Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  * ‘… my few romances have always culminated in Christmas week, Luned [Jacobs], Richard [Pares], Alastair [Graham]’ (Christmas Day 1924; EWD, p. 194).

  * A. L. Rowse wrote: ‘Never can there have been such undergraduate reclame, such publicity, such a peculiar ascendancy as that exerted by Harold Acton in his day at Oxford.’ (A Cornishman at Oxford, p. 23.)

  † Lord Boothby claimed to have started this fashion some years earlier. (My Oxford, ed. by Ann Thwaite, p. 32.)

  * Evelyn and Tony Bushell were not the only ones who spurned his advances. James Lees-Milne later recorded how during the Second World War he half-heartedly agreed to go to bed with Acton, who was then in uniform, but ‘next morning he rebuked me for icy-cold unresponsiveness’. (James Lees-Milne, Diaries 1984–1997, ed. by Michael Bloch, p. 373.)

  7

  His Poor Dead Heart

  After living so uproariously during term time, Evelyn inevitably found the holidays at Underhill rather dull by comparison. In the spring of 1922 he told Driberg that north London suburbia was ‘quite indescribably dreary’.1 His relations with his father, whose stagy readings in the book-room he found increasingly excruciating as he grew older, were further strained by disagreements over his refusal to do any work and his persistent overspending. To supplement Evelyn’s scholarship, Arthur had allowed him a further £220 annually, which with birthday presents and various other demands to meet unpaid debts took up more than a quarter of his earnings, then around £1,000.2 Yet despite this generosity, friends Evelyn took home were often horrified by the way he spoke to his father. One of them shuddered to recall Arthur asking Evelyn how he could be so charming to his friends and yet so unkind to his father. ‘Because I can choose my friends,’ said Evelyn, ‘but I cannot choose my father.’3

  Evelyn could be equally cruel to Alec, as when he suggested that their cousin, Claud Cockburn, who was in need of £200 to pay some debts, ask him for a loan. By his own account Alec was by then making around £800 a year from his writing4 yet nevertheless politely refused the request. Incensed that Alec should spurn his ‘more deserving and artistic’ cousin in this way, Evelyn muttered sternly: ‘That bald-headed lecher needs a lesson in how a gentleman should comport himself’ – Evelyn had conceived the theory that excessive sexual activity since the end of his marriage had caused his brother’s hair to fall out. He then led several sorties from Oxford to London, during which he and his friends would burst out from hiding places and surprise Alec and his latest girlfriend, yelling ‘Boo to Alec the bald-headed lecher!’. He assured Cockburn that Alec’s women were ‘apt to be rendered frigid by anything unconventional’.5

  Alec seems to have been remarkably good-natured about all this – at least he later recalled only the good times they had during this period, introducing Evelyn to his Bohemian friends in London, taking him to parties and generally feeling proud of his ‘witty, lively, hopeful’ younger brother.6 For his part, in later years Evelyn paid tribute to his brother’s generosity – ‘a host who introduced me to the best restaurants of London, on whom I sponged, bringing my friends to his flat and when short of money, sleeping on his floor, until the tubes opened when I would at dawn sway home to Hampstead, in crumpled evening dress among the navvies setting out for their day’s work’.7

  * * *

  Arthur Waugh may have worried that his younger son was frittering away his time and money at Oxford, yet amid all the drinking binges he was in fact remarkably busy across a range of activities, albeit none that bore the slightest relevance to his history degree. At that time, Evelyn still had more confidence in his talents in illustration and design than he did in his Union debating skills or indeed his writing. He later admitted that drawing made him more ‘entirely happy’ than he ever felt when reading or writing and, ever ambitious to get better, he took lessons during the holidays in wood-engraving and during term time went with Peter Quennell to draw the ‘remarkably unalluring’ nude models who sat for life classes at the Ruskin School of Art.

  Throughout his time at Oxford he designed bookplates for friends and dust-jackets for Chapman & Hall, contributed woodcuts to the London Mercury and Golden Hind, and was much in demand to design headpieces and covers for various university magazines and programmes. His distinctive and frequently macabre woodcuts were particularly admired by the university art critics.8 At a time when his reserves of filial piety were running particularly low, one of these depicted ‘That grim act parricide’, in which a deranged young man with a pistol advances towards an older man looking not unlike Arthur Waugh, somewhat alarmed and vulnerable in an armchair. The cartoon was part of a ghoulish series portraying Evelyn’s own version of ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ and appeared in Cherwell, the most subversive of the Oxford magazines of that time and the mouthpiece for the aesthetes and intellectuals, who tended to disparage the more athletically orientated Isis.

  The Isis paid its contributors, however, so the perpetually improvident Evelyn was more than happy to work for that magazine too, supplying numerous cartoons and other illustrations as well as light verse, short stories, film reviews and Union reports, all written under the nom de plume ‘Scaramel’. On the first page of the magazine there appeared ‘Isis Idol’, generally a profile of a sporting hero or leading light of the Union, although Evelyn neatly turned the slot on its head by contributing a paean to Harold Acton, the mincing non-athlete par excellence, as well as a rather less fulsome portrait of his ‘badger-like’ history tutor.

  References to Cruttwell were also discernible in two short stories that Evelyn published in Cherwell in 1923, ‘Edward of Unique Achievement’ in which an undergraduate develops such ‘an absorbing and immeasurable hatred’ for his tutor that he decides to murder him; and ‘Conspiracy to Murder’, in which a young man is driven mad by the ‘ill-dressed and rather dirty’ don who lives in the room opposite and ‘snarls like a beast’ whenever they pass on the stairs.

  Of more biographical interest, however, were two other stories that appeared in different Oxford magazines the same year. In the first of these, the intriguing yet often overlooked ‘Portrait of Young Man With Career’, published in The Isis in May 1923, a pushy student named Jeremy visits ‘Evelyn’ in his rooms and asks for an introduction to Richard Pares, explaining ‘I feel he is a man to know.’ Evelyn calls Pares ‘an amiable rogue’ and protests that he hardly knows him. If this was an ambiguous dig at the lover who had recently forsaken him, the story made far more unsettling reading for his friend Hugh Molson, who immediately recognised himself in the character of Jeremy, whose deep appreciation of the sound of his own voice and tiresome ambition extend to an intention to become president of the Union, a goal Molson achieved two years later.

  In the story, Jeremy fails to take Evelyn’s hint about hardly knowing Pares and continues:

  ‘Nonsense, I’m always seeing you about together. I am not doing anything ‘fore lunch on Tuesday. How about then? Or Friday I could manage, but I should prefer Tuesday.’

  So it was arranged.

  There was a pause; I looked at my watch; Jeremy took no notice; I looked again.

  ‘What is the time,’ he said, ‘Twenty-three to. Oh, good! – hours yet.’

  ‘Before a fool’s opinion of himself the gods are silent – aye and envious too,’ I thought.

  ‘I’m speaking “on the paper” on Thursday.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘About the Near East. Macedonia. Oil, you know.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I think it ought to be rather a good speech.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Evelyn, you aren’t listening; now seriously, what do you really think is wrong with my speaking. What I feel about the Union is …’

  A blind fury, a mist of fire. We struggled together on the carpet. He was surprisingly weak for his size. The first blow with the poker he dodged and took on his shoulder; the second and third caved his forehead in …

  The latter scene is a wish-fulfilling daydream that Evelyn has lapsed
into while his visitor drones on. When Jeremy does eventually get up to leave, he parts with a final annoying request: ‘Oh and Evelyn, if you know the man who reports the Union for the Isis, you might ask him to give me a decent notice this time.’

  In so ruthlessly skewering Molson as a self-important bore, ‘Portrait of Young Man With Career’ effectively ended their friendship. When Molson was later asked why he and Evelyn had fallen out, he recalled that they had been on ‘one of our usual long walks and I suppose I am inclined to be long-winded. I got to talking about oil and when Isis came out next week there was a repetition of much of what I had said … After that I never felt like going out for a long walk with him and telling him what was going on in my mind.’9 Molson professed to dislike what he called Evelyn’s ‘intellectual cruelty’, as well he might, yet in truth the friendship became unviable after he discovered what Evelyn really thought of him.

  Doubtless having Molson’s youthful excesses as much in mind as his overweening ambition, Evelyn could never take him anything like as seriously as he appeared to take himself. When Molson ultimately became a life peer as a Unionist politician (he is remembered now chiefly for the soundbite ‘I will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come’), Evelyn could only ever bring himself to refer to him with the ‘Lord’ between quotation marks.

  * * *

  Evelyn’s other noteworthy short story from 1923 was ‘Antony, Who Sought Things That Were Lost’, which appeared in Harold Acton’s short-lived arts journal The Oxford Broom, for which Evelyn had already designed covers and produced two ‘Cubist’ cartoons. A macabre tale of two imprisoned lovers, Count Antony and Lady Elizabeth, who ruthlessly betrays her husband with their pockmarked turnkey, it was influenced by James Branch Cabell’s mannered fantasy novel Jurgen (1919), as Evelyn later wincingly admitted, ‘that preposterously spurious artefact which quite captivated me at the age of nineteen’. Even Acton later conceded that the story had ‘seemed rather better than it was in fact’ as he had been under Evelyn’s ‘elvish fascination’ at the time. Yet however flawed it might have been in stylistic terms, with hindsight it can now be seen to contain the seeds of Evelyn’s later masterpiece A Handful of Dust (1934), with Antony the forerunner of Tony Last, the chivalrous husband whose bored wife (Lady Elizabeth / Brenda Last) betrays him with a worthless bounder (the turnkey / John Beaver).10 Just as A Handful of Dust reflected Evelyn’s bitter sense of betrayal over the ending of his first marriage, ‘Antony’ was written while he was suffering ‘the pangs of neglected love’ for Richard Pares, as Terence Greenidge later maintained.11 Both works also drew on Evelyn’s nostalgia for a romantic past and his cynical belief that romantic expectations will never be fulfilled.

  * * *

  If Richard Pares’s desertion destroyed nineteen-year-old Evelyn’s hopes in the spring of 1923, he wasted little time before taking up with the next ‘friend of my heart’, as he described him, a handsome eighteen-year-old* at Brasenose called Alastair Graham, who was later disguised in A Little

  Learning as ‘Hamish Lennox’.12 Eight months younger than Evelyn, wellborn, rich and dreamy, Graham became one of the great loves of Evelyn’s early life. As a muse, he made the most obvious contribution to the composite character of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead, which in manuscript twice has ‘Alastair’ in place of ‘Sebastian’.

  Like Pares, Graham was seen by Evelyn’s contemporaries as a catch. Anthony Powell remembered him as ‘frightfully good-looking, with rather Dresden china shepherdess sort of looks … a lot of people were undoubtedly in love with him’.13 Among the queue of admirers was Harold Acton, who in the midst of Graham’s affair with Evelyn gushed in a letter jointly addressed to the two of them: ‘I had erections to think of you two angels in an atmosphere salinated with choir boys and sacerdotal sensuality!’14 He later described Graham as a Pre-Raphaelite beauty but ‘a cock-teaser’,15 and told Duncan Fallowell that he had ‘the same sort of features as Evelyn liked in girls – the pixie look’. He was not a hearty, Acton added, ‘but he dressed like a hearty, in the country style, plus-fours and tweeds’.16

  Evelyn was fond of tweed breeches too, yet there were other more significant similarities. Unlike Pares, Graham had ‘no repugnance of the bottle’, as Evelyn put it, or as Harold Acton preferred, he ‘drank like a fish’. Intellectually and artistically curious, he read widely throughout his life yet he was by nature also profoundly lazy. Having refused to go back to Wellington at the age of fifteen, at Oxford he was even more neglectful of his history studies than Evelyn. ‘I could not have fallen under an influence better designed to encourage my natural frivolity, dilettantism and dissipation,’ Evelyn later wrote, ‘or to expose as vulgar and futile any promptings I may have felt to worldly ambition.’17

  The gap in Evelyn’s diaries makes it hard to say how or when their friendship began – as Graham ruefully told the diaries’ eventual editor, ‘a lot of his happier experiences are not recorded’18 – however it must have been before the end of the summer term 1923, when Alastair failed his Mods and on the advice of the principal of Brasenose was removed from the university by his mother.

  Mrs Graham’s decision threw Evelyn into ‘a momentary restlessness’, as he later downplayed it, and at the beginning of the Michaelmas term he asked his father if he too might be taken away from Oxford and sent to Paris to live as a bohemian artist. Not surprisingly, Arthur did not like this idea.19 ‘I want to go down for good but I cannot explain and my parents are obdurate,’ Evelyn wrote to Carew.20 What was it that he could not explain to his parents? His love for Alastair perhaps?

  Alastair meanwhile was ‘settling down and writing,’ his mother told the Brasenose bursar, ‘so far hard’. She said he would soon be ‘taking up Architecture at London University’, an endeavour that was to prove even less enduring than his Oxford career.21 But though Alastair had left the university, he and Evelyn remained ‘inseparable’, so Evelyn later recalled, ‘or, if separated, in almost daily communication’.22 Alastair ‘continued to haunt Oxford’, driving down regularly from his home in Warwickshire in his two-seater motor car, whereupon he and Evelyn would zoom off into the Oxfordshire countryside, sometimes with a third passenger squeezed in the dicky, more often just the two of them. ‘We hardly saw anything of Evelyn at that time,’ Acton lamented. ‘He [Graham] and Evelyn were always together. An infatuation. Oh definitely an infatuation.’

  In advance of one such visit, Alastair wrote a letter enclosing a photograph of himself naked, posing like some alluring wood nymph beneath an overhanging rock face, his backside pointing seductively towards the camera:*

  My dear Evelyn,

  I’m sending this down by David [Plunket Greene] or the Bastard John [Greenidge, elder brother of Terence], whom I’m seeing this evening. I am sad that you wouldn’t come up for this party. I am afraid it will be bloody. One can always drink but it is rather a cheap path to heaven. I’ve found the ideal way to drink Burgundy. You must take a peach and peal [sic] it, and put it in a finger bowl, and pour Burgundy over it. The flavour is exquisite. And the peach seems to exaggerate that delightful happy Seraglio contentedness that old wine evokes. An old French lady taught it to me, who has a wonderful cellar at Lavalles. I’ve been in bed with pains in my ears for the last two days. May I go and call on your parents one day, or would they hate it? I do not know whether I ought to come to Oxford next week or not next week. It depends on money and other little complications. If I come, will you come and drink with me somewhere on Saturday? If it is a nice day we might carry some bottles into a wood or some bucolic place, and drink like Horace. I’m afraid this is a poor wandering letter. But I cannot write letters. It was only meant to express my sorrow at your absence from this party. I wish you felt merrier, and were not so serious.

  With love from Alastair, and his poor dead heart.

  It seems safe to assume that Evelyn had this letter somewhere in mind when he wrote the passage in Brideshead in which Sebastian
beckons Charles: ‘You’re to come away at once, out of danger. I’ve got a motorcar and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey* – which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend. It’s heaven with strawberries.’23

  Though undated, Alastair’s letter was most likely written in 1924, as he would presumably not have suggested calling on Evelyn’s parents before he had met them, which according to Kate Waugh’s diary happened in December 1923, when Evelyn took him for supper at Underhill.24 Evelyn later indicated that the affair had ‘culminated’ that Christmas.†

  Evelyn went far more often to Alastair’s home, Barford House, near Stratford-upon-Avon, which was by then presided over by Alastair’s widowed mother Jessie, Alastair’s father having died the year before he went to Oxford. ‘Mrs G’, as both Alastair and Evelyn called her (or alternatively ‘the Queen Mother’), had been as mad about hunting as her husband – the excellent surrounding country had been the reason they had bought the house in the first place – but she no longer kept horses. Instead she ‘gardened with all the fury of the chase’, Evelyn recalled, although her vigour failed to rub off on her languid son, who was forever being exhorted to ‘get out of the house and do something!’.

  Barford is nothing like the size of Brideshead or its television alter ego, Castle Howard, which Evelyn visited only once in 1937, yet was far more akin to the stately pile he described in the novel. Nonetheless beneath Barford’s handsome, peeling, white-stucco façade can be glimpsed the same gold-coloured ashlar that Charles Ryder sees on his first visit to Brideshead; its front is embellished with a similar, albeit far less grand, row of Ionic half-columns; and there is even a dome and lantern on the roof, though again on a considerably more modest scale than in the book. When Charles Ryder remembers, ‘I had been there [to Brideshead] before, first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June …’ it is perfectly conceivable that Evelyn is recalling his own first visit to Barford. He is explicit (in Chapter Four) that the June day Charles remembers is in 1923, the same summer that Evelyn’s own love affair with Alastair Graham had begun. The first mention in Kate Waugh’s diary of Evelyn visiting Barford is admittedly not until 3 January 1924, however all the other evidence points to her son having been there the previous summer – without perhaps telling his mother.