by Philip Eade
15
I Can’t Advise You in My Favour
After such a long and anxious build-up it was something of a relief for Evelyn finally to have got his proposal off his chest – even though the response was not the one he had wanted. Shortly afterwards the archbishop’s office told him that while they were confident he would get his annulment, it was unlikely to come through for at least eighteen months. ‘It is funny how things turn out,’ he wrote to Baby when he heard this. ‘Imagine my impatience and despair if I had been honourable and decided to wait till I was free before popping the question. Now having popped it and got my answer it is all more or less O.K.’1
Whether or not he was putting a brave face on it, in other respects Baby’s rejection marked the low point of a difficult and desolate autumn, much of which he had spent by the sea at Diana Cooper’s house in Sussex working on Ninety-Two Days, which he finished in the second week of November. ‘It is a very sad life I lead,’ he wrote to Coote Lygon, ‘very lonely, very uncomfortable, in a filthy cottage in the ugliest place in England with only mice for company like a prisoner in the tower. Still I write my boring book, hand over fist and that is something.’2
Though he was buoyed by writing as fast as ever, rattling off up to 4,000 words a day, his birthday had been a forlorn and introspective affair. ‘I was thirty on Saturday & feel sixty,’ he wrote to Maimie Lygon. ‘I celebrated the day by walking into Bognor and going to the Cinema in the best 1/6 seats. I saw a love film about two people who were in love; they were very loving and made me cry.’3 Reaching the milestone had hit him hard, ‘not the time wasted but the 45 years or so to come’, he told Baby. ‘You are between 20 and 30 and can always die young and that is all right, high promise unfulfilled, and so on. No one ever dies between 30 and 75.’4
However calmly he affected to take Baby’s refusal to marry him, it was not long before Evelyn began beseeching her again. ‘Of course what I asked for last night was out of all reason,’ he acknowledged in early December. ‘It is just that there are periods when one has to hope for a miracle because there seems no possibility of things going right by natural causes.’5 Baby told him that she could no longer accept kisses or presents from him and sent back the chain he had bought her as a Christmas present, but as so often the messages soon became mixed again and when Evelyn went to Madresfield for Christmas, she sent him a sponge, which seemed to set him off again: ‘I have clung to the last sponge you gave me through many changes of bathroom; I threw its shreds away today and will stick to the new one for months to come.’6
* * *
At such times the easiest way for Evelyn to cope was to go abroad and on 29 December he wrote to Baby from the SS Raisai I Huid bound for Morocco. ‘You will say it was sly to go away without saying anything … But please believe it isn’t only selfish – running away from pain (though it has been more painful than you know, all the last months, realizing every day that I was becoming less attractive and less important to you) – but also I can’t be any good to you without your love and it’s the worst possible thing for you to have to cope with the situation that had come about between us.’7
After disembarking at Tangier he took the overnight train to Fez, ‘a city of astonishing beauty,’ he wrote to Katharine Asquith, ‘with running streams & fountains everywhere and enormous covered gateways in very narrow streets – no wheeled traffic, miles of bazaar, elaborate medieval fortifications, hills all round dotted with forts, olive trees, sand cliffs & spring grass, waterfalls. Dense crowds of moors and a few French soldiers – mostly Senegalese or Foreign Legion – practically no touting for tourists.’8
The more worldly Diana Cooper (who had seen him off) and the Lygon girls were treated to his tales from the red-light district: ‘It was very gay and there were little Arab girls of fifteen & sixteen for ten francs each & a cup of mint tea. So I bought one but I didn’t enjoy her very much because she had skin like sandpaper and a huge stomach which didn’t show until she took off her clothes & then it was too late.’9 More to his liking was a girl called Fatima whom he got to know on subsequent visits and briefly thought about installing in his own lodgings. ‘She is not at all Dutch in her ways,’ he told Maimie. ‘She is brown in colour and her face is tattooed all over with blue patterns v. pretty but does not play the piano beautifully, she has a gold tooth she is very proud of but as we can’t talk each other’s language there is not much to do in between rogering.’10
Evelyn’s other priority in Morocco was to write the novel he had been thinking about during the previous year and made a tentative start on in December at Chagford. Explaining the genesis of what eventually became A Handful of Dust, he later recalled that after writing ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ in British Guiana, ‘the idea keeps working in my mind. I wanted to discover how the prisoner got there, and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savages at home and the civilised man’s helpless plight among them.’11
The civilised man in his new book was Tony Last, innocent squire of Hetton Abbey, the savages his unfaithful wife Brenda and her young lover John Beaver. Like all Evelyn’s previous novels, it was firmly rooted in his own experience, drawing on the bitterness he still felt over Shevelyn’s betrayal coupled with his more recent rejection by Baby Jungman; however he was now attempting something much more serious than his previous black comedies. ‘I peg away at the novel which seems to me faultless of its kind,’ he wrote to Katharine Asquith. ‘Very difficult to write because for the first time I am trying to deal with normal people instead of eccentrics. Comic English character parts too easy when one gets to be thirty.’12 In early February 1934 he told her: ‘The novel drags on at 10,000 words a week. I have just killed a little boy at a lawn meet & made his mother commit adultery & his father get drunk so perhaps you won’t like it after all.’13 Every so often he sent instalments back to his agent in London to be typed up. Though still undecided how it would end, he told Peters that the dénouement might possibly be the same as that of ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’.
Eventually it was, and when the book was published later in the year Henry Yorke was among those who found the ending ‘so fantastic that it throws the rest out of proportion. Aren’t you mixing two things together? The first part of the book is convincing, a real picture of people one has met and may at any moment meet again. Then comes the perfectly feasible, very moving, & beautifully written death of that horrible little boy after which the family breaks up. Then the father goes abroad with that very well drawn horror Messinger. That too is splendid & I’ve no complaints. But then to let Tony be detained by some madman introduces an entirely fresh note & we are in phantasy with a ph at once. I was terrified towards the end by thinking you would let him die of fever which to my mind would have been false but what you did do to him was far far worse. It seemed manufactured & not real.’14
Evelyn was unperturbed by his friend’s assessment: ‘Very many thanks for your letter of criticism,’ he replied. ‘You must remember that to me the savages come into the category of “people one has met and may at any moment meet again”. I think they appear fake to you largely because you don’t really believe they exist … I think I agree that the Todd episode is fantastic. It is a “conceit” in the Webster manner – wishing to bring Tony to a sad end I made it an elaborate & improbable one. I think too the sentimental episode with Therese in the ship is probably a mistake. But the Amazon stuff had to be there. The scheme was a Gothic man in the hands of savages – first Mrs Beaver etc. then the real ones finally the silver foxes at Hetton. All that quest for a city seems to me justifiable symbolism.’15
In his introduction to a 2003 edition of the novel, William Boyd suggested Evelyn was being disingenuous here, contending that what really happened was that he ‘needed an ending and realized he had already written something that would do’, and that ‘rather than any huffing and puffing about Websterian conceits’ the author’s primary objective had been to bring Tony to a sad end in line with his belief in t
he cruel and frequently unfair workings of Fate. It is true that Tony’s hellish destiny was in keeping with Evelyn’s pessimistic world view and that he frequently reused what he had already written before – his letters abound with passages shamelessly lifted word for word from those to other correspondents. However the Websterian conceit had not been dreamt up on the spur of the moment in response to Yorke but had been in Evelyn’s mind as early as February, when the book was still only half finished and he told Diana Cooper that it was ‘rather like Webster in modern idiom’.16
* * *
Evelyn returned from Morocco in late February 1934, ‘sweetened by solitude’, he told Diana, and took himself straight off to Chagford to finish his novel, after which he planned to go and live in Oxford to write a life of Pope Gregory the Great. In the meantime, the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar asked for an alternative ending to A Handful of Dust before they would agree to serialise it, given that ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ had appeared the previous year in Cosmopolitan. ‘I’ll get the happy ending done by Saturday,’ he told Peters testily in early April, intending to rattle off 5,000 words describing Tony and Brenda’s reconciliation. Evidently he procrastinated and several weeks later, when Harper’s began to pester him about delivery, he exploded: ‘God how I hate Americans … They can’t have the end tomorrow because it’s not written but I’ll do it this week if necessary.’17
By early July he was back in London and dropped in at the Lygons’ townhouse off Belgrave Square where he found Hughie drinking gin in the library. Hughie announced that he was going to the Arctic island of Spitsbergen in two days’ time with a young explorer named Alexander (‘Sandy’) Glen (later Sir Alexander Glen, chairman of the British Tourist Authority), whom Hugh had met recently though his sister Sibell. On the spur of the moment Evelyn decided to go with them.
After giving Glen £25 for his fare and buying some kit – skis, ice axes, balaclava helmets, windproof clothes, sleeping bag and mackintosh cover – he spent the evening before he left with Winnie, his favourite girl from Mrs Meyrick’s 43 Club, who ‘put up a good show of being sorry for my departure’,18 he recorded. The next morning he went to Farm Street Church ‘to confess Winnie’ and bought a birthday cake for Baby Jungman.
Having studiously refrained from contacting Baby for the past six months, now he was off on his travels again he felt emboldened to send ‘My Darling Tess’ his love for her birthday: ‘You are nearly always in my thoughts wherever I am,’ he wrote. ‘Have a happy year and if ever you aren’t happy and you think I could help you are to ask for me.’19 By the time her birthday arrived they had reached Bergen and Evelyn noted in his diary that Baby ‘ought now to be receiving a series of parcels from me with no name attached. It is more fun for her that way.’20 A few days later, after threading their way northwards towards Tromsø, he wrote to Diana: ‘I don’t like Norwegians at all. The sun never sets, the bar never opens, and the whole country smells of kippers.’21
In the early evening of 17 July they finally caught sight of the south cape of Spitsbergen: ‘Black mountains with glaciers flowing down to the sea between them – occasionally a magnificent burst of light on a narrow silver strip between iron grey sky and iron grey sea, the glaciers brilliantly white, the clouds cutting off the peaks of the mountains.’22 From Advent Bay they took a whaling boat up the west coast to some remote mining huts, where Glen committed the cardinal sin of giving the whaler crew their bottle of rum as he said goodbye, causing ‘very little pleasure to them and great concern to Hughie and me’, according to Evelyn.
They spent the next two days on this desolate shore lashing the sledge, waxing their skis and repacking their provisions before rowing their small boat across the bay to another derelict hut: ‘Seals bobbed in the water around us,’ wrote Evelyn; ‘there were innumerable small icebergs, some white and fluffy, others deep green and blue like weathered copper, some opaque, some clear as glass, in preposterous shapes, with fragile, haphazard wings and feathers of ice, pierced by holes. The whole bay was filled by their music, sometimes a shrill cricket-cry, sometimes a sharp, almost regular ticking, sometimes the low hum of a hive of bees, sometimes a sharp splintering, sometimes a resonant boom …’23
The plan was to climb a glacier and sledge across inland ice to some unexplored territory in the north-east of the island, but first they had to lug all their gear for three miles up a muddy mosquito-infested valley, requiring two trips a day with loads of up to 40lbs, ‘beastly work’ by Evelyn’s account. They had hoped the worst would be over by the time they reached the ice, however an exceptional thaw had rendered the ice rough and hummocky and the snow so soggy that they could only manage five miles a day in ten hours of extreme labour. The glacier itself then proved too badly crevassed to negotiate, so they turned west towards the shore, where Glen promised they would find a trappers’ cabin and a boat left by his last expedition.
Glen’s invincible and to Evelyn’s mind foolhardy optimism had long since begun to grate, besides which Evelyn did not especially relish taking orders from a twenty-two-year-old undergraduate. In his diary he referred to Glen sarcastically as ‘the leader’ and sprinkled the only account he published of their expedition (subtitled ‘Fiasco in the Arctic’) with a series of digs: ‘G tried to swim, but quickly scrambled out, blue and shuddering, saying that it had warmed him … G had said that on the coast we could “live on the country”. He and Hugh went out with their guns but came back empty-handed … G assured us that we should have a craving for fat as soon as we were on the ice. We did not find it so.’24 Evelyn also chided him for being too eager to shoot seals just in case they might need to eat them, lecturing him on the sanctity of life for animals as well as humans.
It came as no great surprise to Evelyn that when they eventually reached the cabin the boat was not there. After sleeping for six or seven hours, Glen and Hugh set off to retrieve their sledge which exhaustion had obliged them to abandon en route, leaving Evelyn to sort out the cabin. When he had done that he lay down on the furs covering the bunk and sank into a deep sleep – from which he was urgently roused by Glen. One of the small streams that they had all crossed with ease a few hours earlier had since become a raging torrent and while Hugh, who was tall and strong, had managed to cross it and go on to fetch the sledge, Glen could not and thought Hugh would be extremely hard pushed to get back across without help. As Evelyn and Glen hurried back there, they heard the roar of the water half an hour before they reached it. ‘When finally we stood on the bank the sound was so great that we could barely make ourselves heard, shouting in each other’s ears,’ Evelyn recalled. ‘The flow was terrific, of no great depth as yet, and still divided by shingle banks into four or five streams, running at a dizzy speed, full of boulders and blocks of ice, whirling down in it.’25
Glen and Evelyn roped themselves together at the waist and began wading across water so cold that ‘we did not feel the ice-blocks that pounded against us’ and flowing so fast that it was impossible to stand without the support of the cord. When they eventually got to within reach of Hugh on the far bank they threw him the rope on a ski stick and began dragging him back across. But just as Glen reached shore the cord broke and Hugh and Evelyn were swept away and dashed against numerous rocks and ice blocks. It seemed an age before they eventually scrambled to safety and Evelyn had long since assumed they would not make it. To regain base camp avoiding the river they now had to make a three-day trek up into the mountains without map, tent, ice axes or rope. ‘If I hadn’t joined the Church of Rome,’ Evelyn told Glen in the midst of this, as they sheltered from a storm beneath a rock, ‘I could never have survived your appalling incompetence.’26 When eventually they returned to England in late August he was scathing about the whole venture, describing it to Tom Driberg as ‘hell – a fiasco very narrowly retrieved from disaster’.27
* * *
Ninety-Two Days was published in the spring to far better reviews than Evelyn had expected – The New York Times Book Review h
ailing it as a departure from ‘the distortion of truth and the tawdry self-exploitation of the travel books of the recent degenerate era’28 – yet when A Handful of Dust appeared on his return from the Arctic few critics considered it anything approaching the masterpiece it is now held to be, although Peter Quennell in the New Statesman thought it ‘certainly the most mature and the best written novel Mr Waugh has yet produced’.29 As far as Evelyn was concerned it was a success, however, not least since it was the Book Society’s Book of the Month and was into its fifth impression by the end of the fourth week. ‘Wherever I go,’ he wrote to Maimie Lygon, ‘the people shout Long Live Bo & throw garlands of flowers in my path.’
He was by then back staying with his parents, who had recently sold Underhill and moved to a flat on Hampstead Lane in Highgate. ‘At present it is all dignity & peace,’ he reported, ‘but I expect we shall soon have a quarrel & black each other’s eyes & tear our hair & flog each other with hunting crops like the lovely Lygon sisters. I am going to spend a very studious autumn writing the life of a dead beast. I think I shall stay here so that I shall not be tempted to the demon at the Savile and to go out with whores & make myself ill as I do if I am away from good parents.’30
The ‘dead beast’ was Edmund Campion, the sixteenth-century Jesuit priest and martyr, and the resulting biography not only raised Evelyn’s stock in Catholic circles but also gave him a far deeper understanding of his adopted faith and ‘a conception of the value of total surrender’, as Christopher Hollis put it. When he had had enough of living under his parents’ roof he went down to Chagford, where he interspersed his writing with days hunting and visits to friends such as the Asquiths at Mells. He also wrote two short stories, ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’* and ‘On Guard’ – described to Coote Lygon as ‘a funny short story about a looney bin and a very dull one about a dog who bit a lady’s nose’.31