by Philip Eade
The next day the two Evelyns went to stay at Heygate’s parents’ house on the Solent. Powell was again a witness and remembered ‘no special tensions throughout the visit’,68 although when they went to tea at Beaulieu Elizabeth Montagu observed that ‘Waugh seemed bored and monosyllabic, whilst his wife and Heygate tried rather too hard to compensate.’69
Shortly after this, on 13 July, Powell and Heygate set off on a motoring trip to Germany and according to Powell spoke little about ‘the embroilment in which Heygate now undoubtedly found himself’. (Nor, incidentally, did they talk much about the rise of Hitler, even though Heygate later admitted that on a previous trip to Bavaria he had carried with him a letter that began: ‘Dear Hitler, this is to introduce John Heygate, a young Englishman interested in your movement.’)70 After two weeks they reached Munich, where various urgent cables awaited them: ‘Instruct Heygate return immediately Waugh.’71
The events leading up to this stern missive had begun with the appearance of the incriminating photograph in the 3 July issue of The Tatler, which threw Shevelyn into a desperate quandary, knowing that many of their friends would have seen it. Her sister Mary begged her to say nothing, however her flatmate Nancy Mitford advised her to tell Evelyn that she loved him and to say that her attitude in the photograph was not what it appeared. ‘But I don’t love him,’ said Shevelyn, explaining that she had never loved her husband and that she had only married him to escape the tyranny of her mother.72
By now anxious to come clean, she wrote a letter to Evelyn (which he received on about 9 July and promptly destroyed) saying she was in love with Heygate, and when Evelyn returned to London three days later she confessed that she had already slept with him. Evelyn’s subsequent divorce petition stated: ‘My wife and I had a long talk upon the subject, and I agreed to forgive her if she would give up Heygate. This she promised to do.’73
There followed a miserable fortnight during which Shevelyn told Alec Waugh that Evelyn was drinking far too much and making himself ill, and then accusing her of trying to poison him. When Alec remarked that they had always seemed so happy together she replied: ‘Yes I suppose I was,’ then after a pause, ‘but never as happy as I’ve been with my sisters,’ which struck Alec as a peculiar thing for a wife to say about a husband.74
They were photographed looking distinctly gloomy at Vyvyan Holland’s ‘Tropical’ party on the Friendship – one caption commenting that the author of Decline and Fall appeared ‘somewhat scared even though there were no fierce Zulus on board’75 – and at Henry Yorke’s wedding on 25 July the groom’s aunt, who had presumably got wind of Shevelyn’s predicament, wryly noted her ‘outward mood of butter not melting in her mouth’.76
The next day Evelyn and Eleanor Watts took the train to Crewe to stay for a few days at Haslington Hall, her family home in Cheshire. Shevelyn was supposed to have gone too but, as Heygate later recalled, ‘she changed her mind and returned to me’.77 This is probably the point at which Evelyn realised once and for all that the reconciliation was not going to work so sent the famous cable summoning Heygate from Germany.
At Haslington, Evelyn and Eleanor sat around miserably drinking Black Velvets, Eleanor by now regretting having turned Heygate down and Evelyn so distraught that he suggested a suicide pact in the rhododendrons. Eleanor later told Selina Hastings that she suspected Evelyn was not so much madly in love with Shevelyn as flattered that such an attractive woman had been prepared to marry him.* She urged him to put her out of his mind, to which he replied, ‘I can’t, I can’t.’78
Shevelyn’s desertion could hardly have come at a worse time as far as Evelyn’s work was concerned, with Vile Bodies barely half written and Labels not even started although he had promised to deliver it to Duckworth’s by the end of July. ‘The last few weeks have been a nightmare of very terrible suffering,’ Evelyn wrote to his publisher, ‘which, if I could explain, you would understand. You shall have the book, unless I go off my head, as soon as I can begin to rearrange my thoughts. At present I can do nothing of any kind.’79 A few days later he asked Balston to omit the dedication to his wife in all subsequent editions of Rossetti.
Evelyn returned home to an empty flat on 1 August and the next day received a letter from Shevelyn saying that she was living with Heygate, at which point he decided to file for a divorce and asked Alec to tell their parents. ‘It’s going to be a great blow to them,’ said Alec, to which Evelyn retorted, ‘What about me?’80 Arthur reacted as predicted. ‘Your poor, poor mother,’ he said when Alec broke the news, ‘your poor, poor mother.’ Only Kate seemed to think about her wretched son.81
A few days later Evelyn wrote to his parents: ‘I asked Alec to tell you the sad & to me radically shocking news that Evelyn has gone to live with a man called Heygate. I am accordingly filing a petition for divorce. I am afraid that this will be a blow to you but I assure you not nearly as severe a blow as it is to me … My plans are vague about the flat etc. May I come & live with you sometimes?’82 He added that ‘Evelyn’s defection was preceded by no kind of quarrel or estrangement. So far as I knew we were both serenely happy. It must be some hereditary tic. Poor Baroness.’83
Clearly the marriage had not been as happy for Shevelyn as Evelyn thought. At the time she was heard to complain that her husband was ‘bad in bed’,84 and she later told Michael Davie that she suspected Evelyn of being homosexual. It is true that Evelyn had had very limited sexual experience with women, and the opportunities to make up for this during their marriage were doubtless limited by Shevelyn’s various illnesses. Nonetheless it seems just as likely that their incompatibility was due to a straightforward lack of chemistry as any deficiencies in his sexual technique or orientation. He would have several passionate affairs with women in years to come and went on to have seven (six surviving) children from his second marriage. While he was always frank about his earlier homosexual experiences and did not go out of his way to deny being to some extent bisexual, the weight of evidence points to his having been predominantly heterosexual by the time he married.*
For his own part, Evelyn told Harold Acton that his reason for seeking a divorce was ‘simply that I cannot live with anyone who is avowedly in love with someone else … I did not know it was possible to be so miserable & live but I am told that this is a common experience.’85 Acton was glad Evelyn was ‘making a gesture of it for Heygate is too contemptible, and he ought to be made to realize how monstrously he has behaved’. However he was so tactless about the possible reasons for Shevelyn’s betrayal (‘Are you so very male in your sense of possession?’86) that Evelyn complained to Henry Yorke that ‘homosexual people however kind & intelligent simply don’t understand at all what one feels in this kind of case’.87
On 6 August, two days after being told of Evelyn’s troubles, Arthur and Kate went to meet Lady Burghclere and Geoffrey Fry to see if anything could be done to save the marriage. They all decided that if Evelyn could be persuaded to hold fire with the divorce proceedings, it might be a good idea for Shevelyn to go to Venice with her sister Alathea, ‘in order to think it over once more,’ as Shevelyn recalled, ‘and perhaps on my return it might be possible for Evelyn to take me back’.
While she was away Heygate went to stay at the Watts’s beach house at Selsey where, evidently anxious to keep his options open, he again asked Eleanor to marry him in case Shevelyn did change her mind and went back to her husband. Eleanor ‘would not hear of it’, she later recalled.88 Heygate then cabled Shevelyn to let her know that he was waiting for her and she promptly returned to London to be with him. Evelyn’s divorce petition was duly served on 9 September.
* The Duckworth brothers were also, incidentally, the elder half-brothers of Virginia Woolf, who later accused them of having molested her during her childhood and adolescence.
* While praising Decline and Fall in a letter to Arthur Waugh, Charles Scott Moncrieff also referred to Humdrum: ‘It seems that only a very rich young man can afford to write as badly as this.’ (25 O
ctober 1928; AWA.)
* The demonic voices who accuse Pinfold of being ‘queer’ in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) later demand: ‘I want the truth, Pinfold. What were you doing in Egypt in 1929?’ If this hints at an illicit dalliance with his former lover, the voices’ naming of the Mena House Hotel where Evelyn stayed with his wife seems to suggest otherwise.
* Mary Pakenham’s view was that Evelyn had been ‘tremendously gratified when this aristocratic, chic, honeypot consented to be his wife, and naturally when she threw him over it was shattering’ (see Note by Lady Mary Clive on Evelyn Gardner [1987], copy in AWA).
* Anthony Powell recalled having been on a train once with Evelyn later in life when a very good-looking young man entered their compartment pushing a tea trolley. After he had gone, Powell asked Evelyn if he preferred men or women, to which Evelyn replied: ‘I suppose I must say I prefer women – but when I see a boy like that I get an awful pang!’ Selina Hastings to author, February 2016.
12
Perversion to Rome
In the months following the break-up several of Shevelyn’s closest friends switched their allegiance to the man she had thrown over. Pansy Lamb, whose husband Henry told Evelyn how profoundly he admired his ‘magnificently patient & generous’1 response to the ‘catastrophe’, was herself not vastly impressed by her former flatmate’s justification that ‘Waugh was too difficult to live up to & that he secretly hated her when he was ill!’ or the fact that ‘she really seems to enjoy the publicity her conduct entails’.2 Shevelyn had been staying at the Lambs’ Dorset cottage in mid-August when the first lawyer’s letter arrived announcing that Evelyn was suing for divorce, prompting her to exclaim, ‘Well, you can’t call life dull!’3
Nancy Mitford had given Shevelyn a dinner party to celebrate their engagement the previous year and she regarded her as her best friend,4 yet as soon as she became aware of the affair she moved out of the flat at Canonbury Square. Shevelyn later maintained that Nancy left ‘not because of her admiration for Evelyn but because Lord or Lady Redesdale insisted’,5 but in any event the two friends never saw each other again and instead Nancy set about developing a lifelong friendship with Evelyn, someone whom she and her sisters did not yet know well but nevertheless idolised as the author of their favourite book, Decline and Fall.6
Nancy’s twelve-year-old sister Jessica later recalled her excitement when ‘Evelyn Waugh, a writer feller and one of the main Swinbrook sewers’7 promised to immortalise her pet sheep Miranda by substituting the word ‘sheepish’ for ‘divine’ in his forthcoming Vile Bodies, and duly did so with his description of Edward Throbbing’s ‘perfectly sheepish house in Hertford St’.
Nancy, meanwhile, began meeting Evelyn regularly for lunch at the Ritz, where he teased her for being ‘a dangerous red’ and advised her on her doomed love affair with the homosexual Hamish Erskine, explaining to her about ‘sexual shyness in men’,8 of which he may have had some experience, but also suggesting she ‘dress better & catch a better man’. ‘Evelyn is always so full of sound common sense’, Nancy wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant.9
For a time, Nancy’s nineteen-year-old sister Diana was even more instrumental in mending Evelyn’s broken heart. The most beautiful of the Mitfords, a ravishing blue-eyed blonde described by James Lees-Milne as ‘the nearest thing to Botticelli’s Venus that I have ever seen’,10 Diana had at her disposal several luxurious houses where Evelyn could lick his wounds and catch up with his writing.
As with Nancy, Evelyn had got to know the Guinnesses through Shevelyn, and in July he had written the introduction to their catalogue of works by ‘Bruno Hat’, the imaginary German artist whom Bryan claimed to have discovered in a shop in Sussex and whose spoof exhibition was held at their house on 23 July, towards the end of the Evelyns’ failed reconciliation fortnight. After his return from Cheshire to find Shevelyn had gone for good, Evelyn miserably took refuge at the Guinnesses’ house on the Sussex coast. On separate occasions that month and the next he also stayed with them in Ireland at Knockmaroon, just west of Dublin’s Phoenix Park, after which he buried himself away at a pub in north Devon in a painful attempt to finish Vile Bodies. ‘It has been infinitely difficult,’ he wrote to Henry Yorke in September, ‘and is certainly the last time I shall try to make a book about sophisticated people. It all seems to shrivel up & rot internally and I am relying on a sort of cumulative futility for any effect it may have. As soon as I have enough pages covered to call it a book I shall join Bryan & Diana in Paris.’11
In early October, after scrawling ‘The End Thank God’ across the last page, he duly made his way to the large Guinness flat in the 7th arrondissement. Each morning, with Diana by then pregnant with her first child and resting in bed, Evelyn made a start on his Mediterranean travelogue Labels while Nancy worked on her first novel, Highland Fling – which she subsequently had to alter ‘quite a lot as it is so like Evelyn’s [Vile Bodies] in little ways,’ she told Mark Ogilvie-Grant, ‘such a bore’12 – and Bryan was busy with Singing Out of Tune, a portrait of a failed marriage and also, like Vile Bodies, an indictment of a way of life. (It is often said that his idea came from the Waughs’ marriage, although by the time the book came out in 1933 Bryan and Diana had themselves separated following her affair with Oswald Mosley, and Bryan begged his wife to tell everyone that it was not their story.)
Back in London, Evelyn took to arriving at the Guinnesses’ house at 10 Buckingham Street (now Buckingham Place) in the morning and staying all day. Diana was fascinated by dazzlingly clever men and equally capable of fascinating them. Having recently struck up a close rapport with Lytton Strachey, she now found herself similarly taken with Evelyn. They would ‘laugh all day long’, she remembered. ‘You couldn’t help loving him. He was so funny and so unlike anyone else.’13
During her confinement, with Bryan out most days reading for the Bar, Diana became increasingly dependent on Evelyn for her entertainment and in due course he began to fall in love with her. A decade later, in his unfinished novel Work Suspended, Evelyn described the novelist-narrator John Plant’s growing infatuation with the pregnant heiress Lucy Simmonds, which he later admitted to Diana was ‘to some extent a portrait of me in love with you’.14
On his usual morning call, John is greeted by Lucy ‘lying in bed in a chaos of newspapers, letters and manicure tools’:
Couched as she was, amid quilted bed-jacket and tumbled sheets – one arm bare to the elbow where the wide sleeve fell back and showed the tender places of wrist and forearm, the other lost in the warm depths of the bed, with her pale skin taking colour against the dead white linen, and her smile of confident, morning welcome; as I had greeted her countless times and always with a keener joy … her beauty rang through the room like a peal of bells … So another stage was reached in my falling in love with Lucy, while each week she grew heavier and slower and less apt for love, so that I accepted the joy of her companionship without reasoning.
The similarities between fact and fiction extended to the narrator’s sense of losing her after the birth of her child, however for the time being Evelyn had Diana all to himself, sitting on her bed during the morning while she dealt with her correspondence, then accompanying her on various excursions in the afternoon – ‘carriage exercise’ in her chauffeur-driven Daimler to the zoo and occasional visits to Underhill for tea – before returning for dinner in the evening.
Seeing Evelyn almost every day as she did at this time, and with him doubtless striving to be as cheerful and amusing as he could, Diana became convinced that the break-up of his marriage had not hurt him as severely as many of his old friends supposed and that there was even ‘a good deal of relief’ stemming from his recognition that he had made a mistake in marrying Shevelyn in the first place. ‘But his pride was hurt, naturally, & the very fact that everyone felt so loudly sorry for him was salt in the wound, even if the wound was superficial.’ In any case, she added, ‘one couldn’t have had him constantly in the house if he’d been saddled
with the other Evelyn, who though very pretty wasn’t much else’.15
When Vile Bodies was published in January 1930 Evelyn dedicated it to the Guinnesses, whose numerous kind gestures had also included giving him a birthday lunch at the Ritz and sending him a Christmas stocking ‘full of lovely things including a gold watch!!’ as Kate was thrilled to record.16 He in turn sent them the leather-bound manuscript of his book as a belated Christmas present with apologies that it ‘will never be of the smallest value’. In 1984 it was sold at Christie’s for £55,000, enough in those days to buy a small house in west London.17
His divorce also came through that month, and in a preface to a later edition Evelyn admitted that the ‘sharp disturbance in my private life’ had upset the latter part, where the tone shifts dramatically at the beginning of Chapter Seven, the point at which he resumed writing after being abandoned by his wife.
His nominal hero Adam Fenwick-Symes becomes the hard-pressed gossip columnist ‘Mr Chatterbox’, who resorts to ‘snaps and snippets about cocktail parties given in basement flats by spotty announcers at the BBC’ – a caustic reference to Heygate, whom Evelyn derided as ‘the Basement Boy’, presumably because he lived in a basement flat.* When, in the next chapter, Adam takes Nina, whom he hopes to marry, and Ginger Littlejohn, the rival who steals her, to a party on an airship moored in a ‘degraded suburb’, it is hard not to think of the incriminating photograph of Shevelyn and Heygate taken aboard the Friendship: ‘There were two people making love to each other near him … reclining on cushions.’ The scene also includes clear allusions to Shevelyn’s casual attitude to their marriage:
‘Nina,’ said Adam, ‘let’s get married soon, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, it’s a bore not being married.’
‘I don’t know if this sounds absurd,’ said Adam, ‘but I do feel that a marriage ought to go on – for quite a long time, I mean. D’you feel that too at all?’