Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  After Christmas Evelyn was asked by Gabriel Herbert to go and stay at Pixton Park in Somerset. It was his third visit to the cheerful and chaotic Herbert family home whose Irish shabbiness – ‘pyramids of books on every table – dogs’ dinners on sofa etc’32 – would later inspire his portrait of Boot Magna Hall in Scoop, some of which was written there. Set in rolling parkland on the edge of Exmoor and originally surrounded by an estate of some 5,000 acres, this handsome stuccoed house had been built by the 2nd Earl of Carnarvon in 1803–5 and given to Gabriel’s father, Aubrey, younger son of the 4th Earl (and half-brother of Shevelyn’s mother), on his marriage to Mary Vesey in 1910. When Evelyn arrived he found a large party of boisterous young people and ‘God they did make me feel old and ill’, he told Maimie. But amid all the exhausting bouts of hockey and hunting and charades he soon found himself falling in love with the youngest of the Herbert sisters, Laura, the silent ‘white mouse’ whom he had barely noticed before but now confided to Maimie that he had taken ‘a great fancy’ to.

  ‘What is she like? Well fair, very pretty, plays peggotty beautifully … She has rather a long thin nose and skin as thin as bromo as she is very thin and might be dying of consumption to look at her and she has her hair in a little bun at the back of her neck but it is not very tidy and she is only 18 years old, virgin, Catholic, quiet and astute. So it is difficult. I have not made much progress yet except to pinch her twice in a charade and lean against her thigh in pretending to help her at peggotty.’33

  Ostensibly shy, reserved and rather frail, Laura was very different to her more garrulous, hunting-mad elder sisters, as she was to all the girls with whom Evelyn had previously fallen in love. Yet as he perhaps sensed, behind the quiet, unassuming façade lay a resolutely independent character with an original, ironic sense of humour and a surprisingly violent temper, which she occasionally suppressed by taking herself off to bed until she had cooled down.

  Her self-reliance may have stemmed from her distant relationship with her domineering mother – like her sister-in-law Winifred Burghclere, Mary Herbert was more obviously devoted to her husband than to her children – and the loss of her remarkable father when she was only seven after he contracted blood poisoning while having some teeth extracted as a supposed cure for his failing eyesight. Following the death of Aubrey Herbert – later immortalised in his granddaughter Margaret FitzHerbert’s fine biography The Man Who Was Greenmantle – Laura’s mother had promptly converted to Catholicism, however Laura stoutly resisted following her lead until she was well into her teens and thus old enough to know her own mind.

  By the time she caught Evelyn’s eye she was training to be an actress at RADA, having earlier attended a small boarding school in Wimbledon followed by a year at a Catholic finishing school just outside Paris (the Convent of the Holy Child at Neuilly, where ‘Kick’ Kennedy was finished a few years later). Besides the age gap and the fact that there was no immediate guarantee of his marriage being annulled, the most obvious impediment to Evelyn’s courtship was the resistance of Laura’s mother, who was far from thrilled about the reappearance of this slightly ungentlemanly – as she reportedly saw him – character who had caused so much trouble for her sister-in-law several years earlier. ‘I thought we’d heard the last of that young man,’ remarked Lady Victoria Herbert, maiden aunt of both Laura and Shevelyn.

  Mary Herbert was likened by James Lees-Milne to ‘a magnificent, imperious stag by Landseer, perhaps an eagle … masterful and very clever … full of opinions and Catholic prejudices’.34 Her first meaningful encounter with Evelyn at Portofino in 1933 had not been especially auspicious and early on during his stay she had pelted him with hard Italian buns and driven him from the house after he was rude about Ireland, where she had grown up at Abbeyleix as the only child of Viscount and Viscountess de Vesci. In general, though, he had been on his best behaviour, polite almost to the point of smarminess and as a recent convert keen to ingratiate himself with her famous Catholic guest Hilaire Belloc, whom Evelyn had met briefly on several previous occasions, most recently with Diana Cooper at Bognor. When Evelyn had gone and Mary Herbert asked Belloc what he made of him, he replied rather disconcertingly: ‘He has the devil in him.’35*

  Following the stay at Pixton just after Christmas, Evelyn’s courtship of Laura ran far from smoothly. In early February 1935, having invited her to London, he greeted her with a hangover and ‘could only eat 3 oysters and some soda water,’ he told Maimie Lygon, ‘and I was sick a good deal on the table so perhaps that romance is shattered’.36 In early May, while pegging away at the Campion biography at a succession of country houses, he wrote to tell Laura that he had begun to despair of ever seeing her again.37 The next month he told Katharine Asquith that ‘estranged is the word re M Herbert. High estimate of her charm and character undiminished but not able to see her without embarrassment.’38

  In late July he had a final go: ‘Darling Laura,’ he wrote to her from St James’s Club in Piccadilly, ‘I am sad and bored and need your company. If you have a spare evening between now and when you leave London, please come out with me. Any time will suit me as I have no engagements that I cannot gladly break. Ask your mother first and tell her I wanted you to ask. That is, supposing you want to come. Perhaps you don’t. I don’t know where I shall be in the autumn so it may be a long time before we meet. Please come. I will behave respectfully, I promise.’39

  His uncertainty as to his whereabouts in the autumn referred to his imminent departure for Abyssinia to report on the looming invasion by Mussolini, and it seems to have been the prospect of this, combined with Laura’s mother’s rigid opposition to him and Laura’s equally determined independence from her, that eventually persuaded Laura to see him again. Soon after receiving the letter she asked him to Pixton for the weekend and it was on that occasion that she fell in love with him. ‘I’m writing to you rather before I meant to,’ she wrote boldly after he had left, ‘but I feel like it – You can’t know how happy I was & how much I loved having you here this weekend – I don’t think I’ve ever loved anything so much … all my love to you darling I do love you so very much more than I can say – I do hope Abyssinia’s fun & not dangerous.’40

  ‘Darling darling Laura,’ wrote a greatly relieved Evelyn from the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, as he prepared to embark for Africa, ‘please don’t find that you are just as happy without me. I am not nearly as happy without you. Bless you my darling love child.’41

  A consummate opportunist when it came to his journalism, Evelyn had asked his agent to capitalise on his previous experience of Abyssinia when news broke of Mussolini’s coming invasion. However in the end it was a word in Lord Rothermere’s ear from his friend Diana Cooper – just as in Scoop Mrs Stitch mentions the young novelist John Boot to Lord Copper – that led to his highly lucrative employment as a correspondent by the Daily Mail, which had lost its star reporter (Sir Percival Phillips, who like Evelyn had reported on the coronation of Haile Selassie in 1930) to The Daily Telegraph just as the crisis loomed.

  Besides his knowledge of the country – an extremely rare commodity on Fleet Street at that time – Evelyn could be counted on as an unflinching advocate of Rothermere’s pro-Italian stance, viewing Mussolini as the most effective barrier against Hitler and Abyssinia as a barbarous country at the mercy of a capricious and violent government unable to cope with its lawless elements. ‘It is entertaining to find a country where the noblemen feast on raw beef,’ Evelyn had written in the Evening Standard earlier that year, ‘but less amusing when they enslave and castrate the villagers of neighbouring countries.’ The Abyssinian empire, he argued, had been taken bloodily and was held ‘so far as it is held at all’ by force of arms. ‘In the matter of abstract justice, the Italians have just as much right to govern; in the matter of practical politics, it is certain that their government would be for the benefit of the Ethiopian Empire and for the rest of Africa.’42

  As with previous trips, besides the Daily Mail contract
, Evelyn looked to get two books out of his adventures: a non-fiction volume about the war, Waugh in Abyssinia, for which he was paid what was then the huge advance of £950 by Longman’s, where his friend Tom Burns commissioned it; and a novel, which eventually became Scoop, inspired by the scorn he felt for the rest of the press corps, among whom he found the conscientious Stuart Emeny of the News Chronicle particularly ridiculous: ‘All events for him had only one significance and standard of measurement – whether or no they constituted a “story”. He did not make friends; he “established contacts”. Even his private opinions were those of his paper …’43

  But while Evelyn was inclined to disparage the whole business of journalism and his own aptitude for it, he actually possessed many of the qualities of an excellent newspaper reporter. One of his fellow correspondents in Abyssinia, W. F. ‘Bill’ Deedes, recalled: ‘His ear was well attuned to the idiocies of this world. He was curious, thorough in any inquiry he made, very quick on the uptake, persistent and observant, and never nervous of embarrassing anyone.’44 Deedes, whose quarter-ton of luggage famously found its way into Evelyn’s portrait of William Boot in Scoop, also admired Evelyn’s bravery, his ability to intimidate friend or foe and to bluff his way out of a tight corner, and the fact that he ‘seemed to be endowed with many of the qualities that good officers are supposed to possess’.45 And he noticed that ‘unlike a lot of so-called snobs, he was adept at conversing with people of small importance, though often baffling them with his brand of wit. He paid close attention to what they said to him, which is why dialogue in his novels rings so true.’46*

  Deedes may have recognised his journalistic talent, but Evelyn did not cover himself in glory as far as the Daily Mail was concerned. The paper’s biggest gripe was that he managed to be so comprehensively scooped by The Daily Telegraph on the most sensational story of the entire war – concerning a master of foxhounds from Berkshire called Francis Rickett who, on behalf of the brazenly named African Exploitation and Development Corporation, managed to obtain the sole rights to oil, minerals and other natural resources over half of Abyssinia, thereby giving Britain and America, to which countries the corporation belonged, a direct commercial interest in the maintenance of Abyssinian sovereignty.

  Evelyn had chanced to travel out with the mysterious Mr Rickett and at the time thought there was something fishy about him, disbelieving his explanation that he was on a mission to deliver Coptic funds to the Abyssinian Orthodox Church and suspicious of the various lengthy cables he received en route, which he would pocket nonchalantly, remarking, ‘From my huntsman. He says the prospects for cubbin’ are excellent.’47 But instead of tailing Rickett to find out what he was really up to, Evelyn took the eccentrically roundabout route of sending a leisurely letter of enquiry to Penelope Betjeman (several weeks away by mail), asking her to find out whether her Berkshire neighbour was a spy or an arms dealer or what.

  When The Daily Telegraph broke the Rickett story a few weeks later, Evelyn was four days away from Addis Ababa in Harar (where he thought Italy was most likely to invade) so he could not even get back in time to file follow-up pieces until the story was already dead. The whole episode irreparably damaged his relations with the Daily Mail and eventually, fed up with their bad-tempered telegrams, he resigned. ‘Well I have chucked the Mail,’ he wrote to Diana Cooper. ‘It was no good they sent me offensive cables twice a day & I took umbrage & they wanted me to stay in Addis and I took despair.’48 But with book contracts still to fulfil he could not afford to leave Abyssinia just yet, and when his replacement was held up in Djibouti, he stayed on working for them until they finally terminated his contract at the end of November. He was away for more than four months in all, during which time he sent frequent letters to the girl whose love he had been assured of on leaving. ‘I wonder how you are,’ he wrote to Laura shortly after his arrival in Addis. ‘In fact I wonder about you most of the day … The thing I think about most is your eyelashes making a noise like a bat on the pillow. How compromising that sounds – you know what I mean, but the Ethiopians won’t who read all my correspondence & telegrams … Darling child I feel very far away from you.’49 In October he hoped to be home by Christmas: ‘I am lonely and bored and have all the material for a jolly good novel about journalists which I want to do before it gets stale to me.’50

  In the event he spent Christmas in Bethlehem, followed by an overnight jaunt by charabanc across the desert to Baghdad for a weekend, then visits to Damascus and finally Rome, where he was ‘crossed examined by beasts [priests] re my wife’, he wrote to Maimie Lygon, and came away impressed after an interview with Il Duce. He returned to London at the beginning of February 1936, arriving ‘in a lion-skin,’ so his father recorded, ‘which much excited Tuppence [their dog]’.51 Laura was even more eager to see him providing her mother would let her. ‘Please ring me up as soon as you reach London,’ she had written. ‘I’ve kept all this week free on the chance of your getting back & of my being allowed to see you. Darling Evelyn I can’t tell you how happy it makes me thinking that you are coming back so soon – Even if I can’t see you, it makes the whole difference knowing that you are near & out of any danger … I am so longing to see you or even to hear your voice.’52

  Evelyn was soon hard at work on his non-fiction book, Waugh in Abyssinia, much of which he wrote as a guest of Perry Brownlow, a distant cousin of Diana Cooper via her natural father Harry Cust and a great friend and lord-in-waiting of King Edward VIII, as he had just become, who like Evelyn spent a fair amount of time at Belton House, Lord Brownlow’s stately home in Lincolnshire. In the spring of 1936, while writing his Abyssinia book, Evelyn stayed at another Brownlow property in Shropshire, where he inhabited a flat above the estate office. ‘So now I live here looking after the great Ellesmere estates,’ he wrote to Maimie Lygon, ‘god it is a responsibility I have afforested & deforested & distrained & debentured & still it won’t come right.’53

  Two weeks later from there he wrote Laura what amounted to an exceptionally straightforward and realistic letter of proposal:

  Tell you what you might do while you are alone at Pixton. You might think about me a bit & whether, if those wop priests ever come to a decent decision, you could bear the idea of marrying me. Of course you haven’t got to decide, but think about it. I can’t advise you in my favour because I think it would be beastly for you, but think how nice it would be for me. I am restless & moody & misanthropic & lazy & have no money except what I earn and if I got ill you would starve. In fact it’s a lousy proposition. On the other hand I think I could do a Grant [Eddie Grant, married to Laura’s sister Bridget] and reform & become quite strict about not getting drunk and I am pretty sure I shall be faithful. Also there is always a fair chance that there will be another bigger economic crash in which case if you had married a nobleman with a great house you might find yourself starving, while I am very clever and could probably earn a living of some sort somewhere. Also though you would be taking on an elderly buffoon, I am one without fixed habits. You wouldn’t find yourself confined to any particular place or group. Also I have practically no living relatives except one brother whom I scarcely know. You would not find yourself involved in a large family & all their rows & you would not be patronized & interfered with by older sisters in law & aunts as often happens. All these are very small advantages compared with the awfulness of my character. I have always tried to be nice to you and you may have got it into your head that I am nice really, but that is all rot. It is only to you & for you. I am jealous & impatient – but there is no point in going into a whole list of my vices. You are a critical girl and I’ve no doubt that you know them all and a great many I don’t know myself. But the point I wanted to make is that if you marry most people, you are marrying a great number of objects & other people as well, well if you marry me there is nothing else involved, and that is an advantage as well as a disadvantage. My only tie of any kind is my work. That means that for several months each year we shall have to separa
te or you would have to share some very lonely places with me. But apart from that we could do what we liked & go where we liked – and if you married a soldier or stockbroker or member of parliament or master of hounds you would be more tied. When I tell my friends that I am in love with a girl of 19 they look shocked and say ‘wretched child’ but I don’t look on you as very young even in your beauty and I don’t think there is any sense in the line that you cannot possibly commit yourself to a decision that affects your whole life for years yet. But anyway there is no point in your deciding or even answering. I may never get free of your cousin Evelyn. Above all things, darling, don’t fret at all. But just turn the matter over in your dear head.54

  * Originally entitled ‘Mr Cruttwell’s Little Outing’, which would not have been wholly inappropriate as Cruttwell was to end his life insane.

  * Many years later, Diana Cooper wrote to her son that while Graham Greene was ‘a good man possessed of a devil’ Evelyn ‘contrary to this is a bad man for whom an angel is struggling’. John Julius Norwich (ed.), Darling Monster: The Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to her son John Julius Norwich, 1939–1952, p. 436.

  * Auberon Waugh later attested to his father’s unexpected affability with the band that came to play Christmas carols each year at their home after the war: ‘The common touch was certainly not something he cultivated, but in a rather surprising way, when he needed it, he had it.’ Auberon Waugh, Will This Do?, p. 49.