Farewell to clubland

Palermo

In the disheartening post a friend has brought to the tranquillity of Sicily from the wilds of London I see that my name has been placed on the Front Morning Room mantelpiece, in accordance with Rule 15 of our Club, as my annual subscription has not been settled. Yet paying it would mean remaining in the Club.

When I first asked to become a member of Brooks’s, I did so at the insistence of my wife, who had given me to understand that joining an historic St James’s club and obtaining British citizenship were the displays of enterprise and fidelity she would require of a slothful and errant husband. My wife, whom I would leave for a woman whose romanticism hinged upon a less onerous requisite, that of money, was an American heiress; in her dreamy eyes, a gentlemen’s club, circumfused with loyalty to the sovereign, was a beautiful gated garden wherein, vicariously through marriage, she could find refuge from the levelling effects of democracy; or at least of that peculiar form of democracy against which Mill had cautioned in the essay ‘On Liberty’ and with which the United States had been plying electorates since the last world war.