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

by Paula Byrne

  Whilst writing about Campion, who spent much of his time travelling between the grand homes of the aristocracy, Evelyn did the same – albeit without the inconvenience Campion faced of having the Elizabethan secret service on his tail. At Newton Ferrers he shocked the aristocratic company by talking crudely about love, which upset Sir Robert Abdy. If he was in the habit of sucking up to aristocrats, the accusation that has dogged his reputation, then this was a curious way of doing so. In Mad World, the private code for boring was ‘Hugh D. Mackintosh’, or rather ‘Makingtosh’, an allusion to an Australian businessman friend of Lord Beauchamp’s whom the Lygon girls found unutterably tedious. Evelyn’s letters to his favourite aristocrat, Lady Maimie Lygon, include several references to Makingtosh of the following kind: ‘I missed that train so I have to wait wait wait wait god it is sad Hugh D. Makingtosh H.D.M Hugh D Hugh D I think I am about to die I missed the train What will Laura say? say? Hugh D. Mackingtosh Grainger is impuissant as the frogs … GRAINGER CAN’T FUCK.’ This is not the customary language of sucking up.

  His life at this time was all ‘wait wait wait wait’. He wanted to propose to Laura but could do nothing until he heard from Rome.

  Evelyn and Maimie both suffered from depression and insomnia. They shared tips on pills and draughts to combat their problems: ‘This is better than what I meant to send. Dissolve both in boiling water (½ tumbler) and drink. Very delicious and you will have 8 hours. Can’t bear to think of you unhappy.’ In April 1935 he wrote to Maimie from Bridgwater to thank her for reciprocating by sending him the ‘beautiful pills. I think I will take to my bed and sleep for a few weeks.’

  Maimie was full of news that her eldest brother had met a Danish widow to whom he had taken a great fancy. Evelyn mentions the relationship between Elmley, who he mocks as ‘the Viscount’, and his lady, ‘the melancholy Dane’. He had formed a clear impression of the latter on the basis of Maimie’s account of her origin: ‘I suppose she will be like Ophelia and walk about with garlands of wild flowers and drown herself.’

  The melancholy Dane was Fru Else Dornonville de la Cour, daughter of an actor and widow of a property developer. Known as Mona, she was very beautiful. Elegant and well travelled, she spoke a number of languages. She had been brought up in Copenhagen by her mother, after her father had left when she was just a young child. He was a well-known character called Viggo Schiwe, who played the part of Jean, the footman who has sex with the aristocratic young woman of the house in the original production of August Strindberg’s scandalous play Miss Julie. Else tended to keep quiet about her theatrical connections, preferring to emphasise that her grandfather had been an admiral in the Danish navy. She was eight years older than Elmley and had a nineteen-year-old daughter from her first marriage. She had been educated at a good school in Copenhagen, which she thought gave her an advantage over the Lygon sisters: ‘I’m sure I got a better education than my sisters-in-law brought up by governesses.’

  She first met Elmley getting off the train at Worcester railway station. She was actually on her way to Madresfield. She had been invited to the house in her capacity as a friend of Lady Carlisle, who knew the Lygons well. Elmley had been travelling on the same train and was mesmerised by the beautiful Danish widow with the beguiling accent. He introduced himself as Lord Elmley, though she had no idea that he was connected to the Lygon family. ‘I was going to stay with people called Lygon,’ she recalled years later, ‘and I knew their father was Earl Beauchamp, but I didn’t know of someone called Elmley.’ Mona was disappointed when the young man left her. She thought that she would never see him again. On arriving at Mad, she was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the house, with its bachelor wing, visiting maids’ rooms and nursery wing. There she saw the dining table which seated several dozen, the well-stocked library, long gallery, the crystal balustrade, ebony furniture, the Bronzinos on the walls, the cases full of Sèvres china and ornate snuff boxes, the Buhl furniture from Versailles, the carpets and tapestries. Then at dinner that evening she was amazed to see the young man she had met on the train taking his place at the head of the table.

  All four sisters were at Mad that weekend and they welcomed Mona warmly. But it was Elmley who particularly singled her out. She had just learned to play backgammon and so he sat her on the sofa and they played all weekend. They agreed to meet up in London and that was the start of their relationship. The Lygon sisters grew to dislike Mona and had very little sympathy with their brother for marrying her. They were sure that, given her age, he would never have children and the longed-for heir. Hugh was not likely to marry and have children, which left only Dickie who was estranged from Madresfield and living with his mother. Mona, for her part, disliked the sisters. She remembered that they were pretty and glamorous and spoilt, ‘financed by their father in a big way’.

  Evelyn had turned against Elmley. What had happened to the champagne-swilling man in the purple suit, carousing in the Hypocrites’ Club and making irreverent films with Evelyn Waugh at his home in Underhill? He had grown pompous and stiff. He found it very hard to get along with people and was still very angry with his father. In later life, perhaps fittingly for a man who met his wife on a train, Elmley’s greatest pleasure as a peer of the realm came from sitting on House of Lords committees to do with the railways.

  Evelyn was hard at work on Campion, even refusing invitations to Maimie’s cocktail parties as he pushed towards the end. He was still depressed about his relationship with Laura, but hoped that the biography of one of England’s greatest Catholic martyrs would help to convince her and her family that, notwithstanding the divorce, he was a good Catholic writer who was worthy of her.

  He then made plans for a return trip to Abyssinia and secured an assignment for the Daily Mail, expenses paid, as war correspondent reporting on Mussolini’s invasion. Diana Cooper had put in a good word on his behalf with Lord Rothermere – as Julia Stitch does with Lord Copper of the Daily Beast on behalf of William Boot (though the wrong William Boot, with hilarious consequences) in the great comic novel that came out of the trip, Scoop. Diana was delighted to have inspired the character of Mrs Stitch.

  Arthur Waugh’s diary records two visits that Evelyn had from Oxford friends before he left for Abyssinia. The first was probably Joyce Gill, whom Evelyn had known since his college days (she had been renowned in Oxford for dressing as a boy). Despite being desperately in love with Laura, Evelyn asked Joyce to leave her husband and go with him to Abyssinia. She later told one of her daughters that choosing not to go had been one of the most painful decisions of her life. She was in love with Evelyn. A letter written to him after the birth of his first child shows the extent to which he could induce strong passion in others: ‘I think of you all the time when I am making love, until the word and Evelyn are almost synonymous! … I have only to remember your eyes – your mouth and my heart aches as if it were a stone cut by a diamond.’

  The other person he saw was Hugh Lygon, who arrived by car on 27 July and took him down to Madresfield for a couple of days. Once again, the house would represent the last of England as he set off for foreign parts.

  En route to Abyssinia, Evelyn visited Rome to try and move along his annulment. He wrote to Maimie from the Grande Hotel de Russie, possibly the most luxurious establishment in the city (the Daily Mail expense account was being well used): ‘Now I must go to Naples and then sail to Africa. I do not want to go. Not at all. I cry a great deal on account of not seeing LAURA.’ From Addis Ababa he wrote love letters to Laura: ‘The thing I think about most is your eyelashes making a noise like a bat on a pillow.’ He told Laura how unpopular he was with the authorities in Abyssinia, that his name was mud at the legation ‘because of a novel I wrote which they think was about them (it wasn’t)’. His friend Patrick Balfour, who was representing the Evening Standard, told his mother: ‘I rather dread his arrival as his name is mud here since Black Mischief and half the European population is out for his blood.’ Sir Sidney Barton and his family at the
British legation had been deeply offended by Evelyn’s cruel caricature of them as the Courtenays in ‘Blackers’. Sir Sidney’s daughter Esmé, who was convinced that she was the model for the promiscuous Prudence, was so angry with him that when she bumped into him at one of the town’s three nightclubs, the Perroquet, she threw a glass of champagne in his face.

  Once again it was ‘wait wait wait wait’. Evelyn kept himself going by writing ribald letters to his women friends back home and gathering material for his next comic novel. He hinted to Maimie that he would love another Christmas invitation to Mad. In fact he was in Jerusalem for Christmas, first at a Franciscan monastery and then moving to a hotel for Christmas Day. He paid a visit to Bethlehem: ‘It was decent to have Christmas without the Hitlerite adjuncts of yule logs and reindeer and Santa Claus and conifers,’ he wrote to Katharine Asquith, ‘but I was appalled to discover that we have no altar at all in the Basilica at Bethlehem … I don’t really want to return to Europe until I know one way or another about my annulment and can arrange things accordingly.’

  CHAPTER 18

  A Year of Departures

  Evelyn Waugh arrived back in England from Abyssinia in January 1936. This was a very significant year for him and the Lygon family. His biography of Edmund Campion won the country’s most distinguished literary award, the Hawthornden Prize, and in July his long wait for news from Rome was over. It was also a year heralded by the death of King George V on 20 January. His last words were reportedly ‘bugger Bognor’, a sentiment which Evelyn would have heartily echoed in view of the miserable time he had spent there working on his travel book.

  Lord Beauchamp was still living his peripatetic existence, writing to Coote of excursions from Sydney to Tahiti and to Wellington in New Zealand. In February 1936 he was aboard the SS New Holland. Coote had written with news of Christmas and the Hunt Ball. Her father wrote that he had sent her a birthday telegram but that it had been misdelivered to Malvern, Australia. In this letter he mentioned the names of his two travelling companions: ‘Byron and I go straight to some mountain hotel in Java while David inspects Bali and then we motor along to Batavia.’ He was still the tourist even in his exile. ‘Byron’, identified by his surname, was the tall and handsome valet. ‘David’, always referred to by his first name, had taken the position of Beauchamp’s secretary. They would stay together for the rest of his life.

  On landing in Europe, Beauchamp stayed in Paris. His former secretary, the Liberal politician Robert Bernays, stayed with him and reported that ‘he was still vainly hoping that with the change of monarchs he will be allowed to return’ to England. This suggests that he was fully aware that it had been King George V as much as the Duke of Westminster who had been his nemesis. The new King, with his own unorthodox sexual arrangements and his closeness to Prince Georgie, might take a more relaxed view of the exile.

  Evelyn was back at Madresfield in February. He then borrowed a remote place in Shropshire to bang out his ‘serious war book’, for which he had no appetite. It was published under the punning title Waugh in Abyssinia. He told a correspondent: ‘If the book bores its readers half as much as it is boring for me to write it will create a record in low sales.’ Much more importantly, during this time, spring 1936, he sent a quietly honest letter to Laura asking her to marry him: ‘I can’t advise you in my favour because it would be beastly for you, but think about how nice it would be for me.’ He went on to give a typically accurate self-portrait: ‘I am restless and moody and misanthropic and lazy and have no money except what I can earn and if I got ill you would starve … Also there is always a fair chance that there will be another bigger economic crash in which case if you had married a nobleman with a great house you might find yourself starving, while I am very clever and could probably earn a living of some sort somewhere.’ He also told her that he had a small family: ‘You would not find yourself involved in a large family and all their rows … All of these are very small advantages compared with the awfulness of my character.’

  From Shropshire he also wrote Maimie some letters entirely in (cod) French, in honour of her being on the continent with her father. As well as giving the information that he had won ‘un cadeau’ for ‘le livre de bon gout, Edmund Campion’ and that ‘M. Jackson a coupé un ‘‘arser’’ dans les cours de chevaux à Worcester’, he asked about her father, expressing the hope that he found himself well ‘avec tous ses aimants’ (‘with all his lovers’). Maimie travelled on from Paris to Venice where Boom had taken a palazzo for the summer.

  The flame-haired mistress of the last Kaiser of Germany leased Lord Beauchamp the piano nobile of the Palazzo Morosini on the Grand Canal, a stone’s throw from the Rialto. Inside, the palace was peaceful, with only the sound of water lapping against stone, but outside was a hive of activity as cargo boats unloaded fish and vegetables for the nearby markets.

  Venice had long been known for its tolerant attitudes towards sex. And it was a city that had always attracted writers, painters and exiles. All about this city of domes and bell-towers lurk the shadows of famous men. Casanova was born in Venice; Wagner wrote the gloriously erotic second act of Tristan there; Robert Browning died in the house of the Doge; Byron’s lover threw herself from the balcony of the Palazzo Mocenigo.

  Foreigners had always rented Venetian palaces for the season. For Virginia Woolf, the watery city was ‘the playground of all that was gay, mysterious and irresponsible’. In the early part of the twentieth century, Baron Corvo, the noted homosexual ex-priest and writer, set himself up in a palazzo on the Grand Canal, where he conducted numerous love affairs with the beautiful young gondoliers who moonlighted as rent-boys servicing rich English lords. Beauchamp knew Baron Corvo’s work from The Yellow Book.

  Corvo’s novel, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole: A Venetian Romance, published in 1934, was a thinly veiled homosexual romance involving an English man and a boy-girl child called Zilda. He also wrote The Venice Letters, detailing his uninhibited real life sexual adventures with teenage Venetian male prostitutes. In lurid detail, Corvo described his exploits with stevedores called Piero, Gildo, Carlo and Zildo and with the sixteen-year-old Amadeo Amadei, who looked as if he came out of a Renaissance painting – ‘young, muscular, splendidly strong, big black eyes, rosy face, round black head, scented like an angel’.

  Amadeo is in search of an English lord to supplement his paltry wage, as are scores of his friends, who have lost custom to the university boys from Padua. At a Venetian trattoria he shows the baron what he has to offer by stripping off his clothes: ‘he was just one brilliant rosy series of muscles, smooth as satin … he crossed his ankles, ground his thighs together … and stiffened into the most inviting mass of fresh meat conceivable, laughing in my face as he made his offering of lively flesh. And the next instance he was up, his trousers buttoned, his shirt tucked in and his cloak folded around him.’ When the baron tells him that he is not rich, Amadeo begs him to recommend him to other rich English nobles. He will do anything for his patron – full anal sex is on offer and a lurid description ensues. Amadeo tells Corvo that many of his friends model for foreign painters and offer sexual services as an added extra. Baron Corvo knows that he must act immediately. ‘Amadeo is ripe, just in his prime … he’ll be like this till Spring … then some great fat slow cow of a girl will just open herself wide, and lie quite still and drain him dry.’ Then his bloom will be gone; ‘he’ll get hard and hairy’ and he will be ‘just the ordinary stevedore to be found by scores on the quay’.

  There is no way of knowing whether Lord Beauchamp availed himself of the services of such stevedores and gondoliers. His secretary, David Smyth, and the aptly named valet, Byron, may have sufficed to fulfil his needs by this time in his life. But he would have enjoyed looking at the dancing, prancing stevedores unloading their cargo outside his palazzo, just as he loved looking at the young Australian men sunning themselves on Bondi Beach.

  In Brideshead, just after describing Lord Marchmain as a Byronic voluptuar
y, Anthony Blanche alludes to the gondolier at the Marchmain palazzo: ‘once I passed them and I caught the eye of the Fogliere gondolier, whom, of course, I knew, and, my dear, he gave me such a wink’. Waugh obviously knew all about the Venetian homosexual underworld.

  From his palazzo, Lord Beauchamp heard the news that his eldest son had got married. There was no question of his attending. The couple were married on 16 June at St Clements Dane, a small Christopher Wren church on the Strand. The bride’s dress was by Maggy Rouff, who designed gowns for silver screen legends such as Greta Garbo. Rouff was known for evening dresses that clung close to the body and were sewn with airy, slanting tiers of ruffles. For the wedding, Mona wore a gown of cream lace with a gold embroidered floral pattern and a fashionable cream cap trimmed with white flowers. She carried orchids.

  The wedding was one of the most glittering society occasions of 1936. Guests included Beauchamp’s old political master, Lloyd George. Evelyn was there; it was shortly before he received the Hawthornden Prize. The Countess Beauchamp attended the wedding and Hugh was his brother’s best man. This was one of the few times after 1931 when the Lygons saw their mother.

  The man conspicuous by his absence was, of course, Lord Beauchamp. He wrote to Coote to beg for news. Never had he felt his isolation more. David Smyth, who had become a trusted figure, almost a member of the family, had been invited to the wedding. He had now returned to Venice: ‘David is safely back and has given news of the wedding … Did you give a dinner that night. Who came? Was Dickie asked? What besides miniatures (by whom?) did your mother give? I hear her memory is getting worse.’