by Philip Eade
If Evelyn had sampled country-house life with the Molsons at Goring Hall, at Barford he gained a far fuller appreciation. Alastair Graham was far closer to a ‘true aristocrat’ than Hugh Molson. His mother was a Southern belle – her American family’s cotton fortune being the main source of Alastair’s substantial private income – his father a bona fide scion of the British landed aristocracy. The younger son of a baronet and grandson of the 12th Duke of Somerset, Hugh Graham had grown up at Netherby Hall in Cumberland and devoted his life to hunting, shooting and fishing. His sisters, Alastair’s aunts, were the Duchess of Montrose, the Marchioness of Crewe, the Countess of Verulam and Lady Wittenham. Alastair was the last person to name-drop his grand relations so Evelyn may not have picked up on all this, yet while staying at Barford (which he was to do on countless occasions, occasionally for several weeks at a stretch) he gained his first meaningful entrée into the upper class world that he eventually came to inhabit.
For Alastair, who had not inherited his father’s passion for field sports, Barford was a place of refuge. A natural recluse (‘rather quiet’, said Acton; ‘buttoned-up’, according to Powell), he craved undisturbed solitude, and in a later letter to Evelyn wrote: ‘All the beautiful things that I have seen, heard or thought of, grow like bright flowers and musky flowers in a garden where I can enjoy their presence, and where I can sit in perfect peace and banish the unpleasant things in life. A kind of fortified retreat that no one can enter except myself.’25
As Evelyn fell in with Alastair’s wish to shut himself off from the outside world, during his final year his Oxford friends saw less and less of him, as did the History School. A late burst of cramming in the summer of 1924 proved insufficient and he was uncomfortably aware as he left the exam room that the questions had been ‘rather inconvenient’. His chances would hardly have been improved by his behaviour at a dinner party held by Cruttwell for the history candidates, ‘at which I arrived tipsy and further alienated their sympathies by attempting, later, to sing a Negro spiritual’.26 At the end of July he returned to Oxford for his viva, dressed in dark coat, scholar’s gown and white tie and fortified by a whisky from his favourite wine merchant. He sensed that it was ‘purely formal’, however, and telegraphed his parents to warn them of ‘my certain third’, confirmation of which duly came the next day.
* Alastair Hugh Graham was born on 27 June 1904 (see Burke’s Peerage, Graham, Bt, of Netherby), and so would have turned nineteen in the summer of 1923.
* Auberon Waugh told Duncan Fallowell that whether Graham enclosed the photograph or whether Evelyn put it in the envelope later was uncertain.
* Peyraguey is a sweet Sauternes and remained one of Evelyn’s favourite wines. He always preferred it unchilled and referred to it as ‘White Claret’. (See Alec Waugh, A Year to Remember, p. 107.)
† ‘… my few romances have always culminated in Christmas week, Luned, Richard, Alastair [Graham] (Christmas Day 1924; EWD, p. 194). Given that Graham was abroad over Christmas 1924, it seems Evelyn was referring to the previous year.
8
Pure as Driven Slush
Evelyn confided to his recently resumed diary that he was ‘much dispirited’ by his Third, although on the day he got his results he deferred the gloom with a lengthy drinking spree, eventually winding up at the Abingdon Arms in Beckley, a village just north of Oxford where he and Alastair had rented a leaky caravan (‘sans horse’, as Evelyn described it)1 to escape from Mrs Graham.2
The next week he and Alastair set off for Dublin, ‘a most unattractive place,’ thought Evelyn, ‘full of barbed wire and ruins and soldiers and unemployed’ – and pubs that closed at 9 p.m. Their two-week Irish jaunt was further blighted by dingy hotels, ‘ghastly’ fizzy beer and towns that all reminded him of Shoreham. It was in Ireland that Cruttwell’s valedictory letter caught up with him: ‘I cannot say that your 3rd does you anything but discredit; especially as it was not even a good one; and it is always at least foolish to allow oneself to be given an inappropriate intellectual label … I hope that you will soon settle in some sphere where you will give your intellect a better chance than in the History School.’3
Back at Barford things scarcely improved during a week in the company of an ‘extremely quarrelsome’ Mrs G, and when Evelyn eventually got back to Underhill he was irked by the presence of ‘a horrible wireless apparatus’ which Arthur had recently acquired; ‘contrary to modern domestic conventions,’ Evelyn later wrote, ‘it was he who always wished to hear it, I to turn it off.’4
The onset of autumn deepened his despondency about the future, exacerbated by the prospect of Alastair’s imminent departure for Africa to spend the winter with his sister in Kenya.5 No less depressing was the thought that he would then have been beginning his last term at Oxford – the ninth he needed to complete his degree having come up in a by-term – had not the certainty of his Third and Cruttwell’s subsequent withdrawal of his scholarship persuaded Arthur that this would be a complete waste of money.
Prior to that Evelyn had been keenly anticipating a term of ‘pure pleasure’, for which he had reserved digs on Merton Street to share with his old Hypocrite friend Hugh Lygon, whom he recalled in his autobiography as ‘always just missing the happiness he sought, without ambition, unhappy in love, a man of great sweetness’. Dubbed ‘lascivious Mr Lygon’ by Evelyn, Hughie was one of the more promiscuously homosexual Hypocrites and it has often been suggested that he and Evelyn were lovers. The timing of this supposed liaison has never been convincingly established, however, and in any case the evidence that they ever went to bed together – while perfectly possible – is far flimsier than one might imagine, comprising a mixture of hearsay and reading between the lines. Selina Hastings evidently had reservations about her three informants and accordingly played down the possibility of an affair. More recently Paula Byrne has been more emphatic about the matter, writing that Tamara Talbot Rice ‘reported that John Fothergill let Evelyn have rooms at the Spread Eagle at Thame at a special mid-week rate so that he and Hugh could meet in private’.6 That appears to clinch it, but did Tamara Talbot Rice really say that? No date or source is given for the assertion, however it appears to come from the brief note of Selina Hastings’s interview with her in 1991, which is in Alexander Waugh’s archive. According to the note, Mrs Talbot Rice said in that conversation that ‘everyone knew’ they had an affair and she also mentioned Evelyn getting a good rate at the pub. But she said nothing about them using it as a trysting place.7
Whatever the nature of Evelyn and Hugh Lygon’s relationship, it has long been recognised that Hugh’s father, the 7th Earl Beauchamp, was the main inspiration for Lord Marchmain, just as Hugh’s elder brother Viscount Elmley (president of the Hypocrites’ when Evelyn joined) provided the model for Bridey (the characteristics he supplied included Bridey’s distaste for fox-hunting), and Hugh himself shared many of the characteristics of Sebastian – his restlessness, his self-destructive drinking, his ever-present teddy bear8 and his ethereal beauty, described by Anthony Powell as that of ‘a Giotto angel living in a narcissistic dream’.9 Yet nowhere in the various mentions of Hugh in Evelyn’s surviving diaries and letters – which contain several references to Hugh’s love affairs with others – is there a hint of sexual intimacy between them.
* * *
With his Oxford plans thwarted and his finances so precarious that he had stooped to writing begging letters to friends, Evelyn now faced the bleak prospect of having to remain at Underhill indefinitely, longer at any rate than he had lived there since he first went to Lancing. By way of distraction, he spent long afternoons at the cinema and otherwise strove to make headway with a novel called The Temple at Thatch (about a young man dabbling in black magic at his ancestral folly) which he had started in June but already sensed would never be finished. Lacking conviction that he could make it as a writer and in search of a more definite purpose, he enrolled at Heatherley Art School, whose term began fortuitously on the same day as Alastair�
�s embarkation, 18 September.
Then located on Newman Street, just behind Tottenham Court Road, Heatherley boasted an array of illustrious alumni – among them Burne Jones, Rossetti, Millais, Henry Moore, E. H. Shepard and Walter Sickert – however when Evelyn went there most of the students appeared to be ‘respectable girls who, like myself, were believed at home to be “artistic”‘, while the few men seemed ‘bent upon making commercial careers’.10
On his first day, when he was set to draw ‘a thin man with no clothes but a bag about his genitalia’, he recognised no kindred spirits, and from then on lunched either by himself or with his old Oxford friend Tony Bushell, who was training to be an actor at the nearby Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Most days they made do with a pub on Tottenham Court Road where they could get a large ham roll and a half a pint of beer for sixpence,11 but occasionally they treated themselves at Previtali’s restaurant, where they celebrated Evelyn’s twenty-first birthday on 28 October. Arthur took the opportunity of his son’s coming of age to remit the money he had lent him during his Irish trip and gave him a further £5 besides, ‘most like a gentleman’, thought Evelyn.12
Throughout this time, in order to escape the tedium of Underhill, Evelyn relied greatly on his brother Alec, who was by then enjoying his post-divorce freedom as a bohemian bachelor about town. He had rented an elegant first-floor flat on Earl’s Terrace in Kensington, with a bedroom that served as an extra sitting room for parties, separated by a curtain in stylish emulation of the Algonquin Hotel in New York. He painted the high ceilings primrose-yellow and the walls pale blue and the whole place was ‘pleasantly suffused with the smell of a luxurious Russian Leather soap he used’, a friend remembered.13
Besides the cocktail parties and suppers he held there, Alec took his brother along to soirées staged by notable 1920s hostesses such as the ‘inexhaustibly hospitable’14 Gwen Otter and the avant-garde writer Mary Butts, who had earlier studied magic with Aleister Crowley and would soon become an opium-smoking intimate of Jean Cocteau. Mary Butts held a memorable ‘super-party’ for Alec at her large house in Belsize Park promising ‘unlimited drink, dancing, female attractions, secluded corners’,15 although it only really got going after Evelyn began lacing the claret-cup with brandy.
Among those caught up in the resulting maelstrom was the young writer Rebecca West, who later became a staunch fan and supporter of Evelyn’s work and remained so until the 1950s, when they fell out irreparably over a libel suit. At similar gatherings Evelyn met luminaries such as Tallulah Bankhead and her then girlfriend Gwen Farrar: ‘My family warned me about men,’ the former quipped, ‘but they never mentioned women!’ On another occasion she boasted, ‘I am as pure as driven slush.’16 No less licentious was her lisping secretary, Sir Francis Laking (brother of Evelyn’s friend Joan), whom Evelyn witnessed pouncing on Alec – much to his brother’s gratification, he could not help noticing.17 Another evening, casting himself in the role of spectator as so often, Evelyn watched as Alec ‘turned up late and a little drunk and after his fashion, fixed upon the ugliest woman in the room, bore her off and lechered with her’.18
It was a constant source of vexation for Evelyn that his lecherous brother was always so much more successful with women than he was, especially as Alec seemed to boast no obvious physical advantages, being as one contemporary recalled ‘very unattractive, tiny and stout’. His appeal seemed to lie mainly in the fact that he was so persistently keen. He was also more obviously charming and approachable than Evelyn, and according to one contemporary, perhaps crucially, he seemed to be ‘very very interested in bores – the more boring the person, the more fascinated Alec became. So he was every hostess’s dream guest.’19
It was Alec who in early 1924 first introduced Evelyn to Elsa Lanchester, one of Mary Butts’s numerous lodgers. At the age of just twenty-two she had recently established a popular cabaret club, the Cave of Harmony, which soon became Evelyn’s favourite nightspot. By the summer he had developed a crush on her and persuaded her to take a part in a silent film he had written with Terence Greenidge called The Scarlet Woman,* much of which they shot in the garden at Underhill; he later referred to it as ‘the Elsa film’, and when she subsequently went on to become a well-known actress and the wife of Charles Laughton, Evelyn liked to claim that it was he who had ‘invented’ her.
In Alastair’s absence, meanwhile, Evelyn continued to visit Barford, although whenever he went into Leamington with Mrs Graham he felt ‘a little sad to pass all the public houses where Alastair and I have drunk’.20 In early November he was lured back to Oxford by John Sutro’s invitation to a luncheon at which his attendance was kept a secret from the other guests – Harold Acton, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, Hugh Lygon, Robert Byron, Arden Hilliard and Richard Pares (recently elected a Fellow of All Souls) – who ‘feted me spontaneously in a way to rekindle all my love of Oxford’.21 An epic lunch of ‘hot lobster, partridges and plum pudding, sherry, mulled claret and a strange rum-like liqueur’ was followed by beer at the New Reform Club, dinner at Merton, more beer in the rooms of ‘a charming hunting man called Reynolds’, a further session at the Nag’s Head pub, then on to the old Hypocrites’ to drink whisky and watch The Scarlet Woman.
‘After about this stage of the evening my recollections become somewhat blurred,’ Evelyn’s diary continues. ‘I got a sword from somewhere and got into Balliol somehow and was let out of a window at some time having mocked Arden and Tony Powell and talked very seriously to Peter Quennell …’22 He returned to Oxford every weekend for the rest of that term, each one consistently more debauched than the last, and adopted the latest Oxford fashion of wearing polo-neck jumpers, ‘most convenient for lechery,’ according to Evelyn, ‘because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like studs and ties’.23
With his tendency to overdo it whenever he happened to venture out, Evelyn soon realised that ‘it is not possible to lead a gay life and to draw well’.24 Though he was ‘by no means the worst in the class’ at Heatherley, the whole business of art school had begun to pall. In December he briefly considered going to live in Sussex as pupil to the printer and bookplate designer James Guthrie, however on a two-day recce he found that, much though he liked his whole family, he was less impressed by their printing press and still less by the discomforts of their ‘ugly little house’ near Bognor.25 As a last resort, he turned to the ‘one profession open to a man of my qualifications’ and took a job as a prep school master in north Wales.
As Evelyn prepared to take up this post in late January 1925, he reflected that he felt more desolate than he had done since Alastair’s embarkation for Africa in September – only now the main cause of his unhappiness was a girl.
* * *
His latest infatuation was with eighteen-year-old Olivia Plunket Greene, whose brother (Richard) Evelyn had befriended in his last year at Oxford. Evelyn first met Olivia in early December and was quickly smitten. If not a classic beauty, she was curiously attractive with bobbed hair, ‘minute pursed lips and great goo-goo eyes’.26 Evelyn saw her again two weeks later and again two days after that, when they ended up in his bedroom at Underhill – albeit chaperoned by Alec and Terence Greenidge – before she eventually left at three.
The next day (Christmas Eve) Evelyn sent her a book that Alec had acquired from Oscar Wilde’s son called Irais – an obscure ‘lesbian novel’ describing an intense sexual relationship between two girls at a Catholic boarding school.27 ‘I wonder whether I am falling in love with this woman,’ Evelyn wrote in his diary that evening,28 beguiled by the intensity of her enthusiasms, her forthright opinions, her ability to be outrageous without compromising her ‘essential delicacy’.29 That she seemed to enjoy getting drunk as much as he did was an added bonus.
Not everyone was charmed by Olivia – her aunt Dorothea Ponsonby thought her ‘a rude, egotistical frivolous vain painted child’30 – however to certain men she was irresistible, not least due to her reputed ‘fastidious but intense appreciation of sexual pl
easure’,31 as one forlorn suitor put it. As various boyfriends discovered to their cost, she was also a notorious tease.
* * *
Doubtless hopeful that the sexy book might spark something between them, Evelyn spent the week after Christmas impatient for a letter from her. At last, on 30 December, she rang up and they went for a pub lunch followed by a magic show. On New Year’s Eve she came for lunch at Underhill and afterwards sat by the fire and talked until tea, at which point she abandoned her previous plans and went with Evelyn to the cinema.
On New Year’s Day Evelyn went for the first time to her house on Hanover Terrace (now Lansdowne Walk) in Holland Park and took an instant liking to her liberal and indulgent mother Gwen, by then separated from Olivia’s father, the singer Harry Plunket Greene. He later wrote of having fallen in love with the entire family and ‘focused the sentiment upon the only appropriate member’. He first told Olivia he was in love with her on 4 January in a nightclub, then wrote the next day to assure her that he had meant everything he said. For the avoidance of doubt, he said it all over again the day after that when they ended a long night out at the flat of Audrey Lucas, the daughter of Arthur Waugh’s friend E. V. Lucas, who complicated the situation somewhat by telling Evelyn that she was in love with him.
Olivia evidently relished the attention yet she repeatedly resisted his advances. The Plunket Greenes’ lodger Harman Grisewood later remembered her telling him that she ‘couldn’t possibly sleep with anybody so hideous’,32 however he was hardly an impartial witness given that he also loved Olivia ‘to the painful point of being entirely consumed by it,’ he admitted. ‘Destroyed some might say.’33