Evelyn Waugh
Page 27
16
Goodness She is a Decent Girl
Evelyn was never going to be the world’s easiest husband, however no one could accuse him of not having been entirely upfront about how difficult he was likely to be. In any case Laura’s reply to his proposal must have been reasonably favourable as he told Diana Cooper in June 1936 that he had been periodically leaving his desk in Ellesmere for trips to see her and ‘loving her a lot and she being exquisitely unDutch. Goodness she is a decent girl.’1
Yet however keen they were on each other, they could still not get married before the Pope had annulled Evelyn’s first marriage and, while Laura remained a minor, her mother had given her consent. The first obstacle was removed on 7 July, when Evelyn returned to his club at dawn after a pilgrimage to Lough Derg in Ireland to find a telegram from Cardinal Godfrey in Rome: ‘Decision Favourable.’ That morning he found Laura and her mother at Farm Street Church, knelt behind them and after the service told Laura the news in the porch. For the next week he saw her every day, doing crosswords together, attending Mass, going to the cinema, dining twice at the Café Royal and once in Nancy Mitford’s bedroom. On 16 July he was interviewed by Laura’s mother at her townhouse on Bruton Street, where she told him that he and Laura must wait until October to be engaged and Christmas before being married.
Mary Herbert’s resistance had possibly been softened by the announcement in late April that Evelyn had won the Hawthornden Prize, at that time Britain’s most prestigious literary award, for Edmund Campion, which had been published the previous autumn while he was in Abyssinia and which his fellow Catholic convert Graham Greene hailed in The Spectator as ‘a model of what a short biography should be’.2 After hearing about the award, Henry Yorke wrote to Evelyn: ‘I would congratulate you on it if it were not for the fact that you are the outstanding writer of our generation & that recognition of this kind has been due to you for a long time. It may sound ungracious to put it in the way I have just done but I do feel hotly that there is not one book you have published which is not very far beyond the books they have given the prize for up till now. It takes time for outstanding work to get through their thick skulls.’3 It was presumably this prize that persuaded the dozy publishers of Who’s Who that Evelyn might at last merit a mention in its pages – he was to appear for the first time in its 1937 edition (listing his sole recreation as ‘travelling’), a scarcely believable seventeen years after his brother Alec’s first entry in the hallowed annual reference work.
Evelyn replied to Henry that it was particularly gratifying that the prize should go ‘to a specifically Catholic book’ – knowing full well that this could do no harm to his reputation at Pixton.4 Neither can it have damaged his marriage prospects that a week before his interview with Mrs Herbert, Maurice Bowra, again in The Spectator, had praised his recently published collection of short stories Mr Loveday’s Little Outing. ‘Mr. Waugh, like Mr. Maugham, succeeds at every kind of writing he attempts,’ wrote Bowra. ‘He manages the short story with the confident touch of an accomplished master … Is it too much to ask that he will abandon biography to lesser men and give us more novels and more short stories like these?’5
But Evelyn relied heavily on his non-fiction and journalism to stay solvent, and with his expenses sure to rise after his marriage he now reached the reluctant conclusion that he needed to return to Abyssinia to beef up his half-written book with a concluding account of how the Italian conquest had turned out. After going to Pixton to say goodbye to Laura, he travelled out to Africa via Rome ‘full of gloomiest forebodings’, he told Katharine Asquith. ‘I am sick of Abyssinia & of my book about it. It was fun being pro-Italian when it was an unpopular and (I thought) losing cause. I have little sympathy with these exultant fascists now.’6 He arrived to find the fledgling colony in an ostensible state of chaos. ‘Truth appears to be Wops in jam,’ he wrote in his diary.7 However by the time he came to finishing his book he was inclined to see the Italian invasion as having brought about the ‘spread of order and decency, education and medicine, in a disgraceful place’; it was akin to ‘the great western drive of the American peoples, the dispossession of the Indian tribes and the establishment in a barren land of new pastures and cities’.8
Leaving Laura this time had proved far more affecting than he expected. ‘How I wish you were here,’ he wrote to her from Assisi. ‘Sweet poppet it seems such a waste to see lovely things & not be with you. It is like being one-eyed & goggling out of focus. I miss you & need you all the time. Most of all when I’m happy.’9 The next day he wrote again:
I need you all the time – when I’m vexed and uncertain & tired – but more than ever on a night like this when everything is unearthly & lovely. You see, darling child, so often when people fall in love & want to be married, it is because they foresee a particular kind of life to which the other is necessary. But I don’t feel that. Sometimes I think it would be lovely to lead the sort of life with you that I have led alone for the last ten years – no possessions, no home, sometimes extravagant & luxurious, sometimes lying low & working hard. At other times I picture a settled life with a large household, rather acrimonious & rather frugal, and sometimes a minute house, and few friends, and little work & leisure & love. But what I do know is that I can’t picture any sort of life without you. I have left half of myself behind in England and I am only dragging about a bit of myself now. And I don’t at all regret the haphazard, unhappy life I’ve led up till now because I don’t think that without it I could love you so much. Goodnight my blessed child. I love you more than I can find words to tell you.10
He told Mary Lygon: ‘I cry a great deal on account of not seeing LAURA. But Lady Horner says absence is like the wind – it extinguishes a little flame & fans a big one with greater heat.’11 However with Laura’s mother insisting on their delaying the announcement of their engagement, Evelyn evidently did not feel bound by absolute fidelity just yet, and on his way back through Rome he recorded that he had ‘intended to bathe, change, fuck, and eat a luxurious dinner. Instead spent the evening driving to pay my debt to the English College [presumably to do with his annulment] in smuggled lire.’12 If there had been any lingering uncertainty in Laura’s mind, Evelyn’s absence in Abyssinia seems to have removed it. ‘I have definitely made up my mind that I want to marry you more than anything I want in the world,’ she wrote to him while he was away. ‘I hope you’re still wanting to marry me. I think I love you more every day.’13
Evelyn arrived back in London on 12 September to the shattering news that Hugh Lygon had died while on a motoring tour of Bavaria, having mysteriously fallen over and hit his head on the curbside, conceivably after drinking or suffering from sunstroke after driving in an open car. ‘It is the saddest news I ever heard,’ Evelyn wrote to Mary Lygon. ‘I shall miss him bitterly.’ During what The Times euphemistically described as Hugh’s ‘varied and adventurous career’,14 an unhappy stint in the City had been followed by an abortive attempt at training racehorses and a brush with the bankruptcy courts, but while he never overcame his alcoholism he had at last seemed to be making a success of his most recent venture of running one of the farms at Madresfield. ‘It is so particularly tragic that he should have died just when he was setting up house and seemed happier than he had been for many years,’ wrote Evelyn.15
Hughie’s death had come only a few weeks after that of his mother, and while Lord Beauchamp, who was still living in exile in Venice, had been prevented from attending his wife’s funeral after being warned as he prepared to disembark at Dover that he would be arrested if he set foot ashore, he determined to go to Hughie’s funeral at Madresfield on 24 August come what may. On this occasion, to the fury of the Duke of Westminster, the Home Secretary suspended the warrant for his arrest. The next year, after his warrant was finally withdrawn, Boom returned to spend the last year of his life at Madresfield, in much the same way as Lord Marchmain returns in Brideshead Revisited.
As the final chapter of Brideshead shows
, all this made a deep and lasting impression on Evelyn’s imagination, however for the time being he had the distraction of his forthcoming marriage to Laura, in contented contemplation of which he was even prepared to make peace with John Heygate, who had written to him shortly after he returned from Abyssinia: ‘I have done you a great wrong. I am sorry. Will you forgive me?’ Evelyn replied on a postcard: ‘O.K. E.W.’*
He had still not told his parents, but two weeks after he got back they heard from Alec on the telephone that his annulment had been accepted by the Pope and that he hoped to be married after Christmas. ‘But he has not written to us!’ protested Arthur in his diary.16 Five days later Kate received a note from Evelyn announcing that he was to be married in February and the day after that he finally got round to writing to his father, obliquely apologising for his ‘unfilial’ delay in telling him of his engagement.17 A week or so later he brought Laura to Highgate. ‘Great preparations for Evelyn & Laura,’ Arthur recorded. ‘The evening was delightful. She behaved charmingly; he was at his best; and the dinner was good.’18 The next day, Arthur and Kate ‘had a pleasant talk over dinner about our happy evening with Evelyn & Laura. Was very glad to see her so happy. By last post a dear little note came to K from Laura, thanking us for being “so sweet” to her, which sent us to bed happier still.’19
Evelyn also wrote to Baby Jungman, telling her that he wanted her to be the first to know – though of course one or two others knew already:
She [Laura] is very young indeed. Very thin and pale with big eyes and a long nose – more like a gazelle really than a girl; completely free of any literary, artistic or social ambition, silent as the grave, given to fainting at inopportune moments, timid, ignorant, affectionate, very gentle, doesn’t sing, Narcissus complex, looks lovely on a horse but often falls off, student of acting, but doesn’t take it too seriously. Catholic but doesn’t take that too seriously either, owns pretty nasty dog called Lump, but he looks like dying soon. I love her very much and I think there is as good a chance of our marriage being a success as any I know.20
The letter to Baby was written from Mells, where he was writing the final chapter of Waugh in Abyssinia, which he finished on 2 October. By the middle of the month he had moved on to Scoop, noting in his diary that he had ‘made a very good start with the first page of novel describing Diana’s early morning’21 – Diana Cooper serving as his model for Mrs Stitch, some of whose less amiable traits betrayed Evelyn’s growing ambivalence towards her on account of her pointed unfriendliness towards Laura. Within two weeks he had completed the second chapter, however his speedy progress was soon halted by his perennial need to make money and in early November he went to see the editor of Nash’s Magazine, where he ‘accepted money for jam job, thirty guineas a month for less than 2,000 words on anything I like’.22
Work aside, much of that autumn was spent looking for somewhere for him and Laura to live. The area around Mells seemed as good a place to start as any, not only because he was there at the time but also because it was very close to his aunts’ home at Midsomer Norton and a convenient stop-off between London and Laura’s family home at Pixton. Both soon set their hearts on an exceptionally pretty Georgian manor house within the bailey of the ruined castle at Nunney, however the owner, a ‘homicidal squireen’ in Evelyn’s estimation, proved impossible to pin down. A few days before Christmas, having by then extended their search north into Gloucestershire, Evelyn recorded in his diary: ‘Saw two no-good houses then Piers Court, Stinchcombe. Absolutely first-rate, delighted.’23 ‘Laura and I have found a house of startling beauty between Bath and Stroud,’ he told Diana Cooper, ‘so that is where we shall live.’24
Situated just above the village on the western escarpment of the Cotswolds, some twenty-two miles north-east of Bristol, Piers Court commanded spectacular views from its garden across the Berkeley Vale (a panorama since spoilt somewhat by the M5 motorway) to the Severn estuary and Forest of Dean beyond. But behind its handsome Georgian stuccoed façade the house itself was in considerable disrepair, without water, gas or electricity, and after spending Christmas at Pixton – hunting, shooting (or in Evelyn’s case beating), and enduring what he wryly recorded as the Herberts’ ‘family fun’ – they returned there in the new year to assess what needed to be done. With a view to having a carving placed on the blank pediment over the porch, around this time Evelyn also wrote to Alec to enquire about the validity of the Waugh coat of arms. On 22 January 1937 his offer of £3,550 for Piers Court and its surrounding forty acres was accepted – a week after he had spent the evening with his parents in Highgate and told them that Laura’s grandmother, Lady de Vesci, was giving them £4,000 as a wedding present with which to buy the house.
Unable to compete with this, Arthur modestly asked them to choose some silver from what he had left of his grandfather’s, wrapped up in flannel under his bed, and said he would give them £25 to buy ‘something definite & lasting – to remind you of me’. ‘I think that’s decent,’ Evelyn wrote to Laura, ‘considering his reduced circumstances & the fact that he forked out handsomely for my mock marriage some years back.’25
Evelyn’s grateful and sympathetic response made a change from his often curt attitude towards his father, with whom he had tended to be by turns sullen and censorious of what he called his ‘affected conversation’.26 To strain relations further, on one of his rare recent visits to his parents he had contrived to set Arthur’s library alight, inadvertently destroying, as he later admitted, ‘hundreds of inscribed copies from almost every English writer of eminence’ – Arthur having had by Evelyn’s reckoning ‘more books dedicated to him than any living man’.27 In the past few months, however, Evelyn had shown a good deal more tolerance and affection towards him, a welcome development that Arthur attributed to Laura’s influence. ‘Certainly we have had much more kindness from him,’ he noted in his diary on New Year’s Eve.28 Two months later, after lunch at the Savoy Grill prior to Evelyn joining the board of Chapman & Hall, Arthur recorded pathetically: ‘Evelyn very gracious & attentive to me.’29
But beyond the initial favourable impressions of his ‘charming’ prospective daughter-in-law, Arthur could never really fathom Laura. He was plainly extremely well disposed towards Alec’s wife Joan, not so much because she was very rich – having inherited a fortune that Alec put at £300,00030 (i.e. more than eighty times what Evelyn paid for Piers Court) from her Australian father – but mainly because she seemed so appreciative of everything about him that Evelyn found so annoying. However Arthur never felt anything like the same affinity with Laura. A few years later he wrote to Joan: ‘Certainly my two daughters-in-law write very differently, and have very different temperaments. I shall never be able to make anything of Laura. We live in other worlds and talk another language. But I miss nothing. I find everything I want in Joan, the daughter of my heart.’31
Whether or not Evelyn picked up on Arthur’s favouritism, he was rather less misty-eyed about his sister-in-law and brazenly mercenary when it came to her offer of some linen for their wedding present after she had already promised to pay for their honeymoon. ‘I think now you should write to her,’ he suggested to Laura from his writing den on Dartmoor where he was polishing off a lucrative film treatment* for Alexander Korda: ‘say Evelyn has told you of her kind offer etc. and make out a big list of what we need – two double beds, three single (at least) & towels for five guests. You might hint at table cloths, table napkins etc. Sorry to put all this on you, but I really am very busy trying to get the film done & as it is correspondence takes ½ my morning.’32
The result evidently failed to come up to scratch: ‘Joan Waugh is mean as hell,’ remarked Evelyn sometime later. ‘Well I suppose I must pay for having neglected her these last 2 years.’33 Hers was not the only offering deemed below par. ‘Presents have come in, mostly of poor quality,’ Evelyn recorded in his diary in early February, ‘except from the Asquiths who have given us superb candelabra, sconces, and table.’34 The Coopers’ g
lass chandelier would have been equally appreciated were it not for the fact that when it arrived, three months after the wedding, the Waughs’ new butler gloomily announced ‘a box full of broken glass outside for you’. As it turned out only a few bits were broken, and as Evelyn told Diana: ‘If we can get it mended [which they soon did] it will be a superb ornament, in fact the whole of our hall and staircase has been planned and painted round it.’35
The wedding took place at eleven o’clock on a showery Saturday morning, 17 April, at the seventeenth-century Catholic Church of the Assumption (originally the chapel to the old Portuguese Embassy) on Warwick Street in Soho, preceded by a cocktail party for all the guests the evening before at 14 Gloucester Gate on the edge of Regent’s Park, where the reception was also held. Among the three officiating priests, Father D’Arcy gave the address, although Evelyn thought him ‘sensationally ignorant of simplest professional duties’. Laura’s brother Auberon gave her away, having spent the journey to the church begging her to change her mind.36* The church was full of family and friends, including, as Tom Driberg reported in the Express, ‘many fair women: Lygons, Jungmans [Baby and Zita], Lady Diana Cooper (straight from Windsor Castle), the Hon Mrs Peter Rodd (novelist Nancy Mitford: she wore a hat made of red and dark blue ostrich feathers, held together by bits of ribbon, which wasn’t nearly as gauche as it sounds)’.
Among the more notable absentees was Evelyn’s best man from his first marriage, Harold Acton, who had settled in Peking in 1932 to teach at the university and translate Chinese poetry after becoming fed up with his falling literary reputation in Britain. The reception was ‘all over’ by a little after one and Arthur Waugh recorded with apparent satisfaction that he was ‘home by 1.40 to a slice of brawn and cheese’.37