by Paula Byrne
The night porter woke the Prime Minister and his wife. They came downstairs in their nightclothes. Mr Stanley Baldwin was wearing striped pyjamas. Mr and Mrs Baldwin greeted the Lygon girls and arranged for them to sleep in one of the spare rooms. In the morning, Mr Baldwin rang Lord Beauchamp to ask if he would send a maid round with day clothes for the girls. ‘Balderdash and Poppycock!’ he retorted – and made them walk home in broad daylight in full evening dress.
In Evelyn’s hands, this episode was transmuted into the sublime comic episode where the wild flapper girl Agatha Runcible unwittingly gatecrashes 10 Downing Street and then appears for breakfast in her party clothes, to the incredulity of the Prime Minister and his wife.
Once he had an agent and a critically acclaimed novel to his name, Evelyn was keen to present himself as the voice of the young generation. He wanted to be seen as the Modern Young Man. He began to take a keen interest in the marketing of his own image. In an article on ‘The Way to Fame’ he advised writing a shocking novel, and taking little notice of the reviews, ‘as long as people talk about it’. For several years, he had been trying out a range of voices in his diaries – the dissolute drunkard, the coolly detached outsider, the outright cynic. Now he saw that in a world dominated by the popular press, he needed a public image that would get people talking.
This is something that he never forgot. The key mistake of his critics and biographers would be to assume that his later pose – as the old buffer, the crusty colonel – revealed his true self rather than originating as a comic impersonation of the type. But the mistake is easily made, not least because – as Waugh would ruefully recognise – he ended up becoming his own caricature.
He became very good at self-promotion. He so desperately needed the money, writing to his agent: ‘Please fix up anything that will earn me anything – even cricket or mothers’ welfare notes.’ When the Evening Standard misread a proposal of his for a piece on ‘The Manners of the Younger Generation’ as ‘The Mothers of the Younger Generations’, he was not deterred. The misunderstanding ‘is unfortunate, but not disastrous’. He duly dashed off an article about the Mothers.
Evelyn decided that he would return to the scene of his honeymoon to write his new novel. He would spend the weeks in isolation, working hard at the Abingdon Arms in Beckley, and then return to his wife at the weekends. The Evelyns invited Nancy Mitford to sublet a room in their Islington flat. She-Evelyn was delighted to have Nancy as a flatmate, and Evelyn asked his male friends to keep an eye on them and chaperone them at parties.
On 25 June 1929, Bryan and Diana held a magnificent 1860s party at their house in Buckingham Gate. Nancy was photographed for the papers wearing a huge crinoline skirt whilst She-Evelyn went dressed as a street-urchin in cami-knickers, carrying a bowling hoop. Harold Acton wrote to Evelyn to say that he had danced with his wife at the party.
Evelyn was engrossed in his novel at Beckley. He described it as ‘rather like a P. G. Wodehouse all about bright young people … I hope it will be finished by the end of the month’. Despite his appetite for hard drinking and good company, he was never really a party animal. He preferred the intimacy of small gatherings with people that he knew and loved. At large parties, he reverted to the stance of the outsider. This made him an effective fly on the wall. He wrote to Harold Acton and Henry Yorke, asking them if they were going to Bryan and Diana’s party. ‘I might go up for it,’ he said, ‘if I thought there would be anyone who wouldn’t be too much like the characters in my new book.’ The pub at Beckley suited him. He could drink beer in companionable silence, without the pressure of being witty and interesting, of singing for his supper. And he enjoyed the company of the working classes. ‘I like so much the way they don’t mind not talking.’
He didn’t go to the party. His next letter was written to his parents: ‘Dear Mother and Father, I asked Alec to tell you the sad and to me radically shocking news that Evelyn has gone to live with a man called Heygate. I am accordingly filing a petition for divorce.’ They had been married for little more than a year.
‘So far as I knew,’ he told his parents, ‘we were both serenely happy.’ The shock was devastating. Adding to his distress was the fact that she had betrayed him with a friend, a handsome man called John Heygate, who worked for the BBC. He was also an Old Etonian. He-Evelyn had entrusted She-Evelyn to his care.
One of the most popular venues for partying was an old sailing ship moored at Charing Cross Pier. It was called The Friend Ship. Nancy and She-Evelyn attended a party there, chaperoned by Heygate. Shortly afterwards, She-Evelyn became his lover. He was descended from the famous seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn. His parents had debated long and hard as to whether they should give their son the first or the second name of their famous ancestor. They finally chose the former. Had they gone for the latter, Evelyn would have left Evelyn for Evelyn.
He-Evelyn returned immediately to London. The Etonian had rewarded the Lancing boy by sleeping with his wife on his first wedding anniversary. He-Evelyn promised to forgive She-Evelyn if she never saw Heygate again. At first she agreed and they tried to make a go of the marriage. They attended a tropical-themed party on board The Friend Ship. A photograph of them in fancy-dress costume, taken at this time, reveals their deep unhappiness. The press commented that the famous author looked rather scared.
The salvage attempt did not work out. On 1 August, He-Evelyn returned home to a cold and empty flat. The cleaner told him that his wife had moved out. She had gone to Heygate, whom she later married.
It was a massive blow to Evelyn’s confidence and self-esteem. His marriage had brought him acceptance and love, but now he felt a fool. The marriage was over almost before it had begun and the manner of its ending had been most degrading. For the rest of his life he found it hard to talk about his ‘mock marriage’ and he expunged most of the references to Evelyn Gardner from his diary. He removed the dedication to her from all later editions of his biography of Rossetti. Many years later John Heygate, by then a converted Catholic, asked for Evelyn’s forgiveness. He responded with a postcard bearing the briefest of messages: ‘O.K. E.W.’
His friends were little comfort, except the ones who unequivocally took his side and refused to have anything to do with She-Evelyn. Nancy Mitford was horrified by her friend’s behaviour and severed the relationship, perhaps feeling a little guilty at her part in facilitating the affair, however unwittingly. Best man Harold Acton was hopeless. Evelyn wrote to him: ‘Evelyn has been pleased to make a cuckold out of me … I did not know that it was possible to be so miserable and live.’ Harold’s response was tactless: ‘Are you so very male in your sense of possession?’ Evelyn noted: ‘it is extraordinary how homosexual people however kind and intelligent simply don’t understand at all what one feels in this kind of case’. His Oxford life seemed to be very remote from him.
There has been speculation that the main reason for the failure of the marriage was sexual incompatibility. She-Evelyn suspected that her husband preferred men to women, and that his technique, learnt from men, ensured that he was ‘bad in bed’ with women. Whilst it is true that Evelyn lacked experience with women, he had several affairs with women after his divorce, which indicate that he was at least capable of inspiring sexual passion. Evelyn Gardner, on the other hand, found it difficult to stay faithful. She married three times. John Heygate killed himself in 1976.
Like the cuckolded Tony Last in A Handful of Dust, Evelyn could hear nothing but ‘the all-encompassing chaos that shrieked about his ears’. He explained his position to Harold Acton: ‘my reasons for divorce are simply that I cannot live with anyone who is avowedly in love with someone else’. Unlike the fictional Tony, who does the gentlemanly thing and lets his wife Brenda divorce him (leading to a hilarious scene in a seedy hotel in Brighton where he pretends to commit adultery for the benefit of some private detectives), Evelyn initiated the proceedings, citing Heygate as co-respondent.
The divorce, finalised in September, ha
d very important consequences. His male friends noted a change in character: he became more brittle and harsh. Neither Alastair nor Harold could comfort him. His deep humiliation would be reflected in his novels for years to come: the theme of the betrayed husband is reprised throughout his literary career. More practically, and ultimately more significantly, the break-up of his first marriage meant that Evelyn had no settled base for a number of years, from 1930 to 1937. Friendship, always important to him, now became something sacred, as many of his friends old and new opened their homes to him. He became an honoured guest in their world.
Many commentators have presented Evelyn Waugh as a social climber, a parvenu who was hopelessly in love with the aristocracy and deeply ashamed of his middle-class upbringing. This view does not chime with the people who loved him the most. Diana Guinness, Nancy Mitford, Coote and Maimie Lygon, Diana Cooper, all members of the aristocracy by birth, emphasised that it was they who sought out his company rather than the other way round. He judged people not by their class but by their ability to be funny and entertaining.
Diana Guinness gave him hospitality in the months after the divorce. She was the first in a long line of devoted, beautiful, intelligent friends that fell under his spell (as he fell under hers). Physically, she was a female version of the ethereal blond man he had fallen for in his youth, and the forerunner of the three women he idolised throughout most of his life: Maimie Lygon, Diana Cooper and his second wife, Laura Herbert. Like all of those women, Diana Guinness was aristocratic, blonde and fragile-looking, but with a steely inner strength. She was just nineteen and pregnant with her first child. Her capacity for laughter was the single most important aspect of their friendship, which was no less intense for being short-lived, especially since the year after his desertion by She-Evelyn was such an important time in his life.
They were barely apart for the whole autumn and winter. He did not inflict on her any sense of the depression he felt over the collapse of his marriage. In a very English way, she helped him to cope with adversity through laughter. ‘When Evelyn was there,’ she later recalled, ‘it was impossible to be dull for an instant.’
It was in the company of Diana that he finished his novel about the Bright Young Things, now called Vile Bodies. He dedicated it to her and her husband. He was also still working on his travelogue, Labels, and that too would be dedicated to Diana and Bryan ‘without whose encouragement and hospitality this book would not have been finished’. He spent Christmas with them and was touched when they presented him with a handsome gold watch, which he treasured for years. He told them that he had nothing to give in return except his friendship and talent.
Among the guests at their Christmas party was Hugh’s beautiful sister, Mary – ‘Maimie’ – Lygon. Hugh himself was with Patrick Balfour when a satirical Christmas card arrived from Evelyn – sending these was one of his annual customs. On one side it printed a gallimaufry of newspaper headlines (‘Women and Bones Mystery’, ‘18 Atrocities This Year’) and advertisements (‘Why Have Indigestion?’, ‘Nearly Everyone Can Write’, ‘Bunions Go!’, ‘Be a Successful Artist: There is Joy and Profit in Creative Art’). On the other side were extracts from unfavourable reviews of Decline and Fall.
Evelyn noted at this time that ‘I was not one of the young men to whom invitation cards came in profusion’ and that he thought of himself ‘less as a writer than an out-of-work schoolmaster’. This was to change. On 14 January 1930, three days before the granting of his decree nisi, Vile Bodies was published. It was an instant success.
BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE AND OTHERS KINDLY NOTE
THAT ALL CHARACTERS ARE WHOLLY IMAGINARY
(AND YOU GET FAR TOO MUCH PUBLICITY ALREADY
WHOEVER YOU ARE).
This light-hearted epigraph to the novel was later removed, but, as would always happen with Evelyn Waugh’s novels, his friends and enemies pored over the pages to find portraits of themselves. Evelyn got into the habit of writing to his friends: ‘Your turn next.’
In fact, only a few minor characters were the result of direct portraiture: the radio evangelist Aimée Semple MacPherson as Mrs Melrose Ape, the ‘Duchess of Duke Street’ Rosa Lewis as Lottie Crump and, most importantly, the party-mad politician’s daughter Elizabeth Ponsonby as Agatha Runcible. The novel’s aristocratic gossip columnists were based on Lord Castlerosse and Lord Donegal, as well as Evelyn’s two friends Tom Driberg (‘Dragoman’ of the Express) and Patrick Balfour (‘Mr Gossip’ of the Daily Sketch).
Rosa Lewis was so furious with Evelyn that she banned him from her establishment, the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street (which is easily recognisable in the novel as Shepheard’s Hotel in Dover Street). ‘There are two bastards I’m not going to have in this house,’ she declared: ‘One is rotten little Donegal’ (she was threatening to sue him for libel) ‘and the other is that swine Evelyn Waugh.’ She also sent a letter to Chapman and Hall threatening litigation. Evelyn responded by writing a column in the Daily Mail entitled ‘People Who Want to Sue Me’.
As was becoming his custom, the novel is peppered with private jokes. The egregious Cruttwell becomes a Conservative Member of Parliament, while the life of Miles Malpractice is based on those of Alastair Graham and Mark Ogilvie-Grant in their diplomatic postings abroad, where they lived their homosexual lives – an existence ‘punctuated by ambiguous telephone calls and the visits of menacing young men who wanted new suits or tickets to America, or a fiver to go on with’.
One of the novel’s themes was the ease with which the public could be duped into slavish conformism. Thus Adam Fenwick-Symes’s gossip column invents the kinds of fashions that were lapped up by the Bright Young People, such as the combination of black suede shoes and green bowler hats or a taste for scruffy cafés on the Underground. Bizarrely, real events fictionalised by the novel were turned into real events by admiring readers. So for example, Evelyn’s account of the Lygon escapade at 10 Downing Street gave rise to a real bottle party at Number 10, given by Isabel MacDonald in honour of Vile Bodies.
With its treasures hunts, nightclubs, parties, sexual experimentation, motor racing, ocean liners and aeroplane travel, Vile Bodies is the English novel of the Jazz Age, as the very different Great Gatsby is the definitive American imagining of the era.
Waugh’s ear for idiom enabled him to breathe life into his characters: ‘ ‘‘Well,’’ they said. ‘‘Well! how too, too shaming, Agatha, darling,’’ they said. ‘‘How devastating, how unpoliceman-like, how goat-like, how sick-making, how too, too awful.’’’ ‘Goat-like’ is a private joke for the benefit of the Mitford girls – young Jessica Mitford adored sheep and disliked goats, so the adjective ‘sheepish’ became a term of approbation and goat-like was used for anything bad. In 1962 Evelyn said in an interview that the flapper slang was one of the key ways in which his novel had captured the spirit of its age: ‘I popularised a fashionable language, like the beatnik writers today, and the book caught on.’
The shallow Nina owes much to She-Evelyn. Her brittleness, her slang, her beauty and her callous infidelity to both her husband and her lover are brilliantly conveyed through the dialogue, often via the briefest of telephone calls (a device pioneered in ‘The Balance’). Nina’s moral blackness is rendered brilliantly in the sparse dialogue of the telephone conversation in which she makes it quite clear that she intends to marry a man she doesn’t love at all (Ginger, for his money) while expecting to carry on being the lover of Adam.
Evelyn later confessed that a ‘sharp disturbance in his private life’ changed the tone of the book ‘from gaiety to bitterness’. What had started out as a light-hearted satire on the Bright Young People became a brutal castigation. The selfish, drifting Bright Young People unconsciously condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Their language is the mark of their shallowness.
Never afraid to take revenge in print, he includes many a dig at She-Evelyn and Heygate. But a more serious point as well as a personal one is being made when Adam says: ‘I do feel tha
t marriage ought to go on – for quite a long time. That’s the thing about marriage.’ Waugh was perfecting the art of simultaneously laying out a moral vision and turning his private quarrels into art.
This was the book that propelled Evelyn into the big time, establishing him as a brilliant young author, the voice of the young generation. It was ironic that he became identified as the leading spokesman of the Bright Young Things at the time when, because of She-Evelyn’s betrayal, he felt most alienated from them. But he relished his new status. The Lancing boy had trumped the Etonians: Evelyn suddenly found himself much sought after by the newspapers and magazines. He could up his price for articles and reviews. With mock pomposity he insisted on ‘feature articles (not side columns like Heygate) – with photograph of me and general air of importance’. He wrote regularly for the Daily Mail and had a slot reviewing books for a glossy society magazine called the Graphic.
He had risen from relative obscurity at Christmas 1929 to become the most widely discussed author of his generation by the end of January 1930. His diaries begin to read like the roll call of the rich and famous. He was feted in London’s most fashionable circles, while remaining loyal to Diana Guinness, who was now in the last trimester of her pregnancy. He always preferred the company of his good friends to wild parties. Even at the height of his fame, he was happy just to ‘chat’ – Diana’s favourite pastime. In the final weeks of the pregnancy, he would sit in her bedroom eating at a small table and telling funny stories while she ate in bed. In the afternoon, they would visit London Zoo. He felt that he had her undivided attention and it was personal attention of this kind more than public fame that rebuilt the confidence that had been shattered by his wife’s infidelity.
