by Philip Eade
‘My dear Shimi,’ Laycock had written to him the previous year. ‘When will you learn some tact? I know that it is uphill work dealing with officers who, to put it snobbishly, do not come from the same social status as those with whom you used to deal with in peacetime … yet nevertheless you must learn to bear with them.’33 And on another occasion, after receiving a complaint about ‘one of your temperamental prima donnas in the shape of Lovat’,34 Laycock rebuked him for ‘pointless bad manners when dealing with junior staff officers’ and ‘not giving a damn for anyone and telling all and sundry where to get off’.35
The account Shimi Lovat wrote in his autobiography* of Evelyn’s ‘sacking’ from the Special Service Brigade was published well after the other main protagonists had died and went unquestioned by Evelyn’s subsequent biographers, even though the author was hardly an impartial witness. The claim that Evelyn had spent his compassionate leave mostly at White’s was perfectly consistent with his normal habits yet seems unlikely in this particular instance given all he had had to do sorting through his father’s papers and dealing with the funeral and so forth. ‘It has been marvelous to have had Evelyn in London,’ his mother wrote to Alec on 3 July, four days after the funeral, ‘he has seen to everything in a kindly and efficient manner … I don’t know what I should have done without him.’36
Several of Lovat’s other assertions are equally questionable – for instance his claim that Evelyn ‘stormed in unannounced to General Haydon’s office’ when he plainly wrote to request an interview; and the notion that he was ‘sacked on the spot for insubordination’, when even by Haydon’s account Evelyn was advised to resign. These may seem rather pedantic points, yet when taken together and then exaggerated by subsequent chroniclers they have further distorted the truth about Evelyn Waugh’s war. Whilst more than capable of putting people’s backs up and far from the ideal company commander, there were other ways in which Evelyn could be very useful to the military. He had an extremely good brain, of great value when it came to planning operations, at headquarters and in the field; he excelled at knocking the long-winded written drafts into concise and readable shape; and above all he was extraordinarily brave and cool under fire. Laycock was himself a well-read and witty man and undoubtedly found Evelyn very entertaining. However it is hard to believe that he would have wanted him on his staff had he not also been impressed by some of his qualities as a soldier.
At first Evelyn felt extremely aggrieved at his treatment and wrote a long letter to Laycock setting out ‘the facts relevant to my leaving the Brigade so that when you have the leisure to look at them, you will know that it is not I who has let you down’.37 He wrote an equally long letter to the head of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten, however by the time he eventually saw him, in early August, he had grown bored of the whole saga and they met on ‘terms so cordial as to be almost affectionate’.38 At the end of that month, back with the Royal Horse Guards at Windsor, he reflected:
I dislike the Army. I want to get to work again. I do not want any more experiences in life. I have quite enough bottled and carefully laid in the cellar, some still ripening, most ready for drinking, a little beginning to lose its body. I wrote to Frank [Pakenham] very early in the war to say that its chief use would be to cure artists of the illusion that they were men of action. It has worked its cure with me. I have succeeded, too, in dissociating myself very largely with the rest of the world. I am not impatient of its manifest follies and don’t want to influence opinions or events or expose humbug or anything of that kind. I don’t want to be of service to anyone or anything. I simply want to do my work as an artist.39
The opportunity to return to writing would come sooner than he thought, however for the time being he persisted in trying to get back into action as a soldier and began badgering Shimi Lovat’s cousin Bill Stirling about a place in 2 SAS, which he had formed after the capture of his brother David in North Africa. ‘I dread the prospect of organization and training and a hundred new acquaintances,’ Evelyn wrote in his diary. ‘But after my treatment by Haydon I must “make good” as a soldier. Nothing can upset him more than to find me promoted as a result of his intemperance.’ Evelyn had stayed with Stirling at Keir, his palatial home in Perthshire, the previous year while his brother David was still missing after the Benghazi raid and they had since furthered their acquaintance at the bar of White’s. For the time being Stirling put Evelyn to work drafting a cogent case to be presented to the War Office for the regiment’s expansion. ‘He is a great change as a master from Bob,’ Evelyn wrote to Laura, ‘– vague, mystical, imaginative, impatient, chivalrous, moral, slow witted, unconventional, unsmart, aristocratic, – in every quality dramatically opposed to Bob and in many ways preferable.’ With his posting eventually fixed, Evelyn was all set to go out with Christopher Sykes and join the rest of the SAS in North Africa in mid-November, however the Allied campaign in the southern Mediterranean went far better than expected and they were eventually deemed surplus to requirements. Instead they were sent on a parachuting course at Tatton Park in Cheshire, from where Evelyn wrote to Laura: ‘Parachuting is without exception the most exhilarating thing I have ever done. All the tedium of the last months has been worthwhile for the few seconds of first leaving the aeroplane. I felt absolutely no reluctance to jump – less than in taking a cold bath.’40 In his diary he recalled stepping from the noisy aeroplane ‘into perfect silence and solitude and apparent immobility in bright sunshine above the treetops’. Years later, when the whole experience had fully ripened in his memory, he described the rapture felt by his fictional alter ego Guy Crouchback on his first parachute jump,
… something as near as his earthbound soul could reach to a foretaste of paradise, locum refrigerii, lucis et pacis. The aeroplane seemed far distant as will, at the moment of death, the spinning earth. As though he had cast the constraining bonds of flesh and muscle and nerve, he found himself floating free; the harness that had so irked him in the narrow, dusky, resounding carriage now imperceptibly supported him. He was a free spirit in an element as fresh as on the day of its creation.41
But Evelyn’s foretaste of paradise was as short-lived as Crouchback’s and on his second jump he landed badly and cracked the fibula in his left leg, an injury that would eventually grant him the time he needed to write Brideshead Revisited, the climax of which had been forming in his mind ever since his efforts that October to save the soul of his dying lapsed Catholic friend Hubert Duggan.
A stepson of Lord Curzon, Duggan had been Conservative MP for Acton for more than a decade and Evelyn had known him vaguely since being at Oxford with his elder brother Alfred, although he and Hubert had only really become friends in the early 1930s at Madresfield after both had been deserted by their wives in strikingly similar circumstances and Hubert began an affair with Maimie Lygon. They had grown closer still during the war, when Hubert was the only one of Evelyn’s friends he made a godparent to his daughter Margaret. By this time Hubert was living ‘in sin’ with Diana Cooper’s long-standing friend Phyllis de Janzé, a renowned beauty and fellow divorcee ten years his senior (and the ex sister-in-law of Alice de Janzé who had shot Evelyn’s friend Raymond de Trafford), but Phyllis died in April 1943 and shortly afterwards Hubert fell gravely ill with tuberculosis.
‘The news of Hubert is very bad indeed,’ Evelyn wrote to Laura that September. ‘He is allowed to see no one … He never sleeps and drugs put him into a delirium but not to sleep. He is in the blackest melancholy and haunted by delusions. There is nothing which can be done for him medically. Supernatural aid needed.’ For three weeks Evelyn visited his stricken friend almost daily at his house on Chapel Street in Belgravia, until eventually one day Hubert began to talk about religion ‘and of returning to the Church’, as Evelyn put it, however Hubert worried that it would be a betrayal of Phyllis to profess repentance of his life with her. The next day Evelyn consulted a Catholic chaplain and was given a medal. ‘Just hide it somewhere in the room,’ said t
he priest. ‘I have known most wonderful cases of Grace being brought about in that way.’
When Evelyn got to Chapel Street later that morning, Lady Curzon told him that Hubert was not expected to live through the day, so Evelyn went immediately to Farm Street to fetch Father Devas. Like Lord Marchmain’s mistress Cara in Brideshead, Hubert’s sister did not want the priest there, but Evelyn brought him in nonetheless and after he had given Hubert absolution Hubert said, ‘Thank you father!’ which was taken as his assent. Evelyn returned to the house that afternoon to find the sister still hostile, yet Father Devas gently explaining his intention to anoint Hubert. ‘Look all I shall do is just to put oil on his forehead and say a prayer. Look the oil is in this little box. It is nothing to be frightened of.’
‘And so,’ Evelyn recorded, ‘by knowing what he wanted and sticking to that, when I was all for arguing it out from first principles, he got what he wanted and Hubert crossed himself and later called me up and said, “When I became a Catholic it was not from fear”, so he knows what happened and accepted it. So we spent the day watching for a spark of gratitude for the love of God and saw the spark.’42
Believing that he had been granted God’s pardon, Hubert briefly rallied but died twelve days later. Evelyn attended a Requiem Mass for him at Farm Street on 3 November and in late January 1944 he asked for time off from the Army in order to write his book. The letter was addressed to the commanding officer of his regiment, the current Duchess of York’s grandfather Colonel A. H. Ferguson, from whom Evelyn requested three months’ leave on the basis that ‘entertainment is now regarded as a legitimate contribution to the war effort’. He went on: ‘It is a peculiarity of the literary profession that, once an idea becomes fully formed in the author’s mind, it cannot be left unexploited without deterioration. If, in fact, the book is not written now it will never be written.’43
Ferguson at first refused, taking the view that his time would be better spent training the Home Guard at Windsor; however after enlisting the support of Brendan Bracken at the Ministry of Information, Evelyn eventually got his leave. Laura not unreasonably saw this as an opportunity to see more of her husband and suggested they take a cottage at Pixton, but Evelyn was always the most ruthlessly self-protective of artists and that idea was quickly scotched. ‘The reason is that I long for your company at all times except one,’ Evelyn explained. ‘When I am working I must be alone. I shall never be able to maintain the fervent preoccupation which is absolutely necessary to composition, if you were at close quarters with me … I shall see if they can take me at Chagford.’44
Thus on the last day of January he checked into the Easton Court Hotel determined to begin writing by ten the next morning. ‘I still have a cold,’ he noted in his diary that evening, ‘and am low in spirits but I feel full of literary power which only this evening gives place to qualms of impotence.’ He remained ensconced there for the next four weeks, intensely engaged in what he already believed was going to be his most significant and self-revealing book, at once a highly romanticised representation of aspects of his own life and, as he later wrote for the dust-jacket, ‘an attempt to trace the workings of the divine purpose in a pagan world, in the lives of an English Catholic family’.
* March Past, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978).
19
A Book to Bring Tears
On 2 February 1944 Evelyn wrote to Laura from Chagford: ‘So the nut started rather stiff & I had to write the first thousand words of magnum opus three times before they came right but now things are going better and I have done 2,387 words in 1½ days. It shall be 3,000 this evening & soon I hope to get 2000 a day. It is v. high quality about Col. Cutler* and how much I hate the army.’1
By the end of the first week he was up to 10,000 words and wrote to his agent that if left undisturbed by the military he hoped to finish the book by the middle of May. He suggested that Chapman & Hall might like to reserve some paper in order to publish it for Christmas but was concerned that their production standards might not do his great work justice. ‘I should like this book to be in decent form,’ he told Peters, ‘because it is very good.’2 From time to time he got bogged down rewriting. ‘Every day I seem to go over what I did the day before and make it shorter. I am getting spinsterish about style.’3 But at other times progress was far more satisfactory and on one day he sat down after dinner and rattled off 3,000 words in three hours. By the end of the fourth week he had completed 33,000 words and had reached the end of the third chapter, when Charles watches Julia drive away from Brideshead Castle and Sebastian tells him ‘We’ll have a heavenly time alone.’
But before he could start on the next chapter he was summoned to London to become ADC to Major-General Ivor Thomas, to whom he promptly behaved so obnoxiously that the general refused to have him. ‘The primary lack of sympathy seemed to come from my being slightly drunk in his mess on the first evening,’ Evelyn nonchalantly recorded. ‘I told him I could not change the habits of a lifetime for a whim of his.’4 To Laura he wrote: ‘The worst I did was to pour claret in his lap.’5 But no sooner had he escaped from one general than another one was conjured for him. Evelyn knew the next one vaguely of old, a substantially more easy-going Old Etonian called Miles Graham whom he deemed ‘a slightly superior type’: ‘So the new general is very much less assuming than Tomas [sic],’ he told Laura, ‘& fully appreciates, or appears to appreciate, the importance of a gentleman leading his own life.’ Graham immediately gave him six weeks’ leave but twenty-four hours later cancelled their arrangement altogether, perhaps having reflected on what he was letting himself in for.
Returning to Chagford after his ten-day break, Evelyn took a while to get back into his stride, but eleven days later he sent off another 13,000 words to be typed up, and six days after that a further 7,800. ‘I am writing a very beautiful book,’ he told Coote Lygon, ‘to bring tears, about very rich, beautiful, high born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons sex and drink which after all are easy to bear as troubles go nowadays.’6 He was greatly relieved to be back doing what he loved best and also away from London where, as he admitted to Coote, ‘it is not unfair to say I never draw a sober breath. I was beginning to lose my memory which for a man who lives entirely in the past, is to lose life itself.’7 The hotel’s other guests were mostly elderly women who did not disturb him apart from when it was sunny and they emerged ‘like lizards’ and annoyed him by sitting right outside his window.8 Despite this and a few brief intrusions by trysting couples, by 29 March he had written a total of 62,000 and was up to the end of Book Two.
* * *
It was at this point that Laura came for her last brief visit to Chagford before the birth of her fifth child, Harriet, who was born in May. Neither Evelyn nor Laura ever appeared greatly to relish having children and Evelyn had greeted the news of Laura’s latest pregnancy with his customary commiseration. ‘I do hope that your nursery life is not proving unendurable,’ he wrote to her. ‘I think I have not said enough about how deeply I admire your patience & resignation in this and in the threat to your future happiness in the birth of another child. If I have seemed to make light of it, that is my rough manner; my heart is all yours & sorrowing for you.’9 Their son Bron later recalled his mother as having scarcely featured in his early life at Pixton and being unaware that motherhood involved ‘any particular emotional proximity’. His father, he remembered, ‘featured not at all’.10
Bron had vague memories of him occasionally turning up in uniform, but most of the time Evelyn evinced a breathtaking determination to stay away. ‘I shall not visit my children during Christmas leave,’ he had written to Laura in December 1941, ‘they should be able to retain the impression formed of me for another three months. I can’t afford to waste any time on them which could be spent on my own pleasures. I have sent them some kippers as compensation.’11 And the next year: ‘I am very glad not to be with my children for Christmas. Ther
e is an hotel at Shaftesbury with a very splendid sideboard. I think we might take a week end there soon when you are fuckable.’12
But as much as Evelyn recoiled – or at least affected to recoil – from spending time with his children, he constantly craved the company of his wife. ‘If by any chance my children should die,’ he wrote to Laura at the time of her latest pregnancy, ‘do come to London. I miss you every hour.’13 Though he sometimes chided her for her careless appearance – ‘Try and get your teeth white before we meet,’14 he wrote before a brief rendezvous that spring – or bombarded her with bossy instructions about their house or children or how to liven up her correspondence, his letters to her were more often tender as well as funny, abounding in heartfelt expressions of his love for and need of her, and the various ways he missed her – ‘bitterly’, ‘unspeakably’, ‘unbearably’, ‘unendurably’ and so on. After the evacuation from Crete in June 1941 he had written to her: ‘What a lot we shall have to say to each other when we meet. I feel that all our future life will be spent in telling how we have spent this year apart. In danger I have one fear, that it means further separation from you.’15
* * *
Just before Easter, Evelyn was again summoned to London for a proposed assignment to conduct journalists around the Second Front, which was due to open that summer. ‘It is not quite as disastrous as it might be,’ he reflected, ‘for I have come to a suitable halting stage in the book and a week or two away from it may do no harm.’16 But, as so often, the job never materialised and instead he passed an idle two weeks at White’s catching up with old friends and drinking ‘a great deal of good wine which is getting scarce daily but still procurable by those who take the trouble’.17 He then went down to Pixton, where he completed the revision of the first two sections of Brideshead. Lady de Vesci’s ancient stepmother Grace, Lady Wemyss, was also staying and as Evelyn recorded, ‘Auberon surprised her in her bath and is thus one of very few men who can claim to have seen his great great grandmother in the raw.’18 Returning to London he gave dinner to his old friends John Sutro and Harold Acton, the latter of whom had been working for RAF intelligence in India. Feasting on gulls’ eggs, consommé, partridge, haddock on toast and nearly a bottle a head of Perrier-Jouët 28, Evelyn was riveted by what he called Harold’s ‘descriptions of service life as seen by a bugger … He combines his pleasures with keen patriotism.’19