by Philip Eade
The hangovers when he finally made it back to Piers Court might last several days, the symptoms invariably ‘insomnia, a disordered stomach, weakness at the knees, a trembling hand which becomes evident when I attempt to use a pen’.28 ‘I get so painfully drunk whenever I go there,’ he wrote to Nancy after a typical visit to London, ‘(Champagne, the shortest road out of Welfaria) and nowadays it is not a matter of a headache and an aspirin but of complete collapse, with some clear indications of incipient lunacy. I think I am jolly near being mad & need very careful treatment if I am to survive another decade without the strait straight? jacket.’29
All the long lunches and late-night carousing were now taking their toll. Long gone were the days when he felt fit enough to ride to hounds. Shortly after the war, when he went to stay with the Betjemans, he told Penelope he felt too old even to ride any more though he was still in his early forties. Even the various earth-moving operations that used to obsess him in the garden were becoming too strenuous. By 1953 he was spending much of his time in an armchair and feeling increasingly unwell: liverish, lethargic, and suffering intermittently from gout, arthritis, rheumatism and back pain. Like his fictional alter ego Gilbert Pinfold he ‘ate less, drank more, and grew corpulent’. He also slept badly. If in the midst of writing something he might ‘find the sentences he had written during the day running in his head, the words shifting and changing colour kaleidoscopically, so that he would again and again climb out of bed, pad down to the library, make a minute correction, return to his room, lie in the dark dazzled by the pattern of vocables until obliged once more to descend to the manuscript’.30
He developed the habit of getting up in the early hours to shave, having a theory that his smooth face on the smooth pillow induced sleep. But otherwise he relied on a cocktail of chloral and bromide to provide him with the ‘six or seven hours of insensibility’ he felt he needed to ‘face another idle day with something approaching jauntiness’.31 But the more resistant he became to the sleeping drugs, which he also used as a painkiller during the day for his rheumatism, the more recklessly he increased the dose, with the result that he began to experience delusions and a memory that even before the Burges washstand episode he told Betjeman was ‘not at all hazy – just sharp, detailed and dead wrong’.32
During the second half of 1953, Evelyn was also haunted by two interviews he did for the BBC. The first of these, which according to Auberon Waugh ‘eventually drove my father mad’,33 was for broadcast on the Overseas Service and conducted by a man named Stephen Black in the library at Piers Court in August. Thirteen-year-old Bron listened to it all outside in the recording van and commented afterwards that the interviewer did not seem to like his father very much.34 In the novel, Gilbert Pinfold has a similarly disagreeable experience at the hands of ‘Angel’ and his team, and when their BBC van disappears down the drive one of Mr Pinfold’s children remarks, ‘You didn’t like those people much, did you, papa?’35 But however little Evelyn liked them, for a decent enough fee he was prepared to go through it all again. Hence a few months later he was interviewed for the BBC Home Service’s Frankly Speaking programme in London, where he was faced by three interviewers, including the same Mr Black. The questions this time were even less friendly, although Evelyn emerged from it with far more credit than his relentlessly po-faced and police-like interrogators. Having been asked about capital punishment and declared that he was in favour of it ‘for an enormous number of offences’, he was pressed on whether he would be prepared to carry out the executions himself. ‘Do you mean actually do the hanging?’ asked Evelyn. ‘I should think it’s very odd to choose a novelist for such tasks.’
Later Evelyn was asked ‘in what respect do you as a human being feel that you have primarily failed?’, to which he replied: ‘I’ve never learnt French well, and I’ve never learned any other language at all. I’ve forgotten most of my classics; I can’t often remember people’s faces in the streets, and I don’t like music. Those are very grave failings.’
‘But no others you’re conscious of?’
‘Those are the ones that worry me most.’36
* * *
On New Year’s Day 1954 the husband of the woman Evelyn loved more than any other besides Laura died at sea en route to Jamaica. In certain respects, Duff Cooper (who had been created Viscount Norwich in 1952) was quite similar to Evelyn, prone at times to extreme irascibility and uncontrollable rudeness, however as Evelyn had told Diana the previous summer, ‘Duff and I have never hit it off.’37
There had been some spectacular set-tos over the years, most recently in April 1953 when Evelyn arrived at the Coopers’ chateau at Chantilly ‘plastered’ after drinking a bottle of Burgundy and some brandy on the train, then set about baiting another guest and later said something offensive about Mountbatten at dinner, prompting an explosion from Duff: ‘How dare a common little man like you, who happens to have written one or two moderately amusing novels, criticize that great patriot and gentleman? Leave my house at once!’38
After some subsequent frank exchanges, the two men eventually made up (‘I have apologised to Norwich,’ Evelyn told Diana, ‘and he has accepted my apology, so that is O.K.’)39 but not before Diana had accused Evelyn of being unable to forgive or forget, and Evelyn had fired off one of his more wounding salvos at her: ‘I am very sorry to hear that Duff was surprised and grieved to learn that I have detested him for 23 years. I must have nicer manners than people normally credit me with.’40
Duff was already unwell by this time, having suffered his first serious haemorrhage in May, a month after the great row at Chantilly, and the fateful trip at the end of the year had been planned with the idea of completing his convalescence. Even as they boarded Duff was feeling unwell and Diana tried in vain to persuade him that they ought to disembark before leaving Southampton. The next day at noon, New Year’s Eve, ‘it happened,’ as Diana later told Cecil Beaton, ‘a rush to the bathroom and a bigger, redder haemorrhage than he’d had before’.41 He might have survived had he been able to get to a hospital, but on board a ship rolling about in heavy seas it was far more difficult to stem the loss of blood, and he died the following day in Vigo Bay at 3.30 p.m.
‘All my prayers are for you and Duff,’ Evelyn wrote to Diana when he heard the next day. ‘If there is any service anywhere that I can do, command it. If my company would be at all comforting, call for me. Believe in my true, deep love.’42 Having flown back with Duff’s body, Diana could not face the funeral at Belvoir Castle on 6 January, and instead remained in London, where Evelyn spent an hour alone with her, finding her ‘wild and witty, full of funny stories’,43 but also hearing a ‘detailed account of Cooper’s death agonies’, as he recorded somewhat coldly in his diary. ‘Not such a quick and clean ending as newspapers gave one to think.’44
* * *
Evelyn was far from well himself at the time, either physically or mentally, and the next month he set off for what was becoming his annual winter getaway, this time taking ship for Ceylon, the start of the terrifying voyage later chronicled in his avowedly autobiographical novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Before leaving he had told Laura that he thought all the chloral might have caused ‘problems with my nut’ and it can scarcely have reassured her to get a letter from Cape St Vincent proposing to ‘come home & lead a luny bin life for a while’.
‘It was at 50 that Rossetti’s chloral taking involved him in attempted suicide,’ Evelyn added cheerfully, ‘part blindness & part paralysis. We will avoid all that … To add to my balminess there are intermittent bits of 3rd Programme talks played in private cabin and two mentioned me very faintly and my p.m. [persecution mania] took it for other passengers whispering about me.’45
The other passengers had already noticed that Evelyn was behaving peculiarly, talking to the table lamps in the dining room and to the toast rack at breakfast, and repeatedly knocking on the cabin door below his and asking for ‘Miss Margaret Black’. During a small dance on board, Evelyn c
omplained that the music was driving him mad, and on another occasion he was seen crouching at the top of a flight of stairs in his pyjamas and then suddenly hurling a stool at an imaginary target. When they reached Port Said the captain persuaded him to disembark, and accompany a fellow passenger by car to Cairo. From there Evelyn wrote to Laura to say that he was ‘resolved never to go anywhere without you again’, and that he had been the victim of an experiment in telepathy ‘real and true. A trick the existentialists invented – half mesmerism – which is most alarming when applied without warning or to a sick man.’46
From Cairo Evelyn flew on to Colombo, where he despatched another barking letter to Laura and one to Diana Cooper describing ‘a group of psychologists a thousand miles away who read every word I write over my shoulder. As I write this I can hear their odious voices repeating it word for word … It began with an elaborate series of practical jokes during which I was convinced I was insane. My sufferings were exquisite but now I know that it is merely a trick of telepathy.’47
Laura had grown increasingly alarmed by Evelyn’s letters and after the one from Cairo she asked their neighbour Jack Donaldson, one of the few locals whom Evelyn got on with, if he would go with her to Colombo to help bring Evelyn home. But before they could get the necessary injections, Evelyn was on his way back and Laura travelled up to the Hyde Park Hotel in London to meet him.
Speaking in a ‘high, unrecognizable squeak’,48 Evelyn began telling Laura the whole story of how he had been tormented on the voyage by the same Mr Black from the BBC who had recently interviewed him and chanced to be on board with his whole family, all of whom had used the powers of telepathy described in his letters to persecute him; only the daughter had shown any mercy. Evelyn mentioned to Laura that they both knew this Miss Black, having met her with a neighbour of theirs in Gloucestershire to whom she was engaged. ‘But Evelyn,’ Laura interrupted, suddenly twigging who he meant, ‘her name wasn’t Black, it was So-and-So, and she had nothing to do with the BBC man.’49 Evelyn immediately realised that Laura was right and when she subsequently telephoned the BBC she was able to establish that Mr Black could not have been on Evelyn’s voyage either as he had been ill in hospital for some weeks. Partially restored to his senses by this, Evelyn agreed that Laura should now summon their friend Father Philip Caraman, editor of the Jesuit periodical the Month for which Evelyn wrote. When Caraman arrived at about 7.30 p.m. he was greeted by Evelyn leaning across the dining-room table and pleading to be exorcised of the devils that were tormenting him. Evelyn also passed on some uncomplimentary remarks the voices had made about Caraman, and when Evelyn briefly left the table, the priest asked Laura whether his behaviour might be part of an elaborate joke of the sort he liked to play. Caraman promptly rang his friend Eric Strauss, an eminent Catholic psychiatrist, who came immediately and concluded that Evelyn had most likely been poisoned by his sleeping drugs, but then told him that the first thing he needed was a good night’s sleep. He therefore wrote out a prescription for an alternative sedative, the vinegary-smelling paraldehyde which Evelyn would continue taking for the rest of his life despite lamenting that it gave him only four hours’ sleep and ‘spoils my zest for wine’.50 A thorough check-up by a London physician later confirmed that Evelyn’s hallucinations were indeed due to bromide poisoning, and after a few good nights’ sleep he was back to normal.
Evelyn did not always seem to enjoy being the object of amusement, however in this instance, once the cause had been ascertained, he was eager to tell everyone about his spell of lunacy, retrospectively at least relishing the strangeness of the whole experience. ‘I have been quite mad,’51 he wrote to Diana, explaining his deranged letter to her from Ceylon; to Nancy Mitford, ‘I’ve been suffering from a sharp but brief attack of insanity.’52* And to Cyril Connolly: ‘I have had my first attack of insanity – quite a sharp one.’53 When Evelyn met Christopher Hollis at Downside and was asked how he had been keeping, he replied: ‘Been mad! Absolutely mad. Clean off my onion!’54
Not the least satisfying aspect of the whole episode was that it provided Evelyn with ‘a hamper to be unpacked of fresh, rich experiences’, from which to write what was to be his last comic novel. He began working on it after finishing Officers and Gentlemen, the second in the Sword of Honour war trilogy, which also coincided with the death of his mother in December at the age of eighty-four. ‘Mrs Yaxley [her maid] found her dead in her chair after tea,’ Evelyn wrote to his daughter Meg. ‘I am afraid you will always remember her as very old & feeble. I wish you had known her when she was young and active.’55 To Nancy Mitford he wrote that it was a ‘happy release’ for his mother who had grown tired of being so dependent ‘but it fills me with regret for a lifetime of failure in affection & attention’.56
Evelyn began what he was soon calling his ‘barmy book’ early in the new year while on a restorative trip to Jamaica. He spent the first fortnight writing at a plantation house belonging to his old friend Perry Brownlow, recently widowed, remarried and drinking more than ever. Though indebted to Perry for so much hospitality over the years, Evelyn nevertheless found it ‘a great intellectual strain to find words simple enough to converse with them. They are indeed a grisly household, gin from ten-thirty on … The women concentrate on a smooth sunburn and hairless bronzed shanks. The men lounge and yawn or play cards … There was a lady here who went to sleep on a mattress in a red bathing dress and all the vultures thought she was dead and bloody and tried to eat her.’57 It was a relief to move on to the Flemings at Goldeneye, where Ian (aka ‘Thunderbird’) was busy working on Diamonds are Forever, ‘an inspiring hive of industry & health’, Evelyn wrote afterwards to Ann.58
Evelyn remained intermittently at work on The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold for the next two years. ‘I am full in the middle of writing an account of my going off my rocker,’59 he told Daphne Fielding in October 1956. Published in 1957, the novel included some of his most candid passages of self-revelation, but although the self-portrait he drew of ‘the Artist in Middle Age’ was typically funny, subtle and nuanced it effectively cemented his reputation as a grumpy symbol of reaction who abhors ‘plastics, Picasso, sun bathing and jazz – everything, in fact, that had happened in his own lifetime’.
[Mr Pinfold] wished no one ill, but he looked at the world sub specie aeternitatis and he found it flat as a map; except when, rather often, personal annoyance intruded. Then he would come tumbling from his exalted point of observation.
Shocked by a bad bottle of wine, an impertinent stranger or a fault in syntax, his mind like a cinema-camera trucked furiously forward to confront the offending object close-up with glaring lens; with the eyes of a drill sergeant inspecting an awkward squad, bulging with wrath that was half-facetious.
He was neither a scholar nor a regular soldier; the part for which he cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously, before his children and his cronies, before it came to dominate his whole outward personality. When he ceased to be alone, when he swung into his club or stumped up the nursery stairs, he left half of himself behind and the other half swelled to fill its place. He offered the world a front of pomposity* mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright, and antiquated as a cuirass.60
Besides a few sharply dissenting voices, most critics considered The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold to be one of Evelyn’s finest works. Writing in the New Statesman, John Raymond hailed Evelyn as ‘the only major writer in English whose work reveals any genuine signs of development’ and said that in reverting to his earliest manner he had ‘given us one of his wittiest, most humane entertainments’.61 Philip Toynbee in The Observer confessed to being no great admirer of what he saw as the ‘mannered precision’ of Evelyn as a stylist, yet concluded that ‘these are the self-revelations of a remarkably honest and brave man who has allowed us to see that he is a likeable one’.62
* When the young architectural historian Mark Girouard visited Piers Court in 1955 and was shown to his be
droom, he exclaimed ‘Burges by God!’ when he saw the wash-hand stand. ‘Not bad,’ wrote Evelyn to Betjeman. EW to IB, 4 July 1955, AWA
* Nancy had seen Evelyn’s breakdown coming in December, telling Raymond Mortimer: ‘He might go mad – madder at least.’ (12 December 1953; cited in Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh, p. 558.)
* ‘I have grown stouter and worse tempered and more pompous,’ Evelyn told Diana Cooper in 1949. ‘Women don’t understand pomposity. It is nearly always an absolutely private joke – one against the world. The last line of defense.’ 21 December 1949; MWMS, p. 105.
22
Suitably Sequestered
Evelyn had never quite rediscovered his love for Piers Court after returning to live there at the end of the war and had lately grown restless. As his grandson observes: ‘He enjoyed making, decorating and improving houses, but once these things were done he lost interest.’1 He was also alarmed by the imminent threat of development around the local town of Dursley, two miles away, but the final straw came in June 1955 when the Daily Express journalist Nancy Spain turned up uninvited on his doorstep one evening shortly before dinner.
An exuberant early television ‘personality’ known for her mannish clothes and proudly lesbian love life* – numbering Marlene Dietrich among her various girlfriends – Miss Spain was also ‘a lively, if not very literary, book critic’,2 as her obituary put it when she died in a plane crash a decade later, and a ‘special’ feature writer known for her stunts. She had telephoned Piers Court earlier in the day to ask if she and her companion, Lord Noel-Buxton, might come and see Evelyn and been firmly told by Laura that her husband was ‘not at home to the Daily Express’.3 They came nonetheless, and when Evelyn asked why they had ignored the sign at the gate stipulating ‘No Admittance on Business’, Lord Noel-Buxton, a tall, timid eccentric briefly on the staff of Farmers’ Weekly and occasionally in the news for attempting to wade across rivers, spluttered: ‘I’m not on business. I’m a member of the House of Lords.’4