Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (TEXT ONLY)

by Paula Byrne

  How would it be for me to stay in some inn or farm in your neighbour[hood] and then every time I have written 5,000 words I could have a reward and walk to your lovely house and have heavenly tea party with you? … Not too far away so that when you have week-end orgies [Madspeak for ‘parties’] I could come tripping in to see them and get ideas that way for my famous book.

  Despite their entreaties he remained in Chagford. ‘How I wish I were in your stately home with all you popular girls. But it cannot be … I can’t leave this hotel until some money comes for me. But that ought to happen in a day or two if that Interesting Play [Vile Bodies] is still going on and then Heigh Ho for the Lygons’ arms. Will you be there next weekend? Say Yes?’

  He kept them up to date with his novel, especially Coote, the sister who took most interest in his work. He even copied into her letter passages from it, such as the menu for a character’s dinner party.

  For all his good intentions, he could not stay away. Liberty Hall was too much of a draw. He was back at Mad in May, sending a telegram to announce his arrival. It was a return to Arcadia and an entrance into the full embrace of a substitute family. This was the summer when he really got to know Mad intimately, living and working there as a member of the family. In the course of 1932 he stayed at Madresfield in January, February, May, June, August, October and several times in November and December.

  His friend from his Oxford days, Peter Quennell, used a striking phrase in reflecting on Evelyn and the Lygons: ‘I’d heard from Coote Lygon that when Evelyn first joined the Lygon family, they told him he ought to become a hunting man.’ ‘Joined the Lygon family’: the girls treated him as if he were their own brother. He had always wanted a sister, and now he had a whole gaggle of them. Quennell added that from the moment Evelyn went to Madresfield ‘he felt that was his world’. Mad World and Waugh World were as one.

  He arrived on 7 May, determined to finish Black Mischief as quickly as possible. Like Charles Ryder at Brideshead, he had found his ‘enchanted palace’. Being treated as family meant that, again like Charles, he could ‘wander from room to room’ and undergo a new aesthetic education. His feelings were the same as those he projected onto Ronald Knox years later: the theologian was also drawn into ‘an enchantress’s palace’, a big country house with ‘expanses of carpet and parquet, abundant well-conducted servants, roaring fires, glittering leather bindings, laughter and music … deliciously exciting to those reared in narrower circumstances’.

  He leafed through rare books in the library and walked in the extensive grounds. The gardens were at their best in May: the Moat Garden, the Rock Garden, the Yew Garden, the Lime Arbour, the Herbaceous Garden, the Greek Temple and Caesar’s Lawn, with its busts of twelve Roman emperors. A dapper-looking Evelyn posed next to the Emperor Vitellius for the benefit of a Tatler photographer. The picture appeared with a caption that provided good publicity:

  Mr Evelyn Waugh, the young novelist whose book, Vile Bodies, has been transformed into a successful play, was snapshotted recently as above when staying at Madresfield Court, the seat of Lord Beauchamp. He is posed beside a bust of the gluttonous Roman Emperor Vitellius – certainly a classical ‘vile body’! Mr Waugh’s new novel, which contains an account of a cannibalistic banquet, will soon be published.

  With no parents to spoil the fun, they could all be Mad Hatters at a tea party. Innumerable details of daily life amused Evelyn and were embellished in surreal fashion. The mundane and its capacity to be transformed into something fantastic was the key to his comic vision.

  The Lygons and Evelyn shared an irreverent sense of humour. Coote kept a juvenile diary that was ‘remarkable only for its dullness’. Evelyn found the diary entries ‘confined to weather, dogs and horses’, and enlivened them with references to incest and an assortment of other immoralities. He pretended that Coote was engaged in orgies and sexual misconduct. This was all the more funny because, in sharp contrast to her older sisters, she was the epitome of innocence. A watercolour of a carthorse that she had carefully painted in the diary was defaced by Evelyn and given a large penis – just as carefully painted. A present of handkerchiefs from Maimie elicited the response: ‘I have tied them to my cock, they look very becoming.’

  ‘It was,’ recalled Coote, ‘like having Puck as a member of the household.’ The description is apt: there was definitely something of the malicious sprite about him, and he was (at this time) slim and small and extremely attractive, with his intense stare and piercing wit. What the girls loved most was his ‘consistent, spontaneous, irreverent wit and his capacity for turning the most unlikely situations into irresistibly funny jokes which continued to be woven into our conversations and letters with an increasing richness of texture over the years’. He was always cheerful and rarely showed them his darker side during these halcyon days.

  Plays and books were incorporated into their daily chat. Sibell remembered him selecting books from the library and reading aloud to the girls in the evenings, eliciting shrieks of laughter. Favourites included Letters of a Diplomat’s Wife by Mary King Waddington, which ‘missed the point of everything’, and also the memoirs of an Arctic explorer entitled Forty Years in the Frozen North, in which a character called Pitt underwent terrible hardships and privations. When his nose became frostbitten he rubbed it with snow: ‘The best thing in the world, the only remedy.’ This became another catchphrase that they applied to a good many unsuitable things. The sisters also remembered there was a novel set in India, which included the line: ‘The East has got me, Granger, but thank God I’m still a pukka sahib.’ ‘Evelyn loved that’ – especially because of Grainger’s presence. Evelyn proposed that Maimie’s dog should be made a member of the Lord’s Day Observance Society under the name of P. H. Grainger, the initials standing for Pretty Hound.

  Jane Austen was high on their list. A ‘Collins’ was their term for a thank-you or ‘bread and butter letter’, named after the unctuous Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. In one of Coote’s letters to Evelyn she complained that her brother, Elmley, and his wife were ‘becoming more and more like Mrs John Dashwood every day’. This is a revealing allusion to what was at the time one of Austen’s lesser-known novels, Sense and Sensibility. Mr and Mrs John Dashwood are two of her most unpleasant minor characters. They disinherit the three Dashwood sisters. The parallels with the Lygons are obvious.

  Literary jokes, some light-hearted, others more hard-edged, abound in the letters that passed between Evelyn and the girls over the years. They quoted lines from Noël Coward’s Private Lives: ‘What fools we were to ruin it all, utter utter fools … very flat, Norfolk – That’s no reflection on her, unless she made it flatter … I swear I’ll never mention it again.’ When Evelyn and Maimie met Coward in the Ritz one day, they both collapsed into giggles and ran away. One of Evelyn’s favourite games was marrying off Coote, who was not exactly overwhelmed with beaux. This became a running joke, with Evelyn asking her every time a new man appeared: ‘Would he do?’

  Evelyn fell ill with the flu and was very pleased to be given the prescription that the family doctor at Madresfield, Doctor Mackie, always swore by: ‘get the girls to give you a dozen oysters and a pint of champagne’. This they did and the cure was instantaneous. He wrote later to say that he had no business being there when he was ill: ‘Please forgive me for being such a boring and inconvenient guest and thank you all for being so kind.’

  It was impossible for Evelyn to be boring. The laughter that he brought sustained the girls at this most difficult time of their lives. Waugh’s first biographer, Christopher Sykes, who knew them intimately, recalled that ‘the Lygons were (and are) among people who, even when confronted by catastrophe, never face life without a sense of humour. It is a rare spirit that shallower people regard as shallow.’ This is astute: to an outsider the banter and play that characterised Mad World appear frivolous and jejune, but in reality the comedy was a means of survival and a manifestation of love. One day they were walking in the garden
and came upon the sundial inscribed with the words: ‘That day is wasted on which we have not laughed.’ Evelyn remarked to the sisters: ‘We haven’t wasted many days, have we?’

  It was hard to concentrate on work. Evelyn groaned loudly as he shut himself away for a few hours a day in the old day nursery in order to finish Black Mischief. They hindered more than they helped, having no qualms about disturbing him and dragging him away to join them in whatever was going on. Sometimes the girls simply joined him in the nursery and chatted. As he wrote, they stitched away at an enormous patchwork quilt that was never finished.

  Evelyn still saw himself as an artist as well as a writer. He had illustrated Decline and Fall and designed his own cover for Vile Bodies. He decided to illustrate Black Mischief with some sketches, for which the girls and other house guests sat as models. Lady Sibell recalled how ‘he drew me sitting on the edge of the bath with a bathrobe on, getting cramp’.

  Despite the distractions, the book was finished at Mad. Black Mischief, with nine drawings by the author, would be published in October 1932. He dedicated it: ‘With love to MARY AND DOROTHY LYGON’.

  CHAPTER 13

  An Encounter in Rome

  The truth is that self-respecting writers do not ‘collect material’ for their books, or, rather, they do it all the time in living their lives.

  (Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-Two Days)

  I think people’s sex lives are their own concern.

  (Lady Mary ‘Maimie’ Lygon)

  He is the last, historic, authentic case of someone being hounded out of society.

  (Brideshead Revisited)

  After completing Black Mischief in May 1932 and receiving the cheque for the balance of his advance, Evelyn decided to reward himself with a holiday in Venice. This was the Venice before package tours, when only a handful of wealthy Europeans and Americans went there. For Evelyn there was also a serious mission, a spiritual pilgrimage: he had arranged to be confirmed in Rome by Cardinal Lépicier.* There was always a conflict within Evelyn between the religious side and the hard-drinking hedonism. This was a trip in which he hoped to reconcile the two.

  His friendship with the Lygon sisters was deepening. After spending time with his parents in London, he was back at Madresfield for long stretches in June, July and a long weekend at the beginning of August. Sometime that summer he wrote a ‘Collins’ (thank-you letter) to his Dearest Blondy: ‘How can I thank you for my long and delightful visit to Mudersfield. It was all heavenly – the pansies and the play and the batting, the idleness and recuperation of spirit. I look forward impatiently to the autumn when we will be reunited.’ He was proud of his friendship with the family, and in July he sent his parents a ‘shame-making’ article by Lady Sibell Lygon called ‘Dinner Party Wits’, numbering him among ‘the people she liked to talk with’.

  He also made an appearance in the pages of her magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, with a hilarious short story called ‘This Quota Stuff: Proof Positive that the British Can Make Good Films’. A wildly exaggerated riff on his brief experience in the world of movie-making, it tells of a newly successful but still impoverished young novelist, Simon Lent, quite clearly based on himself, who is hired by a studio to produce ‘An Entirely New Angle’ (the title under which the story appeared in American Harper’s) on Hamlet. His task is to write the dialogue. ‘But, surely, there’s quite a lot of dialogue there already?’ Lent points out. Studio head Sir James Macrae explains:

  ‘Ah, you don’t see my angle. There have been plenty of productions of Shakespeare in modern dress. We are going to produce him in modern speech. How can you expect the public to enjoy Shakespeare when they can’t make head or tail of the dialogue? D’you know I began reading a copy the other day and blessed if I could understand it. At once I said, ‘‘What the public wants is Shakespeare with all his beauty of thought and character translated into the language of everyday life.’’

  ‘Now Mr Lent here was the man whose name naturally suggested itself. Many of the most high-class critics have commended Mr Lent’s dialogue.’

  Shortly after the story was published in the August Harper’s, Evelyn went into town to lunch with Lady Sibell. They talked about their magazine work and plans for Italy. He then went back to Underhill to pack.

  Evelyn had earlier written to Coote to tell her how glad he was that Hugh was going to be in Italy, because ‘between you and me and the w.c., Raymond de T. is something of a handful v. nice but so BAD and he fights and fucks and gambles and gets D.D. [disgustingly drunk] all the time. But Hugh and I will be quiet and chaste and economical and sober.’ Evelyn had previously met wild ‘desperado’ Raymond de Trafford in Kenya. He was famous for being shot by his girlfriend after a lovers’ quarrel. She then turned her gun on herself. They both survived but were badly hurt. Maimie was convinced that this incident had been recreated in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s soon to be published novel Tender is the Night.

  Since no Evelyn Waugh diary survives from this period, his trip has to be reconstructed from letters and reminiscences that are not specific about dates and travel details, but it seems that he visited Rome for a week, with a fortnight in Venice thereafter.

  After his trouble with the detectives in Paris the previous summer, Lord Beauchamp had returned to the privacy of more distant shores. In November 1931 he was writing home from the Europe Hotel in Singapore, explaining that he was going to Sydney but that he did not know what he would do after that. By Easter Sunday the following year, he was at the Grand Hotel in the resort of Rotorua on New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty, saying that he would return to Europe the following month, though was rather dreading the journey: ‘The thought of the heat rather dismays me for my return – the Gulf of Serpentine, the coast of Java – Singapore Ceylon and the Red Sea in June!!!’ He duly made it back to Dieppe, and thence to Paris and Rome, where he spent the summer.

  He rented a lovely little apartment from the eccentric composer and writer Lord Berners. The address was 3 Foro Romano, overlooking the ruins of the ancient Forum. Berners had bought the property in 1928, and it was lavishly styled in the flamboyant manner that was his hallmark. The bedroom walls were painted in a dirty parchment colour, with the furnishings in deep crimson damask. The bed had an elaborately carved gilt head. There was only the one bedroom, but this suited Berners’s homosexual appetite. Above all, the apartment had a beautiful and spacious drawing room with a balcony commanding a magnificent view of the Forum. Berners said that ‘on a moonlit night it is pure magic’. One looked directly out on the Temple of Saturn and the ruins of the Basilica Julia, which had been commissioned by Julius Caesar in 54 BC. Round the corner was the Piazza della Consolazione. For many exiles and outsiders Rome was indeed a place of saturnine consolation.

  Berners added a garage for his Rolls-Royce, which he had customised with a butterfly motif and in which he was purported to carry a piano – actually a tiny clavichord, adorned with butterflies and flowers. More beloved than the vehicle was its chauffeur, a handsome man called William Crack, described by Siegfried Sassoon as ‘the blue-eyed charioteer’ – his eyes were violet and his presence at Berners’s beck and call was much envied by various homosexual friends. Harold Nicolson described him as ‘William, the Adonis chauffeur’.

  In Rome, Berners found a man called Tito Mannini to look after the apartment. He also happened to be a brilliant cook. Tito came to regard the place as his own. Some of Berners’s guests found him difficult, one or two leaving instantly because of his rudeness. Others loved him. Diana Mitford adored his sour cream chocolate cake. Tito bred canaries. Once, one of his enemies released them and they flew all over the Forum. Tito was distraught and would not return home until he had persuaded his birds to return to their cages. He was just the sort of character that Evelyn loved. Tito later prospered as king of the post-war black market. Lady Dorothy once met him in Rome wearing one of Berners’s suits. He was devoted to Lord Beauchamp and accompanied him to the Palazzo Morosini in Venice in the summer of 1936.

>   It was customary at 3 Foro Romano to take breakfast prepared by Tito (hot rolls and butter with coffee, followed by peaches and figs) out on the loggia overlooking the Forum. For the guests, the Forum was the garden, where they sat in the sun and wandered about. Rome was quiet in those days, ‘not yet the wild noisy hub of crazy traffic, tearing bicycles, scooters and cars’.

  This was where it had been arranged that Evelyn would stay with his new friends. The Lygon children were going to see their exiled father again and Evelyn was finally meeting the man he had heard so much about, whose presence lingered in every room at Madresfield, whose handsome image he had seen in the numerous paintings, and whose undoing he had heard about in intimate detail. He knew that Boom was an extremely cultivated man; he knew of his love for formality, his love for his children, his eccentric habits such as decanting champagne into jugs. His hatred of his wife. His shame at his pariah status.

  Evelyn saw Lord Beauchamp as a Byronic figure. He did indeed have a strong physical resemblance to Lord Byron: his black curly hair, though now greying, the cleft in the chin, the deep blue eyes and full sensuous lips, the slight overweightness, the air of voluptuousness. But there was also the parallel situation of the two lords, exiled to Italy for sexual indiscretions involving charges of homosexuality, leaving their families behind in England. Like Byron, Beauchamp kept fit by boxing and swimming. Evelyn noticed too, despite the inherent grace and nobility, that Boom cut a tragic figure.

  The visit was a great success. Lord Beauchamp, his daughters later recalled, was ‘extremely fond’ of Evelyn and they got on ‘tremendously well’. They visited the sights together, particularly the churches. Boom, always an assiduous planner of social and cultural events, took them all over Rome. They climbed the dome of St Peter’s, a terrifying ascent up a steep and narrow stone staircase set at an angle. They ate ices in the Piazza Navona. A favourite destination was the ancient basilica of San Sebastiano fuori le Mura (St Sebastian outside the walls, otherwise known as St Sebastian at the Catacombs). This was the basilica with the gorgeous statue of Sebastian and his arrows that Evelyn had visited when he was first in Rome in 1927, with his heart and head full of Alastair Graham.