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

by Paula Byrne

  Still he was in love with Teresa ‘Baby’ Jungman. Her letters dating from this time give a good indication of the state of affairs. Baby keeping Evelyn at arm’s distance, Evelyn wanting more and becoming increasingly frustrated: ‘Darling Evelyn, Don’t be cross with me and keep ringing off all the time … what do you expect me to do when you say that you might fall in love with me and that your intentions are evil … I mean to try as hard as I possibly can not to behave badly.’

  It has been suggested that their relationship was at stalemate because Baby simply did not find Evelyn physically attractive. But it was more complicated than this. Baby, despite her flapper reputation, was very serious about her religion. That is part of the reason Evelyn so loved her, as he did Olivia and as he would later love the woman who became his second wife. Evelyn wanted to have a sexual relationship, but for Baby this was not possible, especially since in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church he was still married. Yet she was also being frustratingly ambivalent: ‘If you weren’t married you see it would be different because I might or I might not want to marry you but I wouldn’t be sure.’

  Maimie and Coote, who had witnessed Evelyn’s despair, were furious with her. Sibell recalled that Maimie had a ‘frightful row’ with Baby on Evelyn’s behalf and said: ‘If you’re going on like this with Evelyn, why don’t you go and sleep with him?’ Baby replied: ‘Because I’m saving him from committing a mortal sin.’

  In October Black Mischief was published. With this book, Evelyn began the practice of lavishly binding a first-edition copy for each of his closest friends. The dedicatees, Maimie and Coote Lygon, would have been top of the list to receive theirs. Evelyn told Diana Cooper that he thought that the book was good ‘in just the same sense that Capt Hance’s horsemanship is good’. By which he meant professionally most accomplished. But also, ‘I don’t credit it with any real value.’

  The reviews of ‘Blackers’ were mixed. Some saw it as a transitional work of increasing seriousness, others as a humorous jeu d’esprit in the manner of Ronald Firbank. The novel, drawing on Evelyn’s 1930 visit to Abyssinia for the coronation of Haile Selassie, tells the story of the efforts of the English-educated ‘Emperor Seth’, assisted by a fellow Oxford graduate Basil Seal, to modernise his Empire, the fictional African state of Azania. As Evelyn himself explained, the real ‘savages’ in the novel are the Bright Young Things and European middle-class emigrants. In its juxtaposition of sophisticated and ‘primitive’ cultures, it was an experimental dry run for A Handful of Dust, the great novel that grew from his love of Madresfield and his sensitivity to the effect of Lord Beauchamp’s exile on his children.

  * * *

  * Few people know about this important event in his life. The trip to Rome has escaped his biographers partly because the published edition of his letters only partially prints his ‘Open Letter to the Archbishop of Westminster’ (written in May 1933), omitting the key sentence: ‘I was confirmed privately in Rome last summer by Cardinal Lépicier.’

  CHAPTER 14

  Up the Amazon

  Evelyn spent time with his parents that autumn, ‘pretty gloomy on account of being v. old and poor’. He often escaped to the Ritz for lunches and dinners. On one occasion he saw Sibell sitting at the next table. Evelyn was cross with her for a bitchy reference to Diana Cooper’s ‘raucous laugh’ in one of her articles. He invited her for cocktails only to tear a strip off her for her betrayal. He only forgave her when she cried and then admitted that her lover Lord Beaverbrook had written the article.

  In order to escape from home, he now planned a trip to British Guiana and Brazil, wanting to go ‘among the wildest possible forest people’. South America had caught his fancy in part because of an article that he read in The Times on 29 October. Peter Fleming, brother of future Bond-creator, Ian, had written about an expedition in search of an explorer called Colonel Fawcett, who had ventured into the Brazilian jungle in 1925 in search of the fabled lost city of El Dorado. Fawcett was never seen again, but there were rumours of his being held captive by natives, or being worshipped as a god. Fleming’s completed account was published the following year under the title Brazilian Adventure. Evelyn met Fleming in London and got his advice about an adventure of his own.

  The trip would also be an escape from matters of the heart, the dispiriting relationship with Baby and his casual affair with Lady Lavery. But the main thing was to get new material. With the publication of Remote People and Black Mischief, he had exhausted the stock of his African trip. South America would provide him with plenty of fresh copy. He booked a passage to Georgetown, the capital of British Guiana. His plan was to travel on horseback through the jungle to Boa Vista, making full use of the riding skills learned from Captain Hance. Then Manaos, and back to Europe.

  Before departing for South America he made a valedictory visit to Madresfield, first to the Lygons and then to Captain Hance. His ‘Collins’ to Maimie (dated November 1932) shows him in good spirits:

  Darling Blondy,

  Well goodbye-ee don’t cryee wipe the tear baby dear from your eye-ee tho it’s hard to part I know I’ll be tickled to death to go na pooh tootle oo good bye eee.

  So it was lovely at Mad and I cant thank you enough for all the innocent pleasure I had there.

  Best wishes to you all for the New Year. I hope that before I return you will all be married to royal dukes, mothers of many children and the idols of the populace.

  All love and xxxxxxx

  A diary entry for 4 December 1932 describes his visit to Mad in the week before his departure. ‘Arrived at Madresfield to find everyone still in bed. Three girls and Hubert in the house. Bloggs and Thom Lea to luncheon, later Lord Dudley, very jaunty. Saw Mr Harrison and Captain Hance and left early next morning with Hubert in his car.’ A letter to Maimie written from the Savile Club, when he was more than a little drunk, suggests how deeply he had fallen in love with Mad:

  Well you will say how Bo must have hated staying with me this week-end. However, no, not at all, quite the reverse. I love it and will look back on the noble lines of the Malvern hills that I love so dearly … I was going on to enumerate all the glories of Malvern then I would say how wistfully and with heartache I would look back on them from the jungle.

  Already the seed of his next novel was germinating: a man deep in the jungle looking back with wistful heartache on an English country house created in the exact mould of Madresfield.

  He met Hazel Lavery in the vestibule of the Savile, and she drove him to North End Road to pick up clean clothes and then took him to have his passport photograph taken for his Venezuelan visa. He tried to see as much of Baby as he could. There were many church visits together, and he was delighted when she presented him with a gold St Christopher to wear around his neck. He later attributed the saving of his life to this medallion. Baby saw him off as he embarked for Georgetown: ‘Deadly lonely, cold, and slightly sick at parting … Down the river in heavy rain and twilight. Heart of lead.’

  Christmas was especially difficult. In Ninety-Two Days, the travel book he wrote about this trip, he commented that: ‘Everyone has something to be melancholy about at Christmas, not on account of there being anything intrinsically depressing about the feast but because it is an anniversary too easily memorable; one can cast back one’s mind and remember where one was and in what company, every year from the present to one’s childhood.’ Inevitably, spending Christmas of 1932 so far from England, he cast his mind back to Madresfield and the Christmas of 1931. He was invited to Government House in Georgetown for Christmas dinner, and his thoughts returned to the Malverns. He wrote to Maimie: ‘So yesterday it was Christmas and we had very far flung stuff – turkey and mince pies and paper hats … and we drank to ‘‘Absent Friends’’ and everyone cried like Mr Hanson and I thought of you and little Poll and Lady Sibell and Hughie and Lord Elmley … and the Capt. G.B.H. and Min and Jackie and Reggie and Bartleet … God how S[ad].’

  He was writing regularly to Maimie an
d, as usual, kept up an amusing account of his travels and the eccentrics he had met along the way, including an elderly man who talked in his sleep (‘Buy something, fuck you! Why don’t you buy something’). He would soon meet a more sinister eccentric, who would provide him with the starting-point – which became the end-point – for his next novel.

  Christmas was also a low-key event for Hugh and his father in Australia, a world away from the lavish traditional celebrations at Mad. Beauchamp took pleasure in small things such as a gift of a beautiful orange and white dressing gown from his son. He and Hugh were planning a trip to the Blue Mountains, the spectacular range famous for its wildlife and flora and the blue mist in the air, an effect of the oil of the Eucalyptus trees.

  Hugh was making the most of the opportunities afforded by Australia in the summer season. He went sailing and speed-boating. Boom wrote to Coote to tell her that he had finally convinced his son of the value of letters, especially to those in exile. ‘Hugh appreciates the fact now! A sinner converted indeed!’

  Beauchamp went on to give a poignant depiction of his life. While Hugh was out in the harbour on a speed boat, he sketched his own routine: reading a book in Hugh’s room, a daily morning massage, cocktails at the club, home for luncheon, surfing at Bondi, lawn tennis at home, dinner at 6.45, sleep by ten, embroidery every day. He was still feeling the lack of yellow silk, about which he had complained in an earlier letter. A skilled embroiderer, he sent home as a Christmas gift for Mad the seat covers that he made for the dining chairs. Embroidered in bargello (Florentine flame stitch), they remain there today.

  The children would not go to see their mother and Lady Beauchamp wrote that she was missing out on great happiness. There was an element of revenge in their refusal to visit her: they were ensuring that she felt as much of a pariah in Cheshire as their dear father did in Australia. He may have been missing Dickie, but at least he had Hugh. Boom wrote constantly, with Madresfield always on his mind. He had always loved his home, but now that he was in enforced exile his longing for it increased achingly.

  Evelyn too, in his shack in the jungle, was thinking of Madresfield, as he was often to do. He wrote to Coote on the first day of the new year of 1933:

  Dear Poll,

  It is only five weeks since I left Madresfield. Now I am four thousand miles away and oh what a changed world. Instead of the smiling meadows of Worcestershire and the noble lines of the Malvern hills that I love so dearly, I look out upon a limitless swamp broken only by primaeval forest, desert and mountain. This club, if club it can be called so different is it from the gracious calm of Bucks and Punches, is a low shack on the edge of the jungle. A single oil lamp sways from the rotting beam and so thick are the mosquitoes round it that it sheds only a pale glow. The table has long ago been devoured by ants and I write on my knees crouching on an empty cask … Outside in the night air I can hear the tom-toms of hostile Indians encamped around us and the rhythmic rise and fall of the lash with which a drink crazed planter is flogging his half caste mistress.

  He paints a vivid and unromantic picture of a world in which corrupt officials gamble away their bribes and missionaries, drunk with rum, ‘have long forsaken their vows and live openly with native women infecting them with hideous diseases’. The contrast between the jungle and Madresfield could not be greater. There was a novel in that thought.

  Evelyn was unimpressed with Georgetown. With his guide Haynes (in Ninety-Two Days he is called Bain), he left for Boa Vista, travelling by train, then boat, then horse. On the boat, a rancher joined them: ‘Conversation was all between Mr Bain and the rancher, and mostly about horses. Quite different standards of quality seemed to be observed here from those I used to learn from Captain Hance.’ Haynes was a farcical figure, prone to tales of exaggeration or pure fantasy. He had mood swings and wheezed with asthma. Evelyn grew increasingly worried, whilst also aware of his comic potential. Haynes told Evelyn to ‘Listen out for the six o’clock beetle.’ Why?

  ‘Because he always makes that noise at six o’clock.’

  ‘But it’s now quarter past four.’

  ‘Yes, that is what is so interesting.’

  He was finally able to leave Haynes and head off for a Jesuit mission on the Brazilian frontier. The journey was fraught, with fierce heat and winds by day, freezing cold at night. On the way there was an incident that he related to the Lygon girls: his stallion reared and rolled on top of him, ‘but luckily he was so small that it did not kill me outright’.

  His face was burned from the intense savannah heat, despite his broad-brimmed hat. ‘All through the blazing afternoon,’ he reported to Maimie and Coote, ‘I found that I thought of nothing except drinking. I told myself very simple stories which consisted of my walking to the bar of my club and ordering one after another frosted glasses of orange juice; I imagined myself at a plage, sipping ice-cold lemon squashes under a striped umbrella, beside translucent blue water.’ He was plagued by insects, the worst being ‘jiggers’, the eggs of which had to be dug out of his feet with pins.

  The only respite was to be found at travellers’ ranches, though these were hardly luxurious. At one of them he encountered a man called Mr Christie, reclining in a hammock and sipping cold water from the spout of a white enamelled teapot. Christie was a religious maniac. Evelyn was enthralled:

  He had a long white moustache and a white woolly head … I greeted him and asked where I could water my horse. He smiled in a dreamy, absent-minded manner and said, ‘I was expecting you. I was warned in a vision of your approach … I always know the character of my visitors by the visions I have of them. Sometimes I see a pig or a jackal; often a ravening tiger.’

  Evelyn could not resist asking: ‘And how did you see me?’

  ‘As a sweetly toned harmonium,’ replied Mr Christie politely.

  Christie plied Evelyn with rum: ‘The sweet and splendid spirit, the exhaustion of the day, its heat, thirst, hunger and the effects of the fall, the fantastic conversations of Mr Christie, translated that evening and raised it a finger’s breadth above reality.’ The latter phrase recurs in Brideshead when Charles falls under the spell of Sebastian: ‘We … lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.’

  Another ranch belonged to a Mr Hart. Evelyn examined his well-stocked library, ‘much ravaged by ants’. His next destination was the St Ignatius mission outside Bon Success, where he met and befriended a Jesuit called Father Mather. He stayed nine days, attending Mass in the mornings and reading during the day, as well as observing Father Mather’s missionary work as priest and doctor. Despite the isolation and loneliness of the outpost, Evelyn found him ‘one of the happiest men I met in the country’. Father Mather gave him a haircut and made him presents of a walking stick and a camera case.

  On leaving Father Mather, he tried to reach Manaos via Boa Vista on horseback. This journey was extremely arduous, with little water or food. The thought of Boa Vista, ‘a town of dazzling attractions’, assumed even greater importance in his mind, so he was vastly disappointed when he arrived to find that it was no more than a ‘squalid camp of ramshackle cut-throats’. He was bored and lonely. He wrote to Maimie and Coote:

  Well I have gone too far as usual and now I am in Brazil. Do come out and visit me. It is easy to find on account of it being the most vast of the republics of South America with an area of over eight million square kilometres and a federal constitution based on that of the United States. You go up the Amazon, easily recognisable on account of its being the largest river in the world, then right at Rio Negro (easily recognisable on account of being black) right again at Rio Bianco (easily recognisable on account of being white) and you cannot miss this village on account of its being the only one. The streets are entirely paved with gol
d which gives a very pretty effect especially towards sunset. But otherwise it is rather dull.

  He was, of course, homesick:

  I am rather lonely and have to wait here for some weeks until it rains and there is enough water in the river to go to Manaos. When I get there it is quite near Malvern and I will come over if you will have me and take a glass of beer with you and Bartleet at the Hornyold.

  His letters are peppered with references to their Malvern friends, especially the beer-drinking vicar’s son (‘Tell Bartleet the local beer is called Superale Amazona and is rather nasty on account of it being so warm’).

  To relieve the boredom he turned to writing: ‘Wrote a bad article yesterday but thought of a good plot for a short story.’ That story, based on his encounter with the deranged Mr Christie, would be a stepping-stone towards his masterpiece, A Handful of Dust.

  He never made it to Manaos. He planned to return to Georgetown in what became an absurd misadventure that involved leaving Boa Vista, returning, leaving again, lost horses, lame horses and a potentially catastrophic attempt to return to Bon Success and Father Mather, in which he set off alone without his guide, Marco, and found himself hopelessly lost, without food or drink, exhausted and dehydrated. He was in danger of collapse and felt that he was close to death. In his desperation Evelyn turned to his faith: ‘I had been given a medal of St Christopher [patron saint of travel] before I left London. I felt that now, if ever, was the moment to invoke supernatural assistance. And it came.’ The odds he knew were against him – he later calculated them at 1:54.75 million. But he stumbled upon an old English-speaking Indian about to leave for Bon Success, who saved his life. He was equally grateful to Baby’s medal. He thanked God that he was a Catholic, and took the short ride to Father Mather at St Ignatius, who was amazed to see him arriving on his weary horse.