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

by Paula Byrne

  Glen, who admired the Lygon girls himself, felt that Evelyn was especially close to Coote, though people always thought it was Maimie. He reckoned that Coote underestimated Evelyn’s ‘very great affection for her’. This was typical of her modesty. Glen recalled his own mental picture of Coote sitting in the window doing petit point – ‘one of these vivid little pictures of life’. He regarded her as one of those people who was really unaware of whether she was rich or poor, with something of the gypsy in her (later she would work in Turkey, then live on a river boat on the Thames).

  Sandy Glen’s memories reveal Evelyn and Hugh at their best. They were not only brave and hard working, but also terrific company. He wrote in Young Men in the Arctic of how conversation ran often upon food, which was hardly surprising considering how hungry they always were. He remembered one particular conversational fantasia:

  Dordogne was eventually chosen for a later holiday by Lygon and Waugh. As good food and good wine can best be appreciated after exercise, they decided to take a valet-chauffeur. He would precede them and find the best villages to which they, in their turn, would walk from their previous evening’s abode. Baths run, clean clothes laid out, and finally the most carefully chosen dinner and wines would await their arrival. Books, people and travel were the main subjects when we tired of food itself. We cut out lunch and ate twice a day, so it was in the morning and evening that we did most of our talking. The greatest joy in sledging comes when supper is over and conversation exhausted: then there are no limits to the flights to which thoughts may take one. The while one’s pipe sends up its drowsy smoke, in intertwining streaks of blue and grey.

  The Dordogne remained a fantasy. Evelyn and Hugh would never share such intimacy again.

  They returned to Mad at the end of August, informing Coote and Maimie that they had had mountains in the Arctic named after them.

  There is a remarkable passage in Brideshead Revisited after Cordelia’s long description of Sebastian and his doomed future as an alcoholic. Charles lies awake, tossing and turning, thinking about his friend:

  And another image came to me, of an Arctic hut and a trapper alone with his furs and oil lamp and log fire; the remains of supper on the table, a few books, skis in the corner; everything dry and neat and warm inside, and outside the last blizzard of winter raging and the snow piling up against the door. Quite silently a great weight forming against the timber; the bolt straining in its socket; minute by minute in the darkness outside the white heap sealing the door, until quite soon when the wind dropped and the sun came out on the ice slopes and the thaw set in a block would move, slide, and tumble, high above, gather way, gather weight, till the whole hillside seemed to be falling, and the little lighted place would crash open and splinter and disappear, rolling with the avalanche into the ravine.

  This extraordinary metaphor of destruction, building in a rolling sentence that is itself like an accumulating snowball, is a memory of the trip to the Arctic with Hugh. It is the literary legacy of the fiasco in the north.

  CHAPTER 17

  Ladies and Lapdogs

  While Hugh and Evelyn were narrowly escaping disaster in the Arctic, Lord Beauchamp was once more wandering the globe. He returned from Australia to Lord Berners’s flat in Rome. Maimie took her turn to go out and stay with him. Evelyn returned to Highgate again, using his parents’ home as a base while he saw his friends and regaled them with his Arctic adventures. His father’s diary grumbles that he came in late when everyone else had gone to bed, leaving lights on and doors open. Lupin had returned from yet another harebrained scheme to annoy and frustrate his parents. Arthur’s diary certainly has the aura of Mr Pooter: ‘Evelyn brought gin bitters, and I drank them for lunch … went up to K’s, did 1/3 of the crossword and had a nap … Had a good dinner of egg-salad, duck and green peas and pears. Went early to bed, leaving K and Evelyn to argue and play cards.’

  Evelyn wrote to Maimie: ‘Well it must be decent at Rome but very full of traffic because all roads lead there. If you see the Pope please tell him to jolly well get a move on with my annulment.’ Then another letter: ‘Darling Blondy, So I too am staying with my Boom. At present it is all dignity and peace but I expect we shall soon have a quarrel and black each others eyes and tear our hair and flog each other with hunting crops like the lovely Lygon sisters.’

  He told Maimie that he was going to spend a studious autumn writing the life of ‘a dead beast’ (i.e. Catholic priest) – the Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion. He also wrote that he had dined with the Yorkes and that ‘Henry loved your Boom’ – so Henry Yorke must have been another of the old Oxford set who went out to stay with the exiled earl. And, he continued, ‘I wish you had seen me at the N. Pole. I had great sex appeal – thin as Bartleet.’ He was very pleased with the reception of A Handful of Dust: ‘the good taste book I wrote about sponger is being a success and wherever I go the people shout Long Live Bo and throw garlands of flowers in my path and I have a brass band to play to me in my bath’.

  ‘Handfulers’, as they called it, was published in September. In the library at Madresfield there is a first edition inscribed ‘To Hughie, to whom it should have been dedicated’.

  Diana Cooper told him that everyone was raving about the new book. She shared the general admiration, but she also chided him: ‘You were so very hostile when you left for the Pole that you froze the voicing of my praise.’ In his reply he tried to explain to her how he felt about friendship, but later he crossed out the paragraph:

  The trouble is that I find the pleasures of friendship need more leisure than you can possibly give to it at the present. Also that I am jealous and resentful and impatient though you are none of those things. It is of no interest to me to see you in a crowd or for odd snatches of ten minutes at a time. Perhaps in thirty years time when some of your adherents have died or fallen away.

  This self-censored comment provides a good insight into his exacting view of the requirements of friendship. There are shades of that other goddess Diana (Guinness) whose friendship had been so important to him but whom he had lost because he was jealous and couldn’t bear to be in second place. By contrast, his friendship with the Lygons endured, because they put him at number one or at the very least had the grace to give him the impression that they did. Later that month he took two of the sisters (Sibell and Coote) to a boxing match. And he wrote to Maimie to tell her that he had seen lots of mutual chums at Nancy Mitford’s wedding to Peter Rodd.

  He was at home for most of September and then went off to Chagford, asking the sisters to write to him. He planned to make a start on the Campion biography and also wanted to finish two short stories, ‘Mr Cruttwell’s Little Outing’ and ‘On Guard’.

  He wrote to ‘Darling Poll’ from Chagford: ‘Did you know that in the glorious epoch 1900–1914 [does he mean 1914–18?] the word ‘‘poll’’ was used by our gallant boys … to mean a tart … so now I shall give up calling you Poll on account of its being disrespectful. Darling Dorothy.’ He once again joked that he had found a prospective husband for her: ‘I went to Longleat yesterday and thought it a bad taste house and there was a poor lonely old man called Lord Bath and he had his little dinner laid out on the table god it was sad why not marry him?’ The letter also includes a smutty joke of the kind that he liked to reserve for letters to her: he had been reading a ‘feelthy’ book which ‘says that in rogering the cock should never be withdrawn so much as a millimetre and this gives the maximum pleasure to the lady on account of pressing her bladder’. On a rather different note he told her that he had visited a chapel where there was a stained-glass window with a portrait of the local earl as a child and that this had reminded him of her family chapel – ‘as it might be Elmley etc at Mad’. He begged her to send him a birthday card because he got ‘none last year and it made me very sad’. He asked her to ‘tell Hughie to hurry up and have catholic lessons’ – despite Sandy Glen’s protestation to the contrary, the question of faith may have been something they discussed a
t Spitsbergen. The letter ended with the news: ‘I wrote a funny short story about a loony bin and a very dull one about a dog who bit a lady’s nose. That dog was rather like Grainger only not as intellectual perhaps more like Wincey but god it was a bad story. Please give my best love to your sweet sister and your disgusting friends, Bo.’

  Wincey, Baby Jungman’s dog, was a Blenheim spaniel given to her by the Duke of Marlborough. Evelyn had never been fond of the dog and the feeling was mutual. Grainger had also been very hostile to Evelyn in the early days of Evelyn’s friendship with Maimie. ‘On Guard’, the story in question, finally went to Harper’s Bazaar. The heroine is a fusion of Baby Jungman and Maimie Lygon. This is a good example of Evelyn’s art of composite character creation. His old Oxford friend Terence Greenidge considered that his characteristic literary device was to roll together two real life characters into one fictional one, ‘very often adding some lurid vice’. This was certainly true of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead, whom Evelyn admitted was a composite of Harold Acton and Brian Howard. His rake, Basil Seal, in Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags, was a combination of an Oxford charmer called Basil Murray and Nancy Mitford’s husband, Peter Rodd. When one of Evelyn’s friends asked him how he got away with using real life models for fictional characters, his reply was that you can draw any character as near to life as you want and no offence will be taken provided you say that he is attractive to women. In the case of ‘On Guard’, neither Maimie nor Baby took offence because the heroine of the story was supremely attractive to men.

  It tells the tale of a suitor who leaves for Africa and buys his girl a dog that is tasked to keep away other suitors in his absence. The dog, called Hector after the suitor who purchases it, obliges by spoiling all romances for his owner, peeing on all-comers and barking at them. Grainger and Wincey both had this characteristic, but so as to offend neither of them Hector is made a poodle rather than a Pekingese or a spaniel. Evelyn’s father always had black poodles.

  The heroine, Milly Blade, like Baby and Maimie, is a beautiful blonde: ‘she had a docile and affectionate disposition, and an expression of face which changed with lightning rapidity from amiability to laughter and from laughter to respectful interest’. As with Maimie in real life, her best feature is a beautiful button nose that ‘more than any other, endeared her to sentimental Anglo-Saxon manhood’. Small and snub, it was ‘a nose which made it impossible for its wearer to be haughty or imposing … it was a nose that pierced the thin surface crest of the English heart to its warm and pulpy core; a nose to take the thoughts of English manhood back to its schooldays, to the doughy-faced urchins on whom it had squandered its first affection, to memories of changing room and chapel and battered straw boaters’.

  Men fall hopelessly in love with her and she, beautiful, careless and vague, usually returns their affection for a few months. Four is her normal track record. Mike Boswell (Evelyn) is a platonic friend who has enjoyed a wholly unromantic friendship with Milly since she first came out. ‘He had seen her fair hair in all kinds of light, in and out of doors, crowned in hats of succeeding fashions, bound with ribbon, decorated with combs, jauntily stuck with flowers; he had seen her nose uplifted in all kinds of weather, had even, on occasions, playfully tweaked it with his finger and thumb, and had never for one moment felt remotely attracted to her.’

  All of this changes when he is having tea with Milly, Hector growling quietly. Mike (a tall and personable man of marriageable age) makes the mistake of patting Milly on the knee. Hector attacks and bites him, causing Milly to rush for the iodine bottle: ‘Now no Englishman, however phlegmatic, can have his hand dabbed with iodine without, momentarily at any rate, falling in love.’ Seeing the nose in such close proximity as she dabs his hand, he becomes her ‘besotted suitor’. Meanwhile, Hector continues to ruin her chances, defeating suitor after suitor with his bad behaviour. Milly is more in love with her dog than the erstwhile Hector in Africa. He performs doggy tricks to amuse and delight her, but also disrupts the tender moments by peeing or being noisily sick.

  Finally a suitor manages to get the better of the dog, and in response to his usurpation Hector bites off Milly’s nose, leaving her with a ‘fine, aristocratic beak – worthy of the spinster she is about to become’. Like all spinsters, she is doomed to spend her life alone with an ageing lapdog. In his bitterness towards Baby, Evelyn half-hoped that would be her fate. He would never have wished or dreamed that Maimie might be the one to end her life as a lonely old drunk sitting silently with only a Pekingese for company.

  At the end of December, Evelyn returned to Pixton, the Georgian house on a wooded hillside near Dulverton that belonged to the Herbert family. He was becoming more and more taken with Laura Herbert. Then on to Mells, the home of Diana Cooper’s friend Katharine Asquith, from where he opened his heart on paper to Maimie, who had been so close to him throughout his disastrous courtship of Baby Jungman.

  First Evelyn told her how he felt sad and guilty that his former lover, Hazel Lavery had died aged only fifty-four: ‘I feel a shit.’ He was having a Mass said for her, which would require him to drive six miles in the cold and dark. He then turned to Laura, the ‘white mouse’, whom he had barely noticed at Portofino:

  I have taken a great fancy to a young lady named Laura. What is she like? Well fair, very pretty, plays peggoty beautifully. We met on a house party in Somerset. She has rather a long thin nose and skin as thin as bromo as she is very thin and might be dying of consumption to look at her and she has her hair in a little bun at the back of her neck but it is not very tidy and she is only eighteen years old, virgin, Catholic, quiet and astute. So it is difficult. I have not made much progress except to pinch her twice in a charade and lean against her thigh in pretending to help her at peggoty.

  Evelyn was falling in love with another large chaotic family. Pixton was solid and shabby genteel, rather than aristocratic and beautiful, homely and hospitable rather than grand and elegant. The dogs ruled as they ran about jumping out of windows and sitting proprietorially on chairs, leaving guests like Evelyn to stand. Laura’s mother, Mary Herbert, was another of the fierce, formidable and (unintentionally) funny matriarchs that Evelyn loved. She disliked him at first but came to be devoted to him. Evelyn Gardner was a close cousin of Laura’s on her father’s side. One of Laura’s relations was heard to remark: ‘I thought we had heard the last of that young man.’ The family and guests were noisy – drinking, smoking and talking, mainly about arrangements for horses and hunting, and of course Catholic matters.

  There was a converted chapel outside the house. It had been a laundry room. Father Knox and Father D’Arcy were frequent visitors. A nanny lived upstairs, often to be found quietly playing patience. This kind of country house living was very different to the lifestyle at Mad. But it was comfortable and it was here that Evelyn became drawn to the eighteen-year-old Laura. She may have looked like his favoured type – blonde, fragile-looking, shy, in need of protection – but she was not afraid to stand up to him. Unlike the glamorous flapper girls that had previously attracted him, she was stable, with a very strong sense of self. She also had the all-important sense of humour, and shared Evelyn’s love of nicknames.

  At her young age she was taking on a lot with Evelyn, who was himself such a strong character, and had not lived by half in his thirty-one years. But, bolstered by her strong sense of family pride, she was more than up to the task. Though not as musical as the rest of her family, she liked amateur dramatics and after finishing school in Neuilly she enrolled at RADA.

  Evelyn wrote to her in London: ‘Darling Laura, I am sad and bored and need your company. If you have a spare evening between now and when you leave London, please come out with me. Any time will suit me as I have no engagements that I cannot gladly break. Ask your mother first and tell her I wanted you to ask.’

  In February 1935 an event loaded with heavy symbolism occurred. Evelyn wrote to Maimie with plans for her birthday: ‘for your birthday we will have a stately
orgy’ (orgy meant party in Mad parlance). He joked that Jessel (he of the foie gras episode) had arranged a party on the eve of his wedding to Lady Helen Vane-Tempest-Stewart so that they could reciprocate for his Christmas faux pas at Mad by stealing all his presents. He told her that he had seen Laura in London but that the meeting had not been a success because he had an appalling hangover and after eating three oysters was ‘sick a good deal on the table so perhaps that romance is shattered’. At the very end of the letter he wrote: ‘I set my booms house on fire last Monday.’ It may have sounded casual but Evelyn was very upset about the incident.

  His father’s diary records the events of the night: ‘woke at 4 am to a smell of burning. On opening the bookroom door found the room ablaze. Called K [his wife], and Evelyn called the firemen … many books were burned, the armchair, Rossetti chair, carpet, curtains all scorched … Evelyn went to bed again.’ Not only the precious chair that had once belonged to Rossetti, but also many of the books were irreplaceable. An account by Evelyn, written a couple of years later, says remorsefully: ‘My father is a literary critic and publisher. I think he can claim to have more books dedicated to him than any living man. They used to stand together on his shelves, among hundreds of inscribed copies from almost every English writer of eminence, until on one of my rather rare, recent visits to my home, I inadvertently set the house on fire, destroying the carefully garnered fruits of a lifetime of literary friendships.’ Evelyn, a book-collector himself, knew what this meant to his father. This incident – beside his sense of humour – explains why when he was later in the Army he infamously asked for his wife to save his books before his children, since books can never be replaced, whereas children can.