by Philip Eade
It is too difficult not to write to you now, Evelyn, because things have not been going well, because it’s nearly March 13th which was the day you jokingly suggested that we might meet each year until I am 70. And so I suppose that day will be for me a kind of lovely agony for ever and ever … I have arranged my life now, as I think best, to give the least trouble to you or to Don. When you were married I found that to drive the children back to their Prep-School I had to pass very near to you. So, to be out of temptation, I arranged to have them living at home. It is better so, anyway … And in compensation, I do what you suggested & what in my foolishness I thought almost a crime. I think of you all the time when I am making love, until the word and Evelyn are almost synonymous! And in the darkness each night & in the greyness of each morning when I wake I remember your face & your voice and your body and everything about you so earnestly and intensely that you become almost tangibly beside me. And after that I can forget you for the day (except when I am alone). It is a kind of exercise which, together with being tied hand & foot by the family, keeps me from behaving like the pitiable sort of fool I was 2 years ago. At least I hope it will keep me from it. It is only for the next few years. After I am 40 I won’t want to see you. Then it will just be dismal aged despair! Then even the impossible possibility of having your child will be gone. And I suppose that is at the root of this – this – I can’t call it infatuation because I know that that is an unworthy word for it; because I know, darling, that love is a juster description. And every night I tell myself that your wife now has your child in her body and I think of it and of you always, so that when I do hear or read about it I shall not be unprepared. I tried to do the same thing about your marriage, but darling, it was the dearest kindest thing of you to write about it, and it is because you are like that – because you are Evelyn, that I shall try most terribly hard to conform to the normal convention of ‘decency’ (Christ! what a phrase) and not bombard you with love letters. And if I do ever write darling, it is not a ‘begging letter’ only because I remember that once you said ‘write to me if it helps’. I know that was before you were married again – so I shall not write every day … Almost I could be contented if every night I could write & say ‘Evelyn I love you’ & every morning I could say Evelyn God bless you! But what nonsense! Of course I could not be content. I have only to remember your eyes – your mouth and my heart aches as if it were a stone cut by a diamond … Goodnight & good morning and good day for always, dearest.79
* * *
In the autumn of 1932 travel again seemed to offer Evelyn the best means of distraction from his lovesickness, and after pondering a variety of far-flung destinations – Moscow, Borneo, Peking – he finally settled on the Amazon jungle. When he sent Baby a copy of Black Mischief in late September ‘simply to show you that I was still thinking of you’, he breezily added that he was ‘Off to British Guiana quite soon’.80 However the prospect of leaving appeared only to intensify his feelings for her. In October he told her from Chagford that it seemed ‘all make-believe being genial and friendly with you just as much as it was before when I was disagreeable because when the natural relationship is love everything else is a fraud’.81
Sometime later, on a final visit to Diana in Glasgow before setting off to South America, he wrote again to Baby: ‘I miss you but I won’t go on about that.’82 Two days before he left she joined him for lunch at the Ritz with a Guiana-hand called Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Davson: ‘She sat quiet while he and I spread a map on the table and talked of Guiana,’ Evelyn recorded.
On his last evening, 1 December, they dined together at Quaglino’s (caviar aux blinis, cold partridge, marrow on toast) and the next morning attended Mass at Spanish Place followed by breakfast over which she presented him with a medal of St Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, to wear round his neck – ‘gold, Cartier, very expensive,’ he told Diana, ‘saved out of her pocket money. Deeply moved.’83 They motored down to the docks at Tilbury in her mother’s car. ‘Deadly lonely, cold, and slightly sick at parting,’ Evelyn wrote in his diary. ‘Teresa drove off to lunch with Lady Astor in London. We sailed at about half-past two. Down the river in heavy rain and twilight. Heart of lead.’
* Their trysting place was the Cavendish Hotel, whose proprietress Rosa Lewis had begun her career as a kitchen maid for Alastair’s uncle, Willie Low, a crony of the future King Edward VII. Rosa was thus generally very well disposed towards Alastair and his friends, however she was so offended by Evelyn’s portrayal of her as Lottie Crump in Vile Bodies that she banned him from the premises.
14
Off to the Forest
Shortly before leaving for Georgetown Evelyn told Diana Cooper that he had spent ‘a very pious few days going to church with that Dutch girl’.1 They had even discussed the possibility of their both ‘taking up the religious life’, as he recalled in a letter to Baby en route, albeit adding that on reflection it now seemed very presumptuous to have been talking about it ‘as though it were joining a club’. ‘Here am I going off to the forest to see if it would suit me to be a missionary,’ he wrote. ‘It is just like the people who used to be continually coming to my father and saying they would like to be novelists because it was congenial indoor work with no fixed hours and long holidays.’2
As he implied, he was not perhaps obvious missionary material, yet however seriously he ever viewed that aim, the mordant account he subsequently wrote in Ninety-Two Days (the title itself brought to mind a prison sentence) suggests that he did look upon the journey as a form of penance – even if the artist in him also hoped that this distant and barbarous place might yield ‘experiences vivid enough to demand translation into literary form’.
His choice of British Guiana (now the independent republic of Guyana) came from the fact that it had always seemed to him on a map to be ‘absurdly remote’.3 However he may have been additionally prompted by Peter Fleming’s recent reports in The Times describing a harebrained expedition to try and find the explorer Colonel Fawcett, who had vanished seven years earlier in the Brazilian jungle while searching for the lost city of El Dorado. Two days before leaving Evelyn had had tea with Fleming ‘to talk of equipment for forests’.4 The next day he had packed a suitcase and grip: ‘A few tropical suits, camera, books, a pair of field boots and settler shirt and shorts.’5
Evelyn’s previous travels, including the trip to Abyssinia, had never taken him far from the company of other Europeans or for that matter a hotel, however his expedition to British Guiana was to be of an altogether different order, ‘sterner stuff’, as Eric Newby later classed it, involving travel ‘much more in the manner of a Victorian explorer: with guides who were at best unpredictable, through country in which there was a considerable degree of danger’.6
The discomforts began as soon as he boarded the SS Ingoma at Tilbury. This sluggish cargo vessel was ‘not at all like Highclere’,7 he told Maimie Lygon, but instead resembled ‘an Irish packet-boat with the second-class decks removed to leave a clear deck for the accommodation of two prize bulls, a race horse, a couple of fox hounds and some hens’.8 The heating system did not work – a particularly unfortunate defect in midwinter – and it creaked noisily ‘like a pair of new boots’.
For the first week until they were well past the Azores the sea was very rough, however while most of the other thirty passengers were ‘being sick or else very sullen & quiet’, Evelyn, who was a good sailor, resiliently strode about the boat with a big cigar feeling like ‘no end of a swell’, as he told Maimie Lygon.9 Otherwise he lay in the three-berth cabin he had managed to secure for himself, smoking, studying maps of the jungle and reading – histories of Guiana, D’Arcy’s Nature of Belief and two books of Thomist philosophy.
He thought a lot about Baby and wrote to tell her that he ‘could have cried at any moment’ as they parted. ‘I wanted very much to kiss you goodbye but didn’t have the heart to [risk] another escape.’10 The next day he wrote again: ‘Your St Christopher comforts me and
gives me a feeling of not being quite alone. Think of me sometimes.’11 A few days later he told her that she was ‘very often in my thoughts – closer and dearer than ever before’, and in another letter: ‘Don’t go falling in love with anyone while I’m away. I thought it would be a good thing but now I know I couldn’t bear it … I’d sooner have your love with all the unhappiness it would probably cause both of us, than anything I can think of at the moment.’12
After two weeks at sea they finally reached Antigua and two days after that Barbados. On Trinidad Evelyn was shown around by a man who disconcertingly disclosed that he was Baby Jungman’s first cousin, and more awkwardly he was invited to stay by the manager of a hotel that Alec had insulted at length in The Coloured Countries. Plied with multiple rum swizzles and lent silk pyjamas and a dressing-gown ‘gayer than I should have dared choose for myself’, he pronounced all this an ‘exemplary manner in which to accept criticism’.13 Privately, however, he recorded that except for the new bed, ‘the hotel had all the defects Alec complained of’.14 ‘General impression of Trinidad,’ he concluded, ‘that I don’t want to see it again.’15
His first glimpse of Guiana, on 22 December, was no more uplifting: ‘misty palm-fringe through pouring rain and a few factory chimneys … dreary wind-swept wharfs; some corrugated iron roofs of warehouses’. On the bright side there was a cable from Baby and an interview with a local paper which produced the headline: ‘Handsome and Well-Formed Novelist’.16 Nonetheless he recorded: ‘General impression of Georgetown that I don’t mind how soon I leave it.’17
Obliged to stay there for ten days while he planned his venture into the interior, he was looked after over Christmas by the Governor, Sir Edward Denham, and his wife, lunching with them on Christmas Eve at Government House, dining there again on Christmas Day – ‘Rather a pathetic evening of the Denhams’ charming attempts to be homely among childless officials … I sat between a black attorney general and a white archdeacon’18 – and the day after Boxing Day embarking on a three-day trip up the great Essequibo River on their comfortable steam yacht.
At last all was ready for his own expedition and on New Year’s Eve he wrote to Baby: ‘Unless anything odd happens you won’t hear from me for some time as I am just starting on a journey up country and there are no post offices there. I don’t quite know where I am going yet.’19
His guide was an emaciated eccentric called Mr Haynes (Mr Bain in Ninety-Two Days), commissioner for the Rupununi district. ‘Half black and more than half crazy’,20 as Evelyn described him to Diana Cooper, Haynes was soon regaling Evelyn with accounts of his horse, which supposedly swam underwater, and how he found his way through the bush with the help of parrots which flew on ahead on reconnaissance.
On 3 January 1933 they caught a slow train down the coast to New Amsterdam and the next day a paddle steamer up the Berbice River with ‘monotonous vegetable walls on either bank’ to Takama. They continued from there by horse south to Kurukupari (‘I had no idea where Kurupukari was, but it sounded as good as anywhere else’),21 covering the ninety miles in six days, with Mr Haynes constantly discoursing on subjects such as his own extraordinary honesty, courage, efficiency, generosity, horsemanship, physical prowess and sex appeal. He had a fair amount to say too about the local fauna and in Ninety-Two Days Evelyn later recorded a few of the choicest examples of his guide’s ‘experienced ear’:
‘Listen,’ said Mr Bain one day, ‘that is most interesting. It is what we call “the six o’clock beetle”, because he always makes that noise at exactly six o’clock.’
‘But it is now quarter past four.’
‘Yes, that is what is so interesting.’22
‘Throughout the week’s ride,’ Evelyn wrote in his diary, ‘Haynes did not once stop talking, except at night when he kept me awake with asthma and retching.’23 By the time they reached Kurukupari – a single wooden house in a clearing on a slight hill – he had had quite enough of his companion and left him behind as he pressed on towards the ranch of a man named Christie, a further five days’ ride away.
When he eventually arrived there on the afternoon of 20 January after an ‘intolerably hot ride’ through bush and savannah, a few hours ahead of his two bearers and cook, Evelyn found Mr Christie ‘reclining in hammock and sipping cold water from the spout of a white enamelled teapot’. Christie had ‘a long white moustache and white woolly head; his face was of the same sun-baked, fever-blanched colour as were most faces in the colony but of unmistakeable Negro structure’. When Evelyn greeted him and asked where he could water his horse, Christie smiled at him dreamily and told him that he had been expecting him:
‘I always know the character of any visitors by the visions I have of them. Sometimes I see a pig or a jackal; often a ravening tiger.’
I could not resist asking, ‘And how did you see me?’
‘As a sweetly-toned harmonium,’ said Mr Christie politely.24
That night they drank a lot of rum and talked about Christie’s preaching and his translation of the scriptures into Macushi. Christie recalled seeing in another vision ‘the Love of God’ and, as Evelyn recalled, ‘pronounced it to be spherical in shape and slightly larger than a football’.25 Evelyn later wondered if he had dreamt the whole encounter until he read in a mission magazine about a previous visitor to Mr Christie’s ranch, a priest who had offered his host one of the medals of Our Lady which he carried for distribution among converts. Christie studied it for a moment before giving it back: ‘Why should I require an image of someone I see so frequently?’ he said. ‘Besides, it is an exceedingly poor likeness.’26
The next morning Evelyn was off again at 6.45 a.m. and by eleven he had reached the next ranch on the border with Brazil, where he wolfed down ‘a dish of fried eggs, minced tasso fried with herbs, bananas and delicious Brazilian coffee’.27 At the next ranch, a few more hours on, he gratefully accepted a lift in a motor van to Bon Success, which did the journey in a third of the time it would have taken by horse, albeit rather less comfortably. From Bon Success he then drove on up beside the Takutu River to the Jesuit mission at St Ignatius, ‘as lonely an outpost of religion as you could find anywhere’.28 There he spent a very affecting ten days as a guest of Father Mather, ‘the kindest and most generous of all the hosts of the colony’, whose skill at carpentry reinforced Evelyn’s view of the priest as craftsman, ‘a man with a job which he alone was qualified to do’.
Evelyn eventually moved on on 1 February and three days later reached Boa Vista, a town whose name (‘lovely view’ in Portuguese) combined with Haynes’s misleading description had led him to imagine rather more than the ramshackle huddle of squalid buildings that greeted him. Gone in an instant was the mirage he had conjured of ‘shady boulevards; kiosks for flowers and cigars and illustrated papers; the hotel terrace and the cafés; the baroque church built by seventeenth-century missionaries …’29 More alarmingly, no one seemed to know anything about the fast motor launches that supposedly plied constantly between there and Manaós and by which Evelyn hoped to be able to return to civilisation via the Amazon River. At the Benedictine mission where Father Mather had arranged for him to stay, the monk told him that it was quite impossible to predict when another boat would leave.30 During his days of waiting he found little to occupy himself other than to wander desultorily about the town and every so often call in at the wireless office to see if there was any news of the boat. ‘Goodness the boredom of Boa Vista,’ he wrote to Diana Cooper after he had been stuck there a week, ‘I am already nearly crazy. No one here speaks a word of English. The Benedictine priest (Swiss) knows a few sentences of French but for the last four days he has been down with fever. There are no books except an ant-eaten edition of Bousset’s sermons and some back numbers of a German pious periodical for children. One cannot get drunk as the only liquor in the village is some very mild, very warm beer, which I can drink at a table in the store in a cloud of flies stared at by Brazilians in pyjama suits and boaters. There are of course no c
ars or boats for hire and nowhere to go in them if there were. No roads outside the village at all – bush on one side, pampas on the other, vast shallow river full of sand banks on other sides. No hotel or café or life of any kind. Everyone asleep most of the day … I shan’t ever again undertake a journey of this kind alone. I am getting homesick and shall return direct as soon as I get to Manaós.’31
As so often with Evelyn, boredom eventually gave way to a burst of creativity, and five days later he sent his agent what he described as ‘a grade A short story’, almost certainly ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’, the superbly chilling tale which later served as the penultimate chapter of A Handful of Dust, the novel now seen as his greatest masterpiece. According to Evelyn’s diary the story was written in just two days between 12 and 14 February, although evidently it had been brewing in his imagination ever since he left Mr Christie, who is the clear original in the short story of Mr McMaster (Mr Todd in A Handful of Dust), the sinister settler who takes the hapless Paul Henty (Tony Last) captive on his isolated ranch and makes him read Dickens to him day after day for the rest of his life.