I do not know how many of them represented the Freudian branch of scholarship or if any had yet ‘discovered’ a link between Evelyn's detestation of Cruttwell and his half-suppressed, bitter exasperation with his father. Perhaps there is none, but in these days of lean pickings, scholars must at least appear to be shining their torches into every dark hole. Without prejudice – or should I say without much enthusiasm for the psychoanalytic? – I offer a few pointers in that direction.
In November 1923 Evelyn wrote a short story for one of the Oxford University magazines entitled ‘Edward of Unique Achievement’ in which a history scholar who has recently had his scholarship revoked (Edward) forms a violent dislike for his tutor, Mr Curtis. ‘Edward hated him with an absorbing and immeasurable hatred, so that at last he became convinced that Mr Curtis’ existence was not compatible with his own.’ One day Edward walks coolly up to Mr Curtis's study and kills him mid-sentence, as he sits, looking pompous, in his chair. Shortly after Evelyn had written this story he made a woodcut for a series called Seven Deadly Sins, not the seven deadly sins but seven new ideas of his own choosing. They included ‘The Intolerable Wickedness of Him who Drinks Alone’, ‘The Horrid Sacrilege of Those that Ill-Treat Books’, and ‘That Grim Act of Patricide’ in which a young, dissolute, bruised and probably drunken son points a revolver at the head of his father as the old man stares up at him from an armchair.
In Evelyn's famous short story ‘Mr Loveday's Little Outing’, written in the 1930s, a young girl campaigns to free an inmate from her local lunatic asylum, whom she believes to be entirely sane. The inmate, Mr Loveday, convinces the asylum governors that all he desires is ‘just one little outing’ after which he will return to minister to the other inmates. Originally the story was entitled ‘Mr Cruttwell's Little Outing’, but the publishers got windy and Evelyn changed it. How much he was thinking of C. R. M. F. Cruttwell when he wrote it is impossible to say: Loveday is perhaps too mild-mannered a man to pass for an accurate portrait of Cruttwell. But what is interesting is the act for which the Loveday/Cruttwell character is committed to the asylum – an act which he slyly recommits on his little outing: it is a violent crime resulting from a kinky obsession with women on bicycles. Now, Arthur was never violent, least of all to women, but it is odd (is it not?) that he and Mr Loveday/Cruttwell should both express a fetishism for innocent young women on their bicycles?
During his three years at university Evelyn, to add to his sins, may well have ‘dabbled’ (as they say) in the ‘dark arts’. He wrote several short stories and most of a novel about black magic. Raoul Loveday, a contemporary and fellow member of the Hypocrites (after whom ‘Mr Cruttwell's Little Outing’, was eventually named) went with a group of Oxford undergraduates – including possibly Evelyn's close friend Harold Acton – to study black magic with a sinister menace in Cefalu, Sicily.
Evelyn, whose great enemy in life was boredom, was easily drawn to danger. He craved heady experience. If it is true that he had ‘dabbled’ in this way it did not make him happy. Homosexuality, drunkenness, idleness – all these things contributed to periodic fits of melancholy. ‘I am highly depressed,’ he wrote to Dudley Carew from Oxford. ‘A worthless fellow and quite broke and rather stupid and quite incredibly depraved morally… for the last fortnight I have been nearly insane… I may perhaps one day in a later time tell you some of the things that have happened … I do not yet know how things are going to end … I want to go down for good but I cannot explain and my parents are obdurate.’
At the beginning of his last year Evelyn had written to his father seeking permission to leave university and be sent to Paris. Arthur, not unnaturally, had refused, telling him that the previous two years would be wasted if he did not get his degree. In the end Evelyn decided to put in a spurt of work but it was not enough: he had left it far too late. In his heart he hoped he might scrape a second but after turning the first paper and finding the questions on it to be wholly inconvenient, he convinced himself that he was in for a third and telegraphed Arthur with his gloomy prognostications. Arthur, who was prone more to anxiety and despair than to anger, could hardly protest as he himself had come away with the same result, from the same university. In those days Oxford operated a rigid policy that no one could receive a degree, whatever their exam results, if they had not attended for a minimum of nine terms. Because Evelyn had arrived in January 1922 he was obliged to sit out a further term after his exams with nothing to do. Naturally he looked forward to this period of summer idleness and booked himself rooms, but since his scholarship had been withdrawn, Arthur had no intention of paying him to twiddle his thumbs in Oxford for three months. Instead he told Evelyn that his third-class degree was not worth having and enlisted him at an art school in London for the coming term.
Perhaps Arthur's attitude enraged Evelyn at the time, but by 1962, with his own experiences of fatherhood to reflect upon, his sympathies were with his father. For the Sunday Telegraph he wrote:
At university I disappointed my father gravely. He hoped that I would win the Newdigate and succeed where he had failed in taking a good degree and, perhaps, getting elected president of the Union … I regarded my scholarship as the reward for a brief period of intense effort at school, not as did the college authorities as the earnest for further effort, nor, as my father did, as a relief to his own legitimate expenses. I believed myself entitled to some self-indulgence. I realise now that I was exorbitant in this claim. It was the source of disagreement. Not only was my father not rich; he was, in the rising cost of living, rather worse off than he had been ten years earlier and he was reaching the age when his work, never excessive, was becoming irksome. He saw himself, with some exaggeration, as toiling in order that I might enjoy luxuries which he denied himself. He would have submitted happily enough, I think, if I had
interests with which he sympathised but I was a pure waster and I cannot now feel that his resentment was unjustified.
There was, however, one student escapade with which Arthur sympathised enormously. In July 1924 Evelyn and a group of friends each put up five pounds to make a silent film. It was called The Scarlet Woman and Terence Greenidge was the producer. Evelyn wrote the scenario and, sporting a blond wig, acted as the chief baddie; Alec played an old mother in another wig and various cronies took peripheral roles including (in her first film part) the ginger-headed, shrill-voiced Elsa Lanchester. Evelyn and Alec had befriended her in a drinking-club that she part-ran with the actor Harold Scott in Charlotte Street. Later she married Charles Laughton and became famous for her role as Mary Shelley in the zany Boris Karloff movie The Bride of Frankenstein of 1935. Evelyn, who went to see all her films after that, prided himself on having ‘invented’ her.
Arthur lent Underhill to the young film-makers and much of the action was shot in the garden there. As president of the local amateur dramatic society and an irrepressible thespian, Arthur would have dearly loved, if not the starring role, at least a little cameo. Some of Evelyn's friends regretted afterwards that they had not offered him one, but Evelyn did not repine. Undaunted, Arthur took a chair into the garden and watched with glee as each scene was rehearsed, re-rehearsed and shot amid gales of young people's laughter. He was in ecstasy when the cast broke for luncheon, filling their glasses with red wine and babbling extravagantly to them about the theatre of his youth. When the film was eventually shown to him he could not sit still for excitement, interrupting whenever he recognised one of his own possessions on screen: ‘Look, that's my chair… Take care you don't break that decanter!’
But Arthur's joy on this occasion did not signal the start of a happier relationship during Evelyn's remaining time at Oxford. Nor did matters improve after Evelyn had come down, skiving off his art lessons and abandoning the course after only a few months. Much time was spent traipsing around with Alastair Graham, the boyfriend from whom he was inseparable. First they went to Ireland, ostensibly to learn magic spells, and afterwards drifted aimlessly between London, a leaking c
aravan near Oxford and Graham's mother's house in Warwickshire. Evelyn, Graham and their effete circle praised the modern movement in poetry and painting that Arthur so abhorred, but their enthusiasm was neither intellectual nor aesthetic: it was an expression of delayed adolescence, a rebellion against parental authority. They spoke to one another in an affected code-language that grated on their parents’ nerves, much of it was sexual by innuendo. Students were ‘studenda’, secret places were ‘pudenda’, brothers were ‘bastards’ and women were ‘natural women’ (to distinguish, I presume, from male transvestites); holding, fiddling or mending became ‘masturbating’; to talk to someone was ‘to lie with’ them. It was in this vein that one of Evelyn's closest friends, Christopher Hollis (later an MP and Catholic apologist), wrote to him in 1925: ‘Yesterday we lay with the monks at Downside. On the way we saw a man masturbating a traction engine. His name was Padfield. Young Graham made the older bastard drunk the other night and lay with him.’5 On the rare occasions that Evelyn and Alastair were apart they wrote to each other in this casual manner. Alastair's letters include a great many references to bestiality – the crime for which Cruttwell was obviously and singularly guilty. During a brief stay with the son of a canon at Wells Cathedral in April 1924, he wrote to Evelyn to tell him that:
The Dean of Wells (Joseph Robinson) had the ‘kinderlust’ and seduced children in a ‘pudenda’ hidden behind a panel in the cathedral library.
The authorities at Downside School kept an ark of female birds and beasts for their sexual delectation.
Mrs Graham (Alastair's mother) performed the ‘Rites of Astarte’ on her dog, Seorus, and would be sexually aroused if she saw Alastair's picture (enclosed) of a hound with short front legs and a sticking-up bottom.
The Dean's wife, having discovered her husband's predilection for children, ‘has lain aside all moral restraint and is Sapphistically lying with her own bitch’.
‘How interesting it would be to dress as a dog and sit in the Cathedral.’
‘We saw a horse masturbating in a field’… ‘Just seen four dogs copulating on cathedral green on the way to buy this envelope.’
In his childlike love for Alastair, Evelyn bound these incoming letters into a single volume and entitled it Litterae Wellensis. A few moments ago, as I was browsing through it, the spine detached from the back revealing a slogan in Evelyn's hand. ‘Rien est vrai que le beau’
Alastair and Evelyn disguised their handwriting on the envelopes of the letters they sent to each other so that their parents (particularly Mrs Graham, who was unreliable with the post) would not pry into their affairs. Evelyn got himself into trouble with his father by spreading word that Sir Edmund Gosse had ‘lain’ with a certain lady. When Gosse learned about it, he wrote a furious letter to Arthur, indicating that he would remain Arthur's friend but never wished to see Evelyn again.
Alastair and Evelyn encouraged each other in their heavy drinking but even without Alastair, Evelyn found ways to get stupendously drunk at any hour of every day. Both the teetotal K and Arthur (whose favourite tipple was Emu burgundy, much derided by Evelyn) were exasperated by the stream of inebriates that their younger son introduced to their peaceful Hampstead home – ‘drunken beasts’, K called them. And drunk they were, but Evelyn was the lion among them. Many of his friends noticed a manic, even suicidal quality in his drinking bouts. Dudley Carew later recalled, ‘Evelyn went at the bottle as though he was engaged in a desperate murderous struggle with one who was at the same time deadly enemy and devoted comrade. It was almost a combat on the physical level.’ He would arrange to meet friends in a pub, arrive early and, in the few minutes before they came, paralyse himself with a speed and deadly determination that, on one occasion, astonished even the hardened pub landlord: ‘Never seen anything like it; not in all my life.’ Take a typical episode from his diaries:
8 December 1924
Then I went to Oxford. Drove to 31 St Aldates where I found an enormous orgy in progress. Billy and I unearthed a strap and whipped Tony. Everyone was hideously drunk except, strangely enough, myself. After a quiet day in cinemas, I had a dinner party of Claude, Elmley, Terence, Roger Hollis and a poor drunk called MacGregor. I arrived quite blind after a great number of cocktails at the George with Claude. Eventually the dinner broke up and Claude, Roger Hollis and I went off for a pub crawl which after sundry indecorous adventures ended up at the Hypocrites where another blind was going on. Poor Mr MacGregor turned up after having lain with a woman but almost immediately fell backwards downstairs. I think he was killed. Next day I drank all morning from pub to pub and invited to lunch with me at the New Reform John Sutro, Roger Hollis, Claude and Alfred Duggan. I ate no lunch but drank solidly and was soon in the middle of a bitter quarrel with the President – a preposterous person called Cotts – who expelled me from the club. Alfred and I then drank double brandies until I could not walk. He carried me to Worcester where I fell out of the window then relapsed into unconsciousness punctuated with severe but well directed vomitings. On Wednesday I lunched with Robert Byron at the New Reform and the man Cotts tried to throw me out again. Next day I lunched with Hugh and drank with him all the afternoon and sallied out with him fighting drunk at tea time when we drank at the New Reform till dinner… Next day, feeling deathly ill, I returned to London having spent two months’ wages. I had to dine with Alec, Richard Greene, Julia Strachey… and then back to Richard's home for a drink. Home at two.
Evelyn was not proud of himself – in fact, he was bitterly ashamed.
I do not doubt that he would have liked to please his father but he did not know how to set about it, and although he remained dependent on Arthur for financial support and for the roof over his head, he sought wherever possible to avoid him. He would arrive at Underhill when his father was asleep and surface only after he had left for work. It was best to keep out of his way. As he later wrote: ‘The intermittent but frequent presence of a dissipated and not always respectful spendthrift disturbed the tranquillity of the home to which my father always looked for refuge. My coming of age was not celebrated.’
In April 1925 Evelyn went on a drinking binge with four of his friends. It involved several pubs, a party, a beer-swigging episode at Underhill and a car journey that took them spinning the wrong way round a central London roundabout and ended, after an entanglement with the police, in a prison cell at Bow Street. Because the driver of the car was the son of a former secretary of state the affair reached the papers. Evelyn was not mentioned by name but Arthur was ashamed to read in the Evening Standard: ‘With him was another man in the car who was incapably drunk. A quantity of liquor found in the car was afterwards claimed by this man.’ Arthur knew precisely who ‘this man’ was, but did not have the stomach to confront his son. All he could do was beg for sympathy with martyrish whines and appeals to heaven. One childhood friend of Evelyn claimed that Arthur had indulged him as a boy out of guilt for not loving him as much as Alec. This may be true. It may also be the case that Arthur was consciously reacting against the heavy discipline of his own youth. I have noticed that people who have been raised by a querulous, dominant or volatile parent are often afraid of conflict in later life.
Only a week before the drunken car episode described above, Evelyn had turned up at a friend's house wobbling with inebriation at four o'clock in the afternoon. He carried under his arm three bottles of champagne, whose contents they drank out of teacups. In the evening he took his friends to dinner at his club and generously settled the bill with a cheque. When it bounced, the club secretary telephoned Arthur at Underhill and asked what he proposed to do about it. Arthur protested that Evelyn must be held responsible for his own debts. The secretary had his answer ready: ‘Do you realise,’ he said, ‘that this matter will have to come before the committee, which includes many prominent literary figures? Arnold Bennett is among them. Did Mr Arthur Waugh want the matter of his son's cheque to be brought before Mr Arnold Bennett?’ Arthur agreed to settle the bill, but not with
out a great performance of heavy-weather histrionics.
It was a bad time all round for Arthur. Profits at Chapman and Hall had tumbled to their lowest since he had taken control of the firm in 1903. The valuable Dickens copyrights had expired and a host of eager new publishers had been quick to exploit the situation with cheap rival editions of their own. At Chapman and Hall what meagre profits there were came from scientific books in which Arthur took neither pride nor interest. The company (owned in Dickensian times by Messrs Frederic Chapman and William Hall and afterwards by their descendants) had been recently floated on the stock exchange and Arthur, unable to pay dividends on shares and, as ever, hypersensitive to criticism, dreaded the aggressive atmosphere of shareholders’ meetings. As a small economy during the war he had taken to lunching at home. This meant three hours every day travelling back and forth between Underhill and his office, a double endurance of the long walk uphill from Hampstead station, and a luncheon gobbled at an unhealthy speed. His left ear was, by this time, completely deaf, he was obese, his wife was withdrawn and showing signs of depression, and his asthma attacks had grown steadily worse. In winter Underhill was cold and draughty. As he walked to and from the station, he was forced to stop every few yards to catch his breath, and after dinner, as he rose from the table, he propped himself against the mantelpiece wheezing for air. Any movement from a warm to a cold room brought on a devastating attack. Evelyn remembered his father at these times ‘crying to heaven for release in a wide variety of quotation’.
Fathers and Sons Page 20