Evelyn Waugh
Page 42
23
Decline and Fall
‘Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.’1 So begins A Little Learning, the first of a projected three-part autobiography which Evelyn started shortly after the two weddings, in July 1961. Assured by Peters that the three volumes should bring in ‘over £29,000 – say £5,000 a year for six years’,2 Evelyn began by reading a draft of The Early Years of Alec Waugh, his brother’s memoir which was due out the next year, and afterwards thanked Alec for ‘the kind things you say about me’. He tactfully told his brother what ‘a deep interest & pleasure’ it was to read his book,3 but later confided to his daughter Meg that it was actually ‘not very nice – a great deal of boasting about his sexual adventures,’4 and to Diana Mosley that he considered it ‘embarrassingly revealing’.5
Still on his post-wedding slimming regime, Evelyn was intrigued to learn that Alec was in the habit of ‘spending one day in ten in bed totally fasting and so preserves his monkey-like figure’.6 ‘Twice a day I drink a small glass of cider,’ he told Ann Fleming the next month. ‘I have halved my consumption of cigars. I have become totally silent. Sometimes I sally out with a scythe and after an hour totter back exhausted.’7
Towards the end of the summer, knowing that Evelyn would again want to escape the English winter, Peters arranged for him to retrace his steps of twenty-nine years ago in British Guiana, which became a self-governing country after elections that August, five years prior to gaining full independence. The Daily Mail agreed to pay £2,000 (to include travel expenses) in return for five articles, and also to cover the expenses of a ‘secretary’, in which capacity Evelyn proposed taking along his nineteen-year-old daughter Margaret. ‘I am taking Meg with me partly for the pleasure of her company,’ he told Teresa, by then living in Rome, ‘but chiefly to detach her from the young men she spends her evenings with in London.’8
After failing to get into Oxford, Margaret had spent the past six months writing pamphlets about martyrs for the Jesuits at Farm Street (‘My daughter is a hagiographer by trade,’ her father told friends)9 where Evelyn’s old friend Father Philip Caraman quickly became infatuated with her. He assured Evelyn that in her reserve and soundness of judgement, Margaret was ‘mature beyond her years’. ‘She has an independence and sound sense that owes much to her deep devotion to you.’10 But Evelyn worried that away from work his daughter led a life of reckless dissipation, ‘pub crawling and smoking in Notting Hill Gate’.11 The previous year he had opposed her plan to rent a room off Bron, telling her, ‘You are no more ready for “independence” than the Congo,’ and after she had an unsettling experience of drunkenness he advised her to ‘go straight off & confess it,’ and thereafter to be very careful: ‘Don’t on any account get tight or even noticeably jolly for a long time. What we don’t want is for people to say, “There’s that Waugh girl drunk again”.’12 On another occasion he wrote to her: ‘I am told you drive recklessly. Don’t do that, it’s vulgar.’13 When Meg proposed spending the weekend with a boyfriend at a cottage, Evelyn wrote to her: ‘I know jolly well that no amount of chaperoning ever prevents those who want to fornicate from doing so. It is a matter of manners not morals. Well born, well brought up girls do not stay away with young men and well born, well brought up young men don’t expect them to or respect them if they do.’14 But the keeping of bad company persisted, in Evelyn’s eyes at least, and in the spring of 1961 he told Ann Fleming: ‘Meg is making herself obnoxious in London by moving about with a train of riff-raff who break into people’s houses & eat all the food in their larders & drink all their whisky.’15
Meg often returned to Combe Florey for weekends, but Evelyn could never get enough of her company as she arrived late on Friday, slept all day Saturday and left again on Sunday. Occasionally he sounded needy: ‘I gave you good warning that I should lose interest in you if you neglected me,’ he wrote to Meg shortly before Teresa’s wedding. ‘A generous nature wishes to give, not always to take. A prudent nature seeks to keep in favour with those on whom it is dependent. An honourable nature keeps promises.’16 Subsequently he reminded her: ‘When Alec Waugh was your age he wrote to his father every day.’17 Yet as Evelyn suggested, Meg was as devoted to him as he was to her. ‘You know I love you more than anyone else in the world,’ she wrote after one slightly cross letter. ‘Please don’t stop loving me I couldn’t bear it … Papa I’ll give up living in London and come home for good if you like. I don’t love any of my friends here one quarter as much as I love you.’18
Between the two weddings, with his younger daughter Harriet due to leave school that summer and in need of somewhere to live in London, Evelyn wrote to Diana Cooper enquiring about the basement of her newly acquired house in Little Venice: ‘I am anxious to find rooms in London which my daughters Meg & Hatty could share this autumn, where a trusted friend could keep an eye on them. They could, when required, do devoted duty as ladies in waiting.’ Diana replied enthusiastically, whereupon Evelyn sent her ‘the essential data about the little girls’:
Harriet. Aged 17. Low mentality, high character. She has inherited her father’s deep love of you. She regards you as a lady of the theatre rather than of fashion or letters or high politics. She is pretty when she smiles which is often; sometimes she lapses into blank sullenness. She has no pleasure in rural life and no knowledge of the town. Strong theatrical interests. Strong sense of humour. Chaste, sober, wants to get married but has exaggerated ideas of her market value thinking only elder sons of old nobility suitable. Clean & economical. She leaves school this term without learning one word of any foreign language and is therefore unsuitable for finishing abroad. She goes with a school-friend whose father is on post there at our embassy, to Beirut for August and first three weeks of September. After that she will be a problem. I believe you might find her quite amusing and useful as understrapper. Can’t spell at all. No secretarial qualities.
Meg aged 19 ‘works’ all day with Jesuits at Farm Street. Drinks all night with impecunious young men. Expensive tastes. Snob. Chaste but self-indulgent. Smokes when I am not near. Loving but grasping. Has also inherited her father’s love of you. Filthy in habits. Always in debt. At present she lives with her cousin Anne Fraser (60 Drayton Gardens, S.W.10. Fremantle 9000) who now has two babies & wants to be rid of her. I will not let her live alone. She can’t find any suitable friend to share with. It would be no good setting her up with Hatty. She would not look after Hatty & Hatty would have nothing to do all day. Meg would enter with enthusiasm into all your undertakings of house arrangement, talk engagingly while others toiled and do nothing herself. I find her company so bright that it compensates for her deplorable failings.19
The plan was postponed due to Diana’s delayed return to London and eventually came to nothing, but by that time Evelyn had already conceived the idea of taking Meg with him to Guiana, an idea which Father Caraman fell in with, agreeing ‘she is not sufficiently robust to work here during the day and then go to parties four or five evenings during the week, staying up till midnight and after. A long rest is just what she needs.’20 To Ann Fleming Evelyn wrote: ‘It will be good for her [Meg] to switch to rum for a bit. Port is inflaming her nose.’21
The final volume of Evelyn’s war trilogy Unconditional Surrender was published shortly before they left, dedicated ‘To my daughter Margaret, Child of the Locust Years’. As ever, Evelyn was more interested in the views of his friends and family than those of the critics, and most seemed to think that it was ‘as good as anything you have ever written’.22 Maurice Bowra rhapsodised about the ‘endless variety in the use of words, the shape of the sentences, the adroit vocabulary. How I envy you …’.23 Evelyn’s mother-in-law Mary Herbert thought ‘the wonderful chapter on Guy’s father’s death & funeral says all the central things about the heart of Catholic life & also the heart of the passing relationships of country life and squirearchy without any over emphasis’.
Among the publis
hed reviews, none was more glowing than Cyril Connolly’s in The Sunday Times, acclaiming the trilogy as ‘unquestionably the finest novel to have come out of the war’,24 a remarkably generous tribute given that Ann Fleming had convinced Connolly that Everard Spruce and Survival magazine was an unkind caricature of himself and Horizon. ‘It is not very like him but sufficiently like him to be offensive,’ wrote Bowra to Mrs Fleming. ‘It is sad that Evelyn has such an urge to torture him. It must be a form of love.’25 Fearing that Mrs Fleming’s mischievous intervention had endangered what he termed ‘a very long, the always slightly precarious, friendship,’26 Evelyn did his best to mend fences: ‘There are of course asses in London, who don’t understand the processes of the imagination, whose hobby is to treat fiction as a gossip column,’ he wrote to Connolly. ‘But what distresses me (if true) is that you should suppose I would publicly caricature a cherished friend.’27 Connolly remained sceptical: ‘I do not think posterity will ever believe in our friendship any more than someone who looked me up in the index to your biography!’28 As he prepared to set sail for British Guiana at the end of November, Evelyn made one final bid to soothe his half-hated friend with the news ‘that the vampire bats of Amazonas are now infected with rabies, so we may not meet again’.29
By strange coincidence the ship on which Evelyn and Meg sailed out to the Caribbean was the same Stella Polaris on which he and his first wife had voyaged in the Mediterranean in 1929. This trip was far happier: ‘Little Meg proved a good travelling companion,’ Evelyn wrote to Diana Cooper on their return, ‘never sea sick in the smallest ships in the worst storms, never complaining of discomfort but jolly appreciative of occasional bits of luxury. We came back in a lovely frog steamer full of decaying literary gents. Now her pecker is down & she wants to circumnavigate the globe.’30 To Teresa he wrote: ‘Meg met no one under 50 during her travels and is developing a pretty manner with the senile.’31
Among their hosts had been the sixty-year-old Lord Hailes, Churchill’s former private secretary and by then Governor-General of the soon-to-be defunct Federation of the West Indies. Having stayed happily and luxuriously with the Haileses in Trinidad, Evelyn was taken aback to learn from Ann Fleming that ‘the Haileses found Evelyn a great bore’, gossip she had gleaned from Clarissa Avon. ‘Well I mean to say,’32 Evelyn wrote to Diana Cooper, convinced at first that Lady Avon must have got the wrong end of the stick. Later, as the reality sunk in, he wrote to Nancy:
I must explain about boring the Haileses because it has been what young people call ‘traumatic’. Hailes was a pretty young politician you may have known as Patrick Buchan-Hepburn. I knew him slightly years ago … I had never met his wife but took a liking to her, and they were jolly hospitable to Meg & me. The crucial point is that I was confident they both enjoyed my visit. It made a lovely change, I thought, from most of their official visitors. When I briefly returned to Trinidad they sent ADCs to drag me back. I talked loud & long & they laughed like anything. Now I find I bored them. Well of course everyone is a bore to someone. One recognizes that. But it is a ghastly thing if one loses the consciousness of being a bore. You do see it means I can never go out again.33
Evelyn’s self-esteem suffered another blow a week or so later after an encounter at White’s: ‘I was sitting in the hall at 7 p.m. being no trouble to anyone, when a man I know by sight but not by name – older than I, the same build, better dressed, commoner – came up & said: “Why are you alone?” “Because no one wants to speak to me.” “I can tell you exactly why. Because you sit there on your arse looking like a stuck pig.” ’34
Nancy was quick to reassure Evelyn that ‘whatever else you may be you are not a bore’ and that he was ‘wasted on people like Buchan-Hepburn with whom one would sooner have been seen dead than dancing, in my recollection of old ballroom days’.35 However she also told him that her sister Debo Devonshire, whom Evelyn had always adored but also managed to alienate recently with some drunken rudeness, had ‘cause to be offended judging by the things I’ve heard you say (which I did not pass on but others have)’.36 The result of all this was to ‘produce strong Pinfold feelings of persecution’ and although he attempted to get back to work tinkering with his autobiography,* in April he admitted to Meg that he was ‘in low spirits and in low water’.37
Meg’s own spirits had risen considerably since their return from the Caribbean, not least due to the fact that by the time she received Evelyn’s gloomy letter she had fallen deeply in love. Her new boyfriend was an Irishman called Giles FitzHerbert, who had first met her as a young girl at Pixton in the 1950s but only really registered her when he went to watch the Grand National in March 1962 at the flat she shared with friends Evelyn called ‘the scoffers’. Margaret appeared ‘quite shy and awkward’ at the time but FitzHerbert remembered being struck by her unusual intelligence, even among the scoffers, who included the future Lord Chief Justice Tom Bingham. She was ‘incredibly quick with a clear way of talking,’ he recalled. ‘Everyone noticed. She didn’t gush and there was no small talk.’38 In early August, Margaret and Giles drove down to Combe Florey to ask Evelyn’s permission to marry, and afterwards Giles wrote to thank them ‘for giving up such a treasure with such rare grace’.39
‘Well, she has fallen head over heels in love and I can’t find it in my heart to forbid consummation,’ wrote Evelyn to Nancy. ‘He is a penniless Irish stock broker’s clerk named FitzHerbert of good family but rather caddish & raffish appearance. 27 years old and has not done a hands turn – his stock-broker’s clerkship began on the day of his engagement. A Catholic of not very pious disposition, father killed honorably in the war, a brother I haven’t been allowed to see, whom I suspect is a skeleton in cupboard (as is mine, and also Laura’s for that matter). She had a number of suitors of the kind an old fashioned father would have preferred, but she must have FitzHerbert, & so she shall. She wants children & that is a thing I can’t decently provide for her. I expect that in ten years’ time she will be back on my doorstep with a brood.’40
Ann Fleming commiserated with Evelyn ‘because you will miss her dreadfully’ and Diana Cooper wrote that it was a time that ‘I have so often dreaded for you – a time that I have known myself [her only son John Julius had married aged twenty-two] when one must deliver one’s treasure to another with a generous show of approval’.41 It was indeed ‘a bitter pill and ungilded,’ Evelyn admitted. ‘I would forbid the marriage if I had any other cause than jealousy & snobbery. As it is, I pretend to be complaisant. Little Meg is ripe for the kind of love I can’t give her. So I am surrendering with the honours of war – without war indeed … You see I feel that with Meg I have exhausted my capacity for finding objects of love. How does one exist without them? I haven’t got the gaiety euphoria that makes old men chase tarts.’42
The day before writing to Diana Evelyn had begun what would be his last work of fiction, Basil Seal Rides Again, a final outing for the hero of Black Mischief (1932) and Put Out More Flags (1942) who had always contained elements of Evelyn but now, at the age of sixty, came closer than ever to being a self-portrait. Friends could scarcely fail to spot the parallels between Basil’s jealousy over his daughter’s plan to marry and Evelyn’s own feelings about giving up Margaret, nor perhaps the incestuous undertone in the fictional father-daughter relationship: ‘Two arms embraced his neck and drew him down, an agile figure inclined over the protuberance of his starched shirt, a cheek was pressed to his and teeth tenderly nibbled the lobe of his ear … He disengaged himself and slapped her loudly on the behind.’43
Margaret and Giles were married on 20 October at the Catholic Church of St Elizabeth of Portugal in Richmond, with the reception held at the house of their friend John Chancellor in Kew. Meg wore a tea gown from the dressing-up cupboard originally belonging to her great-grandmother Evelyn de Vesci and ‘looked jolly pretty in it,’ Evelyn told Daphne Fielding, ‘and jolly funny going away in a black velvet hat & red boots’.44 From honeymoon in Italy Meg wrote to thank Evelyn for �
�behaving so beautifully’ at the wedding, having earlier thanked him for ‘being so kind about my engagement’. ‘You are the best father anyone can ever have had in the history of the world – really no flattery or sucking up, I think that. And there need be no divorce between us – I will come home just as often for week ends – Giles won’t mind.’45
Evelyn’s life had been ‘much disturbed by the superabundance of weddings,’ he told friends, and the marriages of his three eldest children in such quick succession seemed scarcely compensated for by his younger ones still being at home. ‘There is another six days of James & Septimus’s holidays,’ he wrote to Ann Fleming in September. ‘Oh the Hell of it.’46 The birth of his first granddaughter, Sophia Waugh, that summer, appeared to spell potential disruption as much as anything else. ‘Bron speaks in a sinister way of quartering his daughter here,’ Evelyn wrote to Teresa.47
That autumn was spent working on a first draft of his autobiography. ‘I am toiling & tinkering away,’ he told Daphne Acton. ‘The trouble is that I am (genuinely) not interested in myself & that while my friends are alive I can’t write candidly about them.’48 To Nancy Mitford he wrote that he had been contacting ‘various men who were at school with me and asking whether they object to revelations of their delinquencies. I think it may have caused a seasonable chill in some reformed breasts. There is a pompous ass called Hot-lunch Molson who I don’t suppose you ever met. I have a full diary of his iniquities in 1921–2. Perhaps he will fly the country.’49
When Evelyn wrote to ask Lord Molson whether he minded his mentioning that he had been ‘tight’ on Ascension day at school, Molson replied that he did not want to be a spoilsport but in view of the fact that ‘that weakness of mine has never been wholly overcome’ it would ‘not only upset my wife very much but also faithful friends in the High Peak’ – the Derbyshire constituency which he had represented as an MP before he was made a peer in 1961.50