Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  During the 1948 American trip Evelyn also renewed what was to become a lifelong friendship with Anne Fremantle, another convert and now leading Catholic intellectual whom he had known slightly in the 1920s and was reputedly the only woman his old tutor Mr Cruttwell ever proposed to. After plying Anne with caviar and ‘comfortable amounts of Bristol Cream’ over Sunday lunch, Evelyn described her to Laura as ‘very nice’, yet entirely failed to understand her decision to become an American citizen, ‘with full consent deliberately committing this horrid act’.98 Evelyn’s brother Alec, who was by then living apart from Joan and spending much of his time in New York, was himself also on the point of taking this incomprehensible step – he became a US ‘resident alien’ in 1950 – and when he called on Evelyn at his hotel later the same day Evelyn told Laura he was ‘greatly taken up with some woman, dressed with inappropriate gaiety, talking in an unusual & unbecoming drawl. Then I felt so ill & sad I went to bed without any dinner.’99

  Evelyn returned to America early in 1949, this time with Laura, to give a series of lectures on ‘Three Vital Writers’, G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox and Graham Greene, returning home at the end of March. ‘I must say I’ve seen enough of USA to last me fifty years,’ he wrote to Nancy when he got back home. ‘It is very degrading to be constantly in the company of people you have to “make allowances for”.’100 But after his 6,000-word article ‘The American Epoch in the Catholic Church’ eventually appeared in Life magazine that autumn, there was yet more demand for Evelyn among American Catholics and in the autumn of 1950 he went there again, his arrival coinciding with the publication of Helena, which he had eventually finished that spring, some five years after starting it. Evelyn always maintained that this was by far his best book, yet while he was in New York being lavishly entertained yet again by the Luces, an anonymous reviewer in Henry Luce’s Time magazine remarked that Evelyn’s ‘sky-blue prose’ had on this occasion gone ‘purple with emotion’. The critical reaction was no better in England and Evelyn later told Christopher Sykes that the book’s reception was ‘the greatest disappointment of his whole literary life’.101

  * Henry Yorke/Green’s most recent novel, Loving, published two months before Brideshead, was also about the country house in decline yet so different in perspective that Evelyn privately described it as an ‘obscene book about domestic servants’ and lamented that his friend had become a ‘fierce proletarian convert’. 31 March 1945; EWD, p. 624; EW to Patrick Kinross, 1 August 1945; AWA.

  * Evelyn never voted himself, explaining: ‘I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants.’ The Spectator, 2 October 1959; EAR, p. 537.

  * Evelyn was also an obliging writer of prefaces to lesser known writers whom he admired, including to Eric Newby’s Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) and to Christie Lawrence’s neglected masterpiece, Irregular Adventure (1947), recounting the exploits of this ‘highly individualistic’ former comrade of Evelyn’s in No 8 Commando after he was captured on Crete in 1941. ‘No one could ask for a better thriller,’ Evelyn declared in his introduction, and Lawrence’s adventures ‘should bring encouragement to all who may be in danger of doubting whether knight-errantry is still possible in the conditions of modern war’.

  21

  Off My Rocker

  Three months earlier, on 11 July 1950, Laura had given birth to their seventh and last child, Septimus. Shortly afterwards Evelyn went to stay at Pixton for the boy’s christening but fled as soon as he heard that Laura’s brother Auberon was also on his way. ‘I think the mixture of all the children & him would be intolerable to you,’ wrote Laura after Evelyn had gone, ‘& even though I know you would be polite to him I know I should be in a fever & miserable, feeling that things were not right.’1 Alone at Piers Court with nothing much to do after finishing Helena, Evelyn soon grew bored and listless. ‘I miss you unendurably & go whistling about the house & fields never hearing an answer,’ he wrote to Laura. ‘Let me know if Auberon looks like going and I will come quick.’2

  Evelyn missed Laura whenever he was away from her for any length of time, his love constantly underpinned by the feeling that she was perhaps the only person who was entirely unafraid of him and able to call him to order. He may have made occasional sharp remarks about her eccentric housekeeping arrangements or dishevelled dress sense, but on the whole they appeared to be remarkably happy together, so unalike in so many ways yet crucially sharing a very similar sense of humour – ‘a very peculiar sense of humour,’ as Gilbert Pinfold’s tormentors described it.

  Laura was essentially a very private person, content to see no one beyond her family and a few local farming folk, and equally content to let her more gregarious husband disappear periodically up to London to see his friends. Whenever they were both at Piers Court they did the crossword together (he apparently not minding that she was noticeably better at it than he was) but otherwise got on with their own thing, he writing in the library or pottering in the garden or going for long walks or taking in a matinee at Dursley cinema, she looking after her cows. ‘She never had more than six or seven of them,’ recalled her son Auberon, ‘but she loved them extravagantly, as other women love their dogs or, so I have been told, their children.’3

  In keeping with his own anarchic tendencies, Evelyn was inclined to let his children do as they pleased when they were young so long as they did not disturb his tranquillity in the library. Much of Bron’s early childhood was thus spent prowling about the woods around Piers Court with an assortment of weaponry or conducting chemistry experiments in a ‘lab’ at the back of the house with explosive substances liberally procured by his father. At Downside, Bron once took a confiscated air pistol from the headmaster’s desk and shot another boy in the leg, maintaining afterwards that he had intended only to stir up the gravel by the boy’s feet.4 He held the school record of fourteen beatings in a single term.

  When Randolph Churchill asked the Waughs to stay in 1953, Evelyn replied: ‘Laura, who, alas, will be busy with farm and children all summer, sends her love and regretfully declines your kind invitation. The boy Auberon Alexander is available for little Winston’s entertainment. His chief interest is shooting sitting birds with an airgun and making awful smells with chemicals. He is devoid of culture but cheerful and greedy for highly peppered foods. If not watched closely he smokes and drinks. Shall I bring him for the first weekend of August?’5

  As soon as they were at boarding school the children were allowed through the green baize doors to have lunch with their parents in the dining room – ‘very gloomy occasions’, according to Bron6 – and to mark the end of each school holidays there was also a rather jollier family dinner party, waited on by Ellwood, at which they all gave little speeches beginning ‘Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking’. In 1956 Evelyn wrote to Bron at Downside: ‘I am delighted to hear that, unaccustomed as you are to public speaking, you have won the debating prize and are going to Sherborne with the team.’7

  As theatrical as his own father in many respects, Evelyn put on white tie and tails for the end-of-holidays dinners, completing the regalia with a display of his military medals. His own speech, before they all moved through for charades and dumb crambo, was invariably ‘some variation on the theme of how delighted he was that the holidays were over and his children were going back to school’, as Bron recalled.8 As it was clear that in this instance he was not being funny, his children could find his remarks quite hurtful, and although their devotion increased as they grew older, in early childhood they felt largely indifferent towards their father: ‘We held him in awe, certainly,’ wrote Bron, ‘but not in much affection at this stage.’9

  Evelyn made no secret of how bored he often was by his children when they were young, just as he was whenever he encountered anyone unable to respond intelligently or at least humorously to what he had to say. However there was an endearing eccentricity about his letters to them when they were at school, usually gossipy, often subversive but almost always affectionate, if
idiosyncratically so. When Meg wrote pointing out that the other girls had all been sent Easter eggs by their parents, Evelyn replied: ‘I won’t send you an Easter egg. You must nibble bits off the other girls’. Perhaps as a reward for your great unselfishness I will send you a little book of devotion instead.’10 As Bron prepared to celebrate his fifteenth birthday at Downside in 1954, Evelyn sounded a rare note of censure: ‘May your sixteenth year start prudently. Give up this nonsense of drinking beer and smoking with local poachers. Eat heavily. Wash down crumpets and cakes with refreshing cups of tea. Keep good company.’11

  Of all his children, the one generally reckoned to have come off worst from Evelyn’s occasional bullying was his middle son James, who had the misfortune to be continually compared with his brother Septimus, the youngest of the family by four years and thus doted on by both parents. ‘Your brother James is home dull as ditchwater,’ Evelyn wrote to Teresa in 1964, ‘your brother Septimus bright as a button.’ At one stage Evelyn made James tell a new joke every day in order to remedy what he saw as his defective sense of humour. ‘And now my son will tell an amusing story,’ Evelyn would announce if there were guests for dinner. Yet despite such ordeals James remembers his childhood as extremely free and on the whole ‘very happy’, and he cheerfully confesses to have been left with no lasting sense of maltreatment. The youngest three were always ‘less privileged’, he recalls, ‘but we were part of a tribe so it didn’t seem to matter’. Septimus, meanwhile, grew up in awe of his father but ‘less from fear than from a desire not appear foolish in front of him’. His abiding impression was of ‘a gentle melancholic man whose chief pleasure lay in parodying his condition’. As his father grew older, Septimus felt increasingly protective of him. When the house filled with children, Evelyn would wander around chanting: ‘Oh the hell of it, Oh the smell of it, Oh the hell of the family life …’12

  * * *

  Evelyn continued to travel far afield during the 1950s, partly as an antidote to the depression that descended on him in winter, particularly at Christmas, which he always found a uniquely dispiriting time of year. In January 1951 he took Christopher Sykes on a tour of the Holy Land under the renewed patronage of Henry Luce, whose wife had enjoyed Helena even if most critics had not. As part of the bargain, Evelyn wrote a long article for Luce’s Life magazine, which later became a short book, The Holy Places, published in 1952 by Ian Fleming’s Queen Anne Press, with an extra essay on ‘St Helena Empress’. By the summer of 1951, Evelyn had returned to fiction and told Graham Greene that he was writing ‘an interminable novel about army life, obsessed by memories of military dialogue’.13

  Greene was about to visit Piers Court with his mistress Catherine Walston, a beautiful and vivacious American-born Catholic convert whom Evelyn had known since before she and Greene became ‘chums’ (as Evelyn put it) and always liked. Mrs Walston was married with five children and although she told Evelyn that he had ‘always been so good to and about us’,14 she had presumably got wind of his occasional splenetic outbursts against adulterers and wrote to Evelyn beforehand to check that her coming to stay would not ‘embarrass’ him in any way. Evelyn replied: ‘Please believe that I am far too depressed by my own odious, if unromantic, sins to have any concern for other people’s. For me it would be a delight to welcome you here.’15 The visit was a great success and it was largely thanks to her that Evelyn saw much more of Greene over the next few years, cementing a close friendship that constantly defied their countless differences and disagreements.

  The book that Evelyn was working on at the time of Greene’s 1951 visit was Men at Arms, the first of his Sword of Honour trilogy based on his experiences in the Second World War, more closely autobiographical than any of his work to date and, like Brideshead Revisited, having the renewal of Catholic faith as its overall theme. Sword of Honour ranks as one of the finest works of fiction produced by the war, however Men at Arms had a rather mixed reception on its first publication in September 1952. The most appreciative review appeared in Luce’s Time magazine, whose anonymous critic compared the experience of reading the novel to ‘hearing a full keyboard used by a pianist who has hitherto confined himself to a single octave’ and predicted that ‘if his trilogy continues as well as it has begun, it will be the best British novel of World War II’.16

  Evelyn managed to miss the dreaded family Christmas that year by taking himself off on a pilgrimage to Goa, where the relics of the great Jesuit missionary St Francis Xavier were being revealed for the last time on the 400th anniversary of his death: ‘One brown stump of toe emerging from white wrapping,’ Evelyn noted approvingly. ‘Body fully vested, one grey forearm and hand, and grey clay-like skull visible.’17 If this brings to mind the morticians at Forest Lawn, here Evelyn’s attitude was strictly reverential and he postponed his own veneration until he could make it more privately. ‘India is very like Stinkers,’ he wrote home to Laura, who stayed behind with the children. ‘There are cows wandering in all the gardens eating all the flowers. All the lower orders call me “master” which I find very familiar.’18 When he got back he told Nancy that Goa had been ‘heaven’, the southern temples ‘fascinating and exhilarating’, the Indians ‘more servile than most foreigners’. ‘I can only bear intimacy really,’ he added, ‘& after that formality or servility. The horrible thing is familiarity.’19

  * * *

  In the late spring of 1953, buoyed by the news that Men at Arms had won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Evelyn published Love Among the Ruins, a strange dystopian ‘romance of the near future’ which he had written the previous year. As usual he sent a special edition of this slim volume to friends, whose opinions he always valued far more than those of professional critics. ‘Ta muchly, ole man, for your very generous present,’ replied John Betjeman. ‘It could not have come at a more appropriate moment, for only last Sunday I visited Stevenage New Town in the rainy afternoon. It was exactly like your book. Three miles of Lionel Brett-style prefabs interrupted by Hugh Casson blocks of flats and two shopping arcades and concrete lampposts throughout and no trees, only muddy Hertfordshire inclines. I saw through the vast, unprivate ground floor window of a house, a grey-faced woman washing up. My goodness, it was terrifying. And the kiddies’ scooters lying out in the rain on the streets and a big vita-glass school on stilts.’20

  In the same way that their religious differences caused friction between Evelyn and Betjeman, their mutual abhorrence of modern architecture and town planning served as a strong bond, as did their shared liking for Gothic Revival decoration and furniture, although Evelyn’s tastes were if anything rather bolder in this regard. For Evelyn’s fiftieth birthday in October 1953 Betjeman gave him an elaborate – and as it turned out rather valuable – wash-hand stand that he had found in a junk shop in Lincoln. The stand was designed by William Burges, a follower of Pugin, whose freakish flourishes Betjeman suggested rendered people ‘punch-drunk’, and he could have been forgiven for thinking that his gift had had just that effect on his friend. ‘Well, my dear fellow,’ Evelyn wrote thanking him, ‘all I can say is I am bowled over. What a present!’21*

  But Evelyn’s dizzy delight soon dissolved when the washstand arrived at Stinchcombe without one of the parts that he so vividly recalled seeing at the home of Patrick Kinross who had stored it temporarily for him in London. ‘Sorry to be a bore,’ Evelyn wrote to Kinross. ‘The Betjeman Benefaction has arrived minus an essential organ – the serpentine bronze pipe which led from the dragon’s mouth to the basin. I am making a row with Pickfords. Can you testify that it left your house intact?’22 He also wrote to Betjeman, including a sketch of what he meant, but Betjeman had not the faintest idea what he was on about. ‘Oh no, old boy,’ he replied. ‘There was never a pipe from the tap to the basin such as you envisaged.’23 Evelyn wrote back just after New Year: ‘I must see an alienist. These delusions are becoming more frequent.’24

  Friends had for some time noticed that Evelyn was not quite himself. In the spring of 1952 he
had asked Christopher Sykes if he would go with him to Sicily, but Sykes this time declined, explaining later: ‘I had noticed a change coming over Evelyn lately. He was becoming more arrogant, more quarrelsome, and indulged his horrible delight in needling on sensitive spots more freely than usual … when we did meet by chance he was invariably unpleasant.’25 Evelyn had long had a reputation for going a bit far, but now his behaviour seemed somehow even more demonic than before. In November 1952 Barbara Skelton, the celebrated femme fatale then married to Cyril Connolly, recorded Evelyn’s wild performance at a party of Ann Fleming’s (shortly after her divorce from Lord Rothermere and subsequent marriage to Ian Fleming), ‘being rude to everybody, pretending he didn’t know who Rosamond Lehmann was when she rushed up to greet him with open arms. Waugh criticised Alan Ross’s beard and, when Cecil Beaton approached him when he was sitting on the sofa with Jennifer Ross, Waugh exclaimed, “Here’s someone who can tell us all about buggery!” He then had to be carried into a taxi at three in the morning.’26

  Though capable of periods of abstinence, particularly during Lent, Evelyn continued to drink prodigiously, especially during expeditions to London when even in middle age he was regularly sick before retiring to bed and not infrequently felt obliged to send flowers the next day to hostesses whose guests he had offended, occasionally enlisting the help of friends to atone for his gravest indiscretions. After one spree Evelyn paid a morning call to Diana Cooper, ‘portly as an alderman,’ as she reported to her son John Julius, ‘dressed in loud and shapeless checks. He’d been obstreperous the night before and broken his host’s decanters, so I had to dedicate an hour of my brief time to buying amendes.’27