Peter Fleming's Pathology

The funniest, and by some way most characteristic, story about Peter Fleming (1907–71) has our man turning up at the Garrick Club in central London sometime in the 1950s clad in full evening dress: white tie, tailcoat, and row of miniature medals. What was he doing togged up like that, an acquaintance duly inquired. “Got to help a friend give a hot meal to the Queen,” the middle-aged exquisite calmly returned. In strict demographic terms, Fleming was an extreme version of a very common type of mid-twentieth-century upper-class Englishman, the type who takes one of the behavioral stanchions of his caste—in this case personal reserve—and converts it into a kind of supercharged variant of the original. To his membership of every top-grade national institution worth the name—Eton; Christ Church, Oxford; the Brigade of Guards; the Country Landowner’s Association—could be added a taciturnity so paralyzing that even similarly buttoned-up convives reeled despairingly in its wake.