by Philip Eade
After a few days Evelyn told Laura that his son’s visit had been ‘an unqualified success’, adding that he had so far ‘behaved admirably and won golden opinions on every side’. However when he took him to London to stay with his grandmother and show him some sights, Evelyn reported:
I have regretfully come to the conclusion that the boy Auberon is not yet a suitable companion for me. Yesterday was a day of supreme self-sacrifice. I fetched him from Highgate, took him up the dome of St. Pauls, gave him a packet of triangular stamps, took him to luncheon at the Hyde Park Hotel, took him on the roof of the hotel, took him to Harrods & let him buy vast quantities of toys (down to your account) took him to tea with Maimie who gave him a pound and a box of matches, took him back to Highgate, in a state (myself not the boy) of extreme exhaustion. My mother said ‘Have you had a lovely day?’ He replied ‘A bit dull’. So that is the last time for some years I inconvenience myself for my children. You might rub that in to him.24
Evelyn and Laura finally moved back into Piers Court two weeks later after almost exactly six years away, leaving the children at Pixton while they put the house back in order. ‘Arrived on a grey, fly-infested, heavy evening with a hangover and the excitement of homecoming contending,’ Evelyn recorded. ‘At first sight the garden was rank, the paths lost, the trees stunted or overgrown irregularly; inside everything damp but superficially tidy. Slept ill.’ The next day he wrote: ‘Nuns half out, ourselves half in. Laura saying how perfect everything looked, I detecting losses and damage everywhere.’25
Evelyn later admitted to having returned home with ‘many sentimental tremors’ only to find that ‘my love for it was quite dead, as so many soldiers found about their wives but not me thank God’.26 Yet within a week the tanks were full enough for a hot bath, his library was back in order and he had begun to resume his pre-war routine. ‘It is delightful to be writing to you again on Piers Court paper,’ he told his mother,
at my own writing table face to face with Queen Victoria in bronze and George III in paint. We have had an arduous week moving in. The nuns left things superficially clean and in as good condition as one could expect after six years school-use, but all the furniture was misplaced, moths had ravaged carpets, paint has gone and innumerable small breakages come to light daily. The water supply had been diverted from the village and is only slowly returning; our first two or three days we could not light the boilers and had to carry all water up in buckets from the well. The garden is in poor shape, many paths entirely lost, but the trees & hedges well grown & the quinces, in particular, bearing well. The stables have been repaired after their collapse.27
It took several months to reassemble their household staff and for much of that autumn they were reliant on Laura’s somewhat erratic cooking and housework, ‘vague but pertinacious’ as Evelyn described it. ‘Little Laura and I live alone here in circumstances of very grave austerity,’ he told Maimie. ‘We have 27 hens which lay sometimes 3, more often 2 eggs a day and keep L. L. constantly busy cramming them with rich foods. She and I live on dry bread & vintage port …’.28 To Randolph he reported: ‘Laura broods despondently over the kitchen range and periodically raises columns of black smoke, announces that our meat ration has been incinerated, and drives me to dinner at a neighbouring inn.’29
The return of the butler Ellwood in mid-November was evidently an uplifting event: ‘silver, boots, and furniture shine,’ purred Evelyn. Less so was the arrival of Teresa and Bron just before Christmas. ‘By keeping the children in bed for long periods we managed to have a tolerable day,’ Evelyn recorded. ‘The children leave for Pixton on the 10th. Meanwhile I have my meals in the library.’30 Shortly after New Year 1946 he wrote to Diana Cooper:
I have my two eldest children here, a boy and a girl; two girls languish at Pixton; a fifth leaps in the womb. I abhor their company because I can only regard children as defective adults, hate their physical ineptitude, find their jokes flat and monotonous. Both are considered great wits by their contemporaries. The elder girl has a precocious taste for theology which promises well for a career as Abbess; the boy is mindless and obsessed with social success. I will put him into the Blues [the Royal Horse Guards] later, meanwhile he goes to boarding school at the end of the month with the keenest expectation of delight.31
Six when he was packed off to prep school, Bron later recalled: ‘Papa’s best practical joke was played in my first term when I was still very nervous. He told me he proposed to change his name to Stinkbottom. When he had done so, the headmaster would summon the school together and say: “Boys, the person you have hitherto called Waugh will in future be called Stinkbottom.” School assembly was held every morning, and every morning I felt a slight tightening of the chest as Mr Dix came forward to make his morning announcements.’32
* * *
After the war Evelyn had begun working on a new novel about St Helena, the research for which entailed ‘a very interesting correspondence with Mrs. Betjeman about horses & sex’, he told Nancy Mitford. Evelyn had first met Penelope Chetwode in the early 1930s staying with the Pakenhams in Ireland when she was engaged to John Betjeman. Fresh from his lessons at Captain Hance’s equitation academy, Evelyn was very keen to go riding with the gamine Penelope but she had taken the Pakenhams’ only good horse and his mount, an unbroken and completely unmanageable bay cob, promptly carted him off at a gallop towards Lough Derravaragh. When Penelope followed she came across the horse grazing calmly by the lake and heard Evelyn calling her from the branch of a tree where he had eventually been deposited. It was the start of a great friendship, admiring of his bravery and literary genius on her part, flirtatious and at times boldly suggestive on his. ‘Be a good girl about this,’ he wrote from Abyssinia in 1935 when asking for information about the mysterious Mr Rickett, ‘and I will reward you with a fine fuck when I get back.’33
If this sounds like a joke or at least wishful thinking on Evelyn’s part, he was later said to have complained to Osbert Lancaster in a moment of bitterness, ‘She always laughs when I come’.34 For her part Penelope recalled being alarmed when he made advances on her both before and after her marriage, maintaining that ‘he never attracted me in the very least’.35 Years later, shortly before Evelyn died, Auberon asked him whether he had ever been to bed with Lady Betjeman, to which he replied, ‘Since you ask, yes.’36
Whether or not this was a tease, Evelyn clearly found Penelope attractive and given that John Betjeman almost certainly knew this, Evelyn’s letter to him in May 1945, explaining that he was modelling the Empress Helena’s early life on the horse-mad Penelope’s own ‘hipporastic’ experiences, bordered on the sadistic: ‘She [Helena] is 16, sexy, full of horse fantasies. I want to get this right. Will you tell her [Penelope] to write to me fully about adolescent sex reveries connected with riding. I have no experience of such things, nor has Laura. I make her always the horse & the consummation when the rider subdues her. Is this correct? Please make her explain. And is riding enough or must she be driven? Are spurs important or only leather-work?’37
After hearing nothing, Evelyn eventually asked Penelope directly: ‘I describe her as hunting in the morning after her wedding night feeling the saddle as comforting her wounded maidenhead. Is that O.K.? After that she has no interest in sex …’38 Penelope had by then read an extract of Evelyn’s work in progress in The Tablet and replied that she thought the descriptions of Helena hunting ‘very good but whatever will Fr Darcy say?’. She further confided that ‘my first experiments in horse sex were when I drove my donkey round the pine-woods at Aldershot in father’s cavalry bit when I was 11’, and that she had ‘found it very difficult to separate sex & religion after I married & frequently used to drive a severely-bitted carriage horse in flights of fancy with an Anglo or Roman priest seated at my side. Couldn’t the Empress take great pleasure in driving a Druid about in a chariot? … Pray consign this to your kitchen boiler when studied.’39
Aside from Evelyn’s nosy questions about his wife,
John Betjeman also had to put up with regular barrages about his own religious views. ‘I have been painfully shocked by a brochure named “Five Sermons by Laymen”,’ Evelyn wrote to him just before Christmas 1946:
Last time I met you you told me you did not believe in the Resurrection. Now I find you expounding Protestant devotional practices from the pulpit. This WILL NOT DO … Your ecclesiastical position is entirely without reason. You cannot possibly be right. Marxist Atheists might be. Zealous protestants may be (i.e. it is possible to say that from the word go the Church was all wrong & had misunderstood everything Our Lord told them, & that it required a new Divine Dispensation in the sixteenth century to put people on the right track again. That is just possible.) What is inconceivable is that Christ was made flesh in order to found a Church, that He canalized his Grace in the sacraments, that He gave His promise to abide in the Church to the end of time, that He saw the Church as a human corporation, part of his Mystical Body, one with the Saints triumphant – and then to point to a handful of homosexual curates and say: ‘That is the true Church.’40
On the point of going over to Rome herself, Penelope Betjeman was as keen as Evelyn was for her husband to convert to Catholicism, however she worried that Evelyn went too far, and in April 1947 she told him that John was ‘in a dreadful state he thinks you are the devil and wakes up in the middle of the night and raves and says he will leave me at once if I go over’. Two months later she wrote: ‘The ONLY thing is to leave him alone at present. He has dreadful persecution mania where Catholics are concerned …’41 Evelyn replied: ‘I am by nature a bully and a scold, and John’s pertinacity in error brings out all that is worst in me. I am very sorry. I will lay off him in future.’42 Two months later, Evelyn recorded in his diary: ‘To Farnborough to make my peace with the Betjemans. Successful in this … Penelope seems resolved to enter the church in the autumn and John to desert her when she does so.’43
* * *
Another long-standing friend who was regularly put through the mill was Cyril Connolly. The commercial success of Brideshead meant that Evelyn could now afford to pick and choose what journalism he did, however in the autumn of 1945 when Douglas Woodruff at The Tablet asked if he might like to supply a ‘trenchant’ review of Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, Evelyn obliged with a piece which, as he cheerfully told Nancy Mitford, ‘shook out a few feathers’44 and might well have ended their friendship had Connolly not sensibly refrained from reacting.
Evelyn and Connolly had been on-off friends since Oxford. Evelyn greatly admired him as a critic – as well he might, given that Connolly was one of his most consistent champions – was fond of him as a drinking companion and realised they had much in common besides their shared literary, artistic and epicurean interests, both being easily bored, notoriously moody, unpredictable and at times spectacularly rude. Yet Connolly’s all too evident wariness of Evelyn also made him the recurrent butt of his bullying, and he was relentlessly teased for his left-wing opinions and castigated for his laziness and lack of religion. ‘Connolly has many injuries to revenge,’ Evelyn admitted in 1951 when he heard that he was researching a profile of him for Time magazine. ‘I can’t blame him if he takes the opportunity.’ But he warned him that when the piece appeared (it never did), ‘I shall horse-whip you on the steps of White’s’.45
Reviewing Enemies of Promise in 1938, Evelyn had described Connolly as the only man under forty who showed any signs of raising literary criticism to an art form, yet tore into the book as ‘structurally jerry-built’.46 The Unquiet Grave had already been widely acclaimed as a potential classic, however Evelyn, while acknowledging that the book contained sentences ‘as beautiful as any passages of modern English prose that I know’, suggested that Connolly had been ‘duped and distracted by the chatter of psychoanalysts’ and that he had given ‘full rein to the tosh-horse whose hooves thunder through the penultimate passages’.47 When Nancy had first sent Evelyn the book in Yugoslavia in 1944, he reported back that the passages about Christianity in particular were ‘real twaddle’ and concluded that ‘Connolly has lived too much with communist young ladies. He must spend more time in White’s.’48
White’s remained the place that Evelyn chose to spend most of his time whenever he was in London, and in March 1946 a friend there, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, a former comrade in No. 8 Commando and now a prosecutor at Nuremberg, invited him to attend the trials as an observer. The ancient Bavarian city had been almost completely destroyed by Allied bombs in the final months of the war and Evelyn found ‘a waste of corpse-scented rubble with a handful of middle-aged, middle-class Germans in Homburg hats picking their way through ruins. We drove to the Sports Palace which is intact but probably due for demolition – typical modern functional magnificence designed for mass parades, now full of German Jews in American uniforms photographing one another in the act of giving the Nazi salute from Hitler’s rostrum.’49
He observed the next day’s court proceedings as a VIP, sitting in the front row of the gallery and watching the various high-ranking Nazis as they came and went from the dock. Göring had ‘much of Tito’s matronly appeal’, Evelyn told Randolph Churchill, while Ribbentrop looked ‘like a seedy schoolmaster being ragged. He knows he doesn’t know the lesson and he knows the boys know.’50
Always fascinated by the macabre, after the court rose for the day Evelyn ‘went to see the room where a French Jew keeps lampshades of human skin, shrunken heads, soap said to be made of corpses and so forth’. After two days he had had enough of listening to legal arguments and flew on to stay with the Coopers in Paris, where Duff had recently become Ambassador. Evelyn initially surprised everyone with his mellow mood, but soon set about baiting the other guests, treating Julian Huxley as ‘a crypto-Communist zoo-keeper with no interest in life beyond the diet of his panda’ and describing Peter Quennell to Diana in terms ‘so foetid and sinister,’ she recalled, ‘that it will colour most unfairly my sentiments for him’.51 ‘Poor Wu,’ she wrote to Conrad Russell afterwards, ‘– he does everything he can to alienate himself from the affection he is yearning for.’52 Also at the embassy was his brother-in-law Auberon Herbert, and when he left for Brussels Diana implored Evelyn to follow him downstairs and tell him that he liked him. ‘He believed it,’ Evelyn noted in his diary.53
In June that year Evelyn went to Spain with Douglas Woodruff to attend a centenary celebration of ‘a Thomist philosopher whose name escapes me’ (Francisco de Vitoria), the inspiration for his novella Scott-King’s Modern Europe, arriving back on 2 July two days after Laura had given birth to their sixth (fifth surviving) child, James.
At the end of that year Duckworth published a compilation of Evelyn’s travel writing, When the Going Was Good, with a preface promising that ‘my own travelling days are over’. However there would soon be more expeditions, including to Scandinavia the next year to write two travel pieces for The Daily Telegraph, and several visits to the United States. The first of these took place in early 1947 after Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer offered an all-expenses-paid trip for himself and Laura to Hollywood to discuss a possible film treatment of Brideshead Revisited. The handsome terms that Peters negotiated on Evelyn’s behalf were that he would be paid $2,000 (more than $20,000 in today’s money) a week throughout their stay, which in the end lasted over two months, with the promise of an eventual $140,000 ($1.5 million) if a film deal was agreed, minus whatever MGM had already spent.
Peters was understandably nervous at the prospect of Evelyn’s visit given his frequently declared hostility to ‘the bloody yanks’, who embodied so much of what he hated about the modern world. In February 1946 Evelyn had written to Maimie Lygon: ‘My book has been a great success in the United States which is upsetting because I thought it in good taste before and now I know it can’t be.’54 Worse than the popular applause was the fan mail that came in its wake. ‘I have momentarily become an object of curiosity to Americans,’ he wrote in an article that spring for Life magazine, ‘and I find that they believe
that my friendship and confidence are included in the price of my book.’ Some of the correspondence was not so friendly: ‘An offensive letter from a female American Catholic,’ Evelyn noted in his diary in March. ‘I returned it to her husband with the note: “I shall be grateful if you will use whatever disciplinary means are customary in your country to refrain your wife from writing impertinent letters to men she does not know.” ’55
The Life piece gave Evelyn the opportunity of ‘answering collectively all the inquiries I have received’, but he also used it as a wider statement of his artistic aims and to respond to a few of the more pointed criticisms, including the charge of snobbery. ‘Class-consciousness, particularly in England, has been so much inflamed nowadays that to mention a nobleman is like mentioning a prostitute sixty years ago. The new prudes say, “No doubt such people do exist but we would sooner not hear about them.” I reserve the right to deal with the kind of people I know best.’56
Before Evelyn set off for America, Peters warned him from New York: ‘I must tell you that you have the reputation here – both at M.G.M. and everywhere else – of being a difficult, tetchy, irritating and rude customer. I hope you will surprise and confound them all by behaving like an 18th century ambassador from the Court of St. James’s. They are children; and they should receive the tolerance and understanding that you show to children. You would (I hope, will) be surprised by the result.’57 Evelyn replied calmly that ‘I mean to do business with the Californian savages if it is possible … I am sure Matson [Evelyn’s New York agent] and his fellow countrymen are, as you say, just little boys at heart, but I believe little boys should be very frequently whipped and sent to bed supperless.’58