Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ draws on Evelyn’s feelings of being stranded in Boa Vista combined with the remembered sensation of entrapment he had felt while his father sat in the book-room at Underhill reading aloud from Dickens – a memory doubtless revived by the stash of Dickens novels Father Mather kept at St Ignatius. McMaster, incidentally, was the name of one of Arthur Waugh’s closest friends.

  Henty has stumbled on McMaster’s ranch while on an expedition aimed at winning back his unfaithful wife. When a rescue party of three Englishmen does finally arrive, Henty misses them because he has been drugged by McMaster, who calmly tells him when he wakes:

  ‘I thought you would not mind – as you could not greet them yourself I gave them a little souvenir, your watch. They wanted something to take home to your wife who is offering a great reward for news of you. They were very pleased with it. And they took some photographs of the little cross I put up to commemorate your coming. They were very pleased with that too. They were very easily pleased. But I do not suppose they will visit us again, our life here is so retired … no pleasures except reading … I do not suppose we shall ever have visitors again … well, well, I will get you some medicine to make you feel better. Your head aches, does it not … We will not have any Dickens today … but tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Let us read Little Dorrit again. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.’

  Unlike Henty, after two weeks in Boa Vista Evelyn did eventually manage to escape, albeit by horse as the promised trade boats had failed to show up, and back towards Georgetown having given up on the idea of Manaós. On the second day, after going on ahead of his guide, he contrived to get lost and was extremely fortunate to stumble upon a hut belonging to an English-speaking Indian just when he and his horse could go no further, a stroke of luck the odds of which Evelyn estimated at 54 million to one. The Indian also happened to be heading to Bon Success, so within a couple of days Evelyn was safely back with Father Mather at St Ignatius, from where he wrote to Baby on Ash Wednesday telling her that he had been ‘saved by the miraculous intervention of St Christopher’ and bade her look forward to his return ‘on account of my bearing and beauty and wit and nobility of character’.32

  He did not reach Georgetown for a further six weeks, however, having rashly chosen a ‘very unpansy’33 route over the Pakaraima Mountains to the upper waters of the Potaro and so down to the Essequibo. ‘One has to walk all the time as there is no trail for lamas,’ he wrote to Baby, ‘and one has a party of Indians in front with choppers clearing the path so it is very slow going.’34 It was an even grimmer journey than he had envisaged, beset by heavy rain, kaboura flies and jiggers that regularly had to be dug out of the soles of his feet. When he eventually made it back he was relieved to find two ‘delightful’ letters from Baby and he replied that he had got ‘a small dead alligator for Wincey [her dog]’.35 He reached London a month later and promptly took himself off to a hotel in Bath ‘to be in good architecture for a little after all those huts and forests’, he explained to Baby,36 and to attend to his backlog of mail.

  Evelyn was mildly annoyed to see that an article he had written describing the Rupununi cattle trail had been rechristened by the Daily Mail ‘My Escape from Mayfair’ (‘It will be about two years before I dare look anyone in the face again,’ he told Baby). Rather more vexing, though, was the discovery that while he was away he had been accused of blasphemy and obscenity in a review of Black Mischief by Ernest Oldmeadow, the moralistic editor of Britain’s oldest Catholic journal. ‘The Tablet says I am no Catholic,’ Evelyn wrote to Baby, ‘and yet I carried a torch for two miles in front of the B [Blessed] Sacrament in Trinidad [at Easter on his way home] and I was the only white man.’37 Gratifyingly, twelve prominent Catholics had sprung to Evelyn’s defence and in his absence written to The Tablet expressing their ‘regard for Mr Waugh’ and protesting at the journal’s ‘bad faith’. Evelyn himself now wrote a scathing 4,000-word ‘open letter’ to the journal’s proprietor, Cardinal Bourne, the Catholic Primate of Great Britain, which Baby sensibly persuaded him not to publish (‘Did I tell you I took your advice and rather deferred to your wishes, about the Cardinal’s pamphlet?’)38 but which he nonetheless distributed among friends.

  From Bath Evelyn went to Madresfield, where he got it into his head one ‘bad night’ that Baby was about to announce her engagement to Sir Michael Duff, a handsome, bisexual landowner from north Wales, and wrote to her withholding his congratulations ‘until I am convinced that he is the solution for our particular problem’.39 He realised the next morning this was not the case but sent her the letter anyway hoping it would amuse her. The four months away seemed only to have intensified his devotion and he was not shy of saying so. ‘I think of you all the time,’ he wrote in July. ‘I believe you are the first woman I have ever been in love with … I love you so much.’40 When he borrowed the Coopers’ house by the sea at Bognor to make a start on Ninety-Two Days (dashed off at an astonishing rate within a month), he told Diana: ‘Trouble is I think of the dutch girl all day – not sweet voluptuous dreams, no sir, just fretful and it sykeses the work.’41 The same day he told Baby that he had wasted three sheets of notepaper from not knowing how to begin a letter to her – ‘I wrote Sweet Tess and that looked silly and Dear Heart which was sillier still, and Lovely Teresa, which was better …’

  Two days later, while staying with the Montagus at Breccles Hall in Norfolk, he wrote again: ‘I don’t think of much except you – your beauty, so fragile and intangible, a thing of fresh water and early morning and the silence of dawn and mist just alloyed with gold and deep, saturated restful greens, like sunrise on that river I travelled down last winter – and your intricate character, all mystery and frustration, a labyrinth with something infinitely secret and infinitely precious at its centre … I couldn’t understand anyone less and want anyone more … Darling Tess your beauty is all around me like a veil so that every moment apart from you seems obscure and half real.’42

  However fond Baby was of Evelyn, her inability fully to reciprocate his feelings continued to cause friction. ‘It is hard to believe that you can’t see me without wanting to have an affair with me,’ she wrote to him, ‘but if that is so I do implore you not to feel bitter about it and not to behave as if we didn’t perfectly understand each other and weren’t very fond of each other indeed quite apart from anything else. Please do try and understand what I mean and not be so unkind – You may have so many friends that you can afford to quarrel with me but there can’t be many who are as fond of you as I am. So do please, Evelyn, be generous enough not to feel bitterly about me – If only you would be less obstinate about having evil intentions we could perfectly well go on seeing each other like we used to.’43

  ‘I am afraid it must be my fault that you are cross with me,’ she went on, ‘perhaps you feel I made too much use of you during those weeks when I was sad – Forgive me if I did – it was only because I felt you were sympathetic and trusted you completely – not only because you were a Catholic because after all there are a good many others who might have been able to produce priests and advice for me!’44

  In this instance Baby’s unhappiness seems to have stemmed from some kind of religious crisis and Evelyn told her how he had recently been asked by Lady Juliet Duff if it was true that she was going into a convent: ‘No, I said, nothing is less likely except her marriage to someone she doesn’t love.’45 He had by then moved on to stay at Madresfield, where he hoped ‘to do the work that got upset when I fell in love’.46 The only other people were Maimie, Coote and Hughie, the latter ‘deep in disgrace’, so Evelyn told Baby, ‘having been tipsy all the weekend and sykesed up the servants and attempted to murder C. Brocklehurst [a Sussex landowner and another of Baby’s admirers – years later he left her money in his will] ‘. Evelyn was sleeping in ‘oriental squalor’ in Lady Sibell’s old room, ‘full of bad taste objects’, and as usual had nursery as his study
. ‘My love to you all the time, everywhere,’ he wrote to Baby.47

  With Baby herself about to leave for a holiday in Italy with her mother and sister Zita, Evelyn had allowed her to persuade him to go on what he imagined would be a ‘nightmare’ Hellenic cruise with a group of fellow Catholics organised by Father Martin D’Arcy. ‘You will think me insane when I tell you,’ he wrote to Nancy Mitford, ‘and you will be jolly well right.’48 But Baby’s imminent departure prompted yet another lovelorn outburst, possibly exacerbated by her confusing ambivalence:

  Darling Evelyn,

  Don’t be cross with me and keep ringing off all the time – you know how fond I am of you and that you were the first person I wanted to see when I was miserable – so please don’t ever doubt that, will you? But what do you expect me to do when you say that you might fall in love with me and that your intentions are evil! You see I enjoy that situation too much not to encourage it as much as I can in a subconscious way – and as I mean to try as hard as I possibly can not to behave badly, it wouldn’t be very consistent of me to go on seeing you all the time, would it! And quite apart from that I have got such a revulsion suddenly from the ungenerousness of encouraging people as much as I can and then being prim in taxis – I know you will understand this although I explain it very badly – For once in my life I am not just being tiresome and enjoying creating a situation – at least I don’t think I am! I am really very fond of you and should like to go on being your friend for the rest of our lives – and I should like to do some enormous thing for you so that you would know that I really mean all this – And if you are ever miserable and want anybody to be sympathetic I only hope that I shall be able to be as sweet to you as you have been to me – Thank you a million times for it, darling Evelyn – you have been an angel – and please do forgive me and not laugh at me for being priggish but I know you will understand me because you always do – If you weren’t married you see it would be different because I might or I might not want to marry you but I wouldn’t be sure – As things are, I can’t be so unfair as to go on when I am quite determined about what I mean to do – Bless you – I might be Helen of Troy from the conceited things I find myself saying!49

  In the weeks leading up to his trip, while staying at Bognor, Evelyn had taken up skipping so as ‘to make me prettier for the papist cruisers’, he told Baby.50 The cruisers were to have included ‘old Hazel’ [Lavery], but she missed the boat, which was a relief to Evelyn, who had been doing his best to avoid her since getting back from Guiana.

  In the meantime, Evelyn spared Baby few of his yearnings: ‘I love you and that’s all there is to it and I know you a little and so realize that you find it hard to do both the hard and the good things that come easily to less remarkable people. You have almost every lovely quality – tolerance, temperance, patience, family affection, discretion, reticence, purity – all unattainable to me. But you’re also lazy, cold and undecided. I knew all that long before I fell really in love with you.’51

  Besides wanting to occupy himself while Baby was in Italy, another of Evelyn’s motives for going on the cruise was to try and coax his old friend Alfred Duggan away from the bottle and back towards his lapsed Catholic faith, a mission which Evelyn was to pursue doggedly for many years to come and with eventual success, although on that particular trip Alfred was conspicuously drunk for much of the time and, as Evelyn told Diana, ‘broke up badly during last days of voyage on account of switching from beer to Jugo-Slavian brandy’.52

  Evelyn’s more immediate achievement aboard SS Kraljica Marija was to make friends with two families of great importance to him in the future, the Asquiths and the Herberts. Of the latter, he made a sufficiently favourable impression on twenty-one-year-old Gabriel Herbert, a first cousin of his first wife, to be invited to go and stay at her family’s house at Portofino after the cruise, and in the intervening week he persuaded Katharine Asquith and her son to join him for a few days sightseeing in Ravenna and Bologna.

  Katharine, then aged forty-eight, was the widow of H. H. Asquith’s brilliant son Raymond, who had been killed on the Somme in 1916. The next year her brother Edward had also been killed in action and she inherited what was left of her family’s Mells estate in Somerset and its beautiful sixteenth-century manor house, built for one of her Horner ancestors after the dissolution of Glastonbury Abbey.

  A convert to Catholicism during widowhood and in some respects rather pious and high-minded, she nevertheless found Evelyn ‘exceedingly amusing and a great collector of the ship’s gossip’,53 as did her seventeen-year-old son Julian, ‘Trim’, who had succeeded his grandfather as the 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith in 1928 and whom Evelyn found ‘studious, holy and respectful’;54 and her ‘very doe-like and sweet’ twenty-five-year-old daughter, Lady Helen, a teacher.55

  The cruise was far more enjoyable than Evelyn had feared and he admitted to Baby he was ‘glad you sent me’. Besides his various old and new friends, the ship was ‘full of people of high rank,’ he told the Lygon sisters, ‘including two princesses of ROYAL BLOOD’. That there was ‘not much rogering’ appeared not to bother him unduly, nor that the food was ‘appalling’. In fact the only obvious impediment to his enjoyment was the news that Baby had cut short her Italian trip to return to London. ‘If I had realised you would be back so soon I wouldn’t now be in the sea of Marmora,’ he wrote to her on 1 September. ‘If you had been a more enterprising girl you should have joined this cruise at Athens.’56

  The ship eventually returned to Venice on 12 September, and after the few days sightseeing with the Asquiths, Evelyn made his way to Portofino, and to ‘Altachiara’, which the Herberts had named in translation of Highclere, although, like Guy Crouchback’s ‘Castello Crauccibac’ in Sword of Honour, the locals always referred to it as the Villa Carnarvon. The house party there was presided over by Gabriel’s mother Mary Herbert, a ‘very decent hostess’, according to Evelyn, and included Mary’s Catholic friend Hilaire Belloc, various young friends of her children and the four Herbert siblings. The second-youngest of these, Laura, then aged seventeen, would eventually become Evelyn’s second wife, although there is no evidence of the merest frisson on this first encounter; indeed he seems barely to have noticed her at all, beyond describing her in a letter to the Asquiths as ‘a white mouse’.

  * * *

  Evelyn was of course still fixated by Baby Jungman, and in any case as a divorcee there seemed no prospect of his marrying anyone at all within the rules of the Catholic Church. Another of his friends on the recent cruise, Christopher Hollis, had noticed how Evelyn had gone to great trouble each day to obtain an English newspaper even though he had never seemed much interested in current affairs. ‘Oh,’ replied Evelyn when Hollis asked him why he did this, ‘just to see if there is any good news – such as, for instance, the death of Mrs Heygate.’57 For a time after his conversion, Evelyn had indeed taken it for granted that Shevelyn would have to die before the Church would allow him to remarry, however by this time he had begun exploring with Catholic friends the possibility of applying to the Church to have his marriage annulled. It was presumably to talk about this that Evelyn had lunched with Shevelyn in July – an event referred to in passing in one of his letters to Baby. (‘I wrote to my wife and she said lunch with me next week. I have grown my hair long and it has twelve white ones she said.’58) By this time Shevelyn’s marriage to John Heygate was becoming unstuck and she was keen to do what she could to make amends so far as Evelyn was concerned. ‘I felt that the whole thing was my fault,’ she wrote later, ‘and to pretend innocence was a lie … I was naturally anxious that he should get his annulment.’59

  In October, Evelyn wrote to Coote Lygon: ‘I shall be in London on Wed to take my poor wife to be wracked by the Inquisition.’60 Beforehand the two Evelyns had lunch together again, during which Evelyn was ‘pleasant,’ Shevelyn recalled, ‘and told me exactly what to say, which priest to be aware of and who was on his side. He was anxious to marry again and was afraid th
e girl would not wait.’61

  The hearing itself took place in a large, gloomy room adjoining Westminster Cathedral, with ‘a bevy of priests at a seemingly never ending table’ as Shevelyn recalled, and four additional witnesses: Alec Waugh, Pansy Lamb, Shevelyn’s sister Alathea and her husband Geoffrey Fry. Evelyn requested an annulment on the grounds of ‘the lack of real consent’, contending that, first, he and his wife had entered the marriage on the understanding that it could be dissolved at the wish of either party and, second, that children had been excluded for an indefinite period.

  The second argument was eventually rejected over its failure to meet the required standard of proof, but the first argument prevailed after both Evelyns described themselves as nominal Anglicans (at best) at the time of their marriage, and testified that their church wedding had been a ‘conventional formality’ and that the words of the ceremony had meant nothing.62 In support of Evelyn’s case, Pansy Lamb went so far as to recall that ‘They came to an agreement in my presence that, if the marriage was not happy, they would not be bound by it, and Miss Evelyn said to me that she had no intention of remaining married if the marriage did not turn out well. The arrangement was not a written contract but a mutual agreement, each accepting divorce as a definitive solution to possible misfortune.’63 Even though the Westminster judges expressed doubts at the time about this evidence on the basis that it seemed to say ‘more than the parties said themselves’, the Rota eventually dismissed their reservations and granted a declaration of nullity: ‘It is established beyond doubt on the evidence that the parties excluded the indissolubility of the bond of marriage by a specific act of will.’64

  Almost three years were to pass before this judgment was delivered, however, due to what the Rota called ‘reprehensible delays’ in Cardinal Bourne’s office at Westminster, where the papers concerning Evelyn’s case lay forgotten until he eventually asked about them again in 1935. But at the time Evelyn was confident that his marriage would soon be annulled and so he felt free at last to propose to Baby Jungman. ‘Just heard yesterday that my divorce comes on today,’ he wrote to Maimie Lygon, ‘so was elated and popped question to Dutch girl and got raspberry. So that is that, eh. Stiff upper lip and dropped cock. Now I must go. How sad, how sad.’65