by Philip Eade
Evelyn, meanwhile, repaired to his club bedroom to be toasted by his best man, Henry Yorke, along with Francis Howard, Douglas Woodruff, John Sutro, Perry Brownlow, Billy Clonmore and Hubert Duggan, after which he and Laura drove to Englefield Green to say goodbye to eighty-five-year-old Lady de Vesci, who had not made it to the wedding but may well have paid for it. They then flew from Croydon to Paris, where they caught the overnight express to Rome, arriving at Portofino the next afternoon by horse-drawn cab. ‘Lovely day,’ wrote Evelyn in his diary that evening, ‘lovely house, lovely wife, great happiness.’38
Three weeks later Evelyn wrote to Katharine Asquith: ‘Well it is o.k. being spliced. Very decent indeed … so far the marriage is an unqualified success.’39 After ten days in Portofino he had taken Laura to Rome to be blessed by the Pope, who proved disappointingly inattentive, then Florence, then back to Portofino, where he resumed work on Scoop, which he admitted to his agent needed to be ‘entirely rewritten’ but promised would be ready in time for publication before Christmas.40 Returning to England at the end of May, they borrowed a house in Chelsea from Laura’s sister before moving finally into Piers Court in July where, as Evelyn told Diana Cooper, ‘we are well and very happy indeed and the beauty of the house waxes daily’. They both became happier still when Laura discovered she was pregnant.
Work on the house, which they tended to refer to as Stinchcombe, or more often ‘Stinkers’, continued well into the next year, with Evelyn taking a keen interest in almost every detail. Besides designing his library and various other bits of joinery around the house, he filled the house with fine furniture and pictures, among them Rossetti’s charcoal nude Spirit of the Rainbow (‘My word it is ugly,’ he told Diana) and Holman Hunt’s painting Oriana, and a good collection of Victorian genre paintings, including works by George Smith and George Elgar Hicks.
He set about re-landscaping the garden, doing much of the physical work himself. Much is often made of Evelyn’s supposed eager adoption of squirearchical ways, strolling about in his loud tweeds and chomping on a cigar. Yet he far preferred pulling brambles, planting trees and pegging out new lawns in the garden to hobnobbing with the local county set.
Several good friends lived within a fifty-mile radius – the Betjemans at Uffington in Berkshire, the Lygons at Madresfield, the Asquiths at Mells – although as neither Evelyn nor Laura had yet passed their driving tests, visiting them meant hiring a man to sit beside them in their car. Others from further afield were persuaded to come and stay, among them Pansy Lamb and Patrick Balfour, who reported to his mother: ‘Lovely house: quite big, almost a “place”. Evelyn v. happy & exaggeratedly domestic: they hardly see anybody. All right in the meantime, but I should think she would begin to want something more sooner or later. She is v. young & very much under Evelyn’s thumb, & the question is how long she’ll be content to stay under it. Wives must have some life of their own.’41 But there would never be any evidence of the restlessness that he predicted.
When Diana Cooper came to stay after the birth of their first child she was assured beforehand that she would ‘not notice baby or dog they are kept away’. Graham Greene, whom Evelyn had known for years but only recently befriended as a contributor of weekly book reviews to his short-lived literary magazine Night and Day, also came to stay with his wife Vivien: ‘Yes, I normally wear a dinner jacket in the evenings,’ Evelyn wrote to Mrs Greene, ‘Laura a dressing gown. Do whatever is most convenient. I have asked a particular fan of Graham’s & am sure he will dress for the meeting.’42
Local grandees held rather less appeal however. ‘Count d’Oyley rang up to ask us to weekend at Berkeley,’ runs a typical entry in Evelyn’s diary. ‘Refused, controlling temptation to explain that I do not go visiting the immediate neighbours.’43 ‘Started work again on novel,’ he noted wearily on another occasion, a few months after they had moved in. ‘Another lady with double-barrelled name called.’44
Across the fields at Stinchcombe Hill lived yet another double-barrelled name and unlikely soulmate for Evelyn, the keen yachtsman and shot Major Sir Francis Fetherston-Godley, then chairman of the British Legion and later retrospectively notorious for having consorted with the leaders of Nazi Germany on a visit there in 1935.* ‘Dined with Lady Featherstone [sic] Godley, recorded Evelyn after an evening chez the mustachioed major and his wife. ‘Bad dinner, bad wine, middle-aged military men boasting about their ancestry.’45 His opinion of the Catholic Misses Leigh at Nympsfield was initially more favourable – ‘acute and decided and amusing’ – although when they came with the local vicar to tea Evelyn noted: ‘Sticky party’.46
By and large he got quite enough social life on trips to London, where he went from time to time to shop for books, artwork, architectural salvage and even basic ironmongery, as well as to discharge his new responsibilities as a director of Chapman & Hall. ‘The month’s figures showed a perceptible improvement,’ he recorded after a board meeting that November, ‘all directors accordingly highly sceptical.’47 Their doubts were shared by Arthur, who wrote in similar vein early the next year: ‘Heard that profits for 1937 exceeded 1936. Amazing but gratifying.’48
* * *
On 9 March 1938 Laura gave birth to their first child, a girl. ‘The daughter large & blond,’ Evelyn told his agent. ‘No one has had the insolence to suggest it is like me.’49 To Thomas Balston he wrote: ‘I foresee that she will be a problem – too noisy for a nun, too plain for a wife. Well standards of beauty may change in the next 18 years.’50 And to Baby Jungman: ‘Dearest Tess, We have got a daughter – very large and ugly – and are going to christen it early next week. Would you be a godmother? Please do.’51
The little girl was christened Maria Teresa on 16 March at the church where Evelyn and Laura had married eleven months earlier, with Francis Howard and Katharine Asquith’s son Julian (Trim) Oxford standing as the other godparents. Afterwards Evelyn wrote to Baby: ‘It was sweet of you to be godmother and to come to the christening. I do hope that we shall see more of one another again one day.’52
Scoop was finally published in May, having taken Evelyn far longer to write than any of his previous novels. Described by Christopher Hitchens in 2000 as ‘Waugh at the mid-season point of his perfect pitch; youthful and limber and light as a feather’,53 at the time it received favourable if not ecstatic reviews. ‘Superb entertainment’, said The Tablet;54 ‘exceedingly amusing’, thought the New Statesman.55 ‘His job is to provide laughter,’ declared The Daily Telegraph’s critic, ‘and how well he does it.’56 Perhaps the most perceptive review came from Evelyn’s former pupil at Arnold House, Derek Verschoyle, who admitted that he found Europe ‘a more effective background to his [Waugh’s] characters than the other continents’, but wrote that almost all his contemporaries could take lessons from him in technique. ‘His books are so easy to read that it is possible to overlook how intricately they are organised. They are exactly of the length and of the form which their subject requires; there is never a word wasted or an emphasis misplaced.’57
It was in the afterglow of this latest success that Evelyn’s parents paid their first visit to Piers Court, which Arthur pronounced himself ‘delighted’ with,58 evidently relishing the luxury of having the butler unpack his suitcase and bring him his morning tea. There may have been vague feelings of bemusement and perhaps even envy that both his sons had ended up in such relatively large country houses, Alec and Joan having recently bought Edrington, a Queen Anne rectory on the Hampshire – Berkshire border which Evelyn had then sent them Sibyl Colefax to decorate. In both cases the money to buy the house had come from the wife’s side of the family, however the difference was that Alec always felt that Edrington was Joan’s and that his writing did not support it and had thus chosen a tiny room in the attic as his study. In Evelyn’s case his pen paid for all the family’s expenses and accordingly he felt no compunction about choosing the best room on the ground floor for his library, installing bookshelves in a series of handsome bays and a fine w
riting desk – all of which would be dismantled and transported in their entirety after his death to the University of Austin in Texas. The room was already filling up with a collection of books that Arthur admired on his visit and in years to come served as an essential place of refuge for Evelyn from the distractions and annoyances of family life. A few years later Kate Waugh asked two of his young children whether they had ever been inside it. ‘Oh no,’ they said, ‘but we have peeped through the window.’59
Evelyn managed to be friendly for most of his parents’ four-day visit, meeting them at Stroud station when they arrived, showing them around the garden and taking them on various expeditions to see the surrounding sights. On the final evening, though, Arthur perhaps sensed that he was once again beginning to get on his son’s nerves: ‘Evelyn and Laura both very tired,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘Too much entertaining! After dinner K & Laura played chess. Evelyn read & I kept quiet.’60
Scoop was more successful commercially than any of Evelyn’s previous novels, yet with a family to feed he remained as receptive as ever to new opportunities for making money and very shortly after its publication accepted a lucrative commission from the oil magnate Viscount Cowdray’s son Clive Pearson – ‘a very rich chap,’ so Evelyn described him to Peters, who ‘wants me to write a book about Mexico’.61 The Mexican President Cárdenas had recently expropriated several oilfields belonging to the Pearson family, along with those of various other foreign companies; and in return for an expenses-paid trip for himself and Laura and a cheque for £989, extracted by Peters before they set off, Evelyn agreed to write a book exposing the rank injustice of all this and countering the impression propagated by Britain’s left-wing press that General Cárdenas was a progressive reformer. An additional draw for Evelyn was the opportunity to denounce the regime’s persecution of the Catholic Church.
Evelyn and Laura left on 30 July and travelled out via New York and Havana, arriving in Mexico City in mid-August and putting up at the Ritz: ‘Uncle Clive’s beneficence followed every state and we have had the smoothest possible journey,’ Evelyn wrote to his mother-in-law. ‘Mexico is a puzzling place & I cannot say we feel at all at home here yet. It is like sitting in a cinema, seeing the travel film of a country one has no intention of visiting. Thousands of American tourists, a handful of disgruntled English businessmen, homicidal traffic, noise, dust – all very far from Stinkers.’62
The Mexican trip lasted almost three months and the resulting book, whose provocative title Robbery Under Law further fulfilled Evelyn’s obligations towards ‘rich Pearson’, was not finished until April 1939, when Evelyn described it to Diana Cooper as ‘like an interminable Times leader of 1880’, a reasonable appraisal of the uncharacteristically stodgy chapters dealing with oil and the Catholic Church. But although Harold Nicolson, generally a great admirer of Evelyn’s writing, called it a ‘dull’ book in The Daily Telegraph, others were surprisingly enthusiastic, not least The Guardian, which praised Evelyn for recounting his experiences ‘with great agreeableness’.63 In America, which unlike Britain still maintained an embassy in Mexico and where it thus bore the more diplomatic title Mexico: An Object Lesson, the book found even more favour with The New York Times: ‘Soberly conceived and wittily executed in the best traditions of the familiar essay, it is one of those astringent volumes which appear every now and then as an antidote to complacency, sweetness and light. The evident sincerity of the author, the high quality of his literary talent and the calm logic with which he pursues his theme entitle him to a hearing in this country.’64
Although Evelyn was a hired gun, the thrust of what he had contracted to write was very much in line with his conservative political outlook, so there was an integrity to his account which reviewers responded to, besides which it may not have escaped their notice that his friend Graham Greene, whose political views were a long way to the left of Evelyn’s, had reached many of the same conclusions in his own more famous travel book on Mexico, The Lawless Roads (inspiration for The Power and the Glory), which came out shortly before Robbery Under Law.
In any event, by the time Evelyn’s book appeared in June 1939 the British public cared very little about what was going on in Mexico due to ominous developments much closer to home, Hitler having invaded Czechoslovakia in March and more recently told his military commanders to get ready for war against Poland in order to expand Germany’s Lebensraum in the east and secure its food supplies via the Baltic port of Danzig. Evelyn himself had been mentally hunkering down since the beginning of the year: ‘We are here immovable until the outbreak of war,’65 he wrote to Baby Jungman from Piers Court on New Year’s Day 1939. He saw the looming conflict as a crusade against the forces of totalitarianism in whichever form and on 22 August, shortly after his parents’ second stay at Stinchcombe, he recorded: ‘Russia and Germany have agreed to neutrality pact so there seems no reason why war should be delayed.’
Since finishing Robbery Under Law he had been working hard on a new novel (eventually published unfinished as Work Suspended), but had lately found himself restless and unable to concentrate and had instead been throwing his energy into the garden. On 24 August he recorded: ‘Working in the afternoon in the garden, clearing the alley, I thought: what is the good of this? In a few months I shall be growing Swedes and potatoes here and on the tennis court; or perhaps I shall be away and then another two or three years of weeds will feed here until the place looks as it did when we came here two years ago.’
With Laura expecting their second child that November he was as happy and settled as he had ever been, yet at the same time he was uneasily aware that their idyll was likely to be brief. Not unnaturally, he did his best to shut the international crisis out and prided himself on being ‘the only English family to eschew the radio’.66 When Diana Cooper came to stay with her devoted friend and admirer Conrad Russell, she wrote afterwards to say how impressed she was by the ‘excellencies’ of his ‘terribly covetable’ house and how delighted she was to see him ‘so happy and so serene’. Yet she failed to understand why the international crisis – ‘a subject which by its nature must be constantly present in all our minds’ – had to be so taboo. Evelyn had forbidden her even from getting her radio from the car to listen to a speech by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, and when at the end of dinner she attempted to bring the subject up she was met with a ‘very nasty snub’ from Evelyn. ‘I saw both butlers blanch at your tone,’ she told him. ‘Why is it Bo?’67
On Monday, 26 August, with Germany poised to attack Poland, the local schoolmistress called to tell Evelyn that Piers Court had been designated as a billet. ‘My heart sank,’ he recorded. ‘But it is not for children but for five adults who are coming to arrange for children’s arrival and go in a week’s time.’ Having made arrangements, however, ‘removing all valuable objects from the rooms I am giving them’, they learned that there were fewer evacuees than anticipated and they would be spared after all, so instead they took a bed and some clothes to a destitute family the vicar was sheltering in his stable loft.
After breakfast on Sunday, 3 September, Evelyn gave in to temptation and listened to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, broadcast on the radio that war had begun. ‘He did it very well’, he told his diary. Two days later he placed an advertisement in the personal columns on the front page of The Times: ‘MR. EVELYN WAUGH wishes to LET PIERS COURT, near DURSLEY, GLOS. FURNISHED for duration of war. Old house recently modernized: 4 reception, 10 bed, 4 bath, & co.: 4 acres or more. Low rent to civilized tenant.’68
* Heygate had originally written to Evelyn shortly after Shevelyn ran off with him, but received no reply. In 1936 a bishop told him that before being allowed to take Communion he must try and obtain the forgiveness of the man he had sinned against, whereupon he wrote again. As Heygate later told Auberon Waugh, the bishop ‘seemed rather surprised’ when he showed him Evelyn’s answer, ‘but was satisfied’. (Sir John Heygate to Auberon Waugh, 11 November 1973; AWA.)
* E
velyn had gone to Korda’s studio to be told the plot of ‘a vulgar film about cabaret girls’; the working title was ‘Lovelies from America’. He was paid £750 for the script but the film was never made. EWD, p. 413n.
* Auberon Herbert’s disapproval of Evelyn was described by Alexander Waugh as ‘the aristocrat’s natural dislike of the arriviste or, as my father preferred, the “traditional jealousy between privilege and actual achievement”. Auberon was no fool. He spoke six languages fluently, had a natural and unusual wit and was adored by figures as random and far apart as Sir Isaiah Berlin and Karol, his Polish butler, but to Evelyn, who deplored his manner of speech, the habitual twisting of his wrists by his face as he spoke, and the suffocating odour of his scent that wafted oppressively about his person, Auberon was no more than a spoiled idler.’ Fathers and Sons, p. 272.
* A possible prototype for Colonel Hodge, owner of Much Malcock Manor, in Evelyn’s short story ‘An Englishman’s Home’ (1938).
17
A War to End Waugh
‘How sad it all is!’ wrote Evelyn’s mother when she saw they were letting Piers Court. ‘May the duration of the war be short & your return to your lovely home be soon.’1 But Evelyn was pessimistic about how long it might last and although he had given the impression of ignoring its approach, privately he had been thinking about little else. The obvious thing for him to do was to apply to the Ministry of Information, where friends such as Graham Greene and Tom Burns were soon busy peddling propaganda. However as an artist and adventurer he felt drawn towards something substantially more active and exciting. ‘My inclinations are all to join the army as a private,’ he confided to his journal. ‘Laura is better placed than most wives, and if I could let the house for the duration very well-placed financially. I have to consider thirty years of novel-writing ahead of me. Nothing would be more likely than work in a Government office to finish me as a writer; nothing more likely to stimulate me than a complete change of habit. There is a symbolic difference between fighting as a soldier and serving as a civilian, even if the civilian is more valuable.’2