now? Sewell insists that he abandoned discretion in the hope his book will reassure young men that "it is not quite the end of the world to be... queer". But I don't buy this; my hunch is that he merely wants a reaction. However, even if my eyes hadn't popped at all the salacious details, I wouldn't say so here. I want more – much more – and he is one of those writers for whom there is no more effective spur than the thought of a reader's merrily swinging jaw.
