by Paula Byrne
At the end of the novel, the tone changes dramatically. Back in Oxford there is a poignant scene between Paul Pennyfeather and handsome aristocratic Peter Pastmaster. Peter is an alcoholic, and has become a member of the very Bollinger Club that had been responsible for Paul’s debagging and his unmerited expulsion from Oxford:
Peter Pastmaster came into the room. He was dressed in the bottle-green and white evening coat of the Bollinger Club. His face was flushed and his dark hair slightly disordered.
‘May I come in?’
‘Yes, do.’
‘Have you got a drink?’
‘You seem to have had a good many already? … You drink too much, Peter.’
‘Oh, damn, what else is there to do?’
This scene anticipates a crucial encounter between Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead. Though Peter Petermaster, son of Lady Metroland, has strong elements of that other Oxford acquaintance Hubert Duggan, son of Lady Curzon, his aristocratic demeanour and his despairing sense that there is nothing else to do in life other than get drunk is clearly suggestive of Hugh Lygon. The name Peter Pastmaster is dangerously close to that of ‘Peter Pusey with whom Hugh Lygon sodomises’.
Evelyn knew that his book was special and he also knew that publishers would be worried about its indelicacy. The book contained a homosexual relationship between Grimes and a schoolboy, not to mention references to incest and to the Welsh mating with sheep. It also features a brothel and a stationmaster who offers his sister for sex. Publishers in the twenties were very cautious about potential lawsuits and Duckworth wanted too many changes, so Evelyn took his manuscript down the road to his father’s firm. Chapman and Hall persuaded him to make some minor changes. It was not until 1962 that Waugh restored the edits.
Most of Evelyn’s friends were amused by his love affair with Evelyn Gardner. They became known as ‘He-Evelyn’ and ‘She-Evelyn’. But not everyone was complimentary. Diana Guinness thought she ‘had a head full of sawdust’. The Fleming girls, his long-standing friends, were lukewarm. One of them, Jean, described Evelyn Gardner as ‘very pretty’ but the other, Philippa, considered her ‘a tight-lipped snobby little thing’. One of her more annoying traits was her slang: ‘angel-face’, ‘sweety-pie’, ‘Prousty Wousty’ for Marcel Proust, a ‘complete Pinkle-Wonk’ for Arthur Waugh. But the fact is, Evelyn was not romantically drawn to intelligent men or women. It didn’t worry him in the least that She-Evelyn was child-like. On the contrary, it brought out his protective instincts.
She was wholly unlike Olivia and this was one reason why she appealed to him. She helped to break the spell. Shortly before meeting She-Evelyn, he saw Olivia at a fancy-dress party dressed as the celebrated beauty and drug addict Brenda Dean-Paul: ‘she seemed so unhappy’. She had invited a black man from Manchester for the day and, in a sorry state, had then phoned Evelyn to help her out. He was no longer interested.
Initially, the Evelyns were good friends rather than lovers. She was relieved that, unlike other men, he didn’t put her under pressure. He-Evelyn had learnt from the disaster with Olivia not to seem over-keen. This kept She-Evelyn’s interest. On the one occasion that he let his guard down by getting drunk, and insisting that he take her home, she refused. She got back in the early hours of the morning and received a telephone call. A polite voice asked: ‘Is that Miss Gardner?’
‘Yes.’
‘What I want to say is, Hell to you!’ Clang went the receiver. She laughed uproariously. Evelyn apologised the next day. ‘He is so sweet,’ she noted. When he proposed, apparently on a whim, at a dinner at the Ritz, she said that she would think about it. The next day she accepted.
Evelyn Gardner was the daughter of Lord and Lady Burghclere. His Lordship had been a Liberal Party politician who was devoted to his four daughters, but had died when they were young. She-Evelyn’s mother was a strong character, the author of historical biographies. She was vehemently opposed to the match with He-Evelyn. She thought him middle class and entirely unsuitable. He said: ‘It never occurred to me that I wasn’t a gentleman until Lady Burghclere pointed it out.’
He-Evelyn seemed to be plagued by bossy older women of the kind he had caricatured in Decline and Fall. Evelyn had learnt from experience that the best response to such redoubtable women was to stand his ground. Secretly, he rather admired the grandes dames, who were like nothing so much as Bertie Wooster’s aunts in the stories of P. G. Wodehouse.
Lady Burghclere was determined to find out more about her daughter’s suitor. She was appalled at her discoveries. With admirable doggedness she travelled to Oxford to conduct her enquiries. Unfortunately for He-Evelyn, she spoke to his old bête noire Cruttwell. She-Evelyn remembered her mother sitting her down and furnishing the information that her suitor ill-treated his father and used to ‘live off vodka and absinthe and went about with disreputable people’. There followed a string of French remarks about certain English vices. Lady Burghclere informed her daughter in no uncertain terms that Evelyn Waugh would drag his wife ‘down into the abysmal depths of Sodom and Gomorrah’. It looked as if Cruttwell would have his revenge.
Lady Burghclere insisted that the couple wait for two years. He-Evelyn merely replied that he would marry She-Evelyn in a week. He had the tenacity to hammer out a compromise. He gained Her Ladyship’s reluctant consent to a match the following September. ‘Victory for the Evelyns!’ her daughter declared to a friend who had been following the saga.
In time-honoured fashion, the opposition to the match only drew the couple closer together. In equally time-honoured fashion, the mother was proved right: the marriage was a disaster. The only compensation was that She-Evelyn kick-started He-Evelyn’s writing career.
Evelyn Gardner, in common with many girls of her generation – Diana Mitford prominent among them – made a hasty marriage in order to escape from home and a domineering parent. For his part, it is not difficult to understand the attraction of marriage to a pretty, vivacious high-society girl, who gave him acceptance and confidence as she propelled him into a new set of glamorous people. They were only twenty-four.
The marriage was held in secret, in a rather tawdry low church. Harold Acton was best man, while Robert Byron gave She-Evelyn away. The date was 27 June 1928. They had not even waited until September as agreed.
After a short honeymoon at a hotel in Beckley, Oxfordshire, they set up home in a flat in Islington, which Evelyn took great pains to renovate. He covered an ugly coal scuttle with stamps and then varnished it. He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn even looked like each other, she with her Eton crop and doll-like features. Nancy Mitford, a friend of She-Evelyn’s who soon became one of the very closest friends of He-Evelyn, thought that they resembled a pair of fresh-faced schoolboys.
Decline and Fall was published in September 1928. By December it was in its third impression, bolstered by some very positive reviews. An inevitable consequence was resentment from jealous friends. At Oxford, Harold Acton had been the leader of the Aesthetes, but since Oxford his fame had dimmed. He published a book called Humdrum at the same time as Decline and Fall. It suffered the inevitable comparison: it was indeed humdrum, where Waugh’s was sparkling. Evelyn complained that when he invited Harold to the Ritz he would invariably reply, ‘Of course you’re a famous author, but you can’t expect a nonentity like me to join you there.’ And if he suggested that they should go to a pub, Acton would reply, ‘My de-ar, what affectation – a popular novelist going to a pub.’ The balance had tipped, and the friendship was different. Evelyn was no longer the protégé.
The marriage got off to a bad start with She-Evelyn suffering poor health. She caught flu, which turned into German measles. In February the couple went on a Mediterranean cruise, the voyage to be paid for by Evelyn publicising the ship. He also planned a number of travel articles, which he eventually published as a book, Labels. The cruise also served as a more extended honeymoon and a chance for She-Evelyn to convalesce. However, her health worsened and she was diagnosed with do
uble pneumonia and pleurisy. At one point, she was coughing up blood and He-Evelyn was worried that she might die. As she recuperated in hospital He-Evelyn nursed her devotedly, reading P. G. Wodehouse to her aloud.
Whilst on the cruise, the couple visited Alastair Graham in Cyprus. He was there with his boyfriend, Mark Ogilvie-Grant. Evelyn noted how relaxed Mark was with the relief of not having to keep up appearances, ‘and having terrific affairs in an atmosphere of garlic and Charlie Chaplin moustaches’. Abroad, as Sebastian discovers in Brideshead, is the place where you do not have to keep up the pretence of being straight.
CHAPTER 8
Bright Young Things
The Evelyns returned in May to the greatest London season since the war. 1929 was the summer of parties. There was a new Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald, promising that the rule of the rich was over. Women under the age of thirty had been given the vote for the first time (the so-called ‘flapper vote’), but in the society pages it was the antics of the aristocrats that filled the pages of the gossip columns. The young couple threw themselves into the London scene.
Nancy Mitford said: ‘We hardly saw the light of day, except at dawn; there was a costume ball every night: the White Party, the Circus Party, the Boat party.’ As she recalled, most parties had themes. There was a ‘Mozart Party’ where everyone dressed in eighteenth-century costume and listened to a symphony orchestra playing the ‘Jupiter’. Another was a ‘Second Childhood’ party at which guests wore baby clothes and arrived in prams. A Cowboy party was given by the Acton brothers. Especially memorable was the Swimming Party, hosted by Brian Howard, Eddie Gaythorne-Hardy, Babe Plunket Greene (sister-in-law of Olivia) and Elizabeth Ponsonby, held at the St George’s Baths, Buckingham Palace Road. The invitation said ‘please wear a bathing costume and bring a towel and a bottle’. This was the first recorded ‘bring a bottle’ party.
Another huge party, also hosted by Howard, on the occasion of his twenty-fourth birthday, was ‘The Great Urban Dionysia’. It had a Greek mythology theme and was announced via an outsize invitation that had to be brought along in order to secure admission. Often there were fights, and the White Party became infamous when it ended in tragedy as a young man drunkenly crashed his car and killed himself. There was a literary party, where people dressed as the titles of famous books. John Heygate’s ‘Never-ending party’ did what it said on the invitation: it went on all day and all night. ‘Oh Nina, what a lot of parties,’ says the hero of Evelyn’s new novel. There is simply no better description of the partying of the aristocratic young in 1929 than that in the book which Evelyn was beginning, Vile Bodies:
Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity … Those vile bodies.
The definition of the true twenties party, according to Anthony Powell, was that it was given by a hostess of no great distinction who did not know half of her guests. The gramophone would belt out jazz. Cocktails were the drink of choice. Indeed, it was supposedly Alec Waugh who invented the cocktail party. Certain parties had black jazz bands of the kind that are memorably described by Anthony Blanche in Brideshead: ‘No, they are not animals at a zoo, Mulcaster, to be goggled at, they are artists, my dear, very great artists to be revered.’
Evelyn saw the hit revue ‘Blackbirds’ many times, once with Alastair before moving on to a lesbian party, where Sir Francis Laking ‘dressed first as a girl and then stark naked danced the Charleston’ while a Russian played a saw like a violin. On another occasion he saw the show and met its star, the beautiful black American cabaret dancer, Florence Mills, in her dressing room afterwards. Oliver Messel threw a party to which ‘all the Oxford Brian Howard set’ and the Blackbirds troupe were invited. One man was so drunk that, as Evelyn noted with his usual weary eye, he ‘vomited and pissed intermittently’. Robert Byron appeared dressed as Queen Victoria.
Most of the parties went on into the early hours of the morning. Policemen who were called in were entreated to join in and disrobe. It was at this time that the press dubbed the upper-class partygoers the ‘Bright Young People’ or ‘Bright Young Things’. Evelyn loved to use the term ironically to describe his particularly serious friends, such as ‘Bright Young Henry Yorke’.
Nancy Mitford remembered the sea of fancy-dress costumes that littered the floor of her tiny room in the Waughs’ flat in Canonbury Square, where she was renting the guest room. That summer she accompanied Lady Sibell Lygon to the Circus party, given by the couturier Norman Hartnell. Performing bears and Siberian wolf cubs entertained the guests, along with a circus orchestra and a jazz band.
Newly-weds Bryan and Diana Guinness were the acknowledged leaders of the Bright Young People – though they vehemently denied the tag. Diana was another of the famous Mitford girls, the most beautiful of them all, with a face like a Grecian goddess: huge blue eyes and blonde hair. She was intelligent and well read, more elegant and individual than the average flapper. She had married an heir to the Guinness fortune when she was only eighteen and they had both embraced high-society life, hosting dinners and parties at their country residence in Sussex and their town house in Buckingham Street. In Vile Bodies, dedicated to Bryan and Diana, Evelyn would write: ‘The real aristocracy [were] the younger members of those two or three great brewing families which rule London.’
Diana was typical of the young well-born women who, once they were out in society, had very little else to do but party. They didn’t work, and if they did have a baby, it was handed over to nanny. Her eldest sister Nancy’s rebellion led the way for her and her sisters. Tiny blows were struck for flapper freedom: ‘Nancy using lipstick, Nancy playing the newly fashionable ukulele, Nancy wearing trousers, Nancy smoking a cigarette … she had broken ground for all of us.’ The flappers even had their own jargon: ‘Darling, too, too divine, too utterly sick-making, how shame-making …’, which He-Evelyn delighted in and incorporated into Vile Bodies.
The 1920s was a good time to be a posh girl. The popular press was buoyant, with numerous daily newspapers and weekly magazines seeking to fill their column inches with society news and the doings of the upper classes. It was a celebrity culture: people wanted to read about the antics of the Bright Young Things and their latest crazes, which might be sunbathing or conducting treasure hunts through London’s department stores. Lady Lettice Lygon, Hugh’s eldest sister, made the headlines for her appearance in a circus party where she performed a comic cycling act, while her hostess danced the Charleston in a top hat and red shoes.
Not everyone was quite as idle as they sometimes made out. Because of income tax and death duties, some young aristocrats needed to earn a living, training as journalists, selling cars or working in fashion stores. Nancy Mitford was a typical cash-poor aristocrat who spent most of her time weekending with richer friends while making abortive attempts to work during the week, before finding her niche as a novelist. There was a feeling that the new regime had finally overthrown fusty Edwardian society. Socialists had forced their way into Parliament and the wealthy had taken to trade. Patrick Balfour (later Lord Kinross) became a journalist with the Daily Sketch. He depended on his friends to give good copy for his society columns; some years later he wrote a book called Society Racket that remains the definitive factual account of the Bright Young Things – as Waugh’s Vile Bodies is the definitive fictional account.
Though she didn’t need the money, Lady Sibell Lygon worked variously as a journalist and in a hairdressing salon in Bond Street. The Illustrated London News carried a photograph
of her having a manicure, while in another photoshoot her sister Maimie posed in a fur coat as part of an advertising campaign for the department store Marshall & Snelgrove. Hugh, meanwhile, was a fixture on the party scene. A caricature in Punch called ‘Our Cartoonist in a Savage Mood – at a Bright Young Party’, shows him draped over the banisters, looking distinctly the worse for wear.
Nightclub owners and professional hostesses such as Rosa Lewis of the Cavendish Hotel provided venues for the young people to drink to late hours. The parties got wilder and drug abuse – particularly cocaine and hashish – was rife. Fast cars, faster women and sexual experimentation: Evelyn Waugh scrupulously chronicled every excessive detail for the satirical novel that was germinating in his mind.
One account of the mad antics of the aristocracy caught his eye and provided one of the great comic set pieces for Vile Bodies. This was a story to top them all, involving the unlikely collision of Bright Young People and politics. It was probably passed on to Evelyn via Hugh Lygon.
Lady Sibell and Lady Mary Lygon had been to a party and stayed out late. Dressed in their white Norman Hartnell party dresses, they enjoyed a night’s dancing and drinking. But when they returned to their London home off Belgrave Square, they found the door locked and the night footman fast asleep. The girls had only five shillings between them, so instead of going to a hotel they decided to beg a bed from a friend. There was another family they knew well who had a night porter: the Baldwins, near neighbours from Worcestershire. So they traipsed from Belgravia to Whitehall. The Baldwins’ current address was 10 Downing Street.
