Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  On 11 January Evelyn described a ‘desolate tea’ with Olivia at Hanover Terrace ‘in front of a gas fire quarrelling in a half-hearted sort of way. Most of the time she insisted monotonously “I don’t think you love me any more” and then became aloof when I attempted to prove that I did.’34 A week later Evelyn saw Olivia kissing his friend Tony Bushell at the theatre and reacted by being ‘very rude’ to her, but she was ‘too drunk to mind’. The next day he turned up drunk at her house after midnight with the same Tony Bushell, broke a gramophone record and refused to go until Olivia knelt down and apologised to him, which she refused to do, ‘quite rightly’, he later conceded. They made up the next day, just before he forlornly departed for Wales, when she told him he was ‘a great artist and must not be a schoolmaster’.35

  * * *

  Unlike its lavishly embellished portrayal as the towered and turreted Llanabba Castle in Decline and Fall, Arnold House was a bland Victorian property perched above the village of Llanddulas on what Evelyn called the ‘highly geological’36 Denbighshire coast, between Rhyl and Colwyn Bay. He completed the last leg of the 250-mile journey from London by taxi, buried beneath a pile of bags belonging to the thirty boys he had reluctantly chaperoned on the train from Euston, who had then walked up from the station. The headmaster’s wife, Mrs Banks,* greeted him sternly. ‘The boys know they must carry their own bags. You should not have let them do that to you, Mr Waugh.’ She then handed him a message she had taken down on the telephone. ‘I hope you can understand it. I certainly cannot.’ Sent by Hugh Lygon and John Sutro, it read ‘On Evelyn, on.’

  The dislike was mutual from then on, alleviated only briefly when Alastair and Mrs Graham came to visit Evelyn a month later and impressed Mrs Banks with their evident social superiority. ‘Some very nice friends of yours have called for you, Mr Waugh,’ she said. ‘I am sure Mr Banks will excuse you from all duties while they are in the neighbourhood.’37

  Evelyn’s duties were in any case fairly vague at first. ‘It is the most curiously run school that ever I heard of,’ he wrote to his mother soon after arriving. ‘No time tables nor syllabuses nor nothing. Banks just wanders into the common room & says “There are some boys in that class room. I think they are the first, or perhaps the fourth. Will someone go & teach them Maths or Latin or something.”‘38

  Evelyn rated himself ‘an obvious dud’ as a schoolmaster, as inept at exercising authority as he was at carving the joint in the school dining room. But although he also admitted to finding ‘a certain perverse pleasure in making all I teach as dreary to the boys as it is to myself’,39 he seems to have been quite popular. Derek Verschoyle – later literary editor of The Spectator, where he recruited Evelyn as a columnist – remembered being favourably struck by his tweed coat, voluminous plus-fours and high-necked jumper, and by his agreeably laissez-faire attitude in the classroom: ‘It could not be said that he made any great formal effort to teach [however] if any child showed curiosity on any specific point he would attempt to satisfy it.’40 When it was his turn to take prep, Evelyn left his charges to their own devices instead of doing the rounds, while he used the time to write. (If anyone was impertinent enough to ask he would say that he was writing a history of the Eskimos.) Verschoyle also recalled that when Evelyn was in charge of ‘communal walks’, the boys vied to walk near him as they found his stories so entertaining.

  At games, on the other hand, Evelyn was ‘so undistinguished a performer that after a few humorous episodes it was thought better that he should not exercise with the senior boys’. Instead he was ‘issued with a whistle and allowed to amble harmlessly around the football field with the ten-year olds’.41 Even more humiliating was Evelyn’s first riding lesson at a local livery yard when, having not ridden since childhood, he was put on a leading rein, only to be met ‘in this contemptible situation’ by the whole school returning from football.42 Perhaps to bolster whatever was left of his dignity, he began to smoke a pipe and grow a moustache.

  Midway through the term, Evelyn told Harold Acton that, while not a bad school, ‘it is a sorry waste of time & energy’. Any time and energy left to him tended to be spent pining for Olivia, engraving a bookplate for her and writing letters ‘full of sorrow and devotion’43 which she either ignored or replied to with such lack of emotion as to make him even more miserable. ‘All the term I have been allowing her to become a focus for all the decencies of life,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘which is foolish of me and not very fair to her.’44 Drinking, as ever, provided a diversion and he enjoyed leading his common-room colleagues (‘a rum lot united like defeated soldiers in the recognition of our base fate’)45 astray in the local pubs. But he could hardly wait for the Easter holidays, not least since he had been invited to stay with all the Plunket Greenes for two weeks in a rented lighthouse on the island of Lundy, off the north coast of Devon.

  Back in London Evelyn quickly reverted to his bad old ways, and on the second evening he so shocked his besotted friend Audrey Lucas with his drunken behaviour that she wrote begging him never to get drunk again. Her letter went unanswered, however, having arrived on the morning of his next spectacular misadventure, an episode later recycled as the late-night carouse involving Charles, Sebastian and ‘Boy’ Mulcaster in Brideshead. Evelyn and Olivia had organised a party to celebrate Richard Plunket Greene and Elizabeth Russell’s engagement, but the drink they ordered failed to turn up. Evelyn accordingly went off to fetch it, persuading Olivia’s cousin Matthew Ponsonby to drive him. Having retrieved it, Evelyn announced he needed to go home to change and suggested a pub crawl to Underhill, a further seven miles away to the north, to which Ponsonby again meekly agreed. After two more glasses of beer there they eventually headed back to the party, with Evelyn insisting on stopping at yet more pubs on the way.46

  As their erratic expedition neared its completion they were pulled over by the police in the Strand after the inebriated Ponsonby drove the wrong side of a traffic island. Later that night his father Arthur, a member of Ramsay MacDonald’s first Labour government, had to be woken by his daughter Elizabeth to go and bail his son out of Bow Street police station. He refused to do anything for Evelyn (‘rather ill-naturedly, I thought’), who was eventually released after four hours in a cell and made it to the party just as it was breaking up. The next morning he was fined 15/6 for being ‘drunk and incapable’, and reportedly ‘made a bad impression as he appeared in court in pink trousers & a green high-necked jumper and cheeked the police’. When one officer said, ‘Come along, my boy,’ Evelyn shot back, ‘Don’t call me “my boy”, my man.’47 Ponsonby, meanwhile, was lucky to get away with a fine of 22 guineas – of which Evelyn offered to pay half – and the loss of his licence for a year. The Daily Telegraph’s report did not name Evelyn, but his friends and family knew perfectly who the ‘incapably drunk’ passenger was. ‘A quantity of liquor found in the car was afterwards claimed by this man,’ the report added.48

  Evelyn’s behaviour shocked even some of his own age group. ‘I am all for a carouse now and again,’ Elizabeth Russell’s sister Georgiana* primly confided, ‘but I think there is something disgusting about Evelyn.’49 Arthur Ponsonby naturally blamed the ‘disreputable’ Evelyn for leading his ‘good-natured and weak’ son astray, telling his wife Dolly (sister of Gwen Plunket Greene) that Evelyn had been ‘distinctly drunk and therefore drew suspicion on M who was not sober’.50

  Later in the year, if Evelyn’s diary is to be believed, the Ponsonbys’ hapless son would be involved in another far more serious motor accident while drunk, ‘killing or at any rate seriously injuring a small boy’.51 However, that Easter, as far as their family was concerned, Evelyn was very much the guilty party, and hence Matthew and Olivia’s grandmother, Lady Parry, was ‘disgusted’ to hear that he was going to stay the next day with the Plunket Greenes ‘just as if we didn’t care when we are all so upset’. Frantic telephone calls passed between the cousins. Evelyn himself received what he called a ‘piteous’ letter from Lady Parr
y and no answer from Dolly Ponsonby after he wrote to her trying to mend fences.52

  The Lundy house party included Elizabeth Russell, Julia Strachey and Terence Greenidge, who annoyed Evelyn with his ‘new and disagreeable mannerism’ of licking the backs of his hands, and later claimed apropos Olivia that ‘she had fallen a bit for me!’.53 Another girl there, Anne Talbot, confessed to Evelyn that she did not know what a phallic symbol was but then appeared to be the most enthusiastic participant in an ‘amazing orgy’ Evelyn walked in on one evening a few days later,54 seeing her ‘almost naked being slapped on the buttocks and enjoying herself ecstatically. Every two minutes she ran to the lavatory and as soon as she was out of the room everyone said, “My dear, the things we are finding out about Anne.” It was all rather cruel.’55

  On the whole it was an enjoyable two weeks for Evelyn, albeit marred by ‘the insistent sorrow of unrequited love’, of which he felt unable to cure himself even though he realised it was almost as trying for Olivia as it was for him. He was also troubled by the news that his own admirer, Audrey Lucas, was soon to marry Elsa Lanchester’s partner at the Cave of Harmony, Harold Scott. ‘It seems to be a most improper arrangement,’ Evelyn mused, ‘and one for which I am largely responsible.’56 Having failed to respond to Audrey’s desperate letter about his drinking, Evelyn feared she was ‘marrying this vulgar man out of mockery’.57 It proved to be an unhappy union.

  From Lundy Evelyn went stay at Barford for a few days’ heavy drinking with Alastair, who had arrived back from Africa just after New Year. But by that time Evelyn only had eyes for Olivia, and he continued to pursue her fruitlessly for a few days back in London before returning ‘in immeasurable gloom’ to Arnold House for the summer term. Within a week he was debating the ‘paradoxes of suicide and achievement’ and bought a revolver from the newly arrived second master, Dick Young, with the idea of killing himself.58 Young was ‘a dapper man of sunny disposition who spoke in the idiom of the army’, but as Evelyn soon discovered, he was also ‘monotonously pederastic and talks only of the beauty of sleeping boys’;59 as Evelyn later admitted, he provided ‘certain features’ for the character of Captain Grimes, his most memorable creation in Decline and Fall: ‘When you’ve been in the soup as often as I have,’ Grimes tells Paul Pennyfeather, ‘it gives you a sort of feeling that everything’s for the best, really … The last chap who put me on my feet said I was “singularly in harmony with the primitive promptings of humanity”.’60 In A Little Learning Evelyn recalled how, a few weeks into the term, Young surprised his colleagues by saying how much he had enjoyed a school trip to Snowdon in honour of the headmaster’s birthday, a singularly tiresome expedition for the other masters. ‘Enjoyed yourself?,’ they asked incredulously. ‘What did you find to enjoy?’ ‘Knox minor,’ he said with radiant simplicity. ‘I felt the games a little too boisterous, so I took Knox minor away behind some rocks. I removed his boot and stocking, opened my trousers, put his dear little foot there and experienced a most satisfying emission.’61

  Evelyn was fascinated by Young’s cheerful recollections of past ignominies: ‘expelled from Wellington, sent down from Oxford, and forced to resign his commission in the Army. He had left four schools precipitately, three in the middle of the term through his being taken in sodomy and one through his being drunk six nights in succession. And yet he goes on getting better and better jobs without difficulty.’62 He admired his ‘shining candour’ and his unfailing ability to bounce back, and the development of his comic outlook as a novelist undoubtedly owed something to their fellowship. He spent many evenings with him in the pubs at Llanddulas and kept in touch after they ceased to be colleagues.

  If Young helped keep Evelyn’s spirits up during his second term at Arnold House, so too did his excitement about a new book, which would be published the following year as a short story, ‘The Balance’. ‘I am making the first chapter a cinema film and have been writing furiously ever since,’ he told his diary. ‘I honestly think that it is going to be rather good.’63 He had also heard from Alec that C. K. Scott Moncrieff, the famous translator of Proust, might want him as a secretary. Happily imagining a year in Italy sipping Chianti under olive trees, Evelyn promptly gave his notice to Mr Banks. ‘I never give notice,’ said Young, when he heard. ‘It’s always the other way about with me. In fact, this looks like being the first end of term I’ve seen, old boy, for three schools.’64

  Evelyn’s life briefly seemed full of promise, but then came a letter from Harold Acton with his crushing assessment of The Temple at Thatch: ‘Too English for my exotic taste. Too much nid-nodding over port. It should be printed in a few elegant copies for the friends who love you such as myself.’65 Evelyn promptly consigned the manuscript to the school furnace. Next came the news that Scott Moncrieff did not need him after all. ‘It looks rather like being the end of the tether,’ Evelyn told his diary.66

  At the end of A Little Learning, he described how all this drove him to leave his clothes and an appropriate quotation from Euripides on the beach one night and swim out to sea with thoughts of drowning, only to be turned back by jellyfish. ‘As earnest of my attempt, I had brought no towel. With some difficulty I dressed and tore into small pieces my pretentious classical tag … Then I climbed the sharp hill that led to all the years ahead.’67

  * They had started filming it at Oxford, including a sequence by the Littlemore Asylum. ‘Evelyn had a thing about loonies at the time,’ recalled Tony Bushell. ‘There were poor loonies looking through the gate and all that.’ The negative of that particular sequence was subsequently lost by Terence Greenidge.

  * In A Little Learning (p. 222) Evelyn called the Bankses Mr and Mrs Vanhomrigh – ‘pronounced by some who sought her goodwill “Vanummery”‘.

  * Later Georgiana Blakiston. Known as ‘Giana’, later that year she was conspicuously drunk herself at her sister’s wedding. (See 22 December 1925; EWD, p. 238.)

  9

  Becoming a Man of Letters

  There is no corroboration for the drowning attempt in Evelyn’s diary or letters and it may very well have been an imaginative flourish to lend a dramatic and slightly farcical finale to his account of his early years. Yet this was undoubtedly a low point. Sent on his way from Arnold House with a few ‘valedictory discourtesies’ from the headmaster, back in London he became acutely aware of the gulf between his own situation and that of his close friends: Harold Acton was at the height of his Oxford popularity and esteem; Tony Bushell, when Evelyn visited him in his dressing room at the Adelphi Theatre, seemed ‘superbly important nowadays with Cabinet ministers waiting on him with their cars and amorous Jewesses offering him their beds’;1 Robert Byron was about to set off on the adventure to Greece that would lead to his first book; Peter Quennell was already a published poet, the most ‘poetical’ since Swinburne according to Evelyn’s bête noire Edmund Gosse;2 even Evelyn’s school sidekick Dudley Carew had published a novel and was assistant editor on a weekly newspaper. Only Alastair Graham remained as determinedly idle and dissolute as ever.

  Evelyn and Alastair were together a lot that August and a resumption of romance is hinted at in Evelyn’s recollection of their having ‘dined in high-necked jumpers’ at Barford and done ‘much that could not have been done if Mrs Graham had been here’.3 After that visit Alastair wrote to him: ‘I feel very lonely now. But you have made me so happy. Please come back again soon. Write to me a lot, because I am all by myself, and I want to know what you are doing … My love to you, Evelyn; I want you back again so much.’4 There is a sense here of Alastair beginning to lose his hold over Evelyn, and more palpably so in his next letter. ‘Thank you for your letter,’ he wrote a few days later. ‘Evelyn, it was very serious for a poor careless, happy person like me. Of course I want you to treat me as your nature wishes to. I don’t understand how one could treat anyone otherwise without being insincere.’5 Evelyn’s pulling away doubtless had to do with his crush on Olivia, with whom he had gone to stay on the Norfolk coast for
a week in September 1925, taking with him a kitten as a present. But in any case he appears to have been turning his attention more towards girls in general, and had confided to certain friends that he wanted to find a wife.6 The same month he recorded going to ‘a party given by one of the homosexual painters I had met at Mary Butts. He wanted to dance with me and Bobbie [Cecil A. Roberts] but it seemed too repulsive and I am afraid we were rude.’7

  In a bid to find more congenial work, meanwhile, he had applied to all the London art galleries and art magazines, but to no avail.8 So in late September he reluctantly began a new teaching job at Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire, an Italianate pile formerly owned by the Rothschilds where backward public schoolboys were crammed for university entrance. With only thirty ‘mad boys’ (or ‘lunatics’), as Evelyn called them, in the whole school, he had more free time here, besides which the proximity to the fleshpots of London and Oxford, as well as his entertaining Cockburn cousins just four miles away at Tring, made life far more agreeable than at Arnold House. So too did the presence in the common room of his great friend Richard Plunket Greene, to whom Evelyn acted as best man when he married Liza Russell that December, another event marred for him by his jealously over Olivia.

  When some of Richard and Elizabeth’s wedding party eventually ended up at the Berkeley, Evelyn looked on as Olivia did ‘that disgusting dance of hers’9 – her version of the Charleston, which was so much the rage then among the Bright Young People.10 Much of his heartache about her stemmed from the fact that she made such a show of being sexually available to everyone. Everyone, that is, except Evelyn, who was barely allowed to touch her. A month earlier, at Matthew Ponsonby’s party, Evelyn observed that ‘Olivia as usual behaved like a whore and was embraced on a bed by various people’.11 Harman Grisewood later insisted that she ‘would never have accepted these physical caresses from anyone to whom she was herself attracted’.