Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  Lady Burghclere – known unaffectionately as ‘the Baroness’ by her daughter’s friends – had already made it plain that she was not remotely in favour of her daughter marrying an ‘impoverished, suburban trainee carpenter’, as Evelyn’s grandson later put it.18 How much snobbery there was on her part and how much subsequent embroidery by Evelyn is anyone’s guess, however years later he told Nancy Mitford that ‘it never occurred to me to think I wasn’t a gentleman until Lady Burghclere pointed it out’.19 One thing was made perfectly clear from the start: she was never going to give her consent to their marriage while Evelyn was without a job. However when he subsequently sought one at the BBC, she used her connections (her one remaining son-in-law Geoffrey Fry wrote to Evelyn’s interviewer, Lance Sieveking, who happened to be a friend of his*) to make sure he did not get it.20

  Lady Burghclere meanwhile began gathering all the evidence she could of Evelyn’s unsuitability, even visiting Cruttwell at Oxford to grill him about Evelyn’s career there. As Shevelyn reported, the embittered don was ‘palpitating with perverse vices’ and assured Lady Burghclere that Evelyn drank copious amounts of vodka and absinthe, went about with disreputable people, lived off his parents, ill-treated his father, had no moral backbone or character, would soon cease to love Shevelyn and would drag her ‘down into the abysmal depths of Sodom and Gomorrah’.21

  After listening to this lurid list Lady Burghclere made a last desperate attempt to reclaim her daughter, asking her to stay for a fortnight in early May with the inducement of publicly announcing the engagement. It had been eighteen months since Shevelyn last spent the night under her mother’s roof, however she was worried about money and anxious not to lose her mother’s support, so accepted. On arrival she was confronted with Cruttwell’s charge sheet and an ultimatum that the marriage could not possibly take place for two years. Evelyn was then summoned and, according to Pansy’s account, ‘behaved with admirable firmness, threatening to get married in a week’, whereupon Lady Burghclere tearfully collapsed and agreed to consent to a wedding providing Evelyn found a job first.22 ‘Victory to the Evelyns!’ declared Shevelyn.23

  * * *

  Lady Burghclere’s demand that Evelyn get a job was not surprising, although hindsight renders it slightly absurd, and Pansy and her fiancé Henry Lamb, who had recently painted Evelyn’s portrait (since lost) with pipe in one hand, pen in the other, hovering over the manuscript of Decline and Fall, were among those who felt that way at the time, accusing her of ‘gross materialism’ and predicting that Evelyn was ‘obviously going to be a successful author in a few years’ time’, that the couple could scrape along till then, and that in the meantime ‘a job’ would only waste his energies.24 As a writer herself, Lady Burghclere cannot have been blind to his potential, having received an advance copy of Rossetti (inscribed ‘with kind regards’ as opposed to ‘with love’) in April, and then presumably seen the favourable reviews, most prominently in The Observer, where J. C. Squire paid tribute to Evelyn’s ‘terse elegance and unobtrusive wit’, and the Nation & Athenaeum, which called it ‘both lively and reliable’. Almost equal admiration was elicited a month later by Evelyn’s sublime rebuke to The Times Literary Supplement for referring to him throughout its far less enthusiastic notice as ‘Miss Waugh’. ‘My Christian name, I know is occasionally regarded by people of limited social experience as belonging exclusively to one or other sex,’ Evelyn wrote; ‘but it is unnecessary to go further into my book than the paragraph charitably placed inside the wrapper for the guidance of unleisured critics, to find my name with its correct prefix of “Mr”. Surely some such investigation might in merest courtesy have been taken before your reviewer tumbled into print with phrases such as “a Miss of the sixties”.’25 Rebecca West considered this ‘a model of how one might behave to that swollen-headed parish magazine’ and expressed the hope that ‘you will go on being so much more intelligent and amusing than most people in such a useful form’.26 What Lady Burghclere made of all this is not recorded.

  Unbeknown to her, meanwhile, throughout the spring of 1928, Evelyn had also been working hard on Decline and Fall, the novel that would make his name. He had first mentioned it to Duckworth’s the previous September, and read the first 10,000 words – which were scarcely altered later – to Anthony Powell towards the end of that year. Powell recalled thinking it ‘extremely funny’, although when he subsequently asked about the novel’s progress Evelyn replied disconcertingly, ‘I’ve burnt it.’27

  Dudley Carew then remembered being regaled with ‘the first fifty pages or so’ in January 1928 at Underhill, with Evelyn sitting in the chair from which Arthur used to declaim after dinner. ‘A happiness, a hilarity sustained him that night, and I was back giving him my unstinted admiration as I did at Lancing. It was marvellously funny and he knew that it was. As was his habit in those old, innocent days, he roared with laughter at his own comic invention and both of us at times were in hysterics.’28

  Buoyed by the prospect of marriage and the growing realisation that he was finally creating something that would do justice to his extraordinary talent as a writer, Evelyn was probably as happy that spring as he had ever been, and his exuberance comes through clearly in the book. A stint writing at The Bell at Aston Clinton was followed by several weeks in March and April in Dorset at the Barley Mow pub in Colehill, two miles from where Shevelyn and Pansy were lodging in a boarding house at Wimborne, also writing novels – Pansy’s would be published a month after Decline and Fall as The Old Expedient. Henry Lamb had rented a house at Poole, seven miles away on the coast, in which to paint while he waited for his divorce from his first wife to come through.

  Shevelyn was struggling with her own novel – which concerned ‘the thoughts of a man and a girl during twelve hours [going] back through their lives, looking at the same situations from different points of view’29 – but was proudly delighted with Evelyn’s. ‘It is really screamingly funny and I think there is a good chance of its being a success, if not a bestseller,’ she told a friend, ‘but I don’t think our mothers will approve of it, certainly mine won’t!’30 During their stay in Dorset Pansy thought Shevelyn seemed ‘really much better than I have seen her in a long time’. ‘I don’t think she is wildly in love with E. W.,’ she continued, ‘but I doubt if she is capable of sustained passion. However she is very fond of him & looks up to his brains & respects his strength of character. At any rate she will not be able to despise him when the first raptures are past which would have inevitably happened with Barry & his like. She has to work hard for him which is the best thing for her.’31

  In mid-May they all moved back to London, Evelyn initially to Underhill and the girls to new lodgings at 7 Upper Montagu Street, kept by a charming if rather slatternly Irishwoman. ‘I suppose this will be the last abode that Evelyn and I will share together,’ wrote Pansy:

  It has been a strange little partnership and I am afraid I have been no help to her in her struggles. Perhaps she never does struggle, only drifts with the tide & that is why she gets into such difficulties. Her marriage still seems remote & it is hard to imagine how much she cares for the other Evelyn. Not enough to follow him barefoot through the world, certainly, but on the other hand she is happier with him & since their engagement than she has been for a long time. The absence of Mary & the necessity to share & intrigue with her is also a great relief … Now the only issue is whether they are to raise a little money & elope or wait until the maternal sanction wafts them to St Margaret’s Westminster. Evelyn Waugh is for the former course, EG for the latter. That’s why I don’t consider her passion for him can be illimitable, or has she prematurely exhausted her capacity for passion? I wonder if the emotions can be worn out from too much use? I don’t see why not.32

  Two weeks later Evelyn recorded in his diary: ‘Evelyn and I were married at St. Paul’s [sic]* Portman Square, at 12 o’clock. A woman was typewriting on the altar. Harold best man. Robert Byron gave away the bride, Alec and Pansy the witnesses. Eve
lyn wore a new black and yellow jumper suit with scarf. Went to the 500 Club and drank champagne cocktails under the suspicious eyes of Winifred Mackintosh and Prince George of Russia. From there to luncheon at Boulestin. Very good luncheon. Then to Paddington and by train to Oxford and taxi to Beckley.’33

  * This is impossible as by his own account Carew did not meet Evelyn Gardner until they were fellow passengers on the Rajah of Sarawak’s hired bus to the Epsom Derby, won by Call Boy, in June 1927. (See Fragment of Friendship, pp. 77–8.)

  † Written in 1975 and running to nineteen pages, this was described by Shevelyn as ‘a full account which the children can dispose of as they like after I am dead’. (Evelyn Gardner to Michael Davie, 8 December 1975, AWA.)

  * In 1914 Mary married Geoffrey Hope-Morley (Morley’s underwear); they divorced in 1928. In 1915 Alathea married Geoffrey Fry (Fry’s chocolate); the marriage lasted but was very strained. In 1916 Juliet married Alexander Cumming-Russell of Clochan; they separated within twenty-four hours and divorced in 1922.

  * In his obituary of Evelyn Gardner in the Independent, Davie wrote that the casual nature of the proposal ‘gave Evelyn Gardner the impression, she explained later, that Waugh was not wholly committed to the marriage’. However the notes of his interview with her say nothing about Waugh’s implied lack of commitment, but rather: ‘Implication seemed to be that absolute loyalty not required of her, she thought.’ (Michael Davie interview with Evelyn Gardner, 24 February 1973; AWA.)

  * Lance Sieveking had met Evelyn a few times at parties and liked him and he later recalled going ‘conscientiously through the motions for half an hour, discussing and assessing his abilities and ending up with a voice test. I was really sorry to turn him down.’

  * More correctly St Paul (no ‘s) Portman Square, built in 1779 as a proprietary chapel for the Portman Estate.

  11

  A Common Experience, I’m Told

  Like so much in Evelyn’s diaries, his account of the wedding service was a mix of fact and fantasy. According to Shevelyn, no one was typing on the altar, although she did remember the sound of a typewriter coming from the vestry as they went in and being a little disconcerted by the mustachioed clergyman who married them, with his Cockney accent and heavy black boots.1 Harold Acton recalled her being so overcome by the whole occasion that she could barely bring herself to say the words ‘I do’.2 Her jitters beforehand had been sufficiently advertised for Robert Byron to complain to his mother of having ‘to fetch Evelyn Gardner to the church and I know she won’t come’.3 However after honeymooning at Beckley, of all places, where Evelyn and Alastair had shared their caravan, she declared herself happy with married life. The Waugh parents were holidaying in France at the time of the wedding but were telegraphed on the day and took the news in their stride. ‘Arthur well again, Evelyns married,’ Kate noted nonchalantly in her diary.4 Lady Burghclere, though, was furious, ‘quite inexpressibly pained’, she told Evelyn after Geoffrey Fry5 eventually broke it to her in mid-July, although years later Nancy Mitford could clearly recall her saying how pleased she was that her daughter should marry into ‘such a good literary family’.6 In any event, she immediately announced it in The Times ‘to avoid scandal and misconstruction’, as she charmingly told Shevelyn.7

  Inconveniently for Evelyn’s writing career, meanwhile, Lady Burghclere’s sister was married to Sir George Duckworth, the brother of Evelyn’s publisher Gerald Duckworth,* who had thus known all about Lady Burghclere’s disapproval of her prospective son-in-law. When Evelyn had submitted the manuscript of Decline and Fall in May, ‘Uncle Gerald’8 (as Evelyn dubbed him) personally intervened to demand the omission of many of the more indelicate scenes, whereupon Evelyn promptly took it down the street to Chapman & Hall, figuring that with his father abroad it would be easier for them to accept it, which they did, albeit ultimately with alterations only slightly less extensive than those that had been insisted on by Duckworth’s. Soon after his return from honeymoon Evelyn set about designing the wrapper and going through the proofs and noted testily in his diary that ‘Chapman’s not an easy firm to deal with’.9 At that point he and his new wife were briefly occupying dingy rooms at 25 Robert Adam Street, just off Baker Street, which Evelyn had taken shortly before their wedding to enable them to marry at the nearby church of St Paul. For the rest of the summer they lived at Underhill, before renting a flat in September on a handsome if then slightly dilapidated Georgian square in Islington.

  The move to 17a Canonbury Square, their first proper marital home, coincided with the publication of Decline and Fall, an event that very quickly and profoundly changed Evelyn’s life. The first review to appear, in The Observer, pronounced it ‘richly and roaringly funny’ and praised the author’s ‘exquisite ingenuousness of manner combined with a searching ingenuity of method; he is a critic of life, whose weapon is the joke disguised as a simple statement; he is an important addition to the ranks of those dear and necessary creatures – the writers who can make us laugh’.10 The verdict that really mattered, however, came two weeks later, when England’s grandest and highest-paid literary journalist Arnold Bennett, whose weekly column in the Evening Standard was splashed along the sides of London omnibuses, hailed the arrival of ‘a genuinely new humorist’ and ‘an uncompromisingly and brilliant malicious satire, which in my opinion comes near to being quite first-rate’.11

  Besides the universal acclaim in the press, Evelyn was congratulated equally effusively by his new friend Rebecca West, for whom it was ‘one of the few funny books that have really made me laugh’, and perhaps more surprisingly by the left-leaning Naomi Mitchison, who wrote to tell him she thought it ‘perfectly plumb’. ‘The really odd thing about it is the unity; you’ve kept it up all the time, so that at the end one is laughing in the same tone (and with the same violence) as at the beginning. And it’s so ridiculously intelligent. I adore funny books, but when one looks for them one never finds anything but P. G. Wodehouse, and after all one is a high-brow.’12 John Betjeman, whom Evelyn had befriended while both were schoolmasters, later recalled that to many of Evelyn’s friends Decline and Fall seemed ‘so rockingly funny, there could never be anything quite so funny again’.13

  Gratifying as all this was, Evelyn was embarrassed a month later when J. B. Priestley and Cyril Connolly both drew attention to the enormous gulf in quality between his brilliant novel and Harold Acton’s aptly named Humdrum, which had come out shortly after. Evelyn had dedicated Decline and Fall to Acton ‘in homage and affection’, however Priestley was adamant that ‘Mr Waugh owes no homage to Mr Acton as a novelist, for the latter’s story is a poor thing, showing us nothing but a vast social superiority to everybody and everything. I have always heard that Mr Acton is one of our brightest young wits, but “Humdrum” seems to me to be really tedious. Perhaps his title was too much for him.’14 Connolly was scarcely less damning, observing that whereas Humdrum ‘falls rather flat’, Decline and Fall ‘seems to possess every virtue which it lacks’.15*

  The friendship between Evelyn and Acton thus entered a decidedly awkward phase, with Evelyn’s star now clearly in the ascendant and Acton’s reputation equally obviously in decline, a state of affairs to which the former mentor evidently found it hard to adjust. ‘I don’t know what to say to Harold,’ Evelyn confided to a mutual Oxford friend around that time. ‘If I tell him that I am going to lunch at the Ritz, he says “Of course you’re a famous author but you can’t expect a nonentity like me to join you there.” If I suggest that we should go to a pub, he says, “My dear, what affectation – a popular novelist going to a pub.”‘16

  Others were upset by Decline and Fall for different reasons. Eddie Gathorne-Hardy and Paddy Brodie (the latter a notably wild and drunken man about town who once mistook the bar at the Ritz for a pissoir)17 had flown into ‘a furious rage’,18 so Acton told Evelyn, after their names were borrowed for the extravagantly camp character Martin Gaythorn-Brodie – it was changed to the Hon. Miles Malpractice in the second edit
ion in November for fear of libel. Similarly, Robert Byron wrote to say how ‘very cross’19 he was about the character of Kevin Saunderson (subsequently renamed Lord Parakeet), who arrives late and drunk to Mrs Beste-Chetwynde’s weekend party and walks around ‘birdlike and gay, pointing his thin white nose and making rude little jokes at everyone in turn in a shrill, emasculate voice’.20 This was too obviously Gavin Henderson, an equally mincing friend of Byron and Brian Howard’s, whom Evelyn confided to his diary he found ‘most trying’.21 Though briefly married, Henderson was, as one contemporary put it, ‘a roaring pansy’, and after succeeding his grandfather as the 2nd Lord Faringdon famously began a speech in the Upper House, ‘My dears …’22 Just as recognisable was Cecil Beaton, whom Evelyn had bullied so mercilessly as a schoolboy in Hampstead and who now found himself caricatured as the photographer David Lennox who accompanies Gaythorn-Brodie/Malpractice to King’s Thursday: ‘They emerged with little shrieks from an Edwardian brougham and made straight for the nearest looking-glass.’23

  Evelyn shrugged off the offence his book caused. ‘I am threatened with four civil actions and a horse whipping,’ he wrote cheerfully to his publisher.24 In any case the shedding of uncongenial acquaintances was offset by the new friendships he was beginning to make through his marriage and the more strategic contacts he had begun to cultivate following his establishment as the newest of London’s literary lions, entertaining Arnold Bennett to dinner one night at Canonbury Square, and the next day having Cyril Connolly to lunch, an occasion that left Connolly with a lasting memory of the two Evelyns as ‘this fantastic thing of the happily married young couple whom success had just touched with its wand’.25

  Connolly was equally struck by their ‘very small spick and span bandbox of a house’, filled with odd bits and pieces lent by friends or bought from local junk shops and altered by Evelyn or made by a local carpenter. Portraits of each of them by Henry Lamb hung in the tiny dining room. When Harold Acton visited he found Evelyn crouched on the floor, sticking postage stamps onto a coal scuttle then applying a coat of varnish, ‘endowing it with a patina of Sir Joshua Reynolds’. ‘The atmosphere was that of a sparkling nursery,’ recalled Acton. ‘One hoped to see cradles full of little Evelyns in the near future, baby fauns blowing through reeds, falling off rocking-horses, pulling each other’s pointed ears and piddling on the rug.’26 But that was not to be.