by Paula Byrne
For all the success of Vile Bodies, he had to work hard to keep his name in the public eye. He quickly finished writing up Labels. Diana gave him the necessary privacy by lending him her country house in Sussex. He travelled back to London for weekends.
In March, Diana gave birth to her son Jonathan and asked Evelyn to be a godfather. The other godfather was an Eton and Christ Church man: Randolph Churchill, son of Winston. Evelyn met him for the first time over the font at the christening. The relationship between the two men would be long-standing and tempestuous.
It was at this time that Evelyn sat for his portrait. Diana and Bryan commissioned Henry Lamb, a follower of Augustus John and the ‘Camden Town’ school. His finely executed oil reveals an attractive young man with auburn hair, pipe to his mouth and the fierce and piercing stare that all his friends remembered so vividly. In tribute to the couple who paid for it, and who did so much for him at this time, he is holding a glass of Guinness in his large craftsman’s hands.
Sadly, however, the friendship came to an end. Once Diana’s baby was born, she was keen to rejoin the social scene. But Evelyn wanted her all to himself. There were quarrels and then Evelyn severed the friendship. Many years later, she wrote asking what went wrong. He gave a forthright answer:
Pure Jealousy. You (and Bryan) were immensely kind to me at a time when I greatly needed kindness, after my desertion by my first wife. I was infatuated with you. Not of course that I aspired to your bed but I wanted you to myself as especial friend and confidante. After Jonathan’s birth you began to enlarge your circle. I felt lower in your affections than Harold Acton and Robert Byron and I couldn’t compete or take a humbler place. That is the sad and sordid truth.
To her credit, Diana remained loyal to his memory, always considering him ‘a perfect friend’ who to her infinite regret ‘bestowed his incomparable companionship on others’.
But there were more complicated undercurrents. Both friends were at crossroads and would take paths that would lead them in very different directions: Evelyn to the Catholic Church and a new circle of friends, Diana to the Bloomsbury set of Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington and then to an intense passion with Fascist leader Oswald Mosley, which would take her to Adolf Hitler’s Germany and then Holloway Prison during the Second World War.
In the end, politics divided Diana from most of her friends, and she and her second husband, Mosley (whom she married in Goebbels’ drawing room in the presence of Hitler), became in her own words ‘social pariahs’. Diana’s most endearing and most destructive quality was her loyalty. Her loyalty to Mosley ruined her life. She remained loyal to Evelyn, upset and angry when he was attacked in the press or in reviews. She was deeply upset by the publication of his diaries, which she felt gave a ‘totally false picture’ of him: ‘I felt angry to think this brilliant and delightful man might be judged by a new generation, who had never known him, by his exaggerated self-caricature.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ her son Alexander comforted her, ‘we’ve got the books.’
But she was right to worry: the caricature has stuck. A great many entries in Evelyn’s diaries smack on first reading of malice or inveterate snobbery. They need the gloss that Diana added to a letter from Evelyn in which he noted that he had been with a group of people whom she wouldn’t like because they were even more humbly born than he was: ‘for the literal-minded: this is a JOKE’.
Without the stabilising friendship of Diana, Evelyn became the very thing he had made his name by satirising: a shiftless Bright Young Thing. Through the summer of 1930 he was feted by society hostesses and the Ritz became his second home. His days were filled with luncheon parties, his evenings with cocktails, dinners and dances.
Then he fell in love. The girl’s name was Teresa Jungman, known to her friends as ‘Baby’. She was a famous flapper, noted for starting the craze for treasure hunts and private theatricals. She and her sister Zita were frequently photographed in the Tatler, wearing fancy-dress costumes or lovely flapper dresses. As well as being beautiful and intelligent, Baby was Roman Catholic. And it would be Baby who would provide the link through which he finally found himself in Hugh Lygon’s family home.
The autumn of 1930 was marked for Evelyn Waugh by a momentous event. On 29 September he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. It is often said that the failure of his marriage propelled him into the arms of Rome. This is probably because when he was asked whether he was a Catholic when writing Vile Bodies he said: ‘Not at all, I was as near to an atheist as one could be.’ Then shortly after the novel was published he converted. But this was a path that Evelyn had been travelling for some time. His father called it his ‘perversion to Rome’.
After Olivia Plunket Greene’s death, Evelyn claimed: ‘She bullied me into the Church.’ Though Evelyn’s friends blamed the Greenes, his confessor Father Martin D’Arcy SJ denied the charge, saying that ‘his close friends Gwen Plunket Greene and her daughter helped to make him act, but they did not make up his mind for him’. His diary records his meetings with Father D’Arcy, whom he described brilliantly as having a ‘blue chin and fine, slippery mind’. They talked about ‘verbal inspiration and Noah’s Ark’, then, on another morning of instruction, ‘infallibility and indulgences’. In Brideshead Revisted Waugh is exceptionally funny on the subject of conversion. The scenes of Rex Mottram’s instruction are based upon Evelyn’s own readiness and willingness to accept the tenets of Catholicism without demur. Rex, like his inventor, is ‘matter of fact’ about the whole business – and, like Evelyn, he starts going to the Roman Catholic church at Farm Street, Mayfair. D’Arcy wrote: ‘I have never myself met a convert who so strongly based his assents on truth … he had convinced himself very unsentimentally – with only an intellectual passion, of the truth of the Catholic faith, and that in it he must save his soul.’
In July, he had met and lunched with Noël Coward, himself a Roman Catholic, and told him of his plans for conversion. Coward advised that conversion was such a grave step that it was best preceded by a trip around the world. Evelyn did things the other way around. He converted at the end of September and then went abroad in October. He got himself a journalistic assignment covering the coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie in Abyssinia.
During the Second World War Evelyn was forced to undergo a psychometric test (he abhorred psychology – ‘the whole thing’s a fraud’). After being asked a number of questions about his parents and childhood, he countered: ‘Why have you not questioned me about the most important thing in a man’s life – his religion?’ He took his Catholicism very seriously, believing in the supernatural element, the ‘Alice-in-Wonderland side of religion’ as Lady Marchmain memorably describes it in Brideshead. He was convinced that his life was saved by divine intervention. One of the most spiritual moments of his life came at the deathbed conversion of one of his closest friends.
Later, after Brideshead, when some critics accused him of glamorising Catholicism and converting out of a ‘love of money’ and a preference for ‘the company of the European upper classes’, he denied the charge: ‘I can assure you it had no influence on my conversion. In England, Catholicism is predominantly a religion of the poor. There is a handful of Catholic aristocratic families, but I knew none of them in 1930 when I was received into the Church.’ Many of his closest friends were Catholics, some of them converts (Harold Acton, Alastair Graham, Christopher Hollis, Frank Pakenham, Douglas Woodruff). Others, such as Tom Driberg and John Betjeman, were devout Anglo-Catholics. Perhaps more significantly, the women with whom he fell in love were all devout Catholics: Olivia Plunket Greene, Teresa Jungman and later his second wife, Laura. The influence of Gwen Plunket Greene was undoubtedly very strong – more so than that of her daughter. Olivia, who had recently converted, had the typical zeal of a convert. For her, it was all an affair of the emotions. For Gwen, by contrast, ‘the call came unadorned by any joy or emotion, only a hard and naked will to follow God’. Evelyn understood this response.
It was no
t something undertaken lightly. He saw that he was making a sacrifice of home, marriage and children. As a divorced man he would be unable to marry again. His reasoning was simple: the world was ‘unintelligible and unendurable without God’. He was twenty-six. He later said to Alec: ‘The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.’ To Father D’Arcy he wrote: ‘As I said when we first met, I realise that the Roman Catholic Church is the only genuine form of Christianity.’ It was perhaps that simple. The Catholic Church was the ‘True Church’ and that was all there was to it.
Evelyn had embraced the Scarlet Woman.
CHAPTER 9
The Busting of Boom
O child of Uranus, wanderer down all times,
Darkling, from farthest ages of the Earth the same,
Strange tender figure, full of grace and pity,
Yet outcast and misunderstood of men.
(Edward Carpenter, Towards Democracy, 1902)
One afternoon in July 1930, Evelyn Waugh took tea with Victor Cazalet, the MP for Chippenham, on the terrace of the House of Commons. On the way he bumped into his old Oxford friend, Lord Elmley, and Oliver Baldwin, the homosexual son of the former Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. That evening Evelyn noted in his diary: ‘Oliver Baldwin grown fatter and Elmley a little thinner.’
Elmley was following his father into politics. His life since Oxford had followed a typical trajectory for a man of his class. He had done a stint in the Army (second lieutenant in the 100th Worcester and Oxford Yeomanry Field Brigade, then transferred to the Royal Tank Corps, where he stayed for the next four years). After that, he went on a world tour.
His brother’s life was rather different. Since Oxford, Hugh had drifted aimlessly. Having been forced to abandon his banking job in Paris, he was often to be seen hanging around in the Packard limousine showroom in Piccadilly, driving around in the vast cars whenever the fancy took him. Every now and then his name crops up in the Court Circular or the gossip columns, accompanying one or other of his sisters to a society reception, a wedding or a dance. He sometimes provided dutiful help to his father, entertaining dignitaries to luncheon in Belgrave Square. He was happier at the Madresfield Agricultural Show and the annual Hunt Ball in Worcester.
In 1929 he decided that he wanted to work with horses, so he became an amateur jockey. His chances of success were slim, given that he was six feet two inches tall. In July 1930, he was on the card to ride a horse called Alan Malone in the Amateur’s Cup at Salisbury. But he was not among the finishers: he must have either scratched or fallen. His next scheme was to train racehorses.
A couple of weeks after Evelyn bumped into Elmley, the newspapers noted that Lord Beauchamp was departing on a world tour. At the end of July 1930 he left London for Australia. He had taken up the position of Chancellor of the University of London and as ambassador on its behalf he intended to visit various universities in Canada and the United States on the way back. In early September he wrote to tell his daughter Coote that he had just crossed the equator: ‘I hope for news of Madresfield and especially of mummy, though I fear it might take her a little time to settle down.’ The wording suggests that there had been some trouble before Lord Beauchamp left Madresfield. Was the countess ill, or worried about her husband’s safety? It is not clear what he meant by her needing time to ‘settle down’. What Lord Beauchamp did not know was that a plot for his downfall was underway.
Beauchamp planned to return to England at the end of January 1931, in time for the opening of Parliament. He travelled home on the Europa, stopping off at San Francisco, Washington and New York. In New York he met Evelyn’s elder brother, Alec, at a party given by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mother. Alec Waugh told him that he was acquainted with Elmley and that he knew Hugh well. ‘A dear, dear boy,’ said Beauchamp; ‘If only he would write to me more often.’ The comment would take on an extra poignancy in the light of the events of the coming year. Alec Waugh recalled that ‘the great man was very gracious and urbane, embellishing his role of guest of honour’. ‘Had he any knowledge,’ Alec wondered, ‘of the trouble that awaited him back in England?’
Lord Beauchamp was said to have ‘exquisite taste in footmen’. When interviewing male staff he would pass his hands over their buttocks, making a similar hissing noise to that made by stable lads when rubbing their horses down. If the young man was handsome and pleasant, Beauchamp would remark: ‘He’ll do well. Very nice indeed!’ The fingers of the footmen of Madresfield were said to be glittering with diamonds. One could hear the clunk of the jewellery as they served dinner.
The diplomat and diarist Harold Nicolson recalled a dinner at Madresfield when he was asked by an astonished fellow guest, ‘Did I hear Beauchamp whisper to the Butler, ‘‘Je t’adore’’?’ ‘Nonsense,’ Nicolson replied, ‘He said ‘‘Shut the door’’.’ But Nicolson, bisexual husband of Vita Sackville-West, knew that the other guest had indeed heard correctly. The Madresfield butler, Bradford, was an exceptionally handsome man. According to Lady Sibell, even her prudish mother thought he was delicious: ‘Not birth-control – self-control,’ she would say in front of him, to the bemusement of her children.
Not all Lord Beauchamp’s servants were homosexual, though many were. One day a heterosexual servant, finding the door to the Belgrave Square drawing room locked, peeped through the keyhole to find the earl and his doctor sexually engaged on the sofa.
At a certain exalted level of society, Lord Beauchamp’s homosexuality had been an open secret for years. His ‘persistent weakness for footmen’ was familiar to many of his friends. Indeed, his proclivities were reasonably well known even to his political opponents. But it was not thought gentlemanly to make them a subject for public attack. Beauchamp felt confident that he could continue his double life without being exposed by his colleagues or the press.
Even his children knew of their father’s secret double life, advising their male friends to lock their bedroom doors at night when they came to stay at Madresfield. If a particularly handsome young man was staying, Beauchamp would try the guest-room door. On finding it unavailing, he would complain at breakfast the next morning: ‘He’s very nice that friend of yours, but he’s damned uncivil.’
At Walmer Castle, where he was frequently without his wife, he held parties for Kentish lads, fishermen and prominent London homosexuals. It was there that he indulged in unseemly behaviour with figures such as the flamboyant actor Ernest Thesiger, subsequently co-star with Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein. When Lady Christabel Aberconway was invited to the Beauchamps’ London residence for tea, she was amazed to find herself being introduced to Thesiger, who was naked from the waist up and adorned with ropes of pearls. He had just been cast in a film called The Vagabond Queen. At Madresfield, Lady Christabel also met a beautiful young man who described himself as a tennis coach. She could not help noticing that he had no idea how to hold a racquet.
Lord Beauchamp took an intellectual as well as a practical interest in homosexuality. He was an admirer of Edward Carpenter, the poet, homosexual activist, vegetarian and socialist reformer. He read Carpenter’s epic poem Towards Democracy, which boldly linked homosexuality to political freedom in a style much influenced by the energies of Walt Whitman. He also treasured Carpenter’s Iolaus: An Anthology of Friendship, a celebration of ‘Greek love’ published in 1902 that became an underground hit in homosexual circles.
It was Carpenter’s long-term partnership with a working-class, uneducated odd-job man called George Merrill that led him to believe that same-sex couples had the power to subvert class boundaries and that homosexuals could be in the vanguard of radical social change. A visit to Edward Carpenter inspired E. M. Forster to write his one openly gay novel, Maurice. The template for the affair between middle-class Maurice and Alec the gamekeeper was the relationship between Carpenter and Merrill. Like Carpenter, Beauchamp was drawn towar
ds young men of a lower social class. His lovers were invariably tall, handsome grooms or manservants.
He was comfortable in the company of homosexuals and gave patronage to men who shared his own orientation. He commissioned the Arts and Crafts designer C. R. Ashbee (also a friend and admirer of Carpenter) to redesign Madresfield. The artist William Ranken, who painted portraits of the family for Elmley’s coming of age, was also homosexual.
Ashbee was lanky and intense, with eyeglass, moustache and wispy beard. Known to be solitary and foppish, he was extremely close to his mother (his father was infamous for possessing Victorian England’s most extensive collection of erotic, and especially flagellant, literature). Like Lord Beauchamp, Ashbee continued to have homosexual affairs after he married. Being a bohemian type as opposed to an eminence in society, he could be quite open about his preferences, insisting to his wife upon his need for ‘comrade friends’: ‘My men and boy friends [have] been the one guiding principle of my life … You are the first and only woman to whom I have felt I could offer the same loyal reverence of affection that I have hitherto given to my men friends. Will not the inference be obvious to you? There are many comrade friends, there can only be one comrade wife.’ Lord Beauchamp would have wished but never dared to write thus to his pious wife.
He would not, then, have felt alone in his leanings, but his downfall came as a result of his increasingly indiscreet conduct. As the years went on he found it more and more difficult to hide his orientation. This was extremely risky for a senior politician in an age when homosexuality was a criminal offence.