by Paula Byrne
Boredom was alleviated by visits from the Plunket Greenes. They brought him a silver flask as a get-well present. Richard and his fiancée Elizabeth were delighted that her parents had finally agreed to their marriage. The wedding was fixed for 21 December, with Evelyn hobbling along as best man. Though pleased for them, he felt they were ‘remote from me behind an impenetrable wall of happiness’.
He turned his attention to a study of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They formed a subject that brought together his love of Victoriana, his fascination with beauty, his interest in both painting and writing, and his yearning for a ‘brotherhood’ of like-minded young men. He worked on it back at Aston Clinton, where he also finishing the drawing of Hugh that was to be his twenty-first birthday present. He was growing ever fonder of the boys, some of whom he thought charming. The best part of the day was when he went to talk to them in the evening.
At Elizabeth and Richard’s wedding, he was depressed. A few days later he went with Olivia to a debauched party full of Russian émigrés. He despised Olivia for dancing ‘the disgusting dance of hers’ – the Charleston, about which she was crazy. She was drinking as much as ever. Whilst she kept him at arm’s length she flagrantly threw herself at other men in his presence. He planned a Christmas trip to Paris and seemed relieved, for once, to escape the Plunket Greenes.
This was Evelyn’s first trip abroad. He went with Bill Silk, a ‘toping actor-manager’, who, like many of his kind, was homosexual. Silk was in love with actor Tony Bushell, another of Evelyn’s friends. It rained constantly and most of the art galleries were closed for the Christmas season. The second evening they visited a male brothel. Evelyn and Silk asked how could they amuse themselves and were told ‘Montez, messieurs, des petits enfants’ (‘Come upstairs, gentlemen, we have little boys’).
After drinking expensive champagne, they were presented with the petits enfants who ‘howled and squealed and danced and pointed to their buttocks and genitalia’. A boy dressed as Cleopatra sat on Evelyn’s knee and started to kiss him. He claimed that he was nineteen and said that he had been in the brothel for four years. Evelyn found him attractive, but he had better uses for the 300 francs that the patron demanded for enjoyment of him. So he decided instead to arrange ‘a tableau by which my boy should be enjoyed by a large Negro’. They went upstairs to a squalid room, and the boy lay there waiting for the black man’s advances, but at the last minute a further argument over the price of witnessing the scene led Evelyn to take a taxi back to his hotel ‘and to bed in chastity’. His diary entry ends with an equivocal: ‘I think I do not regret it.’
Evelyn’s school-mastering life at Aston Clinton was rendered much more bearable by a present given to him by Richard Plunket Greene: a motorbike. ‘It is called Douglas and cost £25.’ He dined with Julia Strachey in London, noting in his diary that she had cut off all her hair, making her look like Hugh Lygon. This was the era when girls were beginning to bob their hair and cultivate the look of lovely androgyny. The fashion pleased Evelyn at a time when his own sexual preferences were veering ambiguously.
He went on his motorbike to Oxford where he had luncheon with Brian Howard and Harold Acton. It was quite like the old Hypocrite days: eating fried oysters, ‘trying on the hats of strange men, riding strange bicycles and reciting Edith Sitwell to the chimneys of Oriel Street’. But his accounts of these visits seem tired and sad. Once again, he was trying to recapture his undergraduate years whilst knowing in his heart that it was time to move on.
Evelyn’s popularity as a schoolmaster was greatly enhanced by the motorbike. From the moment he first rode up the driveway astride it, he became ‘the idol of the school’. He would bribe the boys into behaving better by letting them tinker with its engine. His two favourite pupils, Charles and Edmund, were extremely fond of him, and he of them. His diary mentions them often. On one occasion they took him to see a pond that they had been digging in great secrecy, and he helped them catch fish to put in it. He was upset when he caught Edmund out of bounds and had to beat him. He gave him a Sulka tie as recompense. He also invited the boys to tea. Every evening he would go to their dormitory to say goodnight to them (but nothing more). He took over the school’s literary society and designed the cover for the school magazine. He was trying to recapture his own schooldays – or to reinvent himself as a version of J. F. Roxburgh.
Evelyn loved his home comforts and was pleased that the headmaster had given him a room over the stables, which he converted into a sitting room. He went running with the boys and in return they helped him to fit out his rooms.
The summer term of 1926 began with just a handful of boys in residence, owing to transport problems caused by the General Strike. Evelyn took little interest in the strike other than the opportunity it gave him to relieve boredom under the colour of duty by motoring up to London on his bike and signing up as a volunteer police dispatch rider. On his second day the strike was called off and he returned to school.
He enjoyed the fine weather, reading aloud his favourite Wind in the Willows to the boys in his sitting room, while eating strawberries. And he completed his extended essay on the Pre-Raphaelites, dashing it off in between marking exam papers, and delighting his father with the result.
The long school holidays were spent almost entirely in Alastair’s company. First they went to see Mrs Graham in Scotland. Evelyn loved Edinburgh. As a mark of their intimacy, Alastair took him to see his old nanny, to whom he was devoted. But the ‘Queen Mother’, as they called Alastair’s redoubtable mama, was not in the best of tempers. She resented Evelyn’s presence and accused him of being consistently rude to her.
In late August, Alastair and Evelyn went to Paris. Evelyn was delighted to hear that Elmley and Hugh Lygon were there. They dined together in a fashionable restaurant, visited the Luna Park, and drank a great many champagne cocktails. Being in the company of the Lygons was exhilarating and turned Evelyn off Alastair: ‘I did not see much of Alastair, nor did I want to. He is so ignorant about Paris and French. I think I have seen too much of Alastair lately.’ Evelyn was fascinated by the Luna Park and especially the big wheel. In Decline and Fall Otto Silenus illustrates his philosophy of life by reference to this particular fairground attraction.
These were the years during which the wheel was turning for Evelyn and Hugh. With the Pre-Raphaelites book Evelyn had found his vocation as a writer and over the next few years his career would rise spectacularly. Hugh, by contrast, was descending rapidly from the giddy heights of Eton, Oxford and his coming-of-age party at Madresfield. He was now working at a bank in the Boulevard St Germain. He was drinking heavily. One night, Robert Byron, who was also in Paris, had a call from a hungover Hugh, who had slept in and failed to arrive at the bank. He was in a bad way and asked Robert to go around and help him. The younger sons of the upper classes who dabbled in merchant banking in the capital did not have to put in a great deal of work or show a high degree of financial acumen, but Hugh could not live up even to the limited expectations that were placed upon him. An understanding with the bank was reached and he soon returned to England.
Evelyn went to Oxford and paid off his creditors with a pocket-book full of £5 notes lent by his mother. He dined and partied with Hugh Lygon and the ‘smart set’ at Christ Church. But he was depressed by the parties, describing one of them as ‘all gramophones, cocktails and restlessness’. He resolved upon a life of ‘sobriety, chastity and obedience’.
He published his very short book The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in November – printed, with copious typographical errors, by Alastair Graham on his private press in Stratford-upon-Avon. He began writing a new book called Noah: or the Future of Intoxication. He also finally got his short story ‘The Balance’ into print in an anthology called Georgian Stories and was pleased to be paid £2. 5s. 6d. The book was edited by Alec Waugh and published by Arthur Waugh’s firm, Chapman and Hall.
A Christmas holiday with Alastair in Athens was disastrous. Alastair had finally e
scaped his mother, and taken up a post as honorary attaché to the British legation. Evelyn was repulsed by what he saw as the sordid life of the homosexual expatriate. The talk was all of male prostitutes and Alastair’s flat was ‘usually full of dreadful Dago youths called by heroic names such as Miltiades and Agamemnon with blue chins and greasy clothes who sleep with the English colony for 25 drachmas a night’. This is the kind of expat life that Waugh would recreate so brilliantly in his depiction of Sebastian’s downward spiral in Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn chose instead to spend his time visiting churches and a deserted monastery.
He set off for Italy, hoping that Alastair might rejoin him there. In Rome, he played the tourist, ‘gaped like any peasant at the size of St Peter’s’, took a cab to the Forum ‘and enjoyed myself shamelessly marching about with a guide book identifying the various ruins’. He took a conducted Cook’s tour to the Vatican and was disappointed with the Sistine Chapel. He enjoyed the Colosseum and then one of the sights that made the most impression on him: the Church of St Sebastian Outside the Walls, ‘where I saw the footprints of Our Lord and arrows of St Sebastian’. This was an ancient basilica housing a beautiful and highly eroticised horizontal statue of Sebastian, by the baroque sculptor Antonio Giorgetti, together with alleged relics such as one of the arrows that pierced him and part of the column that he was tied to when he was martyred.
Alastair never turned up, so Evelyn headed home. The new term began and ‘an admirable’ new matron arrived at Aston Clinton. She had previously been a dame in Hugh Lygon’s house at Eton. She gave Evelyn a ham very soon after becoming acquainted with him, but she was to be his nemesis. On 20 February 1927 he wrote in his diary: ‘Next Thursday I am to visit a Father Underhill about being a parson. Last night I was very drunk. How odd those sentences seem together.’ Five minutes later, the headmaster came in and fired him. The matron had told the head that Evelyn had tried to seduce her. This would have made a very amusing story to tell Hugh Lygon: that he was sacked for trying to seduce his friend’s old school matron. Evelyn ‘slipped away feeling rather like a housemaid who has been caught stealing gloves’.
It all seemed like an awful and distorted replay of the Alec Waugh expulsion. He told his mother that he had been sacked for drunkenness rather than indecent behaviour. He was sad that he had been unable to say goodbye to Charles and Edmund, his favourite pupils, though he had written to them. Edmund sent a charming letter in reply: ‘Dear Evelyn, I cannot tell you how sorry I am that you have left. I do not know what Pig and I will do now without your room to go up and tidy or wash.’
‘It seems to me the time has arrived to set about being a man of letters,’ Evelyn wrote in his diary. This was another turning point. After a lunch with Gwen and Olivia Plunket Greene, he realised that his love affair with the family was over. Olivia was boring him with her constant harping on jazz, drink and, above all, ‘Negroes’. All she seemed to want was a big black man. He began to see why many of his closest friends had disapproved of his obsession with her. Harold Acton thought that he was well rid of the entire family, whom he condemned as ‘esurient narcotics’.
He decided to write a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The publisher Duckworth showed initial interest in the project. As Evelyn pondered his future, he made a further note in his diary: ‘I have met such a nice girl called Evelyn Gardner.’
Dudley Carew, Evelyn’s old Lancing friend, claimed that he introduced the two Evelyns, adding that she was impossible to dislike, ‘or, rather, I could imagine only one person who might dislike her, and that was Evelyn Waugh’. It may, however, be that they were introduced by Alec Waugh, who had recently interviewed Evelyn Gardner for an article he was writing about the ‘Modern Girl’ – otherwise known as the ‘flapper’. The slang term was purportedly a description of the physical awkwardness of the fledgling woman as she hovered between girlhood and womanhood.
Evelyn Gardner epitomised the ‘Modern Girl’. She smoked, drank and danced. She cut her hair short, wore lipstick and went to parties, ‘jazzing her way over a floor parqueted with broken hearts’. She was very pretty, with a snub nose and round eyes, and very androgynous. Some of her contemporaries said that she looked like a painted doll. She wore her hair not just bobbed, but in a pixieish Eton crop. She often cross-dressed for parties. In order to create the ‘garçonne’ (female little boy) look popularised by Coco Chanel, girls tied tight strips of linen around their chest to flatten their breasts. F. Scott Fitzgerald, America’s bright young novelist who immortalised the flapper, described the ideal girl as ‘lovely, expensive and about nineteen’. As with Fitzgerald, who wrote This Side of Paradise with the express purpose of winning over the family of Zelda Sayre, Evelyn Waugh’s relationship with an upper-class young flapper was the catalyst for his writing career: brother Alec suggested in his memoirs that Evelyn wrote his first novel in order to raise money for his marriage to Evelyn.
Duckworth’s interest in the Rossetti biography was now translated into a formal commission. By July Evelyn had written 12,000 words without much difficulty. ‘Think it will be fairly amusing,’ he noted in his diary. By the end of August, he had reached 40,000, more than half the acceptable length for a decent book. The noise of the traffic outside Underhill was a distraction, but he was becoming the complete man of letters, consumed by his work, reviewing for The Bookman and mentioning in his diary for the first time that ‘I have begun on a comic novel.’
Rossetti, dedicated to Evelyn Gardner, was a colourful, opinionated biography mixing a grandiose manner with an informal, chatty tone (the brother of the model Lizzy Siddal is described as ‘slightly dotty’). Evelyn had great sympathy with Rossetti. They both hated music, loved craftsmanship, suffered from insomnia and felt that they had been born out of their time. To a greater or lesser extent, all biographers project themselves into their chosen subjects. Evelyn was no exception: even Rossetti’s mother seems to be an exact description of Catherine Waugh. There is more than a little of himself in the description of Rossetti as ‘sensual, indolent, and richly versatile … a mystic without a creed; a Catholic without the discipline or consolation of the Church’. He ultimately describes his subject – as he thinks of himself – as second rate, lacking the ‘moral stability of a great artist’.
He rounded off his endeavours with the words: ‘The End. Thank God’. With his school-teaching experiences fresh in his mind, he was keen to turn his full attention to the comic novel. He was happy to share his work with his friends. He read the first fifty pages of the story aloud to Anthony Powell and then Dudley Carew, who would never forget ‘the happiness, the hilarity, that sustained him that night … he roared with laughter at his own comic invention and both of us at times were in hysterics’. Waugh’s first biographer Christopher Sykes remembered Tom Driberg reading passages to him but being unable to continue because they were both laughing so much. John Betjeman said that when he read it, it seemed so ‘rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again’.
Its working title was ‘Untoward Incidents’, which seemed to set the ‘right tone of mildly censorious detachment’. Like all of his novels, Evelyn’s first had a strong element of autobiography. The novel initiated the ‘spot the portraiture’ game that his friends revelled in, though he sometimes went too far in this regard and risked trouble. Grimes was clearly based on Dick Young from Arnold House, Lady Circumference on Mrs Graham, ‘little Davy Lennox’ was Cecil Beaton, ‘Jack Spire’ of the London Hercules was J. C. Squire of the Mercury. Philbrick, the Balliol flagellant who beat up Evelyn as an undergraduate, gives his name to the mysterious school butler, and the egregious Cruttwell becomes a burglar. Two homosexual characters called ‘Kevin Saunderson’ and ‘Martin Gaythorn-Brodie’, clearly based on his acquaintances Gavin Henderson and Eddie Gaythorne-Hardy, were too close to the bone. Evelyn was forced to change the names to ‘Miles Malpractice’ and ‘Lord Parakeet’.
Another working title for the book was ‘Picaresque: or the Making of an Englishma
n’. As in the great satirical novels of the eighteenth century, Paul Pennyfeather is a picaresque hero. He is unjustly sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour and stumbles from one disaster to the other. His adventures revolve around three worlds, Oxford, a grotesque private school in North Wales, and Mayfair in London. He ends up exactly where he began, though now studying to become a clergyman. Paul Pennyfeather is clearly a version of Evelyn himself.
The novel skewers every aspect of English society from the establishment’s education system to the Church to high society to the legal and penal code. With unerring skill, Waugh satirises cowardly unscrupulous dons and aristocratic philistines (‘the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass’). Its most brilliant comic creations are Captain Grimes the pederastic schoolmaster and the redoubtable Lady Circumference, based on Alastair’s mother, who is forever complaining of her son, ‘The boy’s a dunderhead. If he wasn’t he wouldn’t be here. He wants beatin’ and hittin’ and knockin’ about generally.’ In many ways it is the perfect comic novel. Every sentence is delicately weighted, every joke impeccably timed.
It also introduces those macabre fantasy elements that make Waugh’s world so different from the gentler comic universe of P. G. Wodehouse. A schoolmaster called Prendergast has his head sawn off in Egdon Mire Prison with one of the tools issued to the Arts and Crafts School. One of the little boys, Lord Tangent, is accidentally shot in the ankle at sports day – a comic incident, save that he dies. Grimes, who stages his own apparent suicide, is the only true victor among the characters. An unrepentant pederast and bigamist, he is the ultimate survivor, ‘one of the immortals’: ‘He was a life force … he would rise again.’
Nevertheless, despite its anarchic elements, morality is at the very heart of the novel. One of the questions it poses is how a person can be ethical in an unethical world. Paul Pennyfeather is the only one, despite his passivity and weakness, who is moral and who does the right thing. He doesn’t lie or cheat, and he protects Margot, the upper-class girl he adores, even though he knows that she is unworthy of the sacrifice. He is an innocent in a world of unscrupulous monsters. Waugh also introduces one of the concerns that would become a refrain throughout his novels: the destruction of the country house. The wanton demolition of the ancestral home King’s Thursday, the ‘finest piece of domestic Tudor in England’, and its replacement with a modernist nightmare is indicative of Margot’s inner corruption.
