Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  The Bolshies also directed mockery at their new house tutor, E. B. ‘Gordo’ Gordon, who replaced the popular Dick Harris in September 1919. To begin with the rheumatic Gordo appeared duplicitous and sneaky, prowling about the house unheard in his gym shoes, for which he was dubbed ‘Pussy-foot’ and ‘Super-spy’.43 Yet Evelyn soon realised that he was essentially a good sort who moreover helped foster his artistic interests.

  Evelyn was at that time particularly passionate about lettering and illumination, recently inspired by having visited with his parents the Arts and Crafts community at Ditchling and met the famous calligrapher Edward Johnston. The great scribe had shown him how to cut a turkey quill and demonstrated his ‘foundational’ hand, taking the fourteen-year-old boy’s breath away with the sweep and precision of his strokes, which as Evelyn later remembered were ‘as virile as a bullfighter’s’.44

  In 1919, aged sixteen, Evelyn won the Lancing art prize (judged by the architect Detmar Blow) for an illuminated collect, and one teatime after a characteristically unsuccessful boxing match Gordo summoned him to his study so that he could show his prize prayer to another local scribe called Francis Crease. Evelyn had noticed this peculiar-looking man on Sundays in the school chapel, ‘an incongruously elegant figure in the side aisle’ who would sit through most of the service in meditation and then, after the sermon, suddenly wrap his cape around him and disappear onto the Downs.45 Dressed foppishly in soft tweeds and a silk shirt and cravat, the man had ‘a pink and white complexion often found in nuns’, a high-pitched voice and a ‘delicate, almost mincing’ gait.

  Evelyn maintained that Mr Crease was ‘without immoral proclivities’, although he conceded that he ‘showed a distinct interest in the better-looking boys’.46 With his ginger hair, big ears and bright, staring eyes it is debatable whether the young Evelyn came within that category. In any event Crease went into raptures about Evelyn’s border decoration, declaring it far better than anything he could hope to do. He also said he thought the script shamefully unworthy of it and offered to teach him how it should be done.

  So with the permission of his house tutor one afternoon in January 1920 Evelyn walked over to Crease’s ‘cloister’, an isolated farm four miles away across the Downs at Lychpole. On this first visit he lost his way in the mist and on his second he was caught in a heavy hailstorm and arrived sopping-wet. ‘Crease met me at the door and led me to his bedroom where he lent me dry socks, trousers and shoes,’ Evelyn’s diary records, although he tactfully omitted such details in his letter the same day to his father, whom he reassured that besides being ‘rather effeminate, rather affected’, Crease was ‘very refined and artistic, well bred and charming … the truest dilettante I have ever seen’.47

  Though never especially keen on Crease’s elaborate Celtic-style script or decorations, Evelyn quickly fell under his spell, confiding to his diary within a few months that ‘I owe anything at Lancing worth remembering to him’.48 He later admitted to having enjoyed the actual lessons far less than the ‘hot scones, [handleless] Crown Derby cups and conversation’ that followed.

  Crease was reticent about his past but hinted vaguely that he had previously been attached to an Anglican fraternity and once held a distinguished academic post at Corpus, Oxford – although Evelyn later thought it more likely that Crease had come to know the university through his friendship with a rich American fellow there. He did not name the American in his autobiography,49 but Evelyn may have been referring to the flamboyant art and pornography collector Edward Perry (‘Ned’) Warren, an extremely wealthy Bostonian who ran an all-male establishment at nearby Lewes House, wrote A Defence of Uranian Love, which has been described as ‘the premier pederastic apologia in the language’,50 and would have a pervasive influence on Evelyn’s generation of English aesthetes at Oxford in the 1920s.

  The extent to which Crease followed his friend’s credo is hard to ascertain at this distance, but most other Lancing housemasters warned their boys against going to visit him. There is no evidence that he ever behaved improperly towards his new pupil, however, and so intensely did Evelyn enjoy the visits that Thursday soon became his favourite day of the week. ‘It is such a relief to get into refined surroundings, if only for an afternoon,’ he recorded at the time.51 Sometimes Crease would accompany him halfway on the walk back to school, ‘I eagerly questioning him about architecture or aesthetics or Limoges or Maiolica,’ recalled Evelyn, ‘he trying to turn me to the beauty of the evening and the downs’.52

  Crease’s letters to Evelyn that spring term reveal a growing familiarity, one of them telling him that ‘I can be as direct as you sometimes & you don’t like it so much in others as in yourself – but it is good for you. You want a Friend who is a thorn in the flesh not an Echo!’53 Their rapport did not go unnoticed by Gordo and in March 1920 Evelyn recorded that his house tutor had become ‘very jealous of Crease’s influence’ and had ‘been subtly trying to put me off him’. More awkwardly, Dick Harris subsequently forbade Evelyn’s friend Dudley Carew from going over to tea with Crease, apparently on the basis that he had ‘heard scandal of him’. Evelyn evidently passed the whispers on to Crease, who shrieked that he would send his landlord to the headmaster to vouch for his innocence.54

  As if to demonstrate his own devotion, meanwhile, Evelyn had invited Crease to stay at Underhill for ten days during the Easter holidays – never having asked any of his Lancing contemporaries home – an invitation that was then repeated in a letter from Kate Waugh. Crease felt distinctly apprehensive at the prospect, the more so having read Arthur’s description of the visits to Underhill of the ill-fated young poet Ian Mackenzie, a friend of Alec’s at Sandhurst who had stayed there several times before dying of pneumonia on Armistice Day. Arthur described how their first evening had been spent ‘under the red lamps by the book-room fire, taking down one book after another, and each reading favourite passages in turn’. Even more alarming to the pathologically shy and reclusive Crease was Arthur’s recollection of how Mackenzie liked to start the day by singing and how ‘we made him roar with laughter at the breakfast-table as we imitated the strains that accompanied the process of his dressing’.55

  Before Crease could be persuaded to come, Evelyn had to reassure him that his family was nothing like as hearty as Arthur had made out, and also that his father would cover all his expenses. When eventually he did come, Crease spent much of each day in his bed and at other times cowered in the book-room with his hands over his eyes.56 It was evidently more enjoyable than he had feared, however, and proved to be the first of several visits.

  Most significantly as far as Evelyn’s development was concerned, Crease’s first visit to Underhill changed the way he saw his father, the scribe having perceptively observed that he thought Arthur Waugh ‘charming, entirely charming, and acting all the time’ – an assessment with which Evelyn’s mother agreed. ‘My eyes were opened,’ wrote Evelyn, ‘and I saw him, whom I had grown up to accept in complete simplicity, as he must always have appeared to others.’57 From that moment on, his attitude to Arthur would grow progressively more dismissive.

  What Arthur made of Crease is unclear – he doesn’t get a mention in his autobiography One Man’s Road – although after Alec’s troubles at Sherborne he may have been a little apprehensive about the relationship between this old-maidish man and his younger son, as much as he was offended by Evelyn’s observation that until he met Mr Crease, he had ‘lived among philistines’.58 In any event, Arthur treated their guest ‘kindly if somewhat derisively’, so Evelyn recalled.59 Kate was far more indulgent and continued asking Crease to Underhill for years to come, even after his arrest on a charge of sexual misconduct – a case of mistaken identity according to Evelyn.

  Evelyn’s attachment to Crease grew during the summer term of 1920 to the extent that his going away for a month in May made Evelyn ‘very depressed and unhappy … he is the only real friend I have here. I do believe that I am getting homesick again after three years.’60 In his
mentor’s absence, Evelyn continued going over to Lychpole to practise his illuminated script, and one afternoon he broke the blade of one of his quill-cutting knives. He thought little of it at the time but Crease was far more annoyed than he had expected and wrote to tell him that the knife was very old and quite irreplaceable. In any case, it was in a drawer and Evelyn had no right to be using it at all; he had betrayed his trust. The next post brought another letter from Crease apologising for sounding so cross and their sessions resumed as before when he came back. But their friendship was never the same again.

  Crease went away again that October, this time for nine months, and when he returned in July 1921 Evelyn recorded in his diary: ‘The spell is broken. His influence has quite gone. I see just a rather silly perhaps casually interesting little man.’61 As Evelyn later recalled, he had already transferred his allegiance to ‘the more forceful and flamboyant’ figure of J. F. Roxburgh, an outgoing and agnostic man of the world, in many ways the exact opposite of the monastic aesthete Crease.62

  * Arthur’s masseuse was Mollie Udale-Smith. Later in life, after divorcing Sir Ian Abercromby, 10th Bart, she lived on Tenerife, where the local paper, described her as ‘a liberal and eccentric Englishwoman who changed her husband as she did her shirt’.

  † Waiting for a bath one evening, sixteen-year-old Evelyn endured ‘seven solid minutes of Head’s conversation. He is a bore, though rather an old dear, I’m beginning to think.’ (27 September 1919; EWD, p. 21.)

  * So named because among their privileges was to be allowed to sit on the settle by the fire in the House Room.

  † Waugh described Fremlin as ‘a delightful mercurial fellow, whose father we wrongly believed to have a been eaten by a tiger’. His alternations of exuberance and depression were known as ‘Fremlin’s states’. He was later with Evelyn at Oxford, but died young of black-water fever, a complication of malaria, in Nigeria (A Little Learning, p. 125 and Mallowan’s Memoirs, p. 27).

  5

  Watertight Compartments

  Later renowned as the first headmaster of Stowe and universally known by his initials ‘J. F.’, John Fergusson Roxburgh was a brilliant classicist who had taken a First at Cambridge and been recruited to the Lancing teaching staff before the war to boost the school’s academic standing. Tall and slightly stooped, he cut a dash with his flamboyant wardrobe – the boys counted fourteen suits – and the various idiosyncratic mannerisms he had cultivated as an undergraduate. With his sonorous voice and precise diction he was especially effective at inspiring the boys to read poetry and plays. His popularity was boosted by his religious scepticism and his liberal approach to discipline. His biographer recounts how one boy who was returning with a ‘cricket-bag stuffed with bottles of beer and cider for an end-of-term party had the misfortune to be offered a lift by J. F. who heaved the bag into his car. He said nothing as the bottles clinked but when he dropped him off handed him a packet of fifty cigarettes and said, “Perhaps these will come in useful.”‘1

  When Roxburgh came back to Lancing after the war (during which he had been recommended for an MC and his younger brother was killed) Evelyn quickly became a devotee, delighting in his sarcastic asides about the headmaster’s ‘profound classical witticisms’, as Roxburgh described them, and finding his French lessons ‘really a joy. It is almost worth doing the wretched subject.’2 ‘Every hour in his form room was exhilarating,’ Evelyn later recalled.3 Just as the younger and more reclusive Evelyn had been drawn to the hermit-like Crease, the more convivial Roxburgh now appealed to his growing gregariousness.

  It was in Roxburgh’s modern play-reading society in October 1920 that he first studied George Bernard Shaw’s Candida,4 which gave him further unflattering insight into the character of his father. Evelyn evidently associated Arthur with the Rev. James Mavor Morell, the sermonising husband of the play’s heroine. The next April, Evelyn recorded in his diary: ‘Father has been ineffably silly the whole holidays. The extraordinary thing is that the more I see through my father, the more I appreciate Mother. She has been like Candida and went to Father, whom she must have despised, because he needed her most. I always think I am discovering some new trait in his character and find that she knew it long ago.’5

  Meanwhile Evelyn so revered Roxburgh that for a time he even adopted his way of speaking as if he had a hot potato in his mouth.6 More permanently influential were his stipulations on the precise use of grammar and his hatred of clichés. Besides the French lessons, Evelyn had Roxburgh for ‘general’ subjects in the Upper Sixth from September 1920, studying anything that caught the master’s fancy. Each week the boys wrote 250 words on a chosen subject, which Roxburgh would then read and hand back with verbal comments of praise or debate or, more disconcertingly, no comment at all – a sure sign that the piece had bored him rigid. For Evelyn, most disparaging of all was the remark, ‘Excellent journalism, my dear fellow,’ which he interpreted as ‘trite in thought, colloquial in expression and aiming for effect by smartness and overstatement’.7

  Evelyn never doubted that Roxburgh was homosexual: ‘Most good schoolmasters are,’ he reasoned. ‘How else could they endure their work?’ In his autobiography he professed to think it unlikely that Roxburgh would have given his desires ‘physical release’ with his pupils, yet shortly before leaving Lancing he had recorded in his diary how Tom Driberg had entered Roxburgh’s darkened room one day and found him in a chair with a boy called MacDonald, looking very embarrassed.8* But Evelyn was not Roxburgh’s type. ‘I was small and quite pretty in a cherubic way. His tastes were more classical than rococo.’9 Roxburgh’s particular favourite was his head of house, Eddie Capel Cure, a ‘golden-haired Hyancinthus’ to whom J. F. gave a motorcycle which the boy soon crashed, ruining his handsome looks.† With Evelyn, meanwhile, Roxburgh merely discerned ‘potentialities worth cultivating’.10

  Evelyn’s ambitions at this time were more obviously directed towards a career as a draughtsman than as a writer. However, as Roxburgh noticed, for someone of his age he was exceptionally well read and discerning about literature, and he had by no means ruled out the idea of following in the Waugh family literary tradition. In the autumn term of 1920 he made his first proper stab at a novel, the transparently autobiographical ‘study of a man with two characters by his brother’.11

  In the surviving ten-page fragment, the hero Peter Audley is at public school in Sussex in 1918 and contemplating the possibility of going off to the trenches the next year: ‘He had learnt much of what it was like over there from his brother, but Ralf saw everything so abstractedly and with such imperturbable cynicism. Peter flattered himself that he was far more sensitive and temperamental. He was sure that he would not be able to stand it.’12 However, Peter clearly admires Ralf’s ‘awfully clever’ idea of living his life in ‘watertight compartments’13 – recalling a suggestion of Alec’s that Evelyn seemed to see as a means of giving the freest possible rein to the Jekyll and Hyde sides of his own character.

  The war was by then a fading memory for Alec. Bored at Chapman & Hall and wretched in his marriage, he was also suffering a crisis of confidence in his writing career. So when his seventeen-year-old brother – a year younger than Alec had been when he wrote The Loom of Youth – breezed home for the Christmas holidays announcing that he had started a novel, Alec naturally appeared ‘apprehensive of a rival’,14 as Evelyn noted in his diary, his unease deepened by Evelyn’s choice of subject. Although Evelyn thought his novel ‘fairly good’ and ‘pretty sure’ to get published, his family’s disapproval combined with ‘my own innate sloth’ soon caused him to abandon it – though not before he had written a revealing dedication to himself, bemoaning the lot of an aspiring writer brought up in such an entirely literary family:

  Many of your relatives and most of your father’s friends are more or less directly interested in paper and print. Ever since you first left the nursery for meals with your parents downstairs, the conversation, to which you were an insatiable listener, has been of b
ooks, their writers and producers; ever since, as a sleepy but triumphantly emancipated school boy, you were allowed to sit up with your elders in the ‘bookroom’ after dinner, you have heard little but discussion about books …

  By the end of March 1921 Roxburgh was sufficiently impressed by Evelyn to ask him to tea in his small study, an honour only accorded to a select few. ‘How delightful,’ declared Roxburgh when Evelyn arrived. ‘We have nothing to do until chapel but eat eclairs and talk about poetry.’15 Six months later, following the publication of the first issue of the school magazine under Evelyn’s editorship, J. F. wrote to tell him: ‘If you use what the Gods have given you, you will do as much as anyone I know to shape the course of your generation.’16

  Roxburgh’s tribute to Evelyn followed a string of accolades in his final year at Lancing, during which he became editor of the Lancing magazine and president of the debating society, and won both the poetry and English literature prizes. After the literature prize in June he wrote blithely to Arthur: ‘I’ve got the Scarlyn, all right … I am a little cheered. Of course it is no testament to my brain – there was no serious competition – but I think it shows a certain capacity for work.’17 He was also offered house captaincy in the spring of 1921 as a way of curbing his ongoing campaign of ridiculing the school Corps.18 His choice was to either accept or leave the school. Knowing how much it would mean to his father (whom, despite all his scornful thoughts, Evelyn was still keen to please) and that it was a precondition of the other positions he wanted, he reluctantly accepted.19