Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  Critics once again praised the book’s great wit and originality, however the reviews this time were not quite so universally glowing, with Arnold Bennett regretting ‘the lack of a well-laid plot’ which ‘resulted in a large number of pages which demand a certain obstinate and sustained effort for their perusal’.18 Interviewed by the Paris Review more than thirty years later, Evelyn himself called it ‘a bad book, I think, not so carefully constructed as the first’.19

  However, as he also recalled, he had ‘popularised a fashionable language like the Beatnik writers today, and the book caught on’.20 With Vile Bodies selling 2,000 copies a week, expressions such as ‘shy-making’ and ‘too too sick-making’ soon spread far beyond the Guinnesses’ circle of friends where Evelyn had first heard them. Within a month of publication, the Daily Mirror reported that black suede shoes (among the various spoof fashions propagated by Adam during his stint as Mr Chatterbox) were being ‘much worn up at Oxford just now’.21

  Evelyn’s own stock also rose dramatically. ‘My dear Waugh,’ his old mentor J. F. Roxburgh wrote to him, ‘You are now so eminent that I dare not use your Christian name as I once did!’22 Sought out by literary lionhunters such as Sibyl Colefax and Emerald Cunard, he soon became a fixture in fashionable society, his diary routinely recording lunch with Noël Coward (‘a simple, friendly nature. No brains.’), tea with the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald (‘a nasty and inadequate man’), and dinner with the Duke of Marlborough (‘such a mundane mind,’ whispered the duchess, ‘will go to any party for which he is sent a printed invitation’). Not in the least bit shy about capitalising on his fame, he wrote after one evening: ‘After dinner I went to the Savoy Theatre and said “I am Evelyn Waugh. Please give me a seat.” So they did.’23

  The huge success of Vile Bodies earned Evelyn considerable sums in royalties and simultaneously completely revived the fortunes of Chapman & Hall, whose business had been precarious ever since the lapse of Dickens’s copyrights in 1920. It also enabled Evelyn to demand increasingly exorbitant rates for his journalism. ‘I will only do feature articles,’ he told his agent, ‘– not side columns like Heygate – with photograph of me and general air of importance.’ To editors he was equally forthright. ‘I should quite like to broadcast but what will you pay?’ he wrote to the BBC. ‘It isn’t any good my taking up your time with a voice test if at the end, you find my avarice insupportable. Broadcasting is clearly more exacting work than journalism. I get £20 a thousand words’ writing. I suggest £25 a thousand for speaking. If that’s too much don’t answer.’24 The response on this occasion was ‘Too expensive, have a cocktail?’,25 however enough newspapers did meet his demands and in May he was elated to record that his regular annual income had temporarily rocketed to £2,500 a year.

  That spring, 1930, he finished writing Labels while staying at the Guinnesses’ seaside house in Sussex. The book was published in late September and again dedicated to Bryan and Diana, ‘without whose encouragement and hospitality this book would not have been finished’. Diana’s baby was born at the beginning of March, a boy who was soon christened Jonathan partly due to the fact that Evelyn, who stood godfather, was at the time contemplating a biography of Jonathan Swift.

  After recovering from giving birth, with her old nanny engaged to look after the baby, Diana was keen to make up for lost party-going time and although Evelyn continued to see her regularly for a while, with so many other people now vying for her attention he resented the loss of their previous intimacy and in due course started to behave as objectionably as only he knew how. In July he went to stay with them at Pool Place in Sussex: ‘Diana and I quarrelled at luncheon,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘We bathed. Diana and I quarrelled at dinner and after dinner. Next day I decided to leave. Quarrelled with Diana again and left.’26 At various parties over the next few weeks he went out of his way to avoid her. Eventually he wrote her a note: ‘When I got back last night I wrote you two long letters and tore them up. All I tried to say was that I must have seemed unfriendly lately and I am sorry. Please believe it is only because I am puzzled and ill at ease with myself. Much later everything will be all right. Don’t bother to answer. E.’27

  A few weeks later Bryan wrote innocently to say how glad Diana was to receive his letter: ‘We had both been very upset by your coldness. If it was due to anything she had done or said perhaps the cause can be explained away. But I daresay it was something too elusive to put into words. Anyway you must remember that we are missing you a great deal; and if you should be able to change your mind and come over for a few days nothing would make us more happy.’28 But Evelyn kept refusing their invitations, so Diana reluctantly concluded that he no longer wished to be her friend. It was one of the deepest friendships in each of their lives, yet it lasted barely a year. During Diana’s pregnancy, Evelyn’s visits to her served as a bubble within which he could forget about the trauma of his marriage, and it seems that as soon as Diana began to see other people he felt his humiliation all over again.

  It was not until a few weeks before he died that Evelyn attempted to explain: ‘You ask why our friendship petered out. The explanation is very discreditable to me. Pure jealousy. You (and Bryan) were immensely kind to me at a time when I greatly needed kindness, after my desertion by my first wife. I was infatuated with you. Not of course that I aspired to your bed but I wanted you to myself as especial confidant and comrade. After Jonathan’s birth you began to enlarge your circle. I felt lower in your affections than Harold Acton and Robert Byron and I couldn’t compete or take a humbler place. That is the sad and sordid truth.’29 It was one of the last letters he wrote.

  Diana had consoled herself by telling Nancy that his behaviour had latterly become ‘so horrid when he did come that one didn’t miss him at all’.30 Yet she remained fiercely loyal to his memory and quick to refute whatever misconceptions she perceived about him. She maintained, for instance, that to call him a snob was nonsense – which is perhaps debatable, although it is certainly true that he was never drawn to grandeur for its own sake and did not choose his friends on account of their rank or worldly position. Neither did he go out of his way to court popularity among aristocrats; indeed his behaviour towards them was often so far from sycophantic as to be downright rude – which is perhaps why so many of them ended up with a grudge of some sort or another against him and a (snobbish) tendency on their own part to accuse him of social climbing. ‘He liked people,’ wrote Diana, ‘as I do, because they amused him, or he was fond of them, or he found them stimulating; sometimes he sought their company because of some oddity which delighted the novelist in him. He disliked those who bored or irritated him, and needless to say they, too, were all sorts of men and women … there was never any question of him trying to get to know grandees. The boot was on the other foot.’31

  It is probably true that Evelyn, for his part, did not ‘aspire to Diana’s bed’, although that is not the same thing as saying that he did not find her attractive, which he almost certainly did. As with a lot of men, the more unobtainable the girl, the more attractive she became.

  The reverse had been the case with Audrey Lucas, the only daughter of a domineering father whose more submissive demeanour Evelyn evidently found less alluring. But she had remained keen on him, and he began to see a lot of her after his divorce, by which time her marriage to Harold Scott was also going badly (they later divorced and she married the actor Douglas Clarke-Smith). Even if Evelyn knew that he was unlikely to fall in love with Audrey, he may have figured that with his sexual confidence shattered by his wife’s desertion, an affair might help to rebuild it. Alec Waugh, whose travel book Hot Countries sold 80,000 copies that year, first got wind of their liaison when Evelyn visited him for five days in the South of France at Easter and told him that he was on his way to a romantic rendezvous in Monte Carlo.32 Arthur Waugh innocently observed that Evelyn returned from that holiday to Underhill ‘very tired but well’.33 A month later Audrey announced she was pregnant. ‘I
don’t much care either way really,’ Evelyn noted nonchalantly in his diary, ‘so long as it is a boy.’34 He remained as non-committal as ever and two weeks later he went to bed with another married woman, Dorothy Varda, a noted beauty and renowned man-eater who was by then separated from her husband, the porcelain collector Gerald Reitlinger: ‘Went back and slept with Varda,’ Evelyn recorded, ‘but both of us too drunk to enjoy ourselves.’35 A week after that Audrey told him she was not pregnant after all, ‘so all that is bogus’, wrote Evelyn. Audrey was at least shrewd enough not to let him have his way with her whenever he chose, and after a party later that evening Evelyn recorded that he had ‘waited for hours to sleep with Audrey but she was too tired’.36 Their on-off affair continued until the end of the summer.

  The fling with Audrey was presumably good for morale, however with the failure of his marriage still very much on his mind Evelyn was inclined to play down the importance of sex within marriage in his journalism. In an article that summer entitled ‘Tell the Truth About Marriage’, he wrote that to say that you cannot lead a happy life unless your sex life is happy was ‘just about as sensible as saying, “You cannot lead a happy life unless your golf life is happy”‘. The modern attitude, he added, was that ‘the moment a couple’s physical interest in each other starts to slacken, it is their duty to look for other mates’. He advocated teaching children that sex ‘is not infinitely important or infinitely satisfying’. ‘Teach them fully about birth control and encourage them to find out for themselves exactly how much sex is likely to mean in their own lives: they will not then marry out of curiosity or inexperience. Arrange a system of legal marriage, registered, like any other legal contract, by mutual consent. Then leave it to the Church to show the sacramental importance of marriage to her own members.’37

  The last sentence reflected momentous recent developments in his own spiritual outlook. The previous year, after informing Alec that Shevelyn had left him, he said: ‘The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.’38 Evelyn later admitted that at the time of writing Vile Bodies he himself was ‘as near to an atheist as one could be’,39 however Alec was in no doubt that the break-up of his marriage and the ensuing feeling of emptiness hastened his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

  Since his divorce Evelyn had seen a lot of Gwen and Olivia Plunket Greene, both recent Catholic converts, and he later told a friend that during their various discussions Olivia ‘bullied me into the Church’.40 However according to Father Martin D’Arcy, the Jesuit priest to whom Olivia recommended Evelyn go for instruction at Farm Street in July 1930, ‘no one could have made up that mind of his for him’.41 Evelyn later explained that the first ten years of his adult life as an atheist had proved to him that life was ‘unintelligible and unendurable without God’,42 that he had come to the conclusion that Western civilisation owed its entire existence to Christianity, and that Christianity in turn seemed to exist in its ‘most complete and vital form’ in the Roman Catholic Church. He realised that ‘Catholicism was Christianity, that all other forms of Christianity were only good in so far as they chipped little bits off the main block’; hence it was ‘a conversion to Christianity rather than a conversion to Catholicism as such’.43

  In Father Martin D’Arcy he could scarcely have found anyone more in tune with his growing revulsion with the ‘barbaric’ modern world and his hazily conceived romantic nostalgia for the old English Catholic past. Evelyn candidly admitted that he didn’t ‘feel Christian in the absolute sense’,44 however D’Arcy was so impressed by his unsentimental conviction as to the truth of the Catholic doctrine that he was prepared, as Evelyn later put it, ‘just to get the seed in anyhow & hope some of it would come up’. D’Arcy, who remembered it as ‘a special pleasure to make contact with so able a brain’,45 received him into the Roman Catholic Church at Farm Street on 29 September. The only witness he asked along was Tom Driberg, who interpreted it as part of his remit to inform his Express readers about Evelyn’s conversion the next day. His only godparent was a charwoman who happened to be working there that day.

  Evelyn had told his parents two days before, whereupon Arthur recorded that Kate was ‘very, very sad over news of Evelyn’s secession to Rome’ (although she was typically reticent about her feelings in her own diary). To Arthur, whose family had for so long been steeped in Anglicanism, it felt like a betrayal and he later referred to Evelyn’s ‘perversion to Rome’.46 For both parents, perhaps the saddest aspect of their son’s ‘going over’ was that it seemed to extinguish any hope of his marrying again and giving them grandchildren owing to the fact that the Catholic Church did not recognise divorce. Father D’Arcy was later adamant that at the time Evelyn took his decision, the possibility of having his first marriage annulled had not yet been foreseen, and that by becoming a Catholic he was effectively committing himself to remaining a bachelor for the rest of his life.

  Terence Greenidge also remembered Evelyn telling him at the time that he was now ‘tied to Evelyn G for life unless [Greenidge] bumped her off(!)’ but that Catholicism would at least prevent his ‘making a fool of himself again over marriage’.47 Yet his sacrifice was particularly poignant given that he had spent so much of his adult life yearning to be married and had recently begun to fall for one of the great loves of his life.

  * Anthony Powell thought the tag resulted from Evelyn’s having met Heygate at Powell’s basement flat, however it is a little hard to imagine Evelyn coining it due to Heygate’s occasional presence in someone else’s basement.

  13

  The Dutch Girl

  Known then as ‘Baby’ – a name she never liked and eventually managed to discard – Teresa Jungman was the younger daughter of the prominent London hostess and talent-spotter Mrs Richard Guinness, who was herself generally referred to as ‘Gloomy Beatrix’ or ‘Gloomy Guinness’ or just plain ‘Gloomy’, not so much for her curious habit of closing the curtains during lunch parties as for her very deep voice and doom-laden conversation – she was once overheard demanding of a startled milliner’s assistant: ‘I want a hat for a middle-aged woman whose husband hates her.’1

  Baby and her elder sister Zita were from Gloomy’s first marriage to Nico Jungman, an impoverished Dutch-born artist ‘greatly beloved’, according to his obituary, ‘for his artless charm of manner and almost childlike simplicity of character’.2 The obit tactfully left unspecified the ‘successive misfortunes, often cruelly undeserved’ that befell this naive and generous-hearted man, however they included being abandoned by Baby’s mother while he was interned in Germany for four years during the First World War (Baby was barely ten when they divorced in 1918) and she fell in love with the far wealthier Dick Guinness, scion of the banking branch of that family and himself chairman of the Mercantile & General Insurance Company.

  The new Mrs Guinness soon became a dedicated salonnière and by the late 1920s their house at 19 Great Cumberland Place was a hub of fashionable London society, where clever young politicians like Bob Boothby mixed with writers and artists such as the Sitwells, Noël Coward, David Cecil, Oliver Messel and Cecil Beaton. Loelia Ponsonby (a close friend of the Jungman sisters whose subsequent marriage to Bendor Westminster, the 2nd Duke – of whom more later – was memorably described by James Lees-Milne as ‘a definition of unadulterated hell’) met Evelyn at one of the many gatherings there and thought he looked like a furious cherub, watching with his ‘glaring eye’, missing nothing and giving the impression with his pungent remarks that he was ‘an unhappy man who found in the world much to amuse but little to admire’.3

  Mrs Guinness’s guests tended to find her similarly alarming, however her daughters remained remarkably unfazed by her relentless teasing and their striking beauty and spirited attitude to life soon rendered them among the most dazzling of the Bright Young People. With their equally high-spirited friends Eleanor Smith (Lord Birkenhead’s daughter) and En
id Raphael (who once quipped, ‘I don’t know why they call them private parts – mine aren’t private’) they initiated the nocturnal treasure hunts and masquerades that came to define high society in the late 1920s. Both sisters were much photographed by Cecil Beaton, who admired Baby’s ‘Devonshire cream pallor and limpid mauve eyes’ and ‘her hair, spun of the flimsiest canary-bird silkiness’ which fell ‘lankly over her eyes’ or was ‘thrown back with a beguiling shrug of the head’.4

  Beside her pale beauty, Baby was renowned for her pranks, one of which was to borrow her mother’s Rolls-Royce and mink coat and go about pretending to be a widowed Russian émigré who had been forced to sell her jewels to educate her ‘poor leedle boy’. In the same guise she attended a garden party with two borzois and approached an old general gushing about how she would never forget the night they had spent together in Paris during the war. The general, who was with his wife, coldly replied that he had only spent one night in Paris during the war. ‘Zat was zee night,’ said Baby, before melting away into the crowd.5

  Notwithstanding her mischievousness, Baby also did regular charitable work and was a very strict Catholic, her faith inherited from her mother, whose family had moved to Birmingham as followers of Cardinal Newman. Thus she blended the beauty and zest of Evelyn Gardner with the intelligence and underlying seriousness and unavailability of Olivia Plunket Greene. For Evelyn it was an irresistible combination, as it was for several other disappointed suitors, including Pansy Pakenham’s brother Frank (much later Lord Longford), who had ‘a tremendous walkout’ with Baby after meeting her at the Birkenheads’ in 1928,6 although, as he admitted, ‘no one ever got anywhere with her sexually’.7