by Philip Eade
Exactly how or when Evelyn first came across her is unclear, although when he died his prayer book was found to contain a pressed orchid and fern next to which he had written ‘19 January 1930’ – thought by some to be the date in question.8 After a gap of eighteen months from the time when he and Shevelyn were setting up home together in Islington in November 1928, Evelyn’s surviving diary does not resume until the beginning of May 1930. The first mention of Baby Jungman is on the 26th of that month, when they both dined at the Savoy with Frank Pakenham. It was evidently not their first meeting and Evelyn may already have let on that he liked her, given his observation that Baby seemed ‘anxious to be friendly and very sweet’. Six days later, however, at lunch with Desmond Parsons (Robert Byron’s great unrequited love), Baby arrived very late, left early and ‘sat at the other end of the table so I couldn’t speak to her’.9 The following week she accepted an invitation to a lunch party Evelyn was giving at the Ritz but chucked at the last minute, telling him via a friend that she wouldn’t be able to come after all as she was going to the country, which provoked a rant by Evelyn in the Daily Mail the next week – headlined ‘Such Bad Manners!’ – against ‘incompetent young women who just do not know how to organize their affairs’.10
Baby’s mother later told Evelyn that Baby was in tears after their resulting ‘tiff’, and when he went to lunch at their house in July Evelyn ‘sat at a side table with Baby who was sweet’. Subsequent encounters were rarely more encouraging than this but they seemed to do nothing to diminish Evelyn’s ardour. A consummate if perhaps unintentional heartbreaker, for the next few years Baby Jungman neither surrendered to his advances nor discouraged him from continuing to press his suit, telling him on various occasions that she enjoyed his being in love with her ‘too much not to encourage it as much as I can in a subconscious way’ and that ‘If you weren’t married you see it would be different because I might or I might not want to marry you …’11
* * *
Foreign travel was one way that Evelyn could relieve the torment of unrequited love, and in the six years after the break-up of his first marriage he travelled a great deal. The first of these trips, to Abyssinia, resulted from a conversation he had while staying with the Longfords at Pakenham Hall (now Tullynally) in Ireland in the early autumn of 1930.
It was his second visit there that year, both times at the invitation of Frank Pakenham (a younger brother of the then earl, Edward Longford), whom he had met through Pansy in 1928 and latterly got to know at Gloomy Guinness’s parties in Great Cumberland Place, a few doors along from the Longfords’ townhouse where Frank was born. They became closer after Evelyn’s marriage ended and, as Frank modestly recalled, ‘climbed the slopes of London society together’.12 It was during this period that Evelyn, keen to spend as much time as possible away from Underhill, ‘discovered the delights of the large country house’, as Alexander Waugh puts it. That summer, besides the Longfords and Guinnesses, he also went to stay at Sezincote with the Dugdales and at Renishaw with the Sitwells, the latter in Cyril Connolly’s assessment ‘exactly the sort of aristocrats he longed to be himself’.13 But to give Evelyn his due, he did not pretend to be anything other than an outsider, affecting an attitude to the upper classes that was more sardonic than sycophantic. ‘No-one has a keener appreciation than myself of the high spiritual and moral qualities of the very rich,’ he wrote in the Daily Mail. ‘I delight in their company whenever I get the chance.’14
John Betjeman, sometimes bracketed with Evelyn as a fellow social climber from the middle classes, had been at the same house party at Sezincote and when Evelyn went to Pakenham for ten days in September, he was there too. Not nearly as well known as Evelyn by that time, Betjeman nonetheless seemed far more at ease with himself to the extent that, in Evelyn’s eyes at least, he became ‘a bore rather’,15 endlessly belting out revivalist hymns and joking about eccentric Irish peers. Evelyn by contrast appeared nervous and self-conscious and said very little at mealtimes, although their hostess did remember him coming down to breakfast and demanding ‘Who’s got any funny letters this morning?’16
Evelyn was presumably aware that Frank Pakenham had been as besotted as he was with Baby Jungman, which may explain why, after dinner on the last evening, he took it upon himself to whisper to the beautiful girl Frank had invited to stay on this occasion: ‘Go after Frank. Go up with him. Follow him. Go on.’ The girl was Elizabeth Harman, whom Frank had briefly fallen for at Oxford but then forgotten about for two years while he courted Baby. There may have been an element of self-interest in Evelyn’s advice but Elizabeth was not to know that and she obediently followed Frank up into his bedroom, where, as she recalled, ‘we conducted an ardent but chaste and anxious conversation about ourselves far into the night’.17 Evelyn himself recorded in his diary: ‘Frank and Harman slept together on Frank’s last evening but did not fuck.’18 They were married the next year.
Evelyn, meanwhile, was assumed by the other guests at Pakenham to have resumed his love affair with Alastair Graham, whom he had brought along with him from Renishaw, where Alastair had irritated Georgia Sitwell by ‘boasting’ that his mother was the model for Lady Circumference in Decline and Fall.19 The suspicion that they were once again lovers was scarcely allayed by Evelyn’s tendency to camp it up and put on a high-pitched voice whenever they were together, which was most of the time.20
Alastair was at the time on leave from Cairo, where he and Mark Ogilvie-Grant had followed Sir Percy Loraine when he moved there from Athens in 1929. Loraine’s biographer records Cairo society being rather taken aback by ‘the sparkling intelligence and decidedly informal air of these young aesthetes’. Known as ‘the Embassy girls’, they were famous for their laziness and incompetence and it was a mystery to those unaware of the rumours about Sir Percy that such a stickler was prepared to put up with them for so long.
In any event the posting provided Alastair with a fund of good stories, and the richly embellished one he told one evening in the library at Pakenham about the visit of two Abyssinian princes, who declined to take off their bowler hats and silk capes during a stuffy High Commission lunch party, promptly persuaded Evelyn to attend the coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa that November instead of going to China and Japan as he had originally intended.
Soon after returning from Ireland, Evelyn went on his own to stay at Barford as a guest of Mrs Graham. In the ballroom – which she had built onto the house in 1925 in order to throw a party for Alastair’s twenty-first, which in the event never took place – there was a large Times Atlas of the World from which, in a curiously rash act of vandalism, Evelyn tore a page for use on his forthcoming Abyssinian trip. Mrs Graham was so horrified when she discovered this that she banished him from her house. He returned there a year later, however, when he was trying to start Black Mischief but found it impossible to work with Alastair. ‘We just sit about sipping sloe gin all day,’ he complained. ‘I am reading all the case histories in Havelock Ellis and frigging too much.’21 The last appearance of Evelyn’s name in the Barford visitors’ book was in 1932, by which time he had stayed there on more than twenty occasions, sometimes for several weeks at a stretch.22 After that they disappeared from each other’s lives. Years later, when Alastair’s niece asked him why their friendship had ended, he replied vaguely, ‘Oh, you know, Evelyn became such a bore, such a snob.’23
By the time he said this, while Evelyn had carried on, as Alastair perhaps saw it, moving in ever grander circles to the point at which he eventually married into the aristocracy and installed himself in a Palladian country house with his coat of arms over the portico, Alastair had completely withdrawn from high society to live in a remote fishing village on the west coast of Wales.
Soon after leaving the diplomatic service in 1933, when Sir Percy Loraine was transferred to Ankara, Alastair had been warned by the police to leave London ‘or go to prison’24 following the discovery of his illicit (the laws of the land being what they then were) affair with
the Welsh poet Evan Morgan, soon to be Viscount Tredegar.25*
In 1936 he bought a rambling white house just outside New Quay called Wern Newydd, where he lived as a virtual recluse. His mother had died two years previously and he took with him a few old retainers from Barford and had a rumoured £10,000 a year. Occasionally he threw parties for his neighbours, who at various times included Augustus John and Dylan Thomas. The latter described Alastair as ‘the thin-vowelled laird’,26 and in Under Milk Wood used him as the model for Lord Cut-Glass, who ‘lives in a house and a life at siege’, and has ‘a fish-slimy kitchen’, presumably a reference to the pickled herring Alastair served at his parties and the pamphlet he wrote entitled 20 Different Ways To Cook New Quay Mackerel, a testament to his fondness for sea-fishing as well as cooking.
However, neither Thomas nor anyone else in New Quay seemed to know that Alastair had also been the model for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead. He remained more or less incognito in this respect until the late 1970s, when he was encountered in the Dolau Inn by the writer and critic Duncan Fallowell. Not knowing who he was, Fallowell chanced to fall into conversation with him about Evelyn Waugh, about how ‘well-endowed’ he was as a writer and so forth, at which point the well-spoken stranger at the bar suddenly interjected: ‘He wasn’t well-endowed in the other sense, I’m afraid.’27
Fallowell never established whether he was referring to Evelyn’s private parts or to the fact that he never had any money and Alastair was always having to bail him out. When the Granada television series of Brideshead Revisited went on air in 1981, Fallowell returned to New Quay, knocked on Alastair Graham’s door and asked him out to dinner. Alastair replied that he had had a stroke and was ‘not fit to be seen!’. He could not remember anything, he said, it was all so long ago, then remarked, somewhat cryptically, ‘he was older than me you know’.28 Alastair Graham died the next year, in 1982, ‘taking his secrets with him’.
* * *
The Abyssinian trip that Alastair had inadvertently sparked, and on which Evelyn embarked a month after leaving Pakenham in 1930 armed with press accreditations to the Graphic, Times and Express, lasted five months in all and also took in Zanzibar, Kenya and Cape Town, providing him with material for the travelogue Remote People as well as what he promised his parents on leaving Addis would be ‘a first rate novel’29 – Black Mischief.
Near the end of his journey, he wrote to Baby: ‘I am just going to a lake called Tanganyika where everyone dies of sleeping sickness. I have also caught typhus in a prison, malaria in a place called Hawash, and leprosy in a Catholic church, so I am fairly sure not to come back.’30 A few weeks after arriving home in the spring of 1931 he fell ill with a temperature of 101 and ulcers on his throat. But rather than having contracted any of the exotic diseases enumerated to Baby, he was found to have been poisoned by some watercress eaten at a hotel by the Thames.
That summer all four Waughs went on holiday to Villefranche in the South of France, only the second time that Evelyn’s parents had ventured to ‘the palms, the sunlight and the South’,31 as Alec put it, and by Alec’s account it was a great success, even though Arthur insisted on wearing the same tweed suit that he wore in England together with scarf, vest and long-legged underpants, maintaining ‘I like to feel the wool against my skin.’32
Arthur had brought with him the proofs of his soon-to-be published autobiography One Man’s Road, a sentimental tome which bizarrely contained no reference whatsoever to his younger son’s writing career, despite the fact that Vile Bodies had already established Evelyn as one of the country’s most celebrated young novelists and his books had done much to rescue the fortunes of Arthur’s troubled publishing house. Instead Arthur made plain his distaste for what he saw as the kind of vulgar self-publicising that Evelyn had been so conspicuously guilty of each week recently in the press, pointedly bemoaning the fact that ‘nobody seems content to do his work nowadays without blowing a horn to call attention to his proficiency’.33 Arthur’s determination to deny his son any further publicity may also have stemmed from recent friction between them after they found themselves living under the same roof again after Evelyn’s divorce – although Evelyn kept away whenever he could, borrowing flats from friends or going to stay in the country. Unbeknown to Evelyn, relations had been further strained when Arthur’s curiosity got the better of him one day and he began reading the bound volumes of Evelyn’s diaries, which he kept on a shelf in the former nursery that Arthur was now using as a study. The diaries contained numerous unflattering references to Arthur which left him ‘immensely humiliated and distressed’ according to Alec, who recalled: ‘My mother told me that he never really got over it, that he kept harking back to it.’34
Equally, Arthur may not have appreciated his portrayal in Vile Bodies as the dotty Colonel Blount who allows his house, Doubting Hall, to be used as a film location providing he can appear as an extra – just as Arthur had done with Evelyn and Terence Greenidge’s student film, The Scarlet Woman, in 1924. Nor could he have failed to recognise himself in another of the book’s characters, Adam’s publisher Mr Rampole, who is based, like Arthur, in Henrietta Street and is described as a ‘benign old gentleman’ who is nonetheless notoriously stingy in his dealings with young authors. When Arthur looked back on 1931 he wrote in his diary, ‘Much kindness at home and abroad. Particularly from K [Kate] and Alec.’35 There was no mention of Evelyn.
* * *
Besides entertaining their parents, the Waugh brothers saw various others in the South of France, among them Cyril Connolly, Aldous Huxley and Somerset Maugham, the last of whom they visited twice at his villa on nearby Cap Ferrat and Evelyn offended by addressing him as ‘Dr’ Maugham and feigning ignorance of his literary reputation. Evelyn’s rudeness was partly a symptom of his growing restlessness with the family holiday and he soon went himself off to an uncomfortable monastery in the hills in a bid to try and finish Remote People, which he took back with him to his publishers in June 1931; it was eventually published that autumn to reviews which mostly reflected the haste in which it had been written. ‘I think you have the most important of the young English writers in Evelyn Waugh,’ his new American publisher, John Farrar, was informed by a respected littérateur, ‘but my God, will you stop him writing travel books!’36
When Evelyn returned to the Riviera in mid-July he was accompanied by a very pretty thirty-three-year-old divorcee called Pixie Marix, to whom he had been introduced by his friend Patrick Balfour, and whom he quickly whisked off to a hotel well away from his brother. ‘Evelyn has gone wenching down the coast,’37 Alec told Balfour. Evelyn’s paramour was more respectable than Alec made her sound, however she was reputed to enjoy what she called ‘brinking’, leading men on but stopping short of what Alec delicately termed ‘a bestowal of ultimate favours’.38 Evelyn evidently grew frustrated with this and complained to Balfour: ‘That girl has made a fool of me & taken all my money … It is all very distressing & humiliating. Apart from anything else she is so boring and so American at heart. I could drown her with pleasure.’39 Eventually, Pixie realised that unless she gave him what he wanted she would have to make her own way home, so she changed tack and decided to let him have ‘so much of it that he would wish he had not brought the matter up’.40 At night she kept him at it until two or three in the morning and at dawn she would ‘bound into his room, eager and voracious’.41 A week later, Evelyn wrote to Balfour again: ‘I said some hard things about Mrs. Marix. Well subsequent events have not justified my first estimate of her character … [she] is a nice girl really.’42
* * *
It was in France that summer that Evelyn first read in a newspaper about a divorce suit involving an aristocratic Liberal politician whose predicament would later give him the idea for Brideshead Revisited. The petition had been filed by Countess Beauchamp, the mother of his Oxford friends Hugh Lygon and William Elmley. Although the newspapers did not say so at the time, her grounds had to do with Earl Beauchamp’s homosexuality, evide
nce of which had been rigorously compiled by the Countess’s jealous and vindictive brother, Bendor Westminster, and at the Duke’s insistence was set out in unsparingly explicit detail in the petition: ‘THAT throughout their married life at 13 Belgrave Square, Madresfield Court, and Walmer Castle, aforesaid, the Respondent habitually committed acts of gross indecency with certain of his male servants, masturbating them with his mouth and hands and compelling them to masturbate him and lying upon them and masturbating between their legs …’43
Lord Beauchamp’s fondness for his footmen, whose faces were routinely powdered, was an open secret, and when Evelyn read about the divorce his first reaction was ‘So the story has broken.’44 But while he had known the sons at Oxford, he had never been to their vast moated manor house in Worcestershire or met their sisters, even though they were great friends of Baby Jungman and the Mitfords. He went to Madresfield Court, the house that would cast such a famously powerful spell over him, for the first time that autumn after obeying Baby’s suggestion that he attend Captain Hance’s famous riding academy in nearby Malvern and subsequently being invited by Mary Lygon (whom he chanced to meet lunching with Mrs Guinness) to stay with them while he was doing so.
With Lady Beauchamp having recently decamped to a house on the Westminster estate in Cheshire with their youngest brother Richard, and Lord Beauchamp, known as ‘Boom’ in the family for his resonant voice, driven into exile on the Continent by the threat of criminal prosecution, the three unmarried Lygon girls now had the run of the fully staffed Madresfield and regularly filled it with their friends. The eldest, twenty-four-year-old Lady Sibell, later admitted to finding Evelyn ‘rather tiresome and terribly rude’,45 however her two younger sisters, Lady Mary and Lady Dorothy, then aged twenty-one and nineteen, took to him at once, relishing his endlessly entertaining banter and apparent unwillingness to take anything seriously, least of all himself. He was equally entranced by them and quickly adopted them as yet another of his surrogate families. ‘I miss you both very much at school and in play time,’ he wrote to them after one of his early visits.