How to Disappear

by Duncan Fallowell

  It was the Graham household at Barford which supplied the perfect reductionist model of country-house style. The house itself wasn’t huge but it had all the right things. Alastair himself wasn’t one of the landed Etonians and, like Waugh, he’d gone to a Victorian school; yet he was a good-looking and dissolute member of the gentry class, which gave him the allure of decadence. Most important of all, there was no father in the household to make Waugh uneasy and put him on his mettle. So at Barford he could enjoy his upper-class fantasy without being threatened. During the period of humiliation as a schoolmaster, it was also his escape, enabling him to preserve caste in his own eyes. And the whole affair with Alastair confirmed which direction Waugh would take when he emerged from his shell and became his own man: it would be provincial county, not Harold Acton cosmopolitan. Graham was never much interested in London, but nor was he interested in traditional country pursuits. For him the countryside was a refuge, as Waugh hoped it would be for him too. In this Graham was the more successful. Waugh never found a refuge anywhere.

  By the 1930s Waugh was ready to graduate to the much larger Madresfield Court where again there was no paterfamilias to intimidate the atmosphere. Lord Beau-champ, father of the seven Lygon children, was forced into exile in Italy in 1931 by his brother-in-law the Duke of Westminster, the philistine ‘Bendor’. The Duke’s personality was an odd mixture of prudery and passion (his mistress for many years was Coco Chanel and Simon Blow tells me that he gave Coco what a private note calls ‘a sexual illness’: the Duke was too embarrassed to deal with it and asked Detmar Blow to go and pacify her). This mixture came fully into play when he discovered that his brother-in-law Beauchamp enjoyed sleeping with his own sex, especially with footmen. This was not an uncommon practice but Bendor was a bully too. Prised away by the Duke threatening to expose her husband, Lady Beauchamp fled to the protection of her brother, leaving Madresfield in the hands of her offspring. It was this state of affairs which enabled Waugh to move in on them. While staying in Mal-vern he made contact and complained that he had nowhere to go for Christmas, which got him invited to Madresfield Court, a house he’d never before seen. Waugh preferred classical architecture but Madresfield’s array of turrets and battlements would do. He later said that the place looked like an orphanage – which in a way it was.

  Hugh Lygon, Lord Beauchamp’s younger son, is sometimes touted as the model for Sebastian Flyte but there are only technical similarities. Waugh wasn’t particularly close to him at Oxford and was not among those invited to Hugh’s 21 st birthday party. Hugh lacked Graham’s louche magnetism; he seems to have been a bore and a drip who’d never inspire anyone to anything, let alone fire an artist’s imagination. Waugh was never in love with him and neither was anyone else. Not that Hugh cared either way. When he fell over drunk in 1936, and hit his head and died, Waugh was in Abyssinia and heard about it from his parents in North London when he got back – they’d read it in the newspapers. Any subsequent claim of intimate friendship between the two men appears to be a projection backwards. Like Proust, Waugh created in his writings a milieu which was then superimposed on the real world of the past. What had in actuality been a number of scattered events, in which Waugh – and Proust – had often been marginal observers, became transformed in retrospect into a biographical drama of intense and conscious relationships. The various real-life characters were delighted to be co-opted into this mythologised pantheon – even dukes have to endure countless nothing days – and the authors gratifyingly transformed themselves into centres of the social universe.

  In practice Waugh was far more interested in the lively Lygon sisters whom he now met for the first time and often visited until his second marriage a few years later – and he was never in love with any of them either. The set-up supplied Evelyn not only with friends but also with useful background. From 1931 on, his letters – and presumably his conversation – were full of casual remarks about estate maps, gun rooms and green baize doors, designed to convince the recipient of how thoroughly to the manor born he was (although he never deceived himself; one of the attractive aspects of Waugh is his ability to recognise his own pretentiousness at critical moments). Gentrification was not completed until 1937 when he married Laura Herbert in front of a very respectable guest list, bought Piers Court, and was granted a coat of arms. From 1937 can also be dated a rapid hardening of the exterior personality and a deepening of his unhappiness.

  Waugh was a very physical man. His writing conveys an act of incision and sculptural pleasure. Probably he copulated with the same self-abusive gusto as he ate and drank. Before he’d finished with it he’d fathered six children. But clearly he was bisexual by temperament and loved to ‘camp’ – how those vivid check suits exploded off him! In the film The Scarlet Woman, made immediately after Oxford with several cronies from the Hypocrites Club, Waugh chose for himself the part of Sligger Urquhart, the homosexual Dean of Balliol, and then indulged in outrageously effeminate posturings on the screen, mincing about, sitting on boys’ knees, hugging them, stroking their hair. To see this film to-day is to see a creature of almost Nijinskian levity, thoroughly uninhibited in his portrayal of pagan pleasures.

  Eight years after his second marriage, Waugh’s love for Alastair Graham would burst out afresh in the form of an intense nostalgia and he would make Alastair the hero/anti-hero not of his best novel but of the one closest to his private dreams. Brideshead Revisited lost intensity in its second half and I was going to suggest that it was because Sebastian leaves the scene to be replaced by his rather bloodless sister Julia. That may be true, but loss of focus and vitality in the second half is a feature of every one of Waugh’s novels except Pinfold (which is very short) and Put Out More Flags (for me his best book, with his earlier ‘comic’ and later ‘serious’ manner in ideal balance; also amazingly detached in the circumstances).

  Not only does homosexual emotion resurface in Brides-head, the ‘camp’ does too. The monologues of Anthony Blanche are one of the book’s star features. Wholly convincing as the outrageous prattle of a cultivated queen, they are extended way beyond their narrative functions because, quite simply, Waugh is having such a gorgeous time with them. But Waugh does something more profound with Blanche which it is possible to miss since it is disguised by comedy. He makes him the artistic conscience of the novel. At the end when the narrator, now a painter, is enjoying a successful show of his new work, Blanche unexpectedly turns up from abroad and exposes the pictures for what they are, ‘t-t-terrible t-t-tripe’, the watery products of that English fear of causing offence. This is, as it were, Harold Acton flying in from the world of Picasso, Stravinsky and Diaghilev. So when it came to the crunch Waugh did not, in this novel at least, betray the values and demands of art in the interests of social acceptability – unlike, paradoxically, Harold Acton himself.

  That was in art. In Waugh’s life it was different. Ambivalence terrified him as though it were quicksand. The ruthless suppression of complex aspects of his character must have contributed to his general distemper and thereby to his addiction to drink and pills and to his bromide-induced nervous breakdown. In post-1937 conversation and letters he now refers to homosexuals as ‘buggers’, the straight-hearty name for them in those days, ostentatiously crushing out all tenderness from the subject. But he can’t deceive himself entirely. In The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold one of the first things the voices do is accuse Pinfold of being ‘queer’. He goes into greater definition – not ‘nancy’ or ‘pouf but ‘butch’. In his physical relationship with Graham, Waugh had seemingly been the more active partner.

  In 1977 the New Statesman published a letter in which an American, Telford Gosling Spratt, announced that he was researching a book to be called Evelyn Waugh: The Gay Years and appealing for reminiscences. Nothing came of it and the title was hilarious, reminiscent of a Fred Astaire film. But it’s definitely a topic. John Betjeman once exclaimed on the radio ‘Oh, we were all queer then!’ Waugh could never have been that carefree. The
later rejection of so much of himself- of that generosity of spirit and enlarged capacity for life represented by his bisexuality – and his recourse to caricatured forms of religion and of social image, were disastrous. Existence became for him ever more loathsome, his days ever more alcoholic and miserable. Which would not be so objectionable had this state of affairs been of benefit to his art. But alas it was disastrous for that too. The books go terribly down hill. Whole tracts of them become nothing more than posey propaganda. The lightness went out of his work because it went out of his life.

  The syndrome is not unique. The arc of the playwright John Osborne’s life presents an unlikely parallel. An important attachment to another male early on, followed by professional success turning into drunken dandification, and to belligerent homophobic squirehood in the fourth phase. Both Osborne and Waugh presented a ludicrous spectacle in their last years, as if the ‘camp’ had to find an outlet somewhere and did so in theatrical plumage. Since both were astute observers of the human scene they must have recognised their absurdity and in part relished it. Which makes it ‘ambivalence’ or ‘love-hate’ by another route. To parody with such gross indecorum the squire role they had adopted was a form of offence against it, and what began as an awareness of the comedy of life became with the passing years a Dionysiac orgy of enraged mockery and despair. Both Osborne and Waugh had gay chums to the very end. Osborne incidentally was another one I missed; out of the blue he proposed a rendezvous with me at the Cadogan Hotel in Sloane Street, where Oscar Wilde was arrested, but I was in the South of France and couldn’t make it. And Alastair Graham? From the range of photographs to hand one can see that he was never sartorially excessive in this way. Though usually smart, to the point of dapper, he was also – socially – the real thing: a reserved upper-class man.

  What you are reading is a story of shame and hiding. If most of the hiding was Graham’s, most of the shame was Waugh’s. Waugh of course became an international celebrity, whereas Graham’s life, subsequent to their relationship, entered a fog of obscurity and strangeness.

  The years from 1934 to 1937 are particularly crucial to Graham. Up to that time he had travelled extensively in the Mediterranean. After it, he is a recluse. Why?

  Giving up work, the loss of his gorgon-protectress mother, the desire to evade the ghosts of the past, these factors no doubt played their part. But could there have been a more urgent trigger? In 1936 (as I am to learn) he was staying with Clough Williams-Ellis at Portmeirion and heard that the Wern was for sale much further down the coast. That same year he bought it from a Major Evans and moved there in 1937. Living in the lodge were a gardener and his thirteen-year-old daughter Lottie and they stayed on. I decided to revisit New Quay.

  I saw Lottie Evans, Graham’s housekeeper, again in March 1990, this time in her council house on the edge of New Quay. She had retired.

  ‘Can you remember Mr Graham’s arrival at the Wern?’

  ‘Oh yes. He came with Mrs Cooke the housekeeper and George Wood the butler who’d both been with his mother at Barford. Mrs Cooke had been in his family’s service since Mr Graham was three years old and she trained me as a maid. Mr Graham did up the Wern beautifully. It’s full of knick-knacks now, but when he had it, it was full of big oil paintings.’

  Other local people were also more willing to fill in the gaps. The outbreak of the Second World War forced Graham to participate far more in local life and he developed several robust tastes: beer, sailing, fishing at sea. He went on a boat for the relief of Dunkirk, he joined the Royal Observer Corps, was for a time liaison officer with the US Navy, and also acquired a yacht, the Osprey.

  Dylan Thomas was living in New Quay during the war and Graham didn’t have a very high opinion of him and told a local reporter, Lyn Ebenezer, in 1978 (uncharitably given that it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Thomas’s death) that Dylan ‘was quite boring in company, at least that’s how I always found him, and he was forever begging for money.’

  In 1945, as local press cuttings reveal, Graham had been involved in a shooting incident at Majoda, the bungalow occupied by Thomas and his wife Caitlin. They’d all been drinking at the Black Lion pub with a Captain Richard Killick who’d served in Greece. The man was married to a childhood friend of Dylan’s called Vera and he became convinced that the poet had seduced his wife and had a threesome with Caitlin (which would have been in keeping). The party returned to Majoda and some time later the Captain followed, arrived outside and started firing at them through the keyhole. Then he burst in with a Sten gun and strafed the ceiling with bullets, shouting ‘You’re nothing but a bunch of egotists!’.

  Graham told Richard Jones, whom he met in the early 1950 s at an annual dinner of the New Quay Yacht Club, that Killick had thrown a hand grenade into Thomas’s bungalow and that, fearful for the Thomas children asleep in the next room, Graham covered it with a cushion and gallantly sat upon it. But Killick wasn’t that mad – later it was discovered he’d defused the grenade before tossing it in. Graham reportedly said that ‘By speaking to the Captain and discussing the current situation in Greece, I managed either to make him interested or bored him sufficiently for him to calm down. He agreed to accompany me to his house, Ffynnon Feddyg, which was next door.’

  When the case came up at Lampeter in midsummer, the Captain faced four charges, including one of attempting to murder Dylan Thomas. Graham, who was a witness for the prosecution, received a phonecall from his friend David Talbot Rice who by coincidence was the Captain’s commanding officer and appearing for the defence.

  Graham concluded ‘We were all, including Dylan, very glad when the Captain was cleared by the jury. He was a gentleman, and I’m certain that it was the drink, and the fact that his war experiences had affected his nerves that made him act as he did.’

  When Lyn Ebenezer asked Graham how he’d got to know the Dylan Thomases, he replied ‘Through Augustus John who at the time was painting the portrait of a woman in Aberaeron. He called one night with Caitlin. They had one of the Thomas children with them who was placed in my bed while the rest of us had a few drinks. Suddenly Caitlin, who was an acknowledged dancer, stripped off and danced naked on the table. And when I fetched her child, the child had wet my bed.’

  After the war, Graham’s secretiveness and distaste for life beyond New Quay grew stronger. Dylan Thomas called him ‘the thin-vowelled laird’ in a letter to Margaret Taylor and used him as the model for Lord Cut-Glass in Under Milk Wood of 1954. ‘Lord Cut-Glass lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping’.

  In 1958 Graham decided to sell Wern Newydd. Money was getting tight. Mrs Cooke had died and so had the butler George Wood. Servants of their calibre would never exist again. He had tried to find some, advertising for live-in help, recalled Lottie Evans. A couple arrived from Swansea, stayed two nights and left, vexed by Graham’s exacting standards – and the fact that the Wern still had no electricity or mains water. Inside it the atmosphere must have been pure Regency.

  ‘Except,’ said Lottie, ‘an enormous paraffin burner in the kitchen! I told him I couldn’t carry on working up there and doing it all. He had a big sale with a marquee on the lawn. But even though he sold so much, Rock Street was full of papers and books and furniture.’

  ‘But why did he hide away here?’

  Always the same question.

  ‘Oh…I don’t want to go into all that. Ask them up at the Wern. Have you been up to the Wern yet?’

  No. And it was time that I did.

  The Thomas family, no relations of the poet, purchased Wern Newydd from Alastair Graham and they kindly invited me over for a drink. In the nine years since I’d driven past it and been so taken by its lovely location, the surroundings had altered completely. A garish petrol station had been installed opposite, a holiday camp put up next door, and the Wern itself developed as a commercial riding stable. But I’d never been inside, and when
I did it silenced me. It’s a wonderful, romantic old place.

  The present structure is mostly seventeenth century with parts dating back to the thirteenth. There is much panelling and a wide wooden staircase with shallow tread and barley sugar banisters. Henry Tudor, subsequently Henry VII, stayed here for a night in 1485 on his way to the Battle of Bosworth.

  Mrs Thomas said ‘When we took over, the grounds were in a terrible state. Alastair Graham couldn’t have had anything done for years. So overgrown was it, that we didn’t realise there was a stream running through the garden. But the house was beautiful inside. We found a number of his old books thrown out in the rain with the rubbish. What was so odd was that they were very personal books, the sort you’d think he’d want to hold on to.’

  The Thomases retrieved them and put them back in the library where they currently reside, and they include Graham’s mother’s Prayer Book (Alistair has viciously scraped her bookplate out of it); a Book of Ballads inscribed to Alastair’s father by his tutor at Eton; and two further Prayer Books both inscribed ‘Alastair Graham from Mother, First Communion May 13th 1918’. Since Alastair’s father did not die until 1921 it is curious that the inscriptions are only from the mother – and so very cold. Forty years later the son threw them into the bin. They meant nothing. Or too much, and he wanted to leave all that behind. Either way, he’d obviously ditched the roaring Catholicism mentioned by Claud Cockburn.

  ‘We also found a bill,’ said Dr Thomas (who is a ship’s surgeon). ‘When Graham first came to the Wern he devoted most of his energy to doing it up. The bill says he spent £5,000 on renovations which was an enormous sum before the Second World War – and it can’t have been the only bill. He was famous for his parties, in the earlier period anyway. Caitlin Thomas danced naked on the dining-table [again!]. Viscount Tredegar was a good friend. Tom Herbert, the local vet, was a close friend of Alastair’s, and he told us that Edward VIII visited Graham at the Wern incognito.’