Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  But his condition continued to fluctuate: ‘The news of him is indecisive,’ Evelyn wrote to Father Aelred in October. ‘He has been moved back and forth between three hospitals and is now at the Westminster. Sir Somebody Something can’t make up his mind when to operate.’ He added that the ‘pampering’ Bron was getting was ‘inevitable but regrettable, just when the regiment was making a man of him. Please include in your prayers for his physical welfare prayers for his strength of character, when you are so good as to pray for him.’43 Evelyn wrote along similar lines to Bron’s godmother Maimie Lygon, saying that his character was being undermined by ‘well disposed people sitting round his bed and satisfying his every whim … Perhaps you will go & beat him & rob him and undo all the bad work of others.’44

  When Bron turned twenty that November, Evelyn wrote to him: ‘Many happier returns of the day. It has been a year of triumph and disaster, has it not? I am sure you feel very much more than a year older. To have looked into the throat of death at 19 is an experience not to be sneered at.’ In the same letter he encouraged him to give up the idea of reading English at Oxford: ‘It is a fatal school for anyone who may, as I hope you will, become a writer … But you are master of your fate and captain of your soul now you are out of your teens.’45

  Bron finally left hospital the following March. ‘At about this time,’ he later wrote, ‘I began to be quite fond of my father, never having liked him much in childhood or early youth. As I prepared to leave home and set up my own establishments elsewhere he became more tolerant of my various failings, and in the last five years of his life we enjoyed a distinct cordiality.’46

  If Evelyn’s relations with his eldest son had been strained at times, those with his middle daughter Margaret occasionally bordered on a love affair. Known in the family as Meg, and by Evelyn variously as ‘pig’, ‘disgusting hog’ and ‘sweet swine’, Margaret had been his ‘eye-apple’ ever since she was about five and prematurely allowed to eat in the dining room to save her from a violent nanny. Before sending her to boarding school aged nine, Evelyn described her to the headmistress as ‘very pretty, very stupid, with abounding charm’.47 She was soon homesick and it was while spending the summer term of 1953 being educated at home by Evelyn that she became ‘his official favourite’, as she later recalled, ‘a position neither resented nor sought by my siblings and one which carried with it the risks of disproportionate disfavour as well as the advantages of privilege’.48

  The previous year Evelyn had written to Ann Fleming: ‘My sexual passion for my ten year old daughter is obsessive, I wonder if you’ll come to feel this way about your son. I can’t keep my hands off her.’49 If this was most likely a provacative joke, designed to shock his proudly unshockable friend, Evelyn’s bond with Meg was clearly intense and became increasingly so as a result of her unhappiness at school. ‘When we meet you must tell me whether you are really unhappy or merely giving way to a silly mood. I love you & will not let you be really unhappy if I can prevent it … darling little girl.’50

  Defiant, capricious and intermittently lazy as a teenager, Meg was often in trouble at St Mary’s Ascot. Evelyn was invariably reassuring, if not uncritically so. ‘Darling Meg,’ he wrote shortly before her fifteenth birthday, ‘I am sorry you are in hot water. You do not have to tell me that you have not done anything really wicked. I know my pig. I am absolutely confident that you will never be dishonourable, impure or cruel … the part of your letter I don’t like at all is when you say the nuns “hate” you. That is rubbish. And when you run down girls who behave better than you. That is mean. Chuck it, Meg … You are loved far beyond your deserts, especially by your Papa.’51

  Eventually Meg and the school had decided they had enough of one another and in 1958, aged 15, a few months before Bron’s accident, she had returned home again to be taught by Evelyn. ‘Bron has got his commission in the Blues,’ Evelyn wrote to Diana Cooper at the time, ‘– many sons of old Blues failed. He must have some guts. He succeeds. Scholarship at the House [Christ Church, Oxford] and now this. But he’s a queer morose boy, sloping round the woods with a gun alone or playing light opera on his gramophone. Teresa has had a dazzling term academically. But Meg for me anytime though she’s jolly fat at the moment and eats an abnormal amount.’52

  To Maime Lygon later that year Evelyn described Meg as ‘the joy of my heart, perhaps what you were to Boom only she does not bring me cocktails in my bath’.53 That Christmas, with Bron still in hospital in London, Evelyn seized the opportunity to spend three days at the Hyde Park Hotel with Meg. ‘Our ostensible reason,’ he told Ann Fleming, ‘is to protect Bron from the worst of the Welfare festivities when he fears a Saturnalia when all the nurses dress up as surgeons and the surgeons as nurses and sing carols. My motive is to escape the Saturnalia at home, Margaret’s to visit the theatre and the Cathedral. It will be easier to keep her sober when I have my eye directly on her.’54

  * * *

  Evelyn finally finished his Knox biography in early January 1959 and a few weeks later set off for his annual winter holiday, this year comprising a two-month tour of Central and East Africa. ‘I have let myself in for crossing the whole of Darkers,’ he wrote to Diana Cooper, ‘and writing a sickening account of it when I get home. Damn.’55 He returned in April feeling greatly rejuvenated and was soon ‘half heartedly writing a travel book of ineffable tedium and triviality’56 to pay for his trip. A Tourist in Africa (1960) is as elegantly written as one might expect and has several very funny passages, however it was fair to say, as Cyril Connolly did, that it was ‘quite the thinnest piece of book-making that Mr Waugh has undertaken’.57

  Of far more importance to Evelyn was the reception of his latest magnum opus, Ronald Knox, which was published by Chapman & Hall in the autumn of 1959. Just before publication his agent Peters had told Evelyn that he would value his copy of Knox above all his books ‘because I suspect that you have put into it more care, thought, time and slogging hard work than into anything else you have written. Certainly it is the most difficult task you have ever undertaken. And certainly it is triumphantly achieved.’58 The critics on the whole agreed, even Graham Greene, who admitted to finding the subject at times ‘repellent’, and the sales greatly exceeded expectations, surpassing 12,000 copies within a month.

  The book was not without inaccuracies, as detailed in a 2,500-word letter to the author from the Archbishop of Westminster, but Evelyn accepted the corrections with good grace and promised to amend the next edition. Rather more embarrassing for him was the identification of someone both he and Knox had carefully disguised in their books as ‘C’, a young Etonian whom Knox had fallen platonically in love with while tutoring him for an Oxford scholarship. ‘The question you asked me about the identity of “C” in Knox,’ Evelyn wrote to Maurice Bowra, ‘has been answered in the newspapers by prize shit Muggeridge, who bluffed the truth out of my aged mother-in-law.’59 The mystery person was none other than the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, quite a scoop for Malcolm Muggeridge in his New Statesman diary and perhaps doubly satisfying (or revenge even) given that two years earlier Evelyn had ostentatiously discarded his ear-trumpet during a speech Muggeridge made at a Foyles’ luncheon given in Evelyn’s honour.

  In January 1960 he set off on another winter jaunt, enjoying ‘a ripping time at the expense of the Daily Mail’60 in Venice and Monte Carlo with Laura, followed almost immediately by a trip with Margaret to Athens to visit his old friend Coote Lygon, who was living there at the time (her family formed a theory that she was a spy), and then Rome, returning to Combe Florey in early March. Two weeks later, for a £250 fee he agreed to appear on Face to Face, the TV interview series which had begun the previous year and already featured an array of luminaries ranging from Carl Jung to King Hussein of Jordan.

  ‘Please make it a condition that all letters addressed to me at BBC are returned to senders marked “address unknown”,’ Evelyn wrote to Peters beforehand. ‘I have been greatly annoyed by readers o
f Pinfold who wish to compare their hallucinations with mine.’61 As his grilling drew nearer he contacted Tom Driberg: ‘I have let myself in for cross-examination on Television by a man named Major Freeman who I am told was a colleague of yours in the Working Class Movement. Do you know anything damaging about him that I can introduce into our conversation if he becomes insolent?’62 But he need not have feared. John Freeman may have been a far shrewder and more penetrating interviewer than Stephen Black, but Evelyn again comfortably had the upper hand, his sharp responses as calm as they were clever and delivered with a gleam in his eyes that suggested only mild bemusement at all the impertinent questions he was being asked to answer. Freeman later described it as his most disappointing interview, perhaps because he was so consistently outmanoeuvred during their exchanges:

  ‘Are you a snob at all?’

  ‘I don’t think.’

  ‘Irritability with your family, with strangers?’

  ‘Absolutely everything. Inanimate objects and people, animals, everything.’

  ‘Have you ever brooded on what appeared to you to be unjust or adverse criticism?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid if someone praises me I think “What an ass”, and if they abuse me I think “What an ass”.’

  ‘And if they say nothing about you at all and take no notice of you?’

  ‘That’s the best I can hope for.’

  ‘You like that when it happens?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why are you appearing in this programme?’

  ‘Poverty. We’ve both been hired to talk in this deliriously happy way.’

  Having spent so much time for so little reward (his advance was £3,000) on the Knox biography, Evelyn had good reason to be worried about money. Beset by punitive taxation and with his Brideshead royalties having long since virtually dried up, he struggled to maintain the standard of living that he had enjoyed before the war. He had let go of Ellwood, the butler, when they moved to Combe Florey and after Giovanni and Maria Manfredi finally left in early 1961 they had only daily help in the house; later that year they acquired ‘an engine for washing plates’ which quickly became ‘an object of worship like a tractor in an early Bolshevist film’.63

  Evelyn was in some ways quite relieved to see the Manfredis go. Besides the fact that Laura no longer had to contend with the ‘nervous annoyances of their tantrums and avarice’,64 as Evelyn saw it, she also had less to occupy her after selling all her beloved cows, another consequence of their reduced circumstances. ‘Laura has at last had to give up her herd of cows and mourns them,’ Evelyn told Diana Cooper that Christmas Eve just past. ‘They cost as much to keep as a troupe of ballet girls and the horrible politicians made a law that one can no longer charge them against income tax.’65

  Evelyn was at the time hard at work on Unconditional Surrender, the final novel in his war trilogy, which he had begun in April 1960 and would take a year to write. His expected earnings from the book were modest, however he still had his artistic vocation to fulfil, as he explained to his publisher: ‘Soon I shall have to jump at every chance of writing the history of insurance companies or prefaces to school text-books. Squire and Belloc warn us of the horrors of longevity. But meanwhile, while I have any vestige of imagination left, I must write novels.’66

  To add to his expenses, between finishing his book in the spring and publishing it in the autumn of 1961, his two eldest children were married. In her last year at Oxford Teresa had met and fallen in love with a postgraduate Classics scholar from Princeton called John D’Arms, whom she first brought to Combe Florey in the spring of 1959. After a subsequent visit that summer, Evelyn wrote to Bron: ‘He is not superficially very American (his father, too, was at Oxford), dresses somberly, parts his hair and speaks in low tones. But he has the basic earnestness of his compatriots which I should find unendurable. However that is Teresa’s business, not mine. I am sure he would be a kind and conscientious husband and I shall not have to talk to him.’67 After receiving John’s formal request to marry Teresa in November 1960, Evelyn wrote to congratulate his future son-in-law ‘on your successful courtship of my daughter’ and ‘still more on your resolution to become a Catholic’. ‘I am sending you her pedigree,’ he added. ‘It is not illustrious on my side but it will demonstrate that she has no unacceptable taints in her blood.’68

  Bron, meanwhile, had lately been seeing a lot of a bright young brunette called Teresa Onslow and in early 1961 they too agreed marry, a decision which Evelyn feared they had come to ‘in a mood of irresponsible high spirits which reminds me painfully of my marriage to Evelyn [Gardner],’* as he told Pansy Lamb.69 Bron and Teresa were both only twenty-one at the time and she declined to convert to Catholicism, however on the plus side she was the daughter of the 6th Earl of Onslow and descended from more British monarchs than George VI, the king at the time of her birth.70 ‘It is very distressing that my son should think of marriage at an age when he should give himself to the education of a femme du monde de quarante ans,’ Evelyn wrote to Jack Donaldson, ‘but, as you remark, in this age of miscegenation it is agreeable that he should have chosen a consort of his own class.’71 And to his brother Alec: ‘Your nephew Auberon Alexander has imprudently become engaged … a Protestant alas, but pretty & sharp. I don’t know her well but I think he is fortunate.’72

  The prospect of both weddings filled Evelyn with a mixture of gloom and anxiety. ‘My life at the moment is hideously overshadowed & agitated by weddings,’ he wrote to Daphne Fielding in May. ‘I have a daughter marrying a studious & penniless yank in a fortnight and hard on that a son marrying a pretty, well endowed English girl. But the turmoil & expense are damnable.’73

  Teresa and John D’Arms were married by Father D’Arcy at a Catholic church in Taunton at the beginning of June, with the reception held at Combe Florey. Evelyn later confided to a Catholic friend that the ring had been placed on Teresa’s right hand, adding: ‘I hope this will provide grounds for a suit of nullity.’74 He was not so much against the match as anxious that his daughter should have an escape route (rather in the same way that some nervous parents nowadays insist on a ‘prenup’) in case anything went wrong – bearing in mind of course the problems he had had disentangling himself from Evelyn Gardner. Evelyn found the prolonged wedding celebrations ‘extremely painful’, although John’s parents, who came over from Massachusetts, turned out to be ‘rather a jolly couple and quite indefatigable’, their remarkable stamina over several days staying with the Waughs leaving Evelyn ‘prostrated’,75 he told Ann Fleming. When they had all gone, he wrote tenderly to his ‘dear firstborn’ daughter: ‘I think you have found an exceptionally nice husband and am confident of your happiness.’

  By way of a postscript he added: ‘Yesterday’s Sunday Times had an article on paternity by Mr. Mathew M.P. He said it was essential to the happy relations of fathers and children that they should congregate at bath-time. The children should stand around their father’s bath. The spectacle of his nakedness and wetness while they are clothed and dry establishes confidence and equality. I am sorry I failed you in this.’76

  Bron and Teresa’s wedding was to take place a month later in London, in the same Warwick Street church where Evelyn and Laura had married, but as the day loomed Evelyn began to look for ways he might possibly wriggle out of it. Bron was alive to the danger, having previously failed to entice Evelyn to either his passing out parade or his twenty-first birthday party at the Hyde Park Hotel, the latter paid for by Chapman & Hall and combined with a book celebration for Bron’s first novel The Foxglove Saga, which had quickly sold 14,000 copies in hardback. As Alexander Waugh records: ‘The party was crowded with important people – the Prime Minister, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Sir Isaiah Berlin and many of Evelyn’s closest and oldest friends – but Evelyn and Laura stayed at home.’77 A week prior to the wedding, Bron wrote to Evelyn: ‘I hope you will have the fortitude to remain throughout the reception – at any rate until the hand shaking and photographing are
over.’78 A few days later Evelyn wrote back: ‘Your sister Margaret has the grippe [flu]. I may have to stay and nurse her while your mother attends your nuptials.’79 But Laura made sure he went in the end.

  Four days later Evelyn told Meg that he had ‘nearly’ recovered from the wedding. ‘What I have not recovered from is the photograph of myself in the Sunday Express. I had no idea how old & gross I had become. As I eat nothing it must be drink. Not a drop of wine, whisky or gin has passed my lips since Sunday. I hope when we next meet you will notice a great change.’80 Evelyn had lately been getting through half a bottle of spirits and a bottle of wine a day. Once on his austere regime, on which he was soon claiming to have ‘shrunk to a little wizened monkey’,81 he found he did not miss it, although as so often when he stopped drinking he became rather silent and depressed. Only this time the gloom would prove harder to dislodge.

  * In the more innocent early 1960s, when the News of the World hired Nancy Spain as a columnist, the paper proclaimed: ‘She’s gay, she’s provocative … she’s going places.’

  * Heritage, by Anthony West, was published in America in 1955 but Rebecca West’s threat to sue anyone who published the book in Britain meant that it only appeared there in 1984, after her death.

  * Evelyn probably had in mind his fellow commando Geoffrey Keyes, VC, killed during the Rommel raid in 1941.

  * Giovanni Manfredi was employed at Combe Florey to wait at table as well as acting as cowman; his wife Maria did the cooking.

  * Lady Teresa Onslow was Evelyn Gardner’s first cousin twice removed.