by Philip Eade
EVELYN
WAUGH
A Life Revisited
PHILIP EADE
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY NEW YORK
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Table of Contents
Photos
About the Author
Copyright Page
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For Rita
List of Illustrations
All photographs are courtesy of Alexander Waugh unless otherwise stated. While every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders, the publishers would be pleased to rectify at the earliest opportunity any errors or omissions brought to their attention.
FIRST PLATE SECTION
The Waughs, 1890
The Brute out shooting, c. 1890
Midsomer Norton
The Rabans, c. 1892
Kate and Arthur Waugh with their bicycles (Boston University)
Posing after their engagement
Alec, Arthur and Evelyn, c. 1906
Evelyn with his nanny at 11 Hillfield Road
Kate, Arthur, Evelyn, Alec and poodle at Midsomer Norton, 1904
Alec, Kate and Arthur in the garden at Underhill, 1909
The Pistol Troop, c. 1910
Evelyn, aged eight
Evelyn and Cecil Beaton at Heath Mount
Alec, Evelyn, Kate and poodle, 1912
Lancing school photograph (Lancing College)
Evelyn at Lancing, 1921
At Oxford, 1923
As a teacher at Aston Clinton, 1926
Richard Pares in the Alps with Cyril Connolly (Deirdre Levi)
Alastair Graham (Duncan Fallowell)
Alastair Graham nude (The Waugh Estate and the British Library)
On Lundy Island, Easter 1925 (Private collection)
Olivia Plunket Greene, Patrick Balfour, David Plunket Greene and Matthew Ponsonby (Private collection)
Evelyn on his motor-bicycle at Aston Clinton, February 1926
SECOND PLATE SECTION
The Evelyns at Barford, May 1928
Two photographs of 17a Canonbury Square
Portrait of Evelyn Waugh by Henry Lamb, 1930 (The Estate of Henry Lamb and Bridgeman Images)
Shevelyn at the Guinnesses’ 1860 costume party (Duncan McLaren, www.evelynwaugh.org.uk)
The Evelyns at a ‘Tropical’ fancy-dress party (Illustrated London News Ltd and Mary Evans)
Bryan and Diana Guinness on honeymoon, 1929 (Illustrated London News Ltd and Mary Evans)
House party at Pakenham Hall, 1930 (Thomas Pakenham)
Evelyn in Kenya, 1931
With Rupert and Nancy Mitford and Pansy Lamb at Pool Place, 1930 (Private collection)
With Alec at Villefranche, 1931
Teresa ‘Baby’ Jungman (Private collection)
The Jungman sisters posing as the Gemini sign of zodiac (Illustrated London News Ltd and Mary Evans)
Eileen Agar (Private collection)
Audrey Lucas (Duncan McLaren, www.evelynwaugh.org.uk)
Joyce Fagan
Hazel Lavery (Yevonde Portrait Archive, Illustrated London News Ltd and Mary Evans)
Pixie Marix (Private collection)
Evelyn with Sybil Colefax, Phyllis de Janze and Oliver Messel, 1931 (The Cecil Beaton Studio at Sotheby’s)
Alec Waugh and Joan Chirnside after their engagement, 1932
Evelyn, Hamish St Clair Erskine, Coote Lygon and Hubert Duggan at Madresfield, early 1930s (Private collection)
Evelyn between Lady Mary and Lady Dorothy Lygon (Private collection)
At Captain Hance’s riding academy (Private collection)
Madresfield (Historic England and Bridgeman Images)
Evelyn with Arthur after winning the Hawthornden Prize, 1936
With Penelope Betjeman and her horse at Faringdon House (Private collection)
THIRD PLATE SECTION
Laura Waugh, late 1930s
Pixton Park
Laura and Evelyn’s wedding, 1936
Piers Court
Three photographs at Piers Court
Evelyn in military uniform, 1940
Bob Laycock, photographed by Yousuf Karsh (Camera Press and Martha Mlinaric)
Evelyn with Randolph Churchill in Croatia
Anna May Wong, Evelyn, Sir Charles Mendl and Laura
Waugh family and staff, late 1940s
Evelyn and Laura returning to Plymouth in the Île de France
Evelyn in his study (Mark Gerson and Bridgeman Images)
With his family and two Italian servants, 1959 (Mark Gerson and National Portrait Gallery, London)
At the entrance of Combe Florey (Camera Press and Mark Gerson)
With James, Laura and gardener With Margaret in the Caribbean
At Margaret’s wedding, 1962
Interviewed by John Freeman for Face to Face, June 1960
The Waughs, c. 1965
Family Tree
Preface
In one of the funniest scenes in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s father pretends to suppose that his son’s very English friend, Jorkins, is an American.
‘Good evening, good evening. So nice of you to come all this way.’
‘Oh it wasn’t far,’ said Jorkins, who lived in Sussex Square.
‘Science annihilates distance,’ said my father disconcertingly. ‘You are over here on business?’
Mr Ryder never makes his misapprehension explicit enough to give Jorkins the opportunity of correcting him but he is careful to explain any peculiarly English terms that come up in conversation, ‘translating pounds into dollars,’ as Waugh writes, ‘and courteously deferring to him with such phrases as “Of course, by your standards …”; “All this must seem very parochial to Mr Jorkins”; “In the vast spaces to which you are accustomed …”‘
Evelyn Waugh played similar games in real life. When a young American fan named Paul Moor wrote to him out of the blue in 1949, he was amazed to be invited by return to stay at Waugh’s home in Gloucestershire. Moor later described to Martin Stannard his reception by Waugh’s butler and, almost immediately, being confronted by his ‘idol’, who was wearing a dinner jacket and greeted him with a show of astonishment: ‘But I thought you’d be black! … What a disappointment! My wife and I had both counted on dining out for months to come on our story of the great, hulking American coon who came to spend the weekend.’ Dazed by his host’s exaggerated absence of taste, Moor never realised that Waugh was making a joke about his surname.
Later at dinner, when the butler went to fill Moor’s wine glass, Waugh waved towards a jug on the sideboard, declaring, ‘I’m sure you’d prefer iced water,’ as though that was all Americans liked to drink. When Moor bravely declined, Waugh exclaimed, ‘But we’ve gone to so much trouble!’ Soon he was off again: ‘At breakfast tomorrow I expect you’ll want Popsy Toasties or something like that, won’t you?’ The teasing went on throughout Moor’s three-day visit and yet the baffled innocent came away with the impression that his host was ‘an essentially kind man’.
A brilliant and extraordinarily clear writ
er, Evelyn Waugh could hardly have been easier to understand and enjoy on the page; yet the peculiar traits of his character were often harder to fathom, inclined as he was to fantasy, comic elaboration and mischievous disguise. If the imaginative flourishes in his letters were intended to entertain the recipients, the eccentric and sometimes frightening façades he adopted in person were more often designed as defences against the boredom and despair of everyday life.
Moor was right about Waugh’s kindness and one only has to read his novels to find the deep humanity behind the forbidding front. One of his more sympathetic American obituarists accurately described him as ‘a man of charity, personal generosity and above all understanding’, however it is also true that he rarely went out of his way to advertise the benevolent side of his nature. ‘I know you have a great heart,’ his close friend Diana Cooper wrote to him, ‘but you hate to put it on your sleeve – rightly up to a point – but rather than sometimes letting it fly there, by its own dear volition, you pin a grinning stinking mask on the site.’
* * *
This is not a ‘critical’ biography in the sense that it does not seek to reassess Evelyn Waugh’s achievements as a writer, but aims to paint a fresh portrait of the man by revisiting key episodes throughout his life and focusing on his most meaningful relationships. Drawing on a wide variety of sources – published and unpublished – it also seeks to re-examine and rebalance some of the distortions and misconceptions that have come to surround this famously complex and much mythologised character.
My biggest thank you is to Alexander Waugh, who suggested the idea of a new biography to mark the half-centenary of his grandfather’s death and gave me unfettered access to his archive which has supplied a great deal of the unpublished material in the book. In the course of researching his own richly entertaining Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2005) and more recently as editor-in-chief of the first Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (Oxford University Press; the first of forty-three volumes is due in 2017), he has assembled the most comprehensive Waugh study archive in the world, comprising original manuscripts, rare transcripts, photographs, rare editions, memorabilia, professional records and copies of the vast majority of the existing primary and secondary material.
Among the numerous unpublished letters that cast fresh light on Evelyn Waugh’s life there are more than eighty written to Teresa ‘Baby’ Jungman, with whom he fell hopelessly in love in the 1930s, and who he later claimed formed the basis for every character – male and female – in his masterpiece A Handful of Dust. These letters have long been regarded as the holy grail of Waugh biography and while charting the course of this unrequited affair they show a deeply romantic and tender side to his character that counters the popularly-held view of his heartlessness.
No less significant is the brief unpublished memoir written by Evelyn Waugh’s first wife, Evelyn Gardner, describing the short-lived marriage that is thought to have unleashed a bitter and capricious side to his character and propelled him towards the Roman Catholic Church.
Evelyn Nightingale, as she became by her third marriage, has had a harsh press and was understandably wary of Waugh’s biographers, declining most requests for interviews. She was however forthcoming with Michael Davie, editor of The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976), who interviewed her and corresponded with her regularly. In her 1994 obituary in The Independent he described her as ‘a much more substantial person as well as a much nicer one than the propaganda spread by Waugh’s circle had led me to expect’. After his own death in 2005, Davie’s extensive collection of Evelyn Waugh papers (including his interview transcripts and copious correspondence with Evelyn Nightingale) were acquired by Alexander Waugh. These records constitute another significant cache of untapped primary sources in his archive.
In the course of editing Evelyn Waugh’s diaries Davie had undertaken intensive background research, interviewing several key figures in Waugh’s circle besides his first wife, in several cases shortly before they died. Some of them Davie had sought out; others contacted him to correct false impressions – or, as they believed, the outrageous fictions – in the diaries as they first appeared in The Observer Magazine. His interviewees included Sir John Heygate, for whom Evelyn Gardner had deserted Waugh, who died shortly after meeting him. Alastair Graham, Evelyn Waugh’s intimate Oxford friend, who had become a recluse on the west coast of Wales, was another of those who did not co-operate with any other Waugh biographer to the same extent again, although a few years before Graham’s death in 1982 the writer Duncan Fallowell chanced to discover him in a New Quay pub, which began a quest entertainingly related in Fallowell’s book How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits (2011).
Alexander Waugh’s archive also holds a significant collection of materials donated by Selina Hastings, derived from researches in the 1980s for her own outstanding biography, published in 1994. I am profoundly grateful to her for the resulting access to her numerous interview transcripts and for her great generosity in volunteering several additional stories that she had omitted from her book.
Another part of Waugh’s life which the discovery of ‘new’ material renders ripe for revision is his army career in the Second World War. Here I owe a large debt to Professor Donat Gallagher, who for decades has been scouring military archives across the world for evidence to challenge many of the entrenched myths surrounding Waugh’s military service – including Antony Beevor’s widely adopted thesis concerning the supposed wrongdoing of Waugh and his commanding officer, Robert Laycock, during the Allied evacuation from Crete in 1941.
I am also grateful to Bob Laycock’s son Ben and daughters Emma Temple and Martha Mlinaric for their help with my own research into this complex cause célèbre and for allowing me to quote from their father’s unpublished memoir which sets out his version of events on the fateful night in question. I am equally indebted to Richard Mead, whose full and fascinating biography of Laycock – making full use of the memoir – is due to be published in the autumn; he could not have been more open-handed in sharing information and insights.
This book owes a considerable amount to the various scholars, editors, biographers, critics, filmmakers and bloggers who have done so much over the years to illuminate Evelyn Waugh’s life and work. In addition to those already mentioned I am greatly indebted to the work of Mark Amory, Martin Stannard, the late Christopher Sykes, Robert Murray Davis, Artemis Cooper, Ann Pasternak Slater, Nicholas Shakespeare, the late John Howard Wilson, Douglas Lane Patey, Charlotte Mosley, Paula Byrne and Duncan McLaren – whose various books are listed in the bibliography.
For access to various primary sources relating to Evelyn Waugh I am grateful to the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Boston University Libraries; Brasenose College, Oxford; the British Library; Christ Church, Oxford; Columbia University, New York; Georgetown University, Washington D. C.; the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; Hertford College, Oxford; the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the Imperial War Museum, London; the Liddell Hart Centre, London; the National Archives, Kew; and the New York Public Library. I have sought to obtain permission from all relevant copyright holders and greatly regret it if I have inadvertently missed anyone; any omissions can be rectified in future editions.
I am enormously grateful as ever to my agent Caroline Dawnay and her assistant Sophie Scard; to the endlessly helpful staff of the London Library, where much of this book was written; to Mrs Drue Heinz for a very comfortable and productive four-week fellowship at Hawthornden Castle; and to my preternaturally patient publishers, Alan Samson at Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK and John Sterling at Holt in the US. Many thanks too to everyone else who worked on the book at Weidenfeld – Simon Wright, Lucinda McNeile, Leanne Oliver, Elizabeth Allen, Helen Ewing, Craig Fraser and Hannah Cox; and also to Linden Lawson for her excellent copy-editing; Kate Murray-Browne for her painstaking proofreading; and to Christopher Phipps for compiling yet another model index.
Grateful thanks also to the estate of Harol
d Acton (c/o Artellus Ltd, London), Johnny Acton, the Dowager Countess of Avon, Theo Barclay, Matthew Bell, David Belton, Caroline Blakiston, Rachel Blakiston, Michael Bloch, Tessa Boase, Nina Campbell, Raymond Carr, Matthew Connolly, Barbara Cooke, Richard Davenport-Hines, Maria Dawson, Jill and Tommy Eade, Jo Eade, Duncan Fallowell, Hugo de Ferranti, Claudia FitzHerbert, Giles FitzHerbert, the late John Freeman, Derek Granger, Robert Gray, Jasmine Guinness, Nicky Haslam, Lord Head, Bevis Hillier, James Holland-Hibbert, Kate Hubbard, Luke Ingram, Kathryn Ireland, Paul Johnson, Rosanna Kelly, David Landau, Jeremy Lewis, Imogen Lycett Green, Euan and Fiona McAlpine, Patrick and Belinda Macaskie, Giles Milton, Harry Mount, Rosalind Morrison, Benedict Nightingale, Michael Olizar, James Owen, Thomas Pakenham, Henrietta Phipps, Saffron Rainey, Alex Renton, Hamish Robinson, Jonathan Ross, Charlotte Scott, Nicola Shulman, Christopher Silvester, Rick Stroud, Michael Sissons, Charles Sturridge, Christopher Simon Sykes, Inigo Thomas, Blanche Vaughan, Rupert Walters, Eliza Waugh, Hatty Waugh, James Waugh, Septimus Waugh, Teresa Waugh, A. N. Wilson, Sebastian Yorke and Sofka Zinovieff. And finally, my love and most profound thanks to my wife Rita and daughter Margot.
1
Second Son
In A Little Learning, the autobiography published two years before he died, Evelyn Waugh maintained that his childhood memories were suffused with ‘an even glow of pure happiness’.1 This was possibly designed to thwart what he called the ‘psychological speculations’ and ‘naive curiosity’ of nosy interviewers and biographers, who seemed to be always ‘eager to disinter some hidden disaster or sorrow’.2 In any event, there is plenty of contrary evidence that from an early age he occasionally felt both alienated and unloved, excluded above all from the extraordinarily gooey bond between his father, the publisher and critic Arthur Waugh, and his elder brother Alec – the ‘popular novelist’ as Evelyn later disparaged him. Nothing approaching an equivalent relationship existed between the father and his more exceptional younger son, who remembered that ‘at the height of the day’s pleasure his [father’s] key would turn in the front door and his voice would rise from the hall: “Kay! Where’s my wife?” ‘.3 The arrival of this intruder would mark the end of his mother’s company for the day and confine him to the nursery. ‘The latch-key which admitted him imprisoned me. He always made a visit to the nursery and always sought to be amusing there, but I would sooner have done without him.’4