Arthur should have been overjoyed by the news that his reprobate son was at last falling into line and joining the family business: he, too, had started his career by writing a biography of an eminent man. His Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published within weeks of the poet's death in 1892, had brought him to prominence in London's literary circles, and he had followed it with biographies of Robert Browning and William Wordsworth. They were old-fashioned books, written in the old-fashioned style that flattered their subjects, hid their defects, and trumpeted their ‘serene and unblemished’ lives. For all their arcane ways, Arthur's biographies had launched him on a steady career; but with Evelyn's chance to follow in his father's footsteps, Arthur felt unable to celebrate. By 1927 all faith in his younger son had evaporated, perhaps not without reason. He continued to suppose that Evelyn's best hope was not as a writer but as an artist and, on hearing the news, he shook his head gloomily and sighed a deep, theatrical sigh: ‘Duckworth will never see that book and I suppose I shall have to make good and pay them back their advance.’
But Arthur was wrong – very wrong, as it turned out. Evelyn finished Rossetti within the time agreed. It was published at the beginning of 1928 and not only was it a success – a brilliant achievement for a twenty-three-year-old – but, more importantly, it gave him the confidence to write more. In the end, Rossetti proved to be the first in a long line of startling successes and the launch of a scintillating career that would, to quote Alec, ‘confer high honour upon the name of Waugh’.
Evelyn made his stand on the very first page as a representative of a bright new generation unafraid to pillory his elders. Some literary critics have suggested that the opening passage of Rossetti was intended to mock the arcane biographical style of Lytton Strachey, but I wonder what Arthur must have thought when he read it:
No doubt the old-fashioned biography will return, and, with the years, we shall once more learn to assist with our fathers’ decorum at the lying in state of our great men; we shall see their catafalques heaped with the wreaths of august mourners, their limbs embalmed, robed, uniformed and emblazoned with orders, their faces serenely composed and cleansed of all the stains of humanity. Meanwhile we must keep our tongue in our cheek, must we not, for fear it should loll out and reveal the idiot? We have discovered a jollier way of honouring our dead. The corpse has become the marionette. With bells on its fingers and wires on its toes it is jigged about to a ‘period dance’ of our own piping; and who is not amused?
If this was, as I suspect, a subtle dig at his father it would prove to be by no means the last. From Rossetti onwards Evelyn pursued Arthur Waugh through each of his books with the same zeal and unbending dedication as that which he used to humiliate his former tutor, the wicked dog sodomist of Hertford, C. R. M. F. Cruttwell.
31Peter Waugh tells me this story is entirely untrue. So what could those giggling noises have been?
32Septimus married young. He has three children. Ever gay? I doubt it.
33He operated on the simple assumption that if he was attracted to a girl, she would also be attracted to him.
34I have only come across one example of Alec's turning down a sexual opportunity. In September 1926 he wrote to a friend from Siam: ‘I couldn't think how anyone would have consented to a coupling with the Malayan object with which a Chinese pimp presented me. I could not think of it as a human creature. It woke in me no more ardour – rather less, in fact, than Winifred's nice grey cat. For a moment or two I gazed sorrowfully upon it. Then shook my head, patted its dusky rump, and transferring two dollars to its henna-ed fingers dismissed it to its waiting mother.’
35‘The older bastard’ refers to Christopher's brother, Roger Hollis, afterwards Sir Roger Hollis, head of MI5.
VIII
No Uplifting Twist
At the end of June 1928, two months after the publication of Rossetti, Arthur and K were staying at an inexpensive hotel in Bruges. For twenty years they had holidayed abroad, usually in the north of France – St Malo, Avranches, Caudebec-en-Caux – or in Flanders, taking all their meals en pension in the same hotel. In the early years they had deposited their boys with the aunts at Midsomer Norton but later left them to fend for themselves at Underhill. The previous summer they had taken Evelyn with them to Nîmes. It was a happy holiday, although Evelyn had been maddened by flies. A photograph of him sitting with Arthur at a café table dates from that trip. In 1931 the whole family stayed at the Comb d'Or hotel in Villefranche where Evelyn soon became bored and, after several excursions without Arthur and K to see William Somerset Maugham at his nearby villa, he and Alec left their parents to ‘go wenching’ down the coast. Arthur always wore a tweed suit even in the hottest sunshine. ‘I like to feel wool on my skin,’ he said. Underneath he wore a vest and long-legged woollen underpants, no doubt drenched with sweat.
Now, in 1928, as Arthur and K toured the local churches, parks and galleries, as they sipped coffee – Arthur cramming his mouth with croissant and confiture, talking volubly, smoking his pipe, K aloof, maybe bored – interesting things were going on at home of which they were only dimly aware. The directors of Chapman and Hall had convened in Arthur's absence to decide the fate of Evelyn's first novel Decline and Fall. Narrowly they voted to accept it, and when Evelyn heard the good news, he rushed straight round to his girlfriend's flat, near Sloane Square, and agreed with her to an expeditious and secret wedding. All of this was signed and sealed by the time Arthur and K returned to London in the second week of July.
The young couple were not earnestly or romantically in love; they enjoyed each other's company and were happy together, but their affair had been short and they viewed marriage with a nonchalant, perhaps frivolous detachment. She was not unintelligent. Her sweet, indulgent nature might have hidden a tough core, but on the outside she was warm, and her warmth made Evelyn beam whenever they were together. She (who was also called Evelyn – the Honourable Evelyn Gardner) had a round, prettyish face, short bobbed hair and a boyish sort of body that may, or may not, have reminded Evelyn of Alastair Graham. Her father, who had died when she was young, was Lord Burghclere, a friend of Gladstone, and her mother, with whom she lived, was the elder sister of Lord Carnarvon who, six years earlier, had sponsored Howard Carter's famous excavations of Tutankhamen's tomb at Luxor. For three years She-Evelyn had been trying to escape the overweening influence of her mother. He-Evelyn was similarly keen to break from the bonds of Underhill, and although neither he nor she had much money, marriage for both of them seemed an amusing and convenient means of escape from the menace of parental opprobrium. They were engaged on 13 September 1927.
Evelyn Gardner had spent Christmas at Underhill. She was polite, helpful in the kitchen and generally eager to please, but Arthur was concerned by the apparent frivolity of the Evelyns’ relationship. Both showed off about how lightly they took the obligations of marriage. She had an affected sweetie-pie voice, and used the faddish language of 1920s youth that Arthur deplored. To She-Evelyn things were always ‘divine’ or ‘bogus’ or ‘too shy-making’; she talked of reading ‘Proustie-Woustie’, and wrote to a friend in India after her first visit to Underhill, ‘I went and dined with the Waugh family on Monday. Old Mr Waugh is a complete Pinkle-Wonk. He wears a blue velvet coat at dinner, just like Papa did, and talks about the actresses who were the toasts of his young days. I like that kind of thing.’
Arthur accepted his younger son's engagement with tolerance but he was not enthusiastic; nor did he seriously expect a marriage to take place. He may have counselled delay, as he had with Alec and Barbara Jacobs, but he did not need to push the point for that battle was being waged with striking determination by the formidable and fierce Lady Burghclere – She-Evelyn's mother. This tireless old bat may have enjoyed many friendships in her day but she was not particularly liked by Evelyn, her youngest daughter, and was detested by Evelyn, her soon-to-be-son-in-law, who called her ‘The Baroness’ with a sneer. Although by a twist of fate this shrill panto dame turns out to be
a great-great-aunt of mine on both my father and mother's sides of the family, I have no compassion or loyalty to her memory. Her main weakness was snobbery. She prided herself on being born into the aristocratic family of Herbert of Hampshire. When I was at school to call a boy a ‘herbert’ was to insult him, but for Lady Burghclere, fifty years earlier, a Herbert was something very special indeed. Since the death of her husband she had spent her time writing biographies of dukes, which had entailed much rummaging through papers at their stately mansions. The last thing she wanted for her daughter was an impoverished, suburban trainee carpenter.
Her efforts to prevent the marriage were relentless. She told Evelyn that he could not marry her daughter as she would not agree to it. He fearlessly replied that he would marry Evelyn right away if she carried on like that. In the end a bargain was struck. She would permit the engagement to be officially announced once He-Evelyn had a proper job and renounced his ambition to be a carpenter. In this way the crafty Baroness hoped the relationship would peter out naturally; but she did not leave it to chance. When Evelyn tried to get a job as a radio presenter at the BBC, she found out and, through her connections, blocked it. She used all her researching skills to uncover unsavoury facts about Evelyn's past in order to persuade her daughter to go for someone better. In May She-Evelyn wrote to her friend John Maxse in India:
Thinking all was going smoothly and our engagement would be announced this week, I was greeted by Mama who said
that she had interviewed the authorities at Oxford about Es past career. A Mr Cruttwell and the Dean of Hertford. They said that he used to live off vodka and absinthe (presumably mixed) & went about with disreputable people (there followed a string of French remarks about ‘ces vices’ something or other, all beautifully pronounced but unintelligible). She then added that Evelyn:
lived off his parents
ill-treated his father
had no moral backbone or character
would soon cease to love me
would drag me down into the abysmal depths of Sodom and Gomorrah and finally
we are not to be engaged for 2 years
To all of which we said fiddlesticks and flummery and brow-beat her into agreeing that our engagement should be announced in September and before that if E. had been in a job for two months. Victory to the Evelyns!
How strange that one of Lady Burghclere's charges against He-Evelyn was that he ‘ill-treated his father’. Where could she have got this from? I think Arthur must have inadvertently let it slip. As soon as she heard of the Evelyns’ engagement she had summoned him to a meeting at her house in Mayfair. What was said we shall never know, but according to Alec, there was ‘a frank exchange of views’. Afterwards Evelyn remarked how useful it was to have, at such a time, a father with an unblemished reputation. Of all the whispered meetings or furtive conclaves to which my family has been privy in the last hundred years this one between Arthur Waugh and Lady Burghclere is the one above all others at which I wish I had been a fly on the lampstand.1 I imagine that Arthur aimed for appeasement while Lady Burghclere pulled rank as she had with Evelyn: ‘The late Lord Burghclere would never have wanted his daughter to marry a man who wants to be carpenter’; ‘The late Lord Burghclere would not have thought your son a gentleman’; ‘The late Lord Burghclere would have been appalled by the disreputable company he keeps…’ It was a meeting to which Lady Burghclere had come armed. She had done her homework, and C. R. M. F. Cruttwell had proved a useful ally.
If only Arthur had done a little research of his own he could have put the ball squarely into Lady Burghclere's court: ‘Madam, you have no right to be snooty,’ he might have said. ‘Frankly I am appalled that my genius of a son should be marrying into such a shoddy pack as yours. I understand, madam, that your husband was a bastard, that his mother was a lowly actress and that her mother was a semi-literate thespian whose maiden name cannot even be traced. I am also informed that your brother, the Earl of Carnarvon, is not genetically responsible for all of his issue. News reaches me, too, that your eldest daughter is a cat-obsessed hermit who deserted her husband; that your second daughter is a hypochondriac lunatic who spends all her day lying on the floor in a darkened room; that your third daughter also deserted her husband, a Y-fronts salesman from Kent, in order to set up shop with a rough and ready sailor. As to your little Evelyn, madam, I gather she has already been engaged to nine other men, that she dreams she is being raped by German princes, and that she holds you, Lady Burghclere, with your sarcasm, teasing jokes and snubs, to be responsible for her instability and failure…’
Of course Arthur did not say anything of the sort. The last part of my imagined diatribe (the bit about Lady Burghclere's sarcasm and cruel jokes) is taken from an article She-Evelyn wrote about mothers two years later. Arthur noted in his diary: ‘Unpleasing article by Evelyn Gardner in the Evening Standard’
The Evelyns’ engagement was left dangling when Arthur and K went off on their foreign jaunts and so, too, was the fate of Evelyn's novel. He was convinced that his father would not like Decline and Fall and on at least two occasions waited until he had gone to bed before reading sections of it out aloud to his friends in the book-room. Arthur, for all his joviality and lively mind, did not share Evelyn's sharp wit, or his dry sense of humour.2 By contemporary standards, Decline and Fall was also a little obscene. Arthur must have been worried what the aunts of Midsomer Norton would make of it. How would Connie, Trissie and Elsie react to scenes of prostitution, lavatories, and Welshmen with a predilection for the back end of sheep?
Evelyn knew it was risky but sent it, nevertheless, in a mood of eager anticipation to Duckworth in May 1928. They told him that they could not publish it without first making extensive cuts in the interests of good taste. Evelyn was horrified and refused, brazenly threatening to take it elsewhere. ‘I've looked through the book again and come to the inevitable conclusion,’ wrote the man at Duckworth. ‘As it now stands it is unpublishable. I'm sure no other publisher will have the courage or the folly to issue it without at least as much revision as I suggested. But I realise that you are determined to make the attempt, and have no doubt that I shall hear of its publication later, after you have altered it.’
In dismay Evelyn resolved to show the manuscript, with all Duckworth's deletions scribbled across it, to his father with a view to having it published by Chapman and Hall. He would have preferred any other firm, but he was desperate. He wanted to marry, he needed money and he had no job. He was convinced that his book was good but could not afford to hang about waiting for rejections.
Arthur found himself in an awkward position. He could see that Decline and Fall was a brilliant piece of work, but he could not take to it. He was anxious about nepotism and his image for fairness within the firm. On the other hand he had let The Loom of Youth slip to a rival firm and that had been a bestseller. Could he afford to pass on Decline and Fall as well? In the end it was agreed that the board should make the decision in his absence. He would play no part in it.
But the man from Duckworth had been right about those changes. When Arthur returned to his office a week after the wedding3 he insisted on most, if not all, of the alterations that Duckworth had required. By this stage Evelyn was in no position to argue and he reluctantly consented to all of Arthur's prudish bowdlerisations. It was not until 1962, after his father had died and Chapman and Hall was printing a new uniform edition of Evelyn's works, that most of the original jokes were restored to the text.
But for all his trifling victories over words like ‘lavatory’ and ‘sex’ Arthur was still not happy with the book. Neither were many others. Eddie Gathorn-Hardy, Paddy Brodie and Gavin Henderson, who recognised themselves portrayed as two characters in the novel, threatened to sue – they were all homosexuals. For the third imprint Evelyn agreed to change the names of his queer characters ‘Martin Gaythorn-Brodie’ and ‘Kevin Saunderson’ to ‘Hon. Miles Malpractice’ and ‘Lord Parakeet’. Alec pleaded with his brother to remove th
e name of his current girlfriend, Zena Nayler, from a brothel sign in one of his illustrations. The notice was duly changed from ‘Chez Zena’ to ‘Chez Ottoline’, which must have enraged the Oxfordshire hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell. Before Alec, Zena had had an affair with the popular black singer Hutch, who appears in the novel as Chokey, a jazz minstrel lover of Margot Beste-Chetwynde, a character who wears an ‘almost unprocurable scent’ and is in turn based on Alastair Graham's mother. In Decline and Fall everybody is somebody. Evelyn rarely invented his characters. He took the world as he saw it and the people he knew, bust them up, mixed them about a bit and stuck them back together in a dreamlike and often freakish capriccio. That was the key to his creativity. Between people he knew and his fictional characters he swapped names, personalities, sexes, sometimes mirrored or reversed the truth, but it was never enough to prevent his contemporaries spotting the refracted parts of themselves and their friends in the kaleidoscope. In Decline and Fall, the central character, Paul Pennyfeather, provides the innocent eyes through which a zany world is seen. At the beginning of the book he is sent down from Oxford through no fault of his own. He takes a job as a school-teacher in Wales and, after a series of fantastic semi-autobiographical Alice in Wonderland calamities, ends up, in the final chapter, in more or less the same position as he started out.
She-Evelyn knew that her mother would detest Decline and Fall, not just because she loathed her future son-in-law and everything he stood for, or because it was full of risqué jokes about sex and lavatories, but because she was in it, mercilessly ridiculed in the character of Dr Fagan, a racist headmaster ‘disturbed and grieved’ to learn that one of his daughters is engaged to an unsuitable man:
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