by Paula Byrne
Whilst he waited to complete the last stage of his journey, Evelyn read books from Father Mather’s library, where he found copies of Charles Dickens. He had always associated Dickens with his father – sentimental Victorian tosh – but rediscovering the novels so far from home he felt reconnected to England and quintessential Englishness. He read Nicholas Nickleby with ‘avid relish’ and when he left he took with him a copy of Martin Chuzzlewit.
On the last leg of the return journey he reached a riverside camp belonging to a man he had met before, who ran a primitive trading-post that sold, amongst other things, mechanical mice. Like so many other details of his adventure, they would find their way into his novel. At the camp, he rested in a hammock, reading Dickens and recuperating, waiting for his feet to heal from the wounds gouged by the pins that extracted the jiggers.
By the first week in April he was back in Georgetown and able to dispatch a letter to Mad: ‘Darling Blondy and Poll, Well I am back in Georgetown and all the world is Highclere’ (Highclere was their phrase for all that was luxurious: Sibell had stayed at Highclere Castle and declared it the epitome of splendour). Relieved to be alive and safe, he was full of jokes and high spirits, sending messages to Grainger the Pekingese: ‘Tell Grainger I had luncheon in a Chinese restaurant yesterday and ate a bird’s nest.’ Full, too, of plans for their reunion – ‘Will you lunch with me at 1.30 on May 7th’ – and telling them that he was so thin his trousers fell down and asking them if they’d like a present of a stuffed alligator. He longed for news of Madresfield, such as the meeting between Cecil Beaton and Captain Hance. He relished the thought of the effeminate ‘Sexy Beaton’ with the blustering Capt. G.B.H, but feared that the gossip would have left him behind: ‘I suppose that I shall not be able to understand any Madresfield jokes by the time I get home.’
CHAPTER 15
A Gothic Man
The scheme was a Gothic man in the hands of savages – first Mrs Beaver etc. then the real ones.
(Evelyn Waugh to Henry Yorke, September 1934)
I believe that man is, by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth.
(Evelyn Waugh, Robbery under Law:
The Mexican Object-Lesson, 1939)
I wanted to discover how the prisoner got there, and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilised man’s helpless plight among them.
(Evelyn Waugh, ‘Fan-fare’, Life magazine, April 1946)
When Evelyn arrived back from South America on 1 May 1933 he went to his parents’ home, ‘cheery, red-cheeked, with a car load of luggage, and five stuffed crocodiles in a crate’. This was his last visit to Underhill, as his parents were moving to a small flat in Highgate. Evelyn visited the new flat the following day and offered to pay for the redecoration of the rooms.
He was shocked to read an announcement regarding Black Mischief that had been published in the Catholic newspaper The Tablet, while he had been in South America. Refusing even to name the title or the publisher, it said that a book of such ‘coarseness and foulness’ could not have been written by a true Catholic, which Mr Waugh purported to be, following the public announcement of his conversion a year or two before. Evelyn composed a long open letter in defence of his novel, addressing it to His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. His father described the letter as ‘masterly but libellous’. Evelyn and many of his friends were horrified by the viciousness of the attack on him. In the end, the open letter was not published, although Evelyn had copies privately printed and distributed to friends.
He went to the Yorkes for a visit and then it was to the Grand Pump Room Hotel in Bath, where he planned to read, sort and reply to his huge backlog of correspondence. Among the gossip to catch up on was the shocking news of the break-up of the Guinness marriage. Diana had been having an affair with the Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley. She had left Bryan to be Mosley’s mistress. ‘Don’t tell Hazel I am back,’ he also warned Yorke, for fear that Lady Lavery was still in pursuit of him. He was bored with the demands of this older society woman.
He also wrote to Maimie: ‘Well I have come back and I have bought you an Indian rubber boat with rubber Indians in it … I have a stick of Brazilian tobacco for Capt GBH and it will make him sick.’ He told her that he had seen her pictures in the press and that he would soon be back in London where they could get drunk together: ‘Bath is awfully decent and I drink some very old and expensive port … come and see me. No alright then lunch at the Ritz Wed May 17th.’ He promised to send Bath Buns to little Poll, whose healthy appetite was another standing joke. He would soon spend a few days at Mad, and wrote again to Maimie in advance: ‘Longing to see the dignity prosperity and peace of Mad again. Will come Tues and let you know with telegrams.’
The Lygon girls had still not seen their mother, though in the spring they had sent her violets from Madresfield and a letter. Lady Beauchamp was thrilled. She wrote back: ‘They slept near me, as did your dear letter.’ Violets, she pointed out, denoted ‘balm and healing’. If she thought, however, that forgiveness was on the way, she was very much mistaken.
Evelyn was deeply in debt and owed travel articles, which he was having difficulty writing. For the first time in his life he was writing badly. His agent, A. D. Peters, apologised to his editors: ‘Evelyn has not been doing his best lately … he agrees it is time he pulled up his socks.’ But Evelyn, always honest about himself, knew that he was in trouble: ‘You can’t tell me a thing I don’t know about the quality of my journalism.’ Vogue was refusing his articles because he was charging so much, although Harper’s remained faithful, perhaps because of Sibell and her relationship with Beaverbrook.
In July, he wrote a short story called ‘Out of Depth’, which would be published in the Harper’s Christmas number. He also wrote up ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’, which was published in America in September and then in England in November. Both are on the theme of exile and the loss of paradise.
‘Out of Depth’ tells the tale of a forty-three-year-old man who has lost his faith. He time travels to the future, London (Lunnon) in the twenty-fifth century. All civilisation has disappeared and the city is merely fifty or so huts on stilts raised above the mudflats of the Thames. The people are no more than savages. His sanity is saved by his faith and his discovery of a church in the wilderness: ‘Rip knew that out of strangeness, there had come into being something familiar; a shape in chaos.’ He finds a congregation in prayer, two candles burning. He then awakes from his ‘dream’ to find a priest at his bed, where he makes a confession: ‘I have experimented in black art.’ It is the first fictional work in which his faith plays a significant part, a first tentative step towards the Catholic apologetics of Brideshead.
The image of the ‘savages’ and their huts by the muddy river obviously came from his experience up the Amazon, but the notion of placing a man of deep faith who has lost his way in the ruins of a once great civilisation suggests that he was also thinking about Lord Beauchamp sitting on Lord Berners’s balcony looking out on the ruins of the Forum. The sometime proconsul is exiled among the remains of the great empire that he has served.
‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ is based more directly on the Amazonian adventure. It combines Evelyn’s meeting with the sinister Mr Christie and the Dickens library of Father Mather. The Christie figure, Mr McMaster, detains the traveller in the jungle, reading Dickens to him. There will be no escape: ‘We will not have any Dickens today … but to-morrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Let us read Little Dorrit again. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.’ The hapless traveller, ironically named Henty (after G. A. Henty, the author of popular imperial adventure stories for boys), is a young man of means who has closed up his country house and gone abroad while his wife remains in London, ‘near her young man’. A Handful of Dust would be developed as a back story to the set piece of reading Dickens in the Amazon. The short story
, slightly reworked, and with Christie renamed Mr Todd, suggestive of the German word for death, would form the climax of the novel.
That summer found him back at Madresfield for extended visits throughout May, June and the first half of August. Hugh had returned from Australia and there was yet another upsetting incident involving his alcoholism.
Evelyn wrote to Baby Jungman from Madresfield on 2 August, telling her that no one was there except for Maimie, Coote and Hughie. Hugh was in serious disgrace as he had been drunk all weekend and had ‘Sykesed’ the servants and tried to ‘murder’ Charlie Brocklehurst (a landowner from Sussex who was in love with Baby and many years later left her money). Wally Weston, the boxing maestro, had given Hugh what-for and Hugh was deeply remorseful. Evelyn described him sloping about not raising his eyes from his plate all weekend. He had been put into ‘Lady Sibell’s old room’, which, he wrote, was full of bad taste objects and Eastern squalor. And he had once again been given the old day nursery as his study. Instead of having children themselves, the Lygon girls were serving as midwives to Evelyn’s books.
Hugh’s disintegration was devastating for his family and friends. His looks were fading and his violent outburst towards the staff and a family friend showed that he was no longer the gentle and sensitive young man of Oxford days. His guilt over his homosexuality was also part of the story. Evelyn tried to assist his old friend, but Hugh was beyond help. His battle against alcoholism continued, and in the meantime, Evelyn, unable to do anything, tried to save another Oxford friend who was also alcoholic, Alfred Duggan. From Madresfield he wrote to Nancy Mitford to tell her his latest plan: ‘You will think me insane when I tell you that I am just off for Hellenic Society Cruise.’
The cruise was an attempt to return Alfred Duggan to the faith and help him abandon his heavy drinking – as well as being a more relaxing jaunt than the journey up the Amazon. Evelyn wrote from shipboard to the Lygon girls in the highest of spirits:
Darling Blondy and Poll,
So I am in the sea of Marmora and it is very calm and warm and there are lots of new and old chums on board and I have seen numbers of new and old places and am enjoying myself top-hole … Alfred (brother of bald dago) has behaved very well so far except for once farting at Lady Lovat … The ship is full of people of high rank including two princesses of ROYAL BLOOD. There is not much rogering so far as I have seen and the food is appalling … Perhaps that handsome Dutch girl is staying with you. She was expelled from Capri by Mussolini for Lesbianism you know.* Give her my love and a kiss on the arse and take one each for yourselves too.
Bo
And kiss Lady Sibells arse too if she is with you
And Mims
And Jackies
I don’t think Mr Hood would like it but give him one if he would.
(Mims was Captain Hance’s wife, Jackie’s mother; Mr Hood was the Birmingham boxer trained by Wally Weston.)
This new gang in which Evelyn had started to move became known as the ‘Catholic Underworld’. After dinner they would form a group and listen to Father D’Arcy expound on doctrine. Prominent among them was Katharine Asquith, a friend of Diana Cooper, who was a Catholic convert and had inherited a large house in the West Country called Mells Manor. She noted in her diary that there was the ‘usual rather unusual conversation’ with Father D’Arcy explaining religious principles to Evelyn and Alfie, ‘Mr Duggan rather drunk, but very attentive.’ Evelyn added Katharine to his list of beauties. He noted that she ‘spreads scandal and nicknames them all … is exceedingly amusing and a great collector of ship’s gossip’.
At the end of the cruise Evelyn and Alfie Duggan found themselves at a loose end. They accepted the invitation of one of the other passengers, Gabriel Herbert, to stay at her family’s house in Portofino. It was there that he met for the first time Laura, Gabriel’s younger sister, whom he described as a ‘white mouse’. She was blonde, very pretty and fragile looking. The Herberts, all Catholic converts, were related by marriage to Evelyn Gardner. The visit was marred by Duggan’s attempts to find strong liquor and Evelyn’s attempts to stop him – all distressingly reminiscent of Hugh, but good originating material for the portrayal of alcoholism in the figure of Sebastian.
Evelyn was still desperately in love with Baby Jungman, though he felt that his prospects were bleak because of their Catholicism. The only hope was an annulment of his first marriage. On his return to England in October he began the first stage of what was to become a protracted and painful process. His case was submitted to the Ecclesiastical Court in five sittings during October and November and a report was sent to Rome. The whole business, he hoped, would be settled in six months. The case rested on whether there was a ‘lack of real consent’: according to canon law, if a couple married with the explicit understanding that the union might not endure for life, this was defective consent and therefore possible grounds for an annulment.
Evelyn gave his ex-wife lunch, where they discussed the tribunal. She-Evelyn had agreed to testify. He wrote to Coote telling her: ‘I shall be in London on Wed to take my poor wife to be racked by the Inquisition.’ The judgment at Westminster looked favourable, but the petition that was sent to Rome got lost and forgotten about for almost two years through a clerical error. Evelyn expected to hear from Rome by the following Easter, but in the end the annulment was not granted until 4 July 1936.
Following the Adriatic adventure, Evelyn increased his involvement with the Mells Catholic set. Like Madresfield, the lovely manor house in the Mendip Hills of Somerset became a haven for him. But it wasn’t quite the same: he had to behave himself at Mells, something he always found difficult.
This was not a happy time. He needed money and his journalism was drying up. Diana Cooper had a house near Bognor in West Sussex, which was a present from her mother. It was a large cottage with Gothic windows separated from the shingle beach by a walled garden. In October 1933 she lent it to Evelyn who needed a period of isolation to write up his South American travel book Ninety-Two Days, which he dedicated to Diana. He wrote to Maimie, making light of his depression: ‘had my hair cut in a bad taste way and came back to solitude, sorrow and my tear drenched pillow … yesterday I couldn’t stand the disillusion, death, bitterness any more … I will see you on Wednesday when the sun has passed its zenith. In the evening, unless shes dutch I shall be with Miss J. Can’t help loving that girl.’ He also jokily alluded to thoughts of suicide: ‘wish I was dead like Reggie Beaton’ (Cecil’s elder brother had just thrown himself under a tube train).
Maimie and Diana held very special places in his heart not only because they were beautiful but also because they were vulnerable and prone to unhappiness. His letters to them released his sentimental side. In Bognor, he wrote to Diana, opening with a parody of Noël Coward’s Private Lives (a joke that he shared with the Lygon girls). He mentioned a ‘tearful dinner with little Blondy when she talked about Duggan, very drunk, with such shining generosity that I could only say don’t say any more you are making me cry so terribly’ (the latter phrase is also a quotation from Private Lives). He also said in this letter that Blondy was expecting a proposal from Captain Malcolm Bullock, whose wife had died in a hunting accident in 1927. If he did propose to Maimie, she must have refused him. Evelyn was further depressed by a ‘severe beating from my agent for idleness’. He signed the letter off with the words: ‘Hate everyone except you and Maimie.’
Out of courtesy he told Diana that he liked the house, but he revealed the truth to Poll: ‘It is a very sad life I lead, very lonely, very uncomfortable, in a filthy cottage in the ugliest place in England with only mice for company like a prisoner in the tower.’ He found it hard to work and was still thinking of Baby, telling Diana Cooper: ‘Trouble is I think of dutch girl all day and not sweet voluptuous dreams, no sir, just fretful and it sykeses the work.’ To Maimie he revealed more: ‘The Pope GBH won’t let me use her (nor will she). God how S[ad].’
On 28 October he wrote to Maimie again: ‘I was t
hirty on Saturday and feel sixty. I celebrated the day by walking into Bognor and going to the Cinema in the best 1/6 seats. I saw a love film about two people who were in love; they were very loving and made me cry … I bought myself Sitwell’s new book and find it as heavy as my heart … It is very hard to be 30 I can tell you … oh dear oh dear I wish I was dead.’
Two letters to Coote also date from this time: ‘Darling Poll,’ he begins before launching into some typically affectionate abusive banter: ‘Filthy Bitch – so much for your promise to write to me and cheer me up.’ He complains of being lonely and miserable, writing his boring book, ‘while you meanwhile are having lesbian fun with six toes and Capt GBH … so yesterday I went to London to get more divorced and I lunched at Ritz with little Blondy and saw a lot of repulsive people … it was awful going by train and not having you to see me off … But the important thing I have to say is that GRAINGER KISSED ME spontaneously and with evident relish.’
In the other letter to Coote, sent from Bognor, he noted it was ‘the 2nd anniversary of my first visit to Mad’. And, ‘So you were not really a filthy bitch because you were writing to me just when I had despaired of a letter.’ He told her that he had grown his hair and a beard and looked ‘very effeminate and bohemian’. ‘I am very lonely and very well and sober … I am looking forward to the next war. I shall get a medal and lose a leg and that is irresistible for sex appeal.’
Hugh was also travelling that year. After his long stay in Australia with his father over Christmas 1932 and into the New Year, he returned via the Pacific route, with a month’s stop-over in New York in April 1933. The passenger list describes his occupation as ‘horse trainer’. He is listed as six feet one inch tall with fair hair, fair complexion and blue eyes. ‘In good mental and physical health’, says the documentation for the immigration department, but that was hardly the case. He stayed with a friend named John Steward; it was his first time in the United States.
