Evelyn Waugh
Page 15
She was not greatly attracted to Grisewood either, however during his four years as the Greenes’ lodger, he sometimes put her to bed when she was too drunk to undress. On such occasions, he recalled, ‘I was allowed – encouraged indeed – to make love to her a little … a macabre and an agonising experience for a man who was consumed by love for her and enthralled by her.’ When it stopped, ‘well before the natural outcome of such pleasures’, she would say to him, ‘If you live in the furnace, sometimes you are allowed a glass of water.’12
More regular boyfriends experienced similar frustrations. Some years later, after having become a Catholic and taken a vow of chastity, Olivia wrote to Augustus John’s highly sexed son Henry, himself a recent fugitive from the Jesuits: ‘If I let you hold me in your arms, it is for a variety of reasons … Your embraces are lessons, but most enjoyable, like a lesson in eating ice-cream or treacle.’ In the summer of 1935 they had been due to go to Cornwall together when he received a six-page letter outlining various reasons why she could not have sex with him. He drove on down to Cornwall as planned but she did not follow. He was last seen on a desolate stretch of cliffs, ‘walking along,’ Michael Holroyd writes, ‘swinging a towel, his aunt’s Irish terrier at his heels’. His body was washed up on a beach two weeks later, dressed only in a pair of shorts.13
* * *
For Evelyn, meanwhile, any distraction from Olivia was welcome, and after a ‘dreary’ Christmas with the whole Waugh family crammed into Alec’s flat for two nights, he agreed to go to Paris – his first time abroad – with a heavy-drinking actor-manager called Bill Silk, an ardent admirer of Tony Bushell’s, who promptly took him to a male brothel.* There Evelyn was kissed by a nineteen-year-old youth whom he found ‘attractive but [I] had better uses for the 300 francs which the patron – a most agreeable young man in evening dress – demanded for his enjoyment’. While Bill haggled in bad French over the price, Evelyn then arranged ‘a tableau by which my boy should be enjoyed by a large negro who was there but at the last minute, after we had ascended to a squalid divan at the top of the house and he was lying waiting for the negro’s advances, the price proved prohibitive and, losing patience with Bill’s protracted argument with the patron, I took a taxi home and to bed in chastity. I think I do not regret it.’14 For the rest of the trip, leaving his companion to his nightlife, Evelyn concentrated on sightseeing.
Back in London, another diversion was provided by Elizabeth Ponsonby, Matthew’s fashionable elder sister, one of the first girls to have her hair shingled. Later the model for Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies, Elizabeth was the fabled leader of the Bright Young People and gave the impression at least that she would sleep with anyone who wanted to sleep with her.15 Evelyn had met her the previous autumn without being especially bowled over – ‘two years ago, or less even, I suppose I should have been rather thrilled by her,’ he wrote in his diary.16 But in January 1926, at one of Alec’s dinner parties, she ‘made vigorous love’ to Evelyn which flattered him, and on reflection he was sorry not to have accepted. ‘She has furry arms,’ he noticed. When he met her again the next evening, however, she seemed ‘entirely to have overcome her attraction to me’.17 She was still on his mind a month later when, on a brief dash to London, he sent ‘Liz’ a card asking her to come for cocktails at the Ritz ‘but she did not’.18 When Alec invited her to a cocktail party in March, she again failed to show up.19
The prospect of the Lent term meanwhile was made bleaker by Richard Plunket Greene’s departure for a new job at Lancing. As a parting gift for his best man he had bought him a Douglas motor-bicycle, whose inaugural run ‘shook off 12/6 worth of its lamp,’ Evelyn recorded, ‘broke its front brake and stand and number-plate’ but otherwise went ‘creditably’.20 Heading back to Aston Clinton in the rain a few days later for the start of term, it went less well ‘and finally outside Tring made me wheel it a long way and buy it a new tyre’.21 Undaunted, shortly after that Evelyn set off for Oxford, more than thirty miles away, returning after dinner ‘beastly wet and windy and no light on my bicycle’, once falling over and ‘all the time sliding all over the road’.22 The next day he made for Barford, a ‘dolorous’ sixty-mile journey, again in the dark and rain, during which his bike required a lengthy repair en route when a nut came off the clutch. Three miles short of his destination he again came to a halt with the engine ‘refusing to grapple with the wheel’; later he learned it had ‘“sheared off a key”, whatever that may be’.23
Evelyn was soon persuaded to swap his Douglas for a smaller but more reliable Francis-Barnett, on which he proceeded to undertake even more hair-raising journeys, often in the dark, his lights usually not working, the roads wet or icy, and with plenty of alcoholic refreshments taken en route. When Dick Young, ‘the lecher from Denbighshire’, came to visit him in March Evelyn could not help but cast an envious glance at his ‘marvellous’ Sunbeam, perhaps mindful of the effect his more substantial Douglas had had on his credibility with the boys, making him, unlikely as it sounds, ‘the idol of the school’.24 The Francis-Barnett was not entirely unimpressive, however, as can be seen from the famous motorcycling photograph of Evelyn which, as Duncan McLaren has now established, shows him outside Aston Clinton astride his new machine in February 1926.
With no Richard Greene to drink with, Evelyn tolerated the odd glass with an officious cavalry officer on the staff with the suitably Wavian name of Captain Hyde-Upward, whose one redeeming feature so far as Evelyn was concerned was his habit of thoughtfully polishing and cleaning out his pipe while standing naked at his bedroom window.25 But generally he preferred the company of the boys, especially his two favourites, Edmund and Charles, who kept house for him in the sitting room the headmaster had allowed him over the stables, while he repaid them with tea and strawberries, went for walks with them, sat with them on the golf course and read aloud from The Wind in the Willows. He did not entirely shirk his disciplinary responsibilities and in March recorded that ‘the children have begun to be a little naughty so I have started being strict with them, which is a bore’.26 In the summer term he ‘found Edmund out of bounds and beat him with mixed feelings and an ash plant. He was very sweet and brave about it all. I have given him a Sulka tie as recompense.’27
Evelyn’s friendship with Edmund and Charles would doubtless raise eyebrows today, especially since he seemed to think nothing of inviting Dick Young to visit him at the school, taking him to ‘see the children at football’, whereupon he promptly ‘fell in love with Richard Hollins’. After a subsequent visit, Evelyn recorded: ‘Young of Denbighshire came down and was rather a bore – drunk all the time. He seduced a garage boy in the hedge.’28 In his autobiography Evelyn maintained that he envied Young ‘his unclouded happiness but not his exploits’,29 and there is nothing in his diaries to contradict this. His own romantic sights remained firmly fixed on Olivia, and with her proving so elusive there was always still Alastair, with whom he had been reading T. S. Eliot’s poems in January, ‘marvellously good but very hard to understand’,30 and went to a dance – ‘only it is called a “ball” because it is in the country’ – after which Alastair drove the car up the bank on the way home.
A natural drifter, Alastair was prone to disappear without warning, as when he vanished for ten days in April before being discovered drunk in the Lotti Hotel in Paris.31 In his absence on another longer trip to Constantinople, Evelyn reflected, ‘I have missed him more than I would have thought.’32 But in all probability by this stage they were just friends, so for instance when returning in July from a jaunt to London at dawn Evelyn recorded that ‘Tony [Bushell] slept in my room in the stables, Alastair in his car’.33
Yet they were still close enough for Evelyn to invite himself to accompany Alastair and his mother to Scotland for three weeks in the summer. Mrs G had been less warmly disposed towards Evelyn since discovering that her son was guaranteeing his overdraft and, as Alastair recalled, his ‘deplorable manners’ during the course of the trip ‘did nothing to cle
ar the atmosphere’.34 The two of them then went on to France, where Evelyn reflected, ‘I think I have seen too much of Alastair lately.’35
Alastair would in any case soon be off to take up a diplomatic post in Athens; however before leaving he wanted Evelyn to write a pamphlet for the printing press he had brought home from Turkey. Evelyn had made some notes on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood the previous November at Underhill after spraining his ankle climbing out of a window, and he rattled off PRB: An Essay on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1847–54 in four and a half days. If it now seems rather whimsical and patronising in tone, it was a bold effort given that the Pre-Raphaelites were so out of fashion at the time. Six decades later the young Evelyn Waugh would be hailed as having been ‘a lone voice crying in the modernist wilderness’ and ‘one of the most distinguished pioneers of the Victorian revival’.36
The original publication of PRB came a month after that of Evelyn’s short story ‘The Balance’, which he had written the previous summer. At thirty-eight pages, Evelyn had hoped it might make a short book, however the manuscript he sent to Chatto & Windus was politely returned, as was the copy Evelyn sent to Leonard Woolf – whose rejection letter chanced to arrive the day after Evelyn recorded in his diary that he had been lent ‘a novel [Mrs Dalloway] by Virginia Woolf which I refuse to believe is good’.37 After yet another refusal, Alec eventually came to its rescue and included it in the volume he edited in Chapman & Hall’s series of Georgian Stories, published in October 1926, along with contributions from Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Liam O’Flaherty and others.
As Alec said, Evelyn’s was ‘an avant-garde piece’,38 an experimental collage with abrupt shifts in form and tone, and characters and situations closely drawn from his life. Subtitled ‘A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High Necked Jumpers’, it features an art student recently down from Oxford called Adam Doure who tries to poison himself when the fashionable Imogen Quest blithely ends their affair, blaming her mother. If the experimental narrative techniques did not quite come off in this instance, it was nonetheless an extraordinary piece of writing for a twenty-one-year-old, and the use of cinematic descriptions to achieve greater objectivity, the one-sided telephone conversations and skilfully handled passages of sustained, unattributed dialogue all prefigured devices used to great effect in his later fiction. The Manchester Guardian pronounced it ‘brilliant’,39 albeit ‘for all the most futile reasons’40 in Evelyn’s view. The American writer Conrad Aiken came closer to the mark, acclaiming it as an ‘astonishingly rich portrait of a mind’ and predicting that the author might ‘do something very remarkable [providing] he is not too clever’.41
Despite the encouraging reviews, Evelyn still lagged behind some of his contemporaries, most obviously Henry Yorke, who had begun his first novel Blindness while still at Eton and published it, under the pseudonym Henry Green, just before leaving Oxford that autumn. Evelyn felt ‘impelled’ to write and tell him ‘how very much I like it. It is extraordinary to me that anyone of our generation could have written so fine a book.’42 Two years younger than Evelyn, Yorke was now about to embark on a stint on the factory floor of the family engineering works in Birmingham, an experience that would lead to his second novel, Living (1929), whereas Evelyn remained glumly stranded at Aston Clinton, attempting a life of ‘sobriety, chastity, and obedience’ after his mother had paid off his debts yet again.43 As he passed his twenty-third birthday, for which Arthur gave him ‘some very expensive underclothes, and a pound to buy some dinner with’, he was growing increasingly frustrated with schoolmastering, irritated by the boys’ ‘prattle’44 yet at the same time ashamed of how rude he could be to them. At the end of term, the headmaster grudgingly gave him a £10 pay rise. ‘I think next term will be my last,’ Evelyn wrote in his diary.45
A trip that Christmas holidays to Athens, where Alastair had been posted as honorary attaché to the British Minister, Sir Percy Loraine, did little to cheer him. Alastair had been fascinated by ancient Greece since childhood, brought up on tales of his great-grandfather, the 14th Duke of Somerset, who had travelled throughout the Levant in the 1840s ‘with a shotgun under one arm and a copy of Homer under the other’.46 An additional draw was that the Mediterranean was then seen as ‘the place for Anglo-Saxon gay men to escape to’, as Duncan Fallowell puts it, a place where ‘misfits of all kinds’ could ‘breathe more easily and be themselves’.47 Alastair was a cousin of Lady Loraine, which doubtless eased his appointment; however there were whispers about Sir Percy which, if true, would also have made Alastair an appealing recruit. An ostensibly strait-laced Northumbrian landowner and able diplomat with what his friend Harold Nicolson called ‘a weakness for the processional’, Sir Percy was also rumoured to have a ‘liking for young men and low life’ and to have had an affair with the young Francis Bacon, his distant kinsman by marriage, thus helping to extend the painter’s ‘experience and observation’.48*
Whether Loraine helped extend Alastair’s horizons in the same way is a matter for conjecture, but in any event Alastair seemed to be seizing every opportunity to explore his sexuality away from the restrictive laws of England; as Evelyn recorded, the modern flat he shared with another diplomat was ‘usually full of dreadful Dago youths called by heroic names such as Miltiades and Agamemnon with blue chins and greasy clothes who sleep with the English colony for 25 drachmas a night’.49
Unimpressed by Alastair’s new friends and by Athenian cafés, which he said reminded him of potting sheds, Evelyn eventually struck out alone for Olympia, where he saw the Hermes of Praxiteles that had been found by archaeologists only fifty years previously, ‘quite marvellous and well worth all the trouble I have taken to see it’.50 Yet despite his conscientious and adventurous sightseeing, he was nagged by a feeling of having inherited his father’s ‘homely sentiments’: ‘The truth is that I do not really like being abroad much. I want to see as much as I can this holiday and from February shut myself up for the rest of my life in the British Isles.’51
Home was eventually regained in late January 1927 via Corfu, Brindisi, Rome and Paris, after almost a month away, and he was soon back at Aston Clinton, busily corrupting a new master called Attwell, who seemed to have led ‘the dullest life imaginable’ at Oxford and been a virtual teetotaller before being cajoled into drunken binges by Evelyn. Returning from one of their sprees they came across another new member of staff, a matron who had recently given Evelyn a ham and struck him as an ‘admirable’ sort. What happened next is not clear, although Evelyn later told friends that as a joke he had said some suggestive things to her in French as she came out of the bathroom in her dressing-gown.52 The following day, while Evelyn and Attwell were sitting by the fire laughing about the night before, the headmaster came in and sacked them both. From then on, Evelyn recorded, it became ‘rather a harrassing day’. The next morning Evelyn ‘slipped away feeling rather like a housemaid who has been caught stealing gloves’.53 He warned his parents in advance by telephone that he would be coming, explaining tactfully that he had been dismissed for drunkenness, and when he got there ‘dined in a very sorrowful household’.54 The next day, feeling ‘tired and discouraged’ after ‘trying to do something about getting a job’, he wrote his diary: ‘It seems to me the time has arrived to set about being a man of letters.’55
The same day he wrote to say goodbye to Edmund and Charles, his letter crossing with one from Edmund enclosing two photographs of himself:
Dear Evelyn,
I cannot tell you how sorry I am that you have left and that I never came to say good bye but I was too shy as you had your friend, Cecil Roberts, with you. I am writing this in bed instead of going to call you, I shall miss doing that awfully. Every one is very upset at your leaving. Watkinson asked me especially to remember him to you when I wrote. I do not know what Pig [Charles] & I will do now without your room to go up & tidy or wash up (in cold water). I went up there yesterday to see what you had done with all your things & it looked so bare wi
thout your books & candle sticks & the Ikon (I cannot spell it).56
* * *
Back in London following his dismissal, Evelyn had a discouraging interview with a Father Underhill to explore the idea of his becoming a clergyman before accepting a temporary job at a dismal school in Notting Hill, where ‘all the masters drop their aitches and spit in the fire and scratch their genitals’ and the boys ‘pick their noses and scream at each other in a cockney accent’.57
Prior to taking up that post he ‘spent two days writing a story about a Duke’58 for the well-regarded New Decameron short story series. ‘A House of Gentlefolks’ reintroduces Ernest Vaughan, Adam Doure’s dissolute friend (and Evelyn’s alter ego) in ‘The Balance’, who has now been sent down from Oxford and befriends the Duke of Vanburgh’s supposedly backward grandson and heir after being asked to take him around Europe. More straightforwardly readable if less ambitious than ‘The Balance’, it appeared later that year alongside stories by Michael Sadleir, G. B. Stern, L. A. G. Strong and others.
As he usually did when in London, he saw a lot of the Plunket Greenes, and after lunching with them one day he complained to his diary that ‘Olivia could talk of nothing except black men’.59 Since the opening of the Blackbirds revue the previous autumn it had become chic for Bright Young People to entertain black people at their parties, to the extent that when issuing an invitation promising no such adornment Evelyn took to saying, ‘It’s not a party, there won’t be a black man.’60 Evelyn had in fact seen the Blackbirds shortly after it opened and he went again several times with Olivia after leaving Aston Clinton, recording on one occasion that they ‘called on Florence Mills and other niggers and negresses in their dressing-rooms. Then to a night club called Victor’s to see another nigger – [the American cabaret star] Leslie Hutchinson.’61* It is a commonplace to accuse Evelyn of being racist in such diary entries, just as it is to describe various other pronouncements as anti-Semitic or snobbish. But his apparent prejudices almost invariably contained elements of self-parody or mischievous provocation, or stemmed from a compulsion to say the unsayable. Regarding his descriptions of the Blackbirds, it is worth bearing in mind that language and attitudes were very different then, and in any case the hostesses who courted and patronised black artists, treating them as fashionable and amusing accessories rather as Mrs Beste-Chetwynde does with ‘Chokey’ in Decline and Fall, were if anything more amusing to him than the black performers themselves.