by Philip Eade
Mary had been known since childhood as Maimie and Dorothy as Coote, and to these Evelyn soon added Blondy and Poll respectively, while giving himself the mock-Masonic sobriquet of Boaz (which he later bestowed on the Azanian Minister of the Interior in Black Mischief). Certain traits of their friends were incorporated in a secret code, thus ‘Dutch’ came to denote anyone or anything problematic or uncooperative, a reference to Evelyn’s enduring and much-discussed difficulties in wooing Baby Jungman, whom he generally referred to as ‘the Dutch girl’; ‘Highclere’, the Hampshire seat of the Earls of Carnarvon, was used for anything imposing and luxurious; and to laycock (or lacock) meant to chuck a social engagement, coined after a genial but evidently forgetful young cavalry officer called Robert Laycock (later Evelyn’s wartime commanding officer in the commandos) whom Evelyn routinely referred to as ‘Chucker’: ‘Very very sorry for lacocking tea,’ Evelyn wrote to Maimie.
Evelyn’s irreverent mischievousness was such that it was ‘like having Puck as a member of the household’, Coote recalled.46 The sundial in the garden at Madresfield was inscribed: ‘That day is wasted on which one has not laughed.’ Standing by this one day, Maimie said to Evelyn: ‘Well, you and I have never wasted a day, have we?’47
The laughter helped alleviate the Lygon girls’ sadness over the loss of their father, to whom they were devoted despite his extreme love of formality – always referring to his children by their courtesy titles and insisting that liveried footmen stand behind each chair in the dining room – not to mention his notoriety as a prowler, which meant they had to warn any handsome male guests they had staying at Madresfield to lock their doors at night. They were never reconciled meanwhile to what they saw as the treachery of their mother, a pious and unworldly woman who famously declared after failing to grasp the essentials of what her husband was accused of: ‘Bendor tells me that Beauchamp is a bugler.’ Bendor, meanwhile, charmingly wrote to Beauchamp after his downfall: ‘Dear Bugger-in-law, you got what you deserved.’
Soon looked upon by the sisters as an extra brother, Evelyn found the family’s plight deeply affecting and told Baby that the Arts and Crafts chapel that Lady Beauchamp had given her husband on their marriage (the only part of Madresfield that Evelyn eventually borrowed for his creation of Brideshead Castle) was ‘the saddest thing that ever I saw’.48 He shared the sisters’ concern about their brother Hugh, whose alcoholism and general profligacy led to his going bankrupt in the spring of 1932, which in turn prompted a breakdown and a brief spell in an asylum. And he was at one with their growing antipathy towards their stiff elder brother William, Lord Elmley, the only one of the siblings remaining at Madresfield not to have taken their father’s side.
However much he loved being at Madresfield, Evelyn knew that he had to tear himself away from time to time in order to get on with the various articles he had promised as well as the novel that eventually became Black Mischief. Towards the end of October he wrote to Patrick Balfour: ‘I am having a healthy time riding all day and romping with the bright young Lygons in the evenings but not doing any work or making money – in fact spending pots so must get away quick.’49 He proposed joining Balfour for a stint at the Eastern Court Hotel near Chagford in Devon, a low-ceilinged, old thatched farmhouse which was to become his favourite writing refuge for years to come. ‘I pretend to my London chums that I am going to hunt stags,’ he told the Lygons, ‘but to you who are intimates and confidantes I don’t mind saying that I shall sit in my bedroom writing books, articles, short stories, reviews, plays. Cinema scenarios, etc. etc. until I have got a lot more money.’50 Within a few days of getting there, he admitted that he had been ‘fox catching on Thursday with a pack called South Devon. We galloped like mad for five hours over Dartmoor. My horse fell down once but it wasn’t my fault & I made a “plucky remount”. I pretend I am a farmer & don’t pay any money.’51
Having previously groaned to Baby Jungman that he was ‘lonely and depressed here & the book [Black Mischief] is going badly’,52 he felt better after his day’s hunting: ‘Sweet Tess,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘I have done only 2 pages of the novel but they are masterly. I don’t see how narrative could be finer, of its kind.’53 His feelings for her remained as unreciprocated as ever, however, which tended to produce quarrels whenever they met. ‘If you look on me simply as a pair of trousers for your mother’s parties,’ he wrote after one painful scene, ‘you can’t mind if I ask to be released from an engagement to watch your dogs go to the lavatory. If you regard me as a friend of your own you mustn’t be disagreeable in quite that way. Isn’t that reasonable!’54
On this occasion he could at least look forward to seeing her again over Christmas at Madresfield. But on that occasion Baby proved no more receptive to his endearments than usual and in the new year the same old pangs returned: ‘I hope you have every kind of success and amusement and marry a rich marquess,’ he wrote in January, ‘or a brilliant young novelist or something equally exciting.’55
Another regular guest at Madresfield was Stanley Baldwin’s younger son Windham, known by Evelyn as ‘Frisky’ and more widely as ‘Bloggs’. In common with Evelyn, the ginger-haired and bespectacled Baldwin had had the occasional dalliance with Pixie Marix while also being hopelessly smitten with Baby Jungman, on the basis of which he and Evelyn had formed a mutually commiserative alliance, bolstered by the fact that neither saw the other as much of a threat in the looks department: ‘Mrs Reginald Marix is back in London,’ Evelyn informed Frisky in mid-January 1932, ‘Theresa is hunting in Leicestershire. Make the best you can from these Words to the Wise.’56 Their shared lack of success as suitors cemented what proved to be a lasting friendship and in later life Baldwin recalled that Evelyn was ‘always wonderfully unrude to me and my wife; I can’t think why; and I’ve always been grateful’.57
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In February, staying the Spread Eagle at Thame where he was working on two short stories (possibly ‘Bella Fleace Gave a Party’ and ‘Cruise’), Evelyn again wrote to Baby, telling her that he had ‘thought of you this morning and yesterday and in fact every day since I left London’ and that he was ‘sorry that I am so consistently tiresome with you’. He would shortly be going abroad, he added, in a bid ‘to leave loneliness by being alone for a bit as I used to be able to do’.58 He was away for barely two weeks, much of the time spent travelling to and from Spain, where he went to look at Gothic cathedrals and from where he inevitably again wrote to Baby, imploring her to ‘think of me now and then between telephone calls’.59 When he returned and she went off to stay with some friends in Ireland, another letter followed her. ‘How you must be missing me,’ he wrote optimistically, ‘but cheer up. These separations are the very manure of love.’60 He went on to tell her about the recent first night at the Vaudeville Theatre of the stage version of Vile Bodies, at which ‘everyone laughed very loud and the criticisms this morning seem pretty genial’. Yet as he lamented to Frisky Baldwin: ‘Did little Miss Jungman send me a line of good wishes from Ireland? Not on your life.’61
He spent Easter at Stonyhurst, the Catholic boys’ public school where his old Oxford friend Christopher Hollis was teaching and where he went several times in the early years of his Catholicism. On this occasion he spent much of his time there working on his novel, the delivery of which John Farrar in New York was now beginning to hassle his agent about: ‘You can tell these troublesome yanks that the novel will be called BLACK MISCHIEF and will be ready for them in about 3 weeks,’ Evelyn wrote Peters in early May. ‘It is extremely good.’62
Begun in September 1931 and mostly written during his various stays at Madresfield and Chagford, Black Mischief had taken him eight months to complete, far longer than his first two novels, partly a measure of how distracting he found life at Madresfield, where he groaned every time he shut himself away in the old nursery to write. ‘Oh how I should love to live in your Liberty Hall,’ he wrote to Coote in the spring of 1932, ‘but the trouble about poor Bo is that he’s a lazy bugg
er and if he was in a house with you lovely girls he would just sit about and chatter and get d.d. [disgustingly drunk] and ride a horse and have a heavenly time but would he write his book? No, and must he? By God he must.’63 He found it impossible to stay away for long, however, and in May he was back there again – when the girls and their guests posed as models for the drawings he did for Black Mischief – as he would be in June, August, October and several times in November and December.
* * *
On 21 May 1932, after putting the final touches to Black Mischief, Evelyn caught the early aeroplane to Paris, from where he was to take a train to Rome to be privately confirmed by Cardinal Lépicier.64 His unlikely travelling companion for this pilgrimage was a singularly undevout Catholic friend called Raymond de Trafford, ‘a fine desperado’, as Evelyn described him, from a Lancashire landowning family whom he had met the previous year in Kenya. Having supplied several of the characteristics of Basil Seal in Black Mischief, de Trafford would later feature in James Fox’s White Mischief as the wildest of the notorious Happy Valley set. He was particularly renowned for having been shot by his lover Alice de Janzé at the Gare du Nord in Paris in 1927 (an attempted murder-cum-suicide) and then marrying her five years later, in February 1932, before leaving her again three months after that, his final gesture being to hurl a cocktail in her face at a Parisian café and then burst out laughing.65 It was very shortly after this that he met up with Evelyn on his way to Italy.
To Evelyn’s great relief, Hugh Lygon was due to join them later in Rome. ‘My word I am glad Hugh is coming to Italy,’ he wrote to Coote, ‘because between you and me and the w.c. Raymond de T. is something of a handful. v. nice but so BAD and he fights & fucks and gambles and gets D.D. all the time. But Hugh & I will be quiet & chaste and economical & sober.’66 For the time being Evelyn was held up in Paris by Raymond’s wayward behaviour: ‘He arrived at the Ritz in evening dress having not been to bed,’ Evelyn reported to Baby. ‘He slept all yesterday until ten – I left him tight at four this morning just off for gambling at Le Cercle Haussman. If I don’t manage to move him tomorrow I shall go alone.’67
When they did eventually reach Rome, they were joined not only by Hugh Lygon but also by his sisters Coote and Maimie. They had all come along in order to see their father, who was renting Lord Berners’s opulent apartment overlooking the Forum for the summer. It was there that they all stayed, despite the fact that there was only one bedroom, which was generally occupied by Lord Beauchamp and his handsome young valet Robert Byron, whom he had recruited while wintering in Australia. ‘Wasn’t it extraordinary that we were all there in one room?’ Evelyn wrote years later to Maimie.68
This was the first time that Evelyn had met Lord Beauchamp, whom he had heard so much about. They went sightseeing together and by all accounts got on very well, admiring each other’s intelligence and interest in art and church architecture. On a trip to join Maimie Lygon in Venice later that summer in August, Evelyn inadvertently gathered more material for future use in Brideshead: ‘On some days life kept pace with the gondola, as we nosed through the side-canals and the boatman uttered his plaintive musical bird-cry of warning; on other days, with the speedboat bouncing over the lagoon in a stream of sun-lit foam …’69
In both Rome and Venice that summer Evelyn also hit it off with Lady Diana Cooper, the actress and renowned beauty at whose fortieth birthday party on one of Venice’s islands he had witnessed the famous brawl begun by Richard Sykes and Randolph Churchill which inspired a new word in his private vocabulary – to ‘sykes’, meaning to hit or smash up. Evelyn had first met Lady Diana that spring in London through Hazel Lavery, with whom he had been having a casual on–off affair. He soon became as infatuated with her as he had been with Diana Guinness, yet despite their often ferocious quarrels their friendship proved considerably longer-lasting. Beside the fact that she was bright, beautiful and very grand, Evelyn admired Diana’s cleverness, her unusual wit, her sense of adventure and her extraordinary self-confidence – like all his great women friends, she never allowed herself to be bullied. Diana meanwhile was ‘enraptured by [Evelyn’s] wit, his sensibility, his gusto, his affection for her’, yet equally dismayed by his black rages and random cruelty. She was one of the few women who could call him to order. That autumn, when Evelyn joined her in Birmingham while she was touring the provinces in a revival of The Miracle, a red-faced man approached them and breathlessly asked if he was going the right way to the railway station. Evelyn replied that indeed he was, knowing full well that the station was in the opposite direction. When it dawned on Diana what he had done she refused to speak to him again until he ran after the man, corrected the mistake and helped him with his heavy suitcase.70
It was a measure of how greatly Diana delighted in Evelyn’s company that she was prepared to forgive such indefensible badness and welcomed his frequent visits over the next few months as she moved about the theatres of Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh. He would sit loyally with her in her dressing room and later take her out to dinner; by day they toured the great houses of the district – Chatsworth, Hardwick, Belton, and her two old family homes, Haddon and Belvoir.
Mindful perhaps of her husband’s well-known infidelities, Evelyn was at first not entirely averse to the idea of an affair, however that was the last thing Diana wanted. When she later learned how Evelyn had snorted at the notion of her as a ‘grande amoureuse’, she retorted: ‘How the hell can he tell if I am or not? Just because I never responded to his dribbling, dwarfish little amorous singeries, he need not be so sure!’71 If that sounded cruelly dismissive, she could be equally eloquent on the subject of her devotion to him, later recalling that during this time she had ‘wanted to bind Evelyn to my heart with hoops of steel’.72 In a possible reference to Baby Jungman, she wrote to him: ‘You know perfectly well that you have no Baby as loyal as this Baby and if you believe anything else you are very foolish.’73
Black Mischief was published at the beginning of October, dedicated ‘With love to Mary and Dorothy Lygon’. An exuberantly tasteless black comedy about the absurd attempts of Oxford-educated Emperor Seth to modernise the fictional African island of Azania, it met with mixed reviews. The most glowing came from L. A. G. Strong in The Spectator, who pronounced it ‘a brilliant book’, ‘exceedingly funny’, ‘amazingly well-written’. ‘No one but Mr Waugh could have written a single page of it.’74 Eric Linklater in The Listener was similarly effusive: ‘The manner in which Mr Waugh controls his widely varied matter is admirable. His narrative is swift and picturesque, and his cutting – if one may borrow a Hollywood term – is masterly. “Black Mischief”, indeed, shows an all-round growth of strength.’75 Others, though, were less convinced, among them James Agate in the Express, who found the satire ‘heavy-handed’, while Geoffrey West in Bookman complained that ‘Mr Waugh still seems to suffer from his early illusion that the vapid fatuities of Ronald Firbank are funny.’76 None of this greatly bothered Evelyn, not least since it was the Book Society’s choice as Book of the Month, the first impression of 15,000 copies sold out before publication, and by early October a third was already in the press.
In matters of the heart, however, Evelyn’s situation remained as bleak as ever. The marriage later that month of his brother Alec to an Australian heiress called Joan Chirnside served only to underline his own lack of progress with Baby Jungman, as did the fact that he was unlikely to be able to marry anyone at all now that he was a Catholic divorcee. At the wedding itself Evelyn was seen to behave ‘like a malignant demon with a red hot poker’ and loudly announced to anyone within earshot that he had now set his sights on the attractive Surrealist painter Eileen Agar, ignoring the fact that she was there with her six-foot-tall Hungarian boyfriend (later husband) Joseph Bard. Evelyn subsequently renewed his acquaintance with Eileen while staying the weekend with Alec and Joan, where Eileen recalled how he tried to ‘lure, charm and finally push me into the bushes on our walks through the woods’ and later that night b
oldly called for her outside her bedroom door, which she rewarded only with a chaste kiss on the brow, ‘cool as a coconut, but with perhaps a hint of indulgence’, as she recorded. She was perfectly happy with her ‘calm and steady’ existing lover and ‘had no desire to rush into a passionate and agitated affair which would leave me no chance to pursue my all-consuming interest – painting’.77
Evelyn was evidently neither Baby Jungman nor Eileen Agar’s type, however he was then still impishly good looking, as well as affectionate, charming, clever and extremely funny, and there were undoubtedly women who did find him attractive. A year or two later, he had an affair with a married actress in her early twenties called Clare Mackenzie (stage name Clare Brocklebank), whom he took to stay at Chagford and then evidently abandoned: ‘That was the unkindest cut of all,’ she wrote to him afterwards. ‘Was it absolutely necessary to leave me when I needed you so desperately badly? … I can’t believe you would willingly kick me so hard once I was down. One kind word last night would, I believe, have saved me cracking so badly … My hand is so shaky this morning I can hardly hold the pencil steady, but the doctor’s given me some soothing medicine which may help. And God do I need it after your note this morning. I shan’t stay here long now; what’s the use, I should only be miserable without you … I still can hardly believe you’ve really done this … Please ignore a telegram in very bad taste if it reaches you I hope it doesn’t. I’m afraid I felt so ill I lost all sense of proportion & broke the rules.’78
He cast an even more powerful spell on Joyce Gill, two years his senior, whom as Joyce Fagan he had first met via Alec while he was at Oxford, and smuggled into an all-male party with her posing as Terence Greenidge. She was the only guest to dinner at Underhill on his 21st birthday and it was her flat in Canonbury Square that Evelyn rented after his marriage to Shevelyn in 1928. At some point after the marriage ended, Evelyn and Joyce began an affair. To outward appearances she remained devoted to her American husband, Donald Gill, yet throughout her marriage Joyce had wrestled with a side of her nature that was bohemian, flirtatious, impulsive and adventurous, and she later admitted having agonised over a suggestion of Evelyn’s that she abandon her family and accompany him on one of his expeditions in the 1930s. In 1938, after Evelyn had remarried and was about to become a father, Joyce wrote him a letter that said much about the intensity of their relationship: