Columbia Library columns (v.26(1976Nov-1977May))

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  v.26,no.2(1977:Feb): Page 4  



4                                Miriam. J. Benkovitz

the notebooks show that the novel as first conceived was indeed
dangerous, that Grant Richards had cause for alarm. His failure
to protest sooner is astonishing. In both the proofs and the note¬
books, Evan Morgan is presented not as Eddie Monteith but un¬
mistakably as Heaven Organ.

The Honourable Evan Alorgan, seven years younger than
Ronald Firbank, was the only child of the third Lord Tredegar
of Tredegar Park, Newport, Monmouthshire, and of Lady
Katherine Agnes Blanche Carnegie, daughter of the ninth earl of
Sotithesk. Evan and his mother were devoted to each other, bound
perhaps by their mutual feeling for wild creatures. Every spring,
according to report. Lady Tredegar wisely built herself a nest,
and her son, when he was at Tredegar Park, enjoyed a few rounds
with the gloves against his own kangaroo. Evan "was not only a
boxer but also a painter, a poet, a journalist, and according to
Nancy Cunard, a "fantasy who could be most charming and most
bitchy." When not at Tredegar Park in Wales, Morgan was
usually in London, and there he was often at a restaurant called
The Eiffel Tower.

The Fiffel Tower, situated in Percy Street, Soho, was a meet¬
ing place well before 1914 for London's most brilliant, most inde¬
pendent young people. Nightly there came the "Corrupt Coterie,"
which consisted of Diana Manners and her sisters, Julian and Billy
Grenfell, Lord Ribblcsdale's daughters, the Tennants, the Trees,
Katherine Horner, Edward Horner, Raymond Asquith, Ego and
Ivo Charteris and others, joined by Phyllis Boyd, Nancy Cunard,
Alan Parsons, Duff Cooper, and Evan Morgan. Additional regu¬
lars included Augustus John, Walter Sickert, Jacob Epstein,
Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Delius, Nina Hamnett, Igor Stravin¬
sky (when he was in London), Cecil Gray and Philip Heseltine.

Ronald Firbank also frequented the Eiffel Tower, but irregu¬
larly. He was the grandson of Joseph Firbank, who owned an
estate at Newport as Tredegar did, but Joseph Firbank had ac¬
quired his by beginning work at the age of seven in the coal mines
  v.26,no.2(1977:Feb): Page 4