Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  A couple of weeks later he told Laura: ‘Drunkenness is a very sad thing for the sober. Freddy is fuddled most evenings and, I suppose, just as he was in White’s when I thought him the wittiest of Worm friends – now I find him repetitive & trite.’51

  In the essay he wrote about their time together in Yugoslavia for the collection Evelyn Waugh and His World (1973), Birkenhead described Evelyn in generally affectionate terms. However, possibly prompted by the various unflattering references to himself in Evelyn’s published letters and diaries, he later told Hugh Trevor-Roper (himself not a great fan of Evelyn’s either) that he had actually thought him ‘an odious, indeed a psychopathic character’, ruefully adding: ‘I should have dealt far more hardly with him had his widow not still then been with us, & had I not wished to avoid, perhaps cravenly, the insane malice of his repulsive son.’52 Birkenhead also thought that Evelyn’s virulent hatred of Communism limited his usefulness as a liaison officer to the Partisans; however Clissold offered a different perspective, recalling Evelyn as ‘punctilious in carrying out the duties assigned to him’ and commenting that his diaries showed ‘a good deal of prescience and insight’ about the Partisans’ lack of real interest in fighting the Germans as opposed to getting on with their own civil war.53 Fitzroy Maclean, too, was at pains to stress that Evelyn ‘did his job very efficiently’ and that overall he had been ‘very keen on being a good officer and succeeded in that’. But in any event Evelyn had now had quite enough of soldiering and was longing to go home. ‘The war seems to me to have rolled itself in blubber like an Eskimo & settled down for the winter,’ he wrote to Laura that November. ‘I don’t see much hope of getting back before the spring.’54

  Evelyn’s homesickness was exacerbated not just by his weariness of Randolph but also the knowledge that fifty privately printed advance copies of Brideshead Revisited had been sent out to his family and friends in England. Evelyn begged Nancy Mitford to tell him ‘what everyone says behind my back’ while more confidently telling his mother that he expected ‘a great success’ when the public edition eventually came out the next spring.55

  While the war rolled on interminably in Yugoslavia the least Evelyn required was a respite from Randolph, a feeling that was evidently mutual, with Randolph cabling that he was ‘Waugh-weary’. In early December they got their wish when Evelyn was posted to Dubrovnik to mediate between British troops and the Partisans, with permission also from Fitzroy Maclean to write a report on the subject closest to his heart, the local situation of the Roman Catholic Church.

  Christmas in his new posting was spent entirely alone, ‘which next to being with you,’ he wrote to Laura, ‘is what I like best’.56 It was, he told her, ‘a joy to be surrounded by first class architecture again’, and though his quarters were in ‘a slum’ he had a jeep at his disposal, ‘an excellent Dalmatian cook’, two other servants, plenty of wine and an Alsatian dog.

  In the new year reactions to Brideshead began to arrive, first of all from Nancy, who wrote reassuringly that she thought it ‘a great English classic in my humble opinion’ and that she was ‘literally dazzled with admiration’. A subsequent postcard informed him that ‘people are giving luncheon parties to discuss the book & the Windsors have given it to everyone for Xmas. Rather low-brow circles I fear but still!’57

  Nancy shared Evelyn’s gift for writing letters as if in a gossipy conversation. Hers were sharp, provocative and often very funny. It was a talent that would endear her to Evelyn for the rest of his life; however it also served to highlight the fact that Laura was a far from sparkling correspondent. ‘Sweet whiskers,’ Evelyn wrote to her,

  do try to write me better letters. Your last, dated 19 December received today, so early expected, was a bitter disappointment. Do realize that a letter need not be a bald chronicle of events; I know you lead a dull life now, my heart bleeds for it, though I believe you could make it more interesting if you had the will. But that is no reason to make your letters as dull as your life. I simply am not interested in Bridget’s children. Do grasp that. A letter should be a form of conversation; written as though you were talking to me. For instance you say my Christmas presents have arrived and Eddie is pleased. What do you think of the book? Your copy is still binding but you must have seen his. You know I have not seen one. Tell me what it is like. It is dedicated to you. Are you pleased to see it in this form? Are you curious to know what changes I have made in the final proofs. There are many changes in this copy from what you read before. Can you not see how it disappoints me that this book which I regard as my first important one, and have dedicated to you, should have no comment except that Eddie is pleased with it.58

  After the unbroken solitude of his Christmas, he celebrated the Orthodox equivalent in early January at what was billed as a tea party, although as he told Nancy, ‘One never knows what one will get in this country.’ Without a word of greeting from their military hosts the guests were soon served with ‘(a) Green Chartreuse (b) tea and ham sandwiches (c) cakes and cherry brandy & cigarettes (d) two patriotic speeches. Then it seemed reasonable to think the party was over, but no, in came cold mutton & red wine. It is unsettling at my age.’59 A few days later Evelyn took pity on an elderly sculptor he had met called Mr Paravacini who was short of food and money. Evelyn commissioned a portrait bust of himself in return for £50 and some rations while he was at work: ‘I doubt his ever getting the stone or finishing it,’ Evelyn wrote in his diary; ‘if he does it will be the next best thing to having myself stuffed.’60 ‘It is very masterly,’ he told Laura when the bust was under way, ‘rather bad tempered in expression but most forceful like Beethoven rather. It will be a beautiful possession for you – indeed a series of possessions for all as I propose to have it cast in bronze and terra cotta & lead & iron & so forth and to travel with it as Gerry Wellesley used to travel with the bust of his great ancestor. You can imagine what an interest & excitement it has been to me.’61

  Meanwhile, he felt increasingly worn down, surrounded by ‘so many unhappy people who look to me for help which I can ill supply,’ he told Laura. ‘It seems to comfort them to come & tell me how miserable they are; it saddens me. But is it not odd? Would you have thought of me as having a kind nature? I am renowned for my great kindness here.* At our headquarters in Bari however I am looked on as very troublesome and offensive.’62†

  Evelyn’s latest outrage had been to refuse to be transferred to Trebinje on the grounds that he had not finished his investigations into the Dubrovnik clergy and the alleged killing of fifty-two Roman Catholic priests by Partisans. However a few days later he did obey a command to return to Bari, where he then obtained permission to visit Pope Pius XII in Rome to report on what he had discovered, although His Holiness appeared to grasp almost nothing of what he said. ‘The sad thing about the Pope,’ Evelyn wrote to Laura after his private audience, ‘is that he loves talking English and has learned several elegant little speeches by heart parrot-wise & delivers them with practically no accent, but he does not understand a word of the language.’ When Evelyn had finished expounding on the desperate plight of the Dubrovnik clergy, the Pope ‘made a little English speech, inopportunely the one he keeps for sailors telling them how much he enjoyed a naval review at Portsmouth in 1920 something’.63 A week after his audience Evelyn left Rome with his report on the Church in Croatia half written and flew via Naples to London, arriving there on 15 March.

  Evelyn’s report on ‘Church and State in Liberated Croatia’ eventually ran to some 7,500 words. It was first presented to Fitzroy Maclean, who pronounced it to be ‘reasonably fair’; however when Evelyn tried to circulate it further the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, Sir Orme Sargent, sternly forbade it, seeing it as blatant propaganda against the British government’s policy of support for Marshal Tito. All that Evelyn managed in the end was to get a question asked in the House of Commons in May about what measures were being taken to protect the Croat Catholics, to which the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden
, replied that such matters fell outside the British government’s responsibilities and must remain those of the Yugoslav state.

  Observers far more sympathetic to Tito and the Partisans accused Evelyn of bias in his report and of omitting evidence that Catholic priests had collaborated with the Ustaše terrorists who supported the Italians during the fascist occupation of Yugoslavia. Evelyn freely admitted that some Catholic priests had been guilty of horrific crimes, but insisted that such cases were rare. In any event, even allowing for the possibility of bias on his part, the persistent ill-treatment of priests in post-war Yugoslavia would show his diagnosis of Communist persecution of the Catholic Church to be broadly correct. Evelyn meanwhile remained a fierce critic of Tito, and when Eden invited him to Britain on a state visit in 1952 at the height of the Cold War, he wrote an article angrily denouncing ‘Our Guest of Dishonour’.

  * Colonel S. G. Cutler had been his commanding officer in the Royal Marines in 1942, a ‘pompous booby’ in Evelyn’s estimation and one of his chief military bugbears alongside Tom Churchill, Shimi Lovat and Roger Wakefield.

  * After the war, one of those who served with Evelyn in Dubrovnik wrote to his MP from Yugoslavia to say how he was ‘known and loved by a surprising number of civilians here, for his efforts on their behalf’ (Signalman Leslie John Murphy to Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Thomas Moore, 20 September 1945, cited in Donat Gallagher, In the Picture, p. 265).

  † Evelyn’s immediate superior in Bari, Major John Clarke, later recalled having had his life made hell by Maclean’s ‘incredibly stupid’ decision to send Evelyn to Dubrovnik ‘to tickle up the RC clergy’ and that he ‘stirred up a hornet’s nest’ (Frank McLynn, Fitzroy Maclean, p. 245).

  20

  The Occupation

  The war had been frustrating and disillusioning for Evelyn, however the change of habit had at least stimulated him as an artist and he had written two fine novels, the latest of which was about to make him rich (‘stinking rich’, he assured Laura) and famous. Brideshead Revisited was published at the end of May 1945, three weeks after VE Day. Evelyn was quite sure at the time that it was his most important work, his ‘magnum opus’ as he had called it ever since he started writing it in February 1944. ‘For the first time since 1928,’ he told Nancy Mitford, ‘I am eager about a book.’1

  Not all his friends enjoyed it, Katharine Asquith being prominent among those who did not, however reactions to his privately bound advance copies were mostly very positive. Like Evelyn, Graham Greene would later revise his opinion, however at first he rated it even better than Work Suspended, his previous favourite. Another Catholic friend, Daphne Acton, was ‘ecstatic in her praise’, Martin D’Arcy reported, while Ronnie Knox was ‘at first antagonistic’ but later ‘in tears over the deathbed scene, & by the last chapter an ardent convert’.2 The future Catholic convert Penelope Betjeman wrote: ‘I think it is as good as Madame Bovary.’3

  Among non-Catholic friends the unsurprising consensus was that there was ‘too much Catholic stuff’.4 Yet even the irreligious and increasingly egalitarian Henry Yorke,* who confessed to finding Brideshead’s subject matter deeply distasteful, could only conclude that ‘to my mind you carry out what you set out to do better than any English writer now writing’.5 Meanwhile Nancy reported that Raymond Mortimer had pronounced it a ‘Great English classic’ and Cyril Connolly had found it ‘impossible to put down’.6

  Connolly, though, was also among those who did not care for some of the ‘purple passages’, an opinion that Evelyn would later come to share. In his preface to the 1960 edition, he explained that Brideshead had been written during ‘a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is enthused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful’.7

  After the book was published in May, the first letter of congratulation Evelyn received was a typically extravagant outpouring from Harold Acton, who claimed to have ‘slid my paperknife through the still virginal pages like an itching bridegroom and was panting, trembling and exhausted by the time I had finished cutting them’.

  After he had caught his breath and begun reading the book, Acton had been

  swept alternatively by pleasure and pain: pleasure at your ever-increasing virtuosity and mastery of our fast-evaporating language, for there are subtler nuances of prose in this than perhaps any of your writings; pain, at the acrid memories of so many old friends you have conjured, with accompanying passion which I am surprised to find still smouldering in my bosom after all those years. It is the only successful evocation of the period that I know. But like the period itself, it leaves a melancholy dirge-like aftertaste. So far one has survived, but for how long and into what?8

  Among the early newspaper reviews, the Manchester Guardian was predictably prejudiced against Brideshead’s subject matter while conceding ‘the brilliance of his writing’.9 The Times Literary Supplement questioned whether Evelyn had managed to trace the workings of divine purpose with any ‘marked clarity’ and thought ‘the decorations of the tale’ were devised to better advantage than the working out of his overall theme. Reservations were also expressed about what seemed to be the author’s excessive reverence for the aristocracy. The New Statesman found Brideshead ‘deeply moving in its theme and its design’ and ‘a fine and brilliant book’, yet suggested that ‘a burden of respect for the peerage and Eton, which those who belong to the former or have been to the latter, seem able to lightly discard, weighs heavily on him’.10 Even more damning was Edmund Wilson’s assessment in The New Yorker early the next year: ‘Waugh’s snobbery, hitherto held in check by his satirical point of view, has here emerged shameless and rampant … his cult of high nobility is allowed to become so rapturous and solemn that it finally gives the impression of being the only real religion in the book.’11

  Wilson was America’s pre-eminent critic at the time and had previously singled out Evelyn as ‘the only first-class comic genius that has appeared in England since Bernard Shaw’.12 Given his antipathy towards both Catholicism and conservatism, Brideshead was always going to be less to his liking than Evelyn’s earlier books; however he may also have felt that he had a score to settle, having been teased mercilessly by Evelyn at Cyril Connolly’s table about his failure to find a British publisher for his recent novel on the grounds of obscenity. The next day Evelyn recorded in his diary having ‘chucked an appointment to show London to insignificant yank named Edmund Wilson’.13

  Evelyn shrugged off Wilson’s criticisms and in any case could argue that the various aristocratic characters in his book were never sanctified and mostly decidedly flawed. It was also a gratifying irony for him that ‘the age of the common man’ ushered in by the post-war anti-elitism also fuelled nostalgia for the disappearing aristocratic way of life that made Brideshead such a spectacular bestseller. The first edition sold out in the first week of publication in Britain, and in America the book quickly sold more than half a million copies.14 When it was made America’s Book of the Month in July Evelyn calculated that it was worth ‘£10,000 down and a probable £10,000 from ordinary sales and cinema rights’,15 and he began to look forward to an annual income of at least £25,000 over the next five years.

  But the satisfaction he had always taken in making money was soon competing with the fear of losing it in tax, especially after the post-war general election victory of the Labour Party, whose government Evelyn was soon referring to as ‘the Attlee terror’16 or simply ‘the Occupation’.17

  The pleasure he took in things going wrong, particularly for self-important politicians, meant that at first he found much to enjoy in the shock result.* Having failed to persuade Laura to come up from the country for Ann Rothermere’s election night party, he reported afterwards that ‘although the champagne was exiguous & the vodka watery the spectacle of consternation as details of
the massacre spread was a strong intoxicant’.18 But as the establishment of what he called ‘Welfaria’ got under way, he began to reflect miserably on what he saw as the new regime’s commitment to obliterate all class distinctions, getting rid of a structure which for Evelyn lay at the very heart of English culture and which ‘influenced, and often determined, all social and personal relations’ and had grown over the centuries ‘so complex that no foreigner and few natives could completely comprehend it’.19 He contended that during his lifetime England had changed from being one of the most beautiful countries in the world to being one of the ugliest, adding that: ‘German bombs have made but a negligible addition to the sum of our own destructiveness. It is arguable that the entire process is traceable to the decay of aristocratic domination.’20

  Among those who had been newly elected as MPs, Evelyn saw Christopher Hollis and Hugh Fraser (with whom he got along better than with his brother Shimi Lovat) as ‘the hope of the Catholics’;21 Randolph Churchill, meanwhile, was among those of his friends who had failed to win seats. Unable to move back into Piers Court until September and unwilling to live even temporarily at Pixton, Evelyn arranged to go and stay with Randolph, with whom he was by then reconciled, at Ickleford in Hertfordshire. Evelyn found Randolph ‘crestfallen but not crushed’ by his election defeat,22 although he had also recently separated from his wife Pamela and the only furniture in his rented old rectory were odd bits that she had left behind. ‘The plan is to stay until White’s reopens,’ Evelyn noted in his diary, ‘but I am not confident that we shall live harmoniously so long.’23 Anywhere was preferable to living with his in-laws, however, and he remained there on and off throughout August, joined for the last two weeks by Bron, who was just short of his sixth birthday and a potential playmate for Randolph’s slightly younger son Winston.