Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  In Evelyn’s case there may also have been jealousy over Olivia’s outspoken fascination with black men and her rumoured affair with Paul Robeson. By now Evelyn knew all too well the depressive, self-obsessed flipside of Olivia’s character after witnessing such scenes as her ‘packing bottles in a bedroom littered with stockings and newspaper. Fatter and larger generally, unable to talk of much except herself and that in an impersonal and incoherent way.’62 Yet according to Harman Grisewood he remained desperately in love with her and one day, when the message finally got through that she would never sleep with him, he took hold of her hand and very deliberately burnt the back of her wrist with his cigarette. Olivia found this sadistic act strangely moving, and when she showed the scar to Grisewood she confided that she felt very sorry for Evelyn, ‘sorry’, as Grisewood later recalled, ‘that she could feel no physical attraction for him and sorry that this knowledge should have so frightful an effect, driving him to a sort of frenzy’.63

  For Evelyn, meanwhile, the only way of getting over his obsession with Olivia was for him to find someone else, and on 7 April 1927 he recorded in his diary: ‘I have met such a nice girl called Evelyn Gardner.’

  * Unlike in Britain, where they would remain illegal until the 1960s, homosexual acts had been legal in France since the Revolution.

  * Roger Mortimer recalled that in retirement Sir Percy Loraine lived in the flat below his parents at 76 Sloane Street and that he used to go abroad for the winter, during which time his butler used the flat as a brothel. ‘My mother could not understand the weird noises that could be heard from 2 p.m. onwards. I think my father rather enjoyed them.’ (Dear Lumpy, p. 126.)

  * Known as ‘Hutch’, Hutchinson’s romantic entanglements were a source of particular fascination to Evelyn. Despite being married with a baby, Hutch was at the time openly living with a girl called Zena Naylor (the illegitimate daughter of the art critic Langton Douglas), who soon complained of his sleeping with Olivia’s sister-in-law, Babe Plunket Greene. To complicate matters further, Zena soon became the girlfriend of Alec Waugh, who had to plead with Evelyn to change a brothel sign that read ‘Chez Zena’ in one of his illustrations for Decline and Fall.

  10

  Shevelyn

  There has been a certain amount of debate about when or where the two Evelyns met, Dudley Carew recalling that it was he who introduced them at his flat (and that was why Evelyn was so horrid to him in later years)* and others suggesting that it happened at the lodgings that Evelyn Gardner shared with her best friend Pansy Pakenham on Ebury Street in Belgravia. Evelyn certainly went to the girls’ Ebury Street party, describing it in his diary as ‘a pleasing little one’,1 however that took place in late May 1927, more than six weeks after the Evelyns’ first meeting. According to Evelyn Gardner, whose written account of their relationship has not been seen by any previous biographer,† they had first met at an earlier party given by Sylvia Brooke, Ranee of Sarawak, self-styled ‘Queen of the Headhunters’, at her large house on Portland Place, introduced by their mutual friend Bobbie Roberts.

  Recalling this first meeting, ‘Shevelyn’, as Evelyn’s friends soon took to calling her, wrote: ‘I saw a young man, short, sturdy, good-looking, given to little gestures, the shrugging of a hand which held a drink, the tossing of a head as he made some witty, somewhat malicious remark. He was easy to talk to and amusing.’2 Besides thinking her ‘a lovely girl’, Evelyn never recorded his initial impressions of Shevelyn, however she later presumed ‘he was interested in me because I was gay, boyish looking with an Eton crop and very slim’. A possible additional draw, she hazarded, was ‘that I belonged – so he thought – to the society to which he not only wished to belong but of which he wished to become an undoubted member’.

  Her father, Lord Burghclere, illegitimate eldest son of the 3rd Lord Gardner and the actress Julia Fortescue, had been a Liberal MP and President of the Board of Agriculture under Gladstone then Rosebery. Her mother, Lady Winifred, eldest daughter of the 4th Earl of Carnarvon, and a distant kinswoman of Gwen Plunket Greene, was the scholarly biographer of James, 1st Duke of Ormonde and George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Winifred’s brother sponsored Howard Carter’s Egyptian archaeological expeditions and participated in the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. But Shevelyn longed to escape her illustrious background. Born in 1903 (a month before Evelyn Waugh), the youngest by seven years of four daughters, she never went to school and was brought up by a nanny and governesses, her sister Mary, the next youngest, having been married off when Shevelyn was eleven, after which, as she recalled, ‘the servants became my greatest friends’. She remembered the sensation of being ‘as it were in a cage with no knowledge of the world or the real behaviour of others. One was enclosed and the bursting out when freedom came was not good.’

  Of her parents Shevelyn far preferred her father, ‘whose sunny disposition and ever-kindly wit,’ according to The Times, ‘together with his fame as an amateur actor are perhaps better remembered than his services to Liberalism’.3 However he was fifty-seven by the time Shevelyn was born and she saw very little of him as a child, although she fondly recalled his winking at her across the table during boring lunch parties. He died in 1921, when she was barely eighteen. Her mother, on the other hand, was ‘formidable’ and ‘absolutely terrifying’ as far as Shevelyn was concerned – notwithstanding her dainty figure, tiny waist and mice-like feet.

  Lady Burghclere’s starchiness may have stemmed from having had to sacrifice her own adolescence. Her mother died when she was eleven, leaving it to her to entertain her father’s guests at Highclere Castle (the ‘real’ Downton Abbey) as if she were a grown-up. Her father eventually remarried and when he began crawling around playing bears with his baby son on the drawing room floor, she was horrified that he could be so undignified. When she came to have Shevelyn, her daughter remembered no affection at all. ‘One could never explain one’s presumed misdemeanours,’ wrote Shevelyn, ‘because words froze in one’s mouth or didn’t even get as far as freezing. Neither my sister Mary nor I remember her ever coming into the nursery or schoolroom. There were no goodnights, loving or otherwise, or prayers being heard at bedtime.’

  On the face of it the three elder Gardner daughters had all married well,* however none of the marriages was especially happy and by the time Shevelyn was grown-up two of them had already failed and there were whispers of ‘bad blood’ in the family, which Shevelyn presumed referred to her actress grandmother, some of whose warmth and demonstrativeness she herself exhibited in her role as the archetypal Modern Girl, calling friends ‘angel-face’ and ‘sweetie-pie’, and referring to Proust, whom she once declared herself ‘buried in’, as ‘dear old Prousty-wousty’.4

  Shevelyn’s longing to ‘burst out’ was allied to a natural flirtatiousness, a slim figure, pert little nose and, like her distant cousin Olivia Plunket Greene, round ‘goo-goo’ eyes that men found highly attractive. By the time she was twenty-three she had been engaged nine times, often simultaneously, her assorted fiancés including a ship’s purser whom she had met on a trip to Australia, where her mother had sent her to break up another unsuitable entanglement. When she met Evelyn Waugh at Sylvia Brooke’s party she had recently accepted a proposal from the Ranee’s handsome ADC and former boyfriend Barry Gifford, whom shellshock had transformed from dashing First World War hero to hopeless soak and ‘frightful bounder’ in several people’s estimation. Shevelyn knew he was an alcoholic, but ‘in my immature way I imagined I could cure him’; however they had to hold fire for the time being because he was still technically married.

  * * *

  Aside from finding Evelyn Waugh attractive and fun, the fact that he was a writer was also very appealing, given that she had recently quit her job as a vendeuse at the Maison Arthur fashion store on Dover Street in order to write a play, and was keen for an entrée into the literary world. When they met he had just begun a trial stint on the Daily Express, and after their first lunch à deux at the Gree
n Park Hotel in late May he went straight off to cover a fire in Soho, where ‘an Italian girl was supposed to have been brave but had actually done nothing at all’.5 He was sacked shortly afterwards, perhaps not surprisingly if the advice he subsequently offered budding journalists was any reflection of the attitude he displayed at work. When assigned a story, ‘the correct procedure is to jump to your feet, seize your hat and umbrella and dart out of the office with every appearance of haste to the nearest cinema’.6 There the probationer was advised to sit and smoke a pipe and imagine what any relevant witnesses might say. It was perhaps Evelyn’s good fortune that in his seven weeks on the paper, not one of the pieces he filed was published.

  Shortly before being let go by the Express, after toying with the idea of writing a book about the Mormons, he had in any case been commissioned by Duckworth’s, where his friend Anthony Powell worked, to write a biography of Rossetti in time for the centenary of the painter’s birth the next year. Arthur Waugh gloomily predicted that the book would never be finished and that he would have to make good the publisher’s advance of £20 which Evelyn, who invariably lurched towards largesse when in funds, had spent in a week. However, after two weeks with his parents and Alec in the South of France (during which Evelyn and Alec visited the Marseilles red-light district, which may have occasioned Evelyn’s first sexual encounter with a woman), he knuckled down, and after three weeks he had completed 12,000 words. A month later he was up to 40,000, helped by a stint at the Abingdon Arms in Beckley (where he and Alastair had rented their horseless caravan three years earlier), from where he went most days to Oxford to write in the Union library, which Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites had decorated with murals in the 1850s. Next he decided to patch up his quarrel with Mrs Graham and move on to Barford, where he could work undisturbed in a room under the roof called the cock-loft, formerly a lady’s maid’s ‘cutting-out room’, furnished with only a table and, as Alastair recalled, ‘one of those headless, armless, legless dummies representing the ideal Victorian lady’s figure’.7

  Despite doing all the research as he went along – including interviewing Rossetti’s former secretary Hall Caine in bed and looking ‘like a Carthusian abbott’, and visiting Kelmscott Manor, where Rossetti had shared a lease with William Morris, whose daughter Evelyn found to be ‘a detestable woman’ – he managed to complete Rossetti: His Life and Works within seven months. By today’s standards the eventual 227 pages includes a lot of long direct quotations – comprising as much as a third of the text in some chapters – however considering that he was barely twenty-four, and that the book is studded with strikingly trenchant and at the time unfashionable opinions, it was a distinctly impressive achievement.

  Did the thought of enhancing his eligibility in the eyes of Evelyn Gardner give an extra spur to his writing? Almost certainly it did. After their lunch date in May there had been a long weekend over Whitsun when they both stayed in Wiltshire with Shevelyn’s sister Mary Hope-Morley, who was by then estranged from her first husband and entertaining his replacement, Alan Hillgarth, ‘very sure of himself’, noted Evelyn in his diary, ‘writes shockers, ex-sailor’. There was then a long interval while Evelyn got on with Rossetti before he again began to pursue her in earnest in mid-September. In late November – by which time he had taken a leaf out of the Pre-Raphaelites’ book and was learning to be a cabinetmaker at the Academy of Carpentry – he told his diary that he was seeing Shevelyn ‘a lot’, and she had recently been to dinner at Underhill to meet his parents, after which she told a friend: ‘Old Mr Waugh is a complete Pinkle-Wonk. He wears a blue velvet coat at dinner, just like Papa did, and talks about actresses who were the toasts of his young days. I like that kind of thing.’8

  A little wiser perhaps after his forlorn pursuit of Olivia, Evelyn seems to have blundered only once with Shevelyn when, ‘a little too tight’ one evening, as she told a friend, he was furious when she wouldn’t let him take her home. ‘When I got back about 1.30 the telephone rang, & a small precise voice said, “Is that Miss Gardner?” “Yes.” “What I want to say is, Hell to you!” Clang went the receiver. I did laugh so much. Evelyn apologised profusely the next day, he is so sweet.’9 ‘Sweet’ is a word that crops up a lot in her descriptions of him at this time.

  Evelyn had been vaguely on the lookout for a wife for the past two years, and it had evidently already crossed his mind that Evelyn Gardner might be the one. When one day she let slip out of the blue that she was thinking of going to Canada, he realised he could afford to dither no longer. Three days later, on 12 December, Evelyn took her out to dinner at the Ritz Grill and proposed. ‘Let’s get married and see how it goes,’10 is how he phrased it, according to Shevelyn, who recalled there being no mention of love. She asked for time to think about it but the next day rang up to accept.

  She later admitted that, much though she ‘liked Evelyn and admired him sincerely’, she ‘should have considered it far longer than I did. But I was anxious to get married and settle down.’ Her sense of urgency had been heightened by two recent developments. Her closest sister Mary, whom she idolised to an extent unfathomable to her friends, had announced that she was going to marry the cocksure shocker writer Alan Hillgarth (to whom Hevelyn had taken a virulent dislike, as had her flatmate Pansy Pakenham) and follow him to South America. And Pansy had also just got engaged to the painter Henry Lamb. ‘Suddenly there was the danger of my having to return home,’ recalled Shevelyn. ‘I did not think that my mother would allow me to live alone [and was afraid she] might cut off my allowance.’

  To give her her due, besides the sheer convenience of marriage at this time she also felt that Evelyn would be far more stimulating company than the ‘solid 100% he-men’ with whom she had previously consorted, whose appeal, she told a friend, lay ‘in their directness and sex-appeal’ yet whose charms tended to wear off to the point when they became ‘hum-drum’.11 Her acceptance of him was encouraged by Pansy, who told a friend at the time that ‘after all these toughs & cavemen that make up her usual clientele, E. Waugh seems like claret after whisky [and] seems to be kind and bracing at the same time’.12 Pansy had been equally instrumental in persuading Evelyn to take the plunge when he did. ‘I was greatly in favour of this,’ she wrote to a friend just after the engagement, ‘as I thought E. Gardner had lost her nerve about marriage & that if she didn’t do it at once she would let it peter out out of sheer funk.’13

  Evelyn’s proposal does not sound all that romantic, it is true, and is often adduced as proof that he was not especially in love with her. Equally plausible, however, is that he was nervous and unsure of her response and anxious to protect himself against her possible rejection, which would have been perfectly understandable with Barry Gifford still lurking about, and given all the knocks his confidence had suffered at the hands of Olivia. In any case, Shevelyn later implied that his breezy suggestion was far less threatening and more appealing to her than a passionate declaration of love, telling Michael Davie that she interpreted it as meaning that absolute faithfulness was not required by her. ‘I had been brought up to believe everything that people said. I believed him. I was a ninny.’14*

  Whatever the depth of his feelings for her, Evelyn was also keen to get away from home. ‘How I detest this house [Underhill],’ he had reflected earlier that autumn, ‘and how ill I feel in it. The whole place volleys and thunders with traffic. I can’t sleep or work … The telephone bell is continually ringing, my father scampering up and down stairs, Gaspard [the dog] barking, the gardener rolling the gravel under the window and all the time the traffic. Another week of this will drive me mad.’15

  It was nonetheless there that Evelyn asked his fiancée to spend five days over Christmas, after which Shevelyn wrote to Kate thanking her ‘for the happiest Christmas I have ever had. I loved being at Hampstead & wish I were with you still. I have never thanked you properly for the letter you wrote me, when I got engaged to Evelyn. It was so much the nicest letter I have ever had. Somehow, I thought
that you wouldn’t be pleased, because Evelyn is such an exceptional person, and I know how fond you are of him. I hope I shall be able to make him happy. I think when one loves someone, as much as I love Evelyn, one is terrified of disappointing them.’16

  Shevelyn was to go to Underhill many times after that, giving her ample opportunity to observe the Waugh household. When talking to her, Alec Waugh referred to Underhill as ‘the little house’, hinting that she might find it rather humble compared to what she was used to, however it struck her as far more of a home than the various places in which she had grown up. She was occasionally taken aback by the tensions between the two brothers and also by Evelyn’s ill-concealed aversion to his father’s sentimentality. But overall she found the Waugh parents far easier to get along with than her own mother, of whom she had recently observed that ‘unless you agree with her every word she is furious. The great thing is to say “quite” to every remark she makes.’17