by Alec Waugh
Evelyn gave little sign of adopting literature as a career. In the summer of 1927 he was taken on the staff of the Daily Express on probation, and given a three months’ contract on a low salary. At the end of the three months the Daily Express (if it had retained his services, it would have had to pay him an official salary) terminated this agreement. London newspapers at this time frequently made such arrangements with young men down from the Universities. They got the services of an intelligent and presumably ambitious young man for a small cost, and there was the chance that they might find a promising journalist. They did not detect such promise in Evelyn. They did not print a line he wrote; but fifteen months later the man who had fired him, was paying the author of Decline and Fall thirty guineas a thousand words.
Evelyn had been commissioned by Tom Balston of Duckworth to write a book on Rosetti, and been paid an advance of £50. This was another cause of worry for my father. He himself never paid an author money until the MSS. was delivered. He was afraid that Evelyn would never write the book and that he himself would be responsible for the return of the £50.1 have told the story of these years in my chapter on Evelyn in my collection of autobiographical portraits. They were a great strain upon my father. Then suddenly the pressure was released. In January 1928, Evelyn became engaged to Evelyn Gardner. To finance this project he went into the country and wrote a novel. That novel was Decline and Fall. Two months before it was published, the two Evelyns were married surreptitiously. It seemed that my father had a delightful last chapter for his book. But in the summer of 1929 Evelyn’s wife ran off with another man. In the following year Evelyn was admitted to the Roman Catholic communion. That whole story in the spring of 1931 when my father was at work on One Man’s Road was too close for its emotion to be recollected in tranquility. Better not to attempt it. The most surprising feature of this omission is that it did not at the time seem extraordinary that Evelyn Waugh’s father should publish an autobiography that did not mention the fact that his younger son was the day’s most dominant young novelist. In his A Hundred Years of Publishing he paid a warm tribute to Evelyn’s excellence. He had no doubt about the quality of his son’s writing. But the fact that he makes no mention of Evelyn’s early manhood, makes his portrait of himself very incomplete.
His book has proved a warning to me. My autobiography ended in the summer of 1930. This present narrative is confined to the year 1931. I do not intend ever to write a consecutive narrative about the new life that began with my marriage in October 1932.
During his marriage, Evelyn had a flat in Islington, in Cannonbury Square. He abandoned it when his marriage broke and again he made his base in his parents’ house. He kept his clothes there, and such few personal possessions as he retained. He did not want a flat of his own. He found it easier to borrow one from a friend, when he was in London; quite often he borrowed mine. In my mother’s diary there is a note against May 27, two days before their departure for Villefranche ‘Evelyn returns’. Maybe he stayed on at Underhill; at any rate on June 4 a letter posted in Paris announced that he was planning to ‘join us shortly’. He arrived on June 9 accompanied by Patrick Balfour (now Lord Kinross), Keith Winter, and a young painter who for reasons that will soon become obvious I would prefer not to name.
I had only met Patrick once before and then very briefly after the theatre in Beatrice Lillie’s dressing-room. I had been struck by his elegance, good looks and easy manners, but I was on my guard with him. He was Mr Gossip of the Daily Sketch, and one of the models for the Earl of Balcains in Vile Bodies. I was not sure if I should like him. Gossip writers had a dubious reputation in the days of ‘The Bright Young People’. Hostesses wanted their parties to be ‘written up’. They were indignant when gossip writers accorded less attention to them than they did to other hostesses; they pretended to be annoyed when their privacy was not respected. In consequence, in self defence, gossip writers tended to be supercilious and arrogant. I did not know whether this was true of Patrick Balfour, but I expected that it might be. I had another reason for being on my guard. He had had affairs with two young women who had been concerns of mine. He had not ‘cut me out’. They were warm-hearted ladies. Once he had followed, once he had anticipated my concern. In both cases there had been a time gap of at least a year. Even so it was possible that I might well come to resent their interest in him. It might have implied a criticism of myself.
In the 1890s Hubert Crackanthorpe wrote a story called ‘A Dead Woman’ in which a man discovers after his wife’s death that she has been having an affair with his best friend. He goes to see his friend, hot for revenge but when he begins to talk to him, he finds that the love they shared with a dead woman is a bond between them, deepening their friendship. That can happen between two men who have been in love with the same woman at different times. But it can also happen that the knowledge of shared favours can cause deep dislike. What can she have seen in him? Perhaps she has got from him something that one could not give oneself.
One talks of ‘possessing’ a woman, but one knows, inside one’s heart, that one has only touched a section of her, eighty per cent maybe, fifty per cent, even as little at times as thirty per cent, when one acts as stop-gap in her life. One knows that there is a part of her one has not touched. She is vulnerable, because of a deficiency in oneself, and there is nothing to be done about it. One knows that she will sooner or later meet the man who will fill that deficiency. One loathes the man who can do just that. That is how it is quite often. But sometimes when there is a gap of time, and another man is filling the place one did in her life, one feels that she is attracted by the same things in him that had attracted her in oneself. That makes a bond.
I could not tell how it would be with Patrick Balfour. Would his association with those two women be a bond, or would I recognise that they had been attracted by characteristics antipathetic to me. Luckily the two passages were to prove a bond between us. I quite liked to think of them together.
Patrick was to become and was to remain one of my closest friends, the only real friend that Evelyn and I had in common. My meeting with him was one of the pleasantest of the many pleasant things that happened to me in 1931. I met him at a lucky time. He was in trouble of a temporary kind. An engagement had been broken off under circumstances which had convinced his father that he was heavily in debt and living beyond his means in London. His father had issued an ultimatum. ‘I will pay your debts, if you will resign your job as Mr Gossip and go abroad quietly to work upon a serious book.’ His father’s idea of what was an adequate allowance for a young man writing a novel in the South of France was very different from what Patrick’s had been three months earlier. Nor had Patrick any credit on the Riviera. He could not sign bills in restaurants. He was definitely poor and ready to welcome simple company.
Keith Winter, too, was poor. But in a different way. He was poor in the way that a quite prominent novelist very often is, when the finishing of the novel on which he will receive a large advance has been delayed and a couple of short stories that he had expected to sell right away to an American magazine have not yet found a market. Winter needed to lie low, but his position and his prospects were gilt-edged. His first novel Other Men’s Saucers had attracted a great deal of attention. He had turned The Rats of Norway into a play with Laurence Olivier in the lead. He was twenty-four years old, he was friendly, pleasant looking; he gave himself no airs. Most people liked him, a rich future was prophesied for him. And for a few years his promise was abundantly fulfilled. His play The Shining Hour was a great success, on both sides of the Atlantic. Today he is forgotten. Something went wrong, somewhere, in Hollywood where things can so easily go wrong; and they went wrong in wartime, a difficult period for an Englishman far from his base. He had been discharged from the Navy, for ill health. There was nothing obvious for him to do in England. He received an offer from Hollywood. He took it and he has not come back. It is the kind of thing that happens in the world of letters. It is one of the reasons
why writers do not encourage their children to make a career of authorship.
Shortly after the war, there was talk of M.G.M. filming Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn was summoned to Hollywood and installed in ‘The Garden of Allah’, at great cost to M.G.M. Keith Winter was requisitioned to write the script. Evelyn was told that Winter was in low waters and that he would be performing an act of kindness if he would be as co-operative as possible. A success now might restore his self-confidence. But Evelyn’s heart was not in the deal. His income tax was so great that he would have received very little return from a sale to M.G.M. £150,000 would have become £1,500 and for so small a return he was not going to allow the meaning and message of his novel to be ruined by what Hollywood would call a happy ending with Charles Ryder marrying Julia. Moreover he was spending as much time as he could at Forest Lawns getting the material for The Loved One. On one occasion he was told that there was an important conference on the next day at the studio which he must attend. He was sorry, he said, he couldn’t. ‘But Mr Waugh,’ he was informed by a breathless secretary, ‘Mr Louis B. Meyer himself will be at the conference.’
‘I can’t help that,’ he answered, ‘at Forest Lawns they’re laying out a stiff who’s been two weeks in the water.’
In Villefranche, Evelyn had pretended that he was not on speaking terms with Winter, and that Winter must use Patrick as an intermediary when he wanted to address him. There was also some confusion about shirts. Winter had a red shirt with white spots that was only printed on one side of the linen. Winter was working in a room on the second floor, facing the Place du Marché Whenever an acquaintance came on to the terrace, Evelyn would call up, ‘Winter come out on the balcony and show these visitors your shirt.’ There was also some long saga about, through a mistake at the laundry, Winter having appropriated Patrick’s shirts. This saga of the shirt was continued in ‘The Garden of Allah’. Winter arrived for lunch with Evelyn in an undervest, a jacket and no shirt. The head waiter would not allow Winter into the restaurant without a shirt, so that Evelyn had to go to a man’s furnishing store and buy him one.
It was rumoured in England that Keith Winter had become a Roman Catholic. I have since heard that this is not true, but that he has found a ‘purpose in life’; that he lives very simply in Greenwich Village, that he is devoted to ‘good works’ and that he is not unhappy, that he feels fulfilled. It is the last thing that I would have expected for him in that distant summer.
We all of us had friends along the coast, so that the family group often divided into separate parties. Patrick was an old friend of Somerset Maugham, and several visits were made to the Villa Mauresque; from one of these visits Patrick and Winter returned alone, having left the painter behind. ‘Willie took a fancy to him,’ Patrick explained. Next day the painter returned shortly before lunch with a well contented smirk. The great man, he told us, had been delighted with a trick of his with his finger tips that had reminded him of the boys in Bangkok. He felt he had been a great success and presumed that he would be invited to a number of W.S.M.’s smarter parties. But this was, in fact, the sole invitation that he received. I only once heard Maugham speak of him afterwards, and then it was on a derogatory note. ‘Not a very agreeable person,’ he remarked; yet I once saw them together that autumn at a small cocktail party given by Patrick Balfour. When the painter handed Maugham a glass the back of his hand touched Maugham’s palm. As it did a lecherous expression came into Maugham’s face, an expression I have only seen there that once. The incident is surely symptomatic. Robin Maugham has written that W.S.M. considered it one of his mistakes that he had tried to persuade himself that he was only twenty-five per cent homosexual, and seventy-five per cent heterosexual, whereas actually it was the other way about. I think he resented his own homosexual feelings and tried to despise, often with success, those who administered to them.
I see the painter every so often nowadays. He has been moderately successful. He is married; he has three children. He gives talks on the B.B.C. He has held two or three appointments in American universities. He is a popular member of the Savile.
In Brideshead Revisited Evelyn had the situation of a peer with a large estate, who during the first war deserted his wife, the mother of his four children and set up in Italy with another woman. He never returned to England, until, after his wife’s death, he came home to die. That situation was suggested to Evelyn by an incident that took place that summer. One morning I found Evelyn and Patrick discussing over their coffee a report in the Continental Daily Mail that a divorce suit was being brought against one of the richest and most prominent peers of the realm, a man in his middle sixties who had been very active in political and public life. ‘So the story has broken,’ Evelyn said.
I will not mention the peer by name. I will use the name that was given him in Brideshead, Marchmain, with Flyte as the family name. In real life Lady Marchmain was the sister of a prominent Duke, and the case was being brought because of a quarrel between her husband and her brother, at her brother’s instigation. A groom for whom Marchmain had formed an attachment many years before was to be cited. The case was never brought because the King intervened. He could not allow a man who had been his own representative to be exposed to scandal. But the case was only dropped on the condition that Marchmain left the country.
I had met Marchmain three months earlier in New York at a dinner party that F.D.R.’s mother had given for him. Both his sons had been Oxford contemporaries of Evelyn’s. I had seen quite a lot of his younger son, and I exchanged a few words about him with his father. ‘A dear dear boy,’ he said. ‘If only he would write to me more often.’ The great man was very gracious and urbane, embellishing his role of guest of honour. He was on his way back from a world tour. Had he any knowledge of the trouble that awaited him in England?
His younger son was very good looking, very charming. He was also a very heavy drinker. He died young, through an accident, not through drink. When Brideshead was published it was generally assumed that he was the original of Sebastian Flyte.
Somerset Maugham often insisted that he himself rarely put real people into books – though in the end he did not deny that Alroy Kear was in large part Hugh Walpole, but when Brideshead was being discussed in the autumn of 1945 at a New York lunch party, he remarked, ‘We all know, of course, who Sebastian was. A charming boy. He drank himself to death.’
But I should question whether he was more than casually in Evelyn’s mind. Up to Evelyn’s first marriage, I knew, or knew about, most of his friends, and I can recognise how much he took one feature here and one trait there. Charles Ryder is far from being a self portrait, and I would say that the role played by Sebastian in Ryder’s life was filled in Evelyn’s by Richard Pares and the Scot whom in A Little Learning, he calls Hamish Lennox. Hamish’s mother, whom I never met was partly the original of Lady Circumference in Decline and Fall. Lady C. had a special wood port which was kept in plentiful supply and the consumption of Barford Port was the equivalent of the exuberant raids upon the Brideshead cellar. I wonder, incidentally, how many Brideshead readers were puzzled by Sebastian taking a bottle of Peyraguey on that first picnic. It was a hot day; there is no mention of ice, and Peyraguey is a very sweet Sauternes. It was one of Evelyn’s idiosyncrasies to prefer his Sauternes un-chilled. At one time he described it as ‘White Claret’. The last time I dined at his house, he served in July a Sauternes at room temperature.
IX
I said in the first chapter of this book that fate vouchsafed me two romances in 1931. The second began during June. One morning as I was sitting on the terrace writing, with Evelyn beside me reading the Eclaireur de Nice, a taxi drove up to the hotel. From it stepped a young woman. She was alone. She had two suitcases. She was blonde. She was very thin. She was simply dressed in an ochre yellow sheath of linen. She moved with a lissom ease. Evelyn and I looked at each other. We knew exactly what each was thinking. ‘Let’s toss for it,’ I said. ‘A three day first refusal,’ Evelyn sugg
ested. I won the toss.
That evening I was sitting on the terrace with my parents and Keith Winter over a coffee and a fine: Evelyn and Patrick were in Nice. She strolled slowly along the waterfront. I stood up. ‘I’m going to ask her to join us.’ My mother suggested that it would be more proper if the invitation came from her. ‘She probably only speaks French,’ I said. But that was not so. She spoke English with an individual but educated accent. Her name was Mary G … She was a Canadian, she said. Her husband was an American, a painter. He was in Russia. He was going to join her here in a few days. They had a flat in Paris. She had two daughters. She was so slim that it was very hard to think of her as having daughters. She was very quiet, almost demure. I had not gained much by winning my bet, I thought.
Two evenings later, I had a small dinner party to which I invited her. During the previous day and a half I had scarcely seen her. She had not been to the beach. She had dined in Nice. She had gone in by bus. We had a short gossip by the Octroi, which was pleasant enough, but she had a remote air. Later she told me that at the time she was taking drugs. At the dinner – we were a party of six – she sat at the other end of the table. She looked very beautiful, but very abstracted. She did not take much part in the conversation, and I wondered if Evelyn would have better luck with her when my three days were up. We dined at what was then called the Cabanon and is now Jimmy’s. After dinner we went to the Garden Bar. She sat against the wall, her head rested against it. She scarcely spoke, then, afterwards, as we walked back to the hotel, she slipped her hand into mine and pressed her sharp pointed nails into my palm. It was one of the most electric sensations of my life. In ten minutes we were in bed.
