by Philip Eade
Evelyn’s reminiscences of Molson eventually went well beyond Ascension Day, and although he omitted his real name, the use of the nicknames ‘Preters’ and ‘Hot Lunch’ meant that plenty of people, if not perhaps his Derbyshire constituents, knew perfectly well who he was. When the book was eventually published, in 1964, John Betjeman wrote to congratulate Evelyn on ‘how lovably ridiculous appears Hot Lunch Molson’.51
Molson’s alarm was shared by his fellow peer, Matthew (by then Lord) Ponsonby, who as a magistrate hardly relished having his drunken arrest in 1925 dredged up. Others, though, seemed remarkably relaxed, none more so than Evelyn’s pederastic one-legged colleague at Arnold House, Dick Young, whom Evelyn traced to an almshouse in Winchester: ‘By all means “publish-and-be-damned” so far as I am concerned,’ Young replied cheerfully. ‘I always flatter myself that I was the original Capt. Grimes.’52 A few days later he wrote again:
Incidentally, when I say ‘publish and be damned’, I trust you will mention no scandal that could remotely connect me – in the mind of the Master of St Cross, the ‘local vicar’ – to you. True, no man is entitled to a better reputation than he has earned. But one is at St. Cross in some slight degree on the word of ‘Referees’, and it might be extremely awkward to have any ‘suspicions’ about oneself floating around, tho’ I imagine that several of our old Brothers may have incidents in their past to which they would not purposely draw attention!53
That all said, Young had no objection to having his misdeeds fully recounted in Evelyn’s autobiography under the pseudonym ‘Captain Grimes’, and when he eventually read the book wrote to tell Evelyn that he found it all rather ‘nostalgic’.54
Snowbound for much of January 1963 at Combe Florey, in February Evelyn and Laura escaped to Menton in the South of France, but returned early so that Evelyn could fulfill a $5,000 commission to write an obituary of the ailing Pope John XXIII, who died in June. That spring both Margaret and Bron’s wife Teresa announced they were expecting babies: ‘I hope at least some of these grandchildren will be a source of delight to you in your old age,’ wrote Bron. ‘Will you let them pull your beard?’55 Just short of his sixtieth birthday in October, Evelyn heard that his daughter Teresa, too, was pregnant and wrote to congratulate her: ‘Does John feel strongly that his offspring should be born on American soil?’ he asked. If not he offered to pay Teresa’s air fare ‘so that it might be a subject of our good queen’. ‘It could always renounce allegiance on coming of age if it feels strong republican sentiments.’56
At the age of fifty-nine, Evelyn already felt like a geriatric, ‘very lame,’ he told Ann Fleming. ‘Carrying too much weight. Can’t get down the weight walking because of the lameness. A vicious circle.’57 As he became increasingly decrepit, the gardener ‘Coggins’ (real name Walter Coggan) seemed to spend more and more time deferentially imparting his rural wisdom to Laura in the kitchen garden to the point where Evelyn began referring to him as ‘my rival, Mr Coggins’. ‘Coggins has become complete master of this property,’ Evelyn reported at the end of August.58 In September, feeling increasingly seedy, as he told Meg, Evelyn booked himself into a health clinic in the New Forest: ‘Well, Madam,’ Coggins was heard to say to Laura when he heard Evelyn was to be away for a fortnight, ‘we shall really be able to get down to it then?’59 Midway through his stint at the health farm, Evelyn wrote to Ann Fleming: ‘I have lost 13 lbs and all my good spirits.’60
Once past his sixtieth birthday, however, Evelyn began to cheer up, ‘content to be old,’ he told a cousin. ‘No one can now expect me to carry anything.’61 He was equally content to see no one outside his close family, not even old friends, and he found the fortieth anniversary meeting of the Oxford University Railway Club that November ‘ghastly’, despite the intriguing presence of Terence Greenidge, who announced that he had had a large part of his brain removed, rendering him ‘very cheerful’, Evelyn told Alfred Duggan, but devoid of ‘most of the idiosyncrasies which used to endear him’.62* Christmas at Combe Florey was as usual ‘Hell’, Evelyn told Meg, but he was at least ‘glad to have a grandson in the male line’, Bron’s wife Teresa having given birth to a son on 30 December 1963, later christened Alexander Evelyn Michael.
A Little Learning was eventually finished at the end of 1963 and published in the autumn of 1964. The critics were largely complimentary, although some found it a little reticent. V. S. Pritchett in the New Statesman called Evelyn ‘a thoughtful rather than intimate autobiographer … He keeps the lid on’,63 a view that Evelyn effectively endorsed in his later admission to Diana Mosley: ‘It is truthful in the sense of stating nothing false but, of course, it omits a good deal.’64 Anthony Burgess delighted in the book’s ‘Gibbonian classicism’ but was convinced ‘it is an act, a posture, and it derives from the father’s more Dickensian histrionics as much as the fictional gift itself’.65 Alec Waugh, perhaps relieved to be treated so gently, called it ‘an important book because it presents and interprets the seedtime of one of the most important writers of our day’.66 Among Evelyn’s friends, Katharine Asquith was predictably dismayed by the passages about Captain Grimes but overall found the book ‘of absorbing interest … some of it sounded so happy – some so terribly sad, some so funny & all so beautifully told’.67
The most unhappy reader was Evelyn’s old Lancing sidekick Dudley Carew, whom he had not named but unkindly portrayed in the book as ‘a boy in another house’ whom he had ‘fascinated and dominated’. ‘Why on earth you should deliberately spit in the eye of one who has always wished you well passes my comprehension,’ Carew wrote to him after reading the book. ‘I have long letters of yours over a period of years which give a very different picture of an old friendship from the contemptuous squiggle of a caricature you have drawn of our relationship which relegates me to the position of a half-witted hanger-on you tolerantly patronized for a term or two … Many people whose opinion of me I value will have little difficulty, thanks to your gratuitous clues, in identifying me with the grotesque figure of the “boy in another house”. As for my private feelings, you have hurt them most damnably.’68
In a bid to set the record straight, ten years later Carew published his own memoir (A Fragment of Friendship: A Memory of Evelyn Waugh When Young), which described A Little Learning as ‘the worst book Evelyn ever wrote’ yet whose bitter tone only served to strengthen the impression created by Evelyn in his rather savage pen portrait. In any event, by the time A Little Learning came out, Evelyn was fast losing his teeth, literally as well as metaphorically. ‘When the last go I shall harden my gums with salt and eat soft foods,’ he told Diana Cooper in October.69 But in December he announced: ‘I may buy a lot of new teeth in the new year and see if they help. Most of my lack of appetite comes from the boredom of chewing with my few, loose teeth. Not eating drives me to the bottle – both spirits & drugs. One can’t sleep hungry.’70
‘I own a toothbrush but since I have no teeth it is a superfluous possession,’ he wrote to Ann Fleming in the new year, ‘like the tiaras of ladies who are never asked out.’71 In March 1965 he had his few remaining wobbly teeth drawn in order to make room for a new set, insisting on going through with the procedure without an anaesthetic as his father had done. ‘It would be inconvenient for Laura if I kicked the bucket,’ he acknowledged to Nancy Mitford beforehand, ‘otherwise no apprehensions.’72 Two months after the operation he told her: ‘Honks [Diana Cooper] tells everyone I am dying. I don’t think it’s true. But I suffer in dignity & pleasure from my new snappers and I do no work.’73
But although they initially pleased him, his new teeth were never entirely successful and some months later he announced: ‘I have lost the art of eating.’74 All in all, the past twelve months had been rather grim for him, beset by death as well as dentistry, beginning with that of Alfred Duggan, followed by Baby Jungman’s son Richard Cuthbertson, killed in a car accident, then Harry Ilchester (formerly Stavordale) and Phil Dunne. ‘There has not been a fortnight without a funeral,’ Evel
yn told Nancy in May. ‘Ian Fleming [who had died in August 1964] is being posthumously canonized by the intelligentsia. Very rum.’75
After going to see Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in September, Evelyn confessed to Nancy: ‘I find I can’t follow the plot of any plays or films nowadays, whether it is my decay or theirs I don’t know.’76 By far the greatest of his woes, though, was his dismay at the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, which had radically reformed the Latin Mass, demystifying the priest’s role and replacing Latin with the vernacular, to the point at which Evelyn now hated going to church. ‘The buggering up of the Church is a deep sorrow to me and to all I know,’ he told Nancy. ‘We write letters to the papers. A fat lot of good that does.’77 ‘No one minds more than I,’ he wrote to Ann Fleming, ‘& no one can do less.’78
His deepening gloom began to worry friends and family. ‘I’ve never seen you so low as before I went away,’ wrote Meg at the beginning of December. ‘It seemed a more abiding settled depression than ever before. Darling Papa please don’t be unhappy – you may think this an impertinence but it is written in love – I think your trouble is that you don’t go to the sacraments often enough. You can’t expect your faith to suffer these onslaughts unless you sustain it.’79
Evelyn replied: ‘You must not worry about my condition. I am growing old and old men suffer from aberrations of one kind of another. Dope is less harmful and less sinful than, say, drink or chasing young girls or boys. It would of course be better to be a saint. God chooses his own. The awful prospect is that I may have more than 20 years ahead. Pray that I “make my soul” in this period. I shall just become more and more boring I fear. Don’t let me in my dotage oppress you.’80
Margaret now feared that he really was trying to kill himself: ‘Please, please Papa see a doctor – a proper specialist. Your stomach has probably shrunk or certainly will & you are growing physically weaker under one’s eyes … If there is no eternity then life is precious & if there is life is just as precious – eternity is forever & ever there is no point in prolonging it.’81
Evelyn rallied slightly in the new year of 1966, but responded despairingly when nagged by a publisher about the delivery of a book on the Crusades he had promised the previous year. ‘Tell them I have temporarily lost my reason as the result of the Vatican Council,’ Evelyn pleaded with Peters. ‘Tell them anything. Get them to release me from my foolhardy promise.’82 He intended instead to concentrate on the second volume of his autobiography; however he gave a fairly clear hint to Christopher Sykes (who was afraid of what it might say about him) that it would never be finished: ‘My life is roughly speaking over. I sleep badly except occasionally in the morning. I get up late. I try to read my letters. I try to read the paper. I have some gin. I try to read the paper again. I have some more gin. I try to think about my autobiography. Then I have some more gin and it’s lunch time. That’s my life. It’s ghastly.’83 His correspondence with friends was littered with oblique references to death: ‘Maurice [Bowra] has sent me (unsolicited) the extract from his memoirs that deals with me,’ Evelyn told Ann Fleming. ‘It is as respectful & affectionate as an obituary.’84
On Easter Sunday, 10 April 1966, Evelyn attended a Latin Mass in the Catholic chapel in the small market town of Wiveliscombe, five miles from Combe Florey, accompanied by Laura, Hatty, James, Septimus, and all the FitzHerberts – Margaret, Giles and their two little girls, Emily and Claudia. The service was conducted by Father Philip Caraman, who was staying at Pixton. Evelyn appeared surprisingly cheerful, benign and friendly to everyone, even to Auberon Herbert, who was also in the congregation, along with his mother Mary and sister Bridget. Afterwards they all drove back to Combe Florey, where again Evelyn was in high spirits as they all gathered in the morning room. At some point he left the room to go to the library where a postcard was later found, dated 10 April, addressed to a Catholic academic called Professor Robin Anderson: ‘Many thanks for your interesting sympathetic letter. We live in a dark age. I cannot hope to live to see it lighter.’85
It was almost certainly the last thing Evelyn wrote. When he failed to reappear for lunch, a search was begun during which Septimus, fifteen at the time, eventually knocked on the door of the downstairs lavatory, which was locked from the inside. Getting no answer, he fetched a ladder so that he could peer in through a high window and saw his father slumped on the floor having suffered a heart attack. In shock he called out to his nineteen-year-old brother James, who managed to climb in through the window and unlock the door. Evelyn was then dragged out into the passageway, where the FitzHerberts’ Irish nanny, Maureen Regan (henceforth ‘Nurse Regan’) attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Father Caraman, to whom Evelyn had given a cheque that morning for ten guineas for his Mass, administered conditional absolution – ‘Si vivis, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis. In nomine Patris et Filio et Spiritus Sancti, amen’* – before summoning the priest at Wiveliscombe, Father Formosa, to bring his oils to anoint the dead man. Bron and Teresa were living at Hungerford at the time and had been out to a long lunch with friends, leaving their two young children, Sophia and Alexander, at home with their nanny. When they arrived back that evening to find a policeman on their doorstep Bron immediately feared something terrible had happened to his children and it came as a ‘conscious relief’ to hear that instead his father had died suddenly in Somerset.
On further reflection, he wrote: ‘To die on Easter Sunday, after communion, among friends, with no lingering deterioration of the faculties, must be reckoned a merciful death.’86 Margaret, too, although devastated saw some cause for comfort: ‘Don’t be too upset about Papa,’ she wrote to his great friend Diana Cooper. ‘You know how he longed to die and dying as he did on Easter Sunday, when all the liturgy is about death and resurrection, after a Latin mass and holy communion, would be exactly what he wanted. I am sure he had prayed for death at Mass. I am very, very happy for him.’87
* ‘I have reached myself in my autobiography,’ he wrote to Ann Fleming in May, ‘and you know how boring that is.’
* Even on that trip he surrounded himself with family, taking along with him Bron and his son-in-law Giles FitzHerbert.
* ‘If you are living, I absolve you from your sins. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, amen.’
Epilogue
Evelyn was buried on the Friday after Easter in a special plot on the edge of the Combe Florey garden adjoining the Anglican churchyard of St Peter and St Paul. The funeral at the Catholic church of St Teresa of Lisieux in Taunton was conducted by Father Caraman, who also gave the address at a full Requiem Mass held six days later at Westminster Cathedral, where special dispensation was obtained for the Mass to be said in Latin. The congregation sang six verses of Evelyn’s favourite hymn, ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’, which he used to hum to himself while working in the library.
The obituaries paid tribute to the precision of his prose, his wildly comic invention and unique satiric stance, while also recording his deep aversion to the modern world, his staunch Catholic apologetics and his reputation for misanthropy and snobbery. Bron thought the notices ‘with few exceptions, extraordinarily grudging’,* and indeed they mostly overlooked the more humane side of Evelyn’s character, which was left to his friends to record in their letters of condolence to Laura. When news of his death reached Graham Greene in Paris late on Easter Day he promptly sent a note saying he was ‘shocked more than I can find it possible to write’. ‘As a writer I admired him more than any other living novelist & as a man I loved him. He was a very loyal and patient friend to me. What I loved most in him was that rare quality that he would only say the kind things behind one’s back.’1†
Among the many letters that followed was one from Diana Mosley, who had been estranged from Evelyn for more than thirty years until they were reconciled a few weeks before he died. ‘Evelyn was such an extraordinarily gifted, clever and really good person,’ she wrote to Laura, ‘so unusual �
� unique – that your loss does not bear thinking about. He is the sort of person one would miss more and more. Even I, who never had the joy of seeing him, feel so sad today.’2 Her sister Nancy (Mitford) said that she ‘loved Evelyn I really think the best of all my friends … he was far the best living writer of English without a doubt. For him one can only say he did hate the modern world, which does not become more liveable every day.’3
Evelyn’s agent Peters called it ‘a literary tragedy’ that he had not completed his autobiography, and remembered his client as ‘unfailingly kind & generous to me during the whole of the forty years that I knew him – never a harsh word or a rebuke, even when I deserved them. The world who did not know him had, I’m afraid, a distorted picture of him which he himself took some trouble to paint. But the real Evelyn was a very fine man. I loved him and I shall miss him for the rest of my life.’4
There was much mention in the letters of Evelyn’s strength and singularity. For Patrick Kinross, he stood out as ‘the most alive, the most consistently his personal self’ among his friends. ‘Even in his poses he was simply burlesquing some part of himself. What a joy he was to be with, & to hear from and to talk about! Whatever mood he was in, gay or morose, benign or angry – he was always thoroughly positive and in the whollest sense human. What a strong and alive personality. No one so dominated a room by simply being in it. His affections were constant & he was the staunchest of friends & the most outspoken too. His friendship was not only a solace and stimulus, but a challenge. This made him the ideal literary mentor, not only encouraging and praising but criticising sharply.’5
Several writers recalled Evelyn’s generosity, including P. G. Wodehouse, whom he had long championed as ‘the Master’ and whose reputation he had staunchly defended after Wodehouse came under attack for broadcasting from Germany during the war. Although they had only met once, in New York, Wodehouse had ‘always looked on him as one of my dearest friends,’ he told Laura, ‘and I can never forget all he did for me’.6 Angus Wilson described Evelyn’s praise for his first published short story in 1947 as ‘the most exciting thing I can remember to do with my writing’ and was equally appreciative of his reviews of his early novels when he felt misunderstood by other critics. ‘That this encouragement should have come from someone who differed from me in all social and political questions was only what one had come to expected from somebody who cared so completely about writing for itself. But for me that it should have come from our finest novelist was everything.’7 Robert Henriques was another who, reading back over the letters Evelyn had written to him over the years, felt ‘overwhelmingly what a deeply kind person he was’ although he also admitted that he had always been rather afraid of him. ‘To me he was a superior kind of person, not just intellectually, and as the best writer of our generation, but morally and in ways I can’t define. Yet, while feeling more diffident with him than with anyone else I have ever known, I was always keenly aware of his great concern for his friends. Very few people have seemed to mind as much as he did about how his friends were faring. That, and his generosity and his intense loyalties, were qualities as important to his friends as his wit and brilliance.’8