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

by Paula Byrne

  In July, Evelyn and Randolph were posted to the Italian port of Bari and then to an island off the Dalmatian coast called Vis. From there they headed to the small spa town of Topusko, the Partisans’ headquarters. They flew in on 16 July but, just as they were about to land, the plane crashed. There were nineteen on board and ten were killed instantly. Before setting off on the flight, Evelyn had mentioned in a letter to his wife that he had abandoned a silver medal that she had given him because the silver chain had turned his neck green. He believed that whereas Baby Jungman’s St Christopher had saved him in the Amazon, this time the lack of Laura’s token had nearly cost him his life.

  Badly burnt, he was sent to hospital in Bari. To his great good fortune, Coote Lygon was stationed near there with the WAAFs. For the last two years of the war, Coote had been posted abroad. Like many other women of her class, her life had been given new meaning and adventure by the opportunity to serve her country. Most of the time she was in Italy, in the small Apulian town of San Severo, below the mountains of the Gargano peninsula on the Adriatic. She remembered Evelyn and Randolph going in and out of Yugoslavia. Evelyn sent her a telegram to tell her of the plane crash and of his injuries. She immediately went to see him.

  Coote was delighted to be of use to Evelyn, whose first concern was that she should contact Laura. His hands were so burned that he could not hold a pen and so she wrote to Laura for him.

  Coote remembered the hospital visit for more than one reason. Late in life, she recalled Evelyn’s burnt hands and the grumbling son of the Prime Minister, ‘complaining of water on the knee … creating a fine fuss’. But she also remembered a significant moment in the course of her conversations with Evelyn. He told her about the new book he had just finished: ‘It’s all about a family whose father lives abroad, as it might be Boom – but it’s not Boom – and a younger son: people will say he is like Hughie, but you’ll see he’s not really Hughie – and there’s a house as it might be Mad, but it isn’t really Mad.’

  If Coote felt apprehensive, she didn’t reveal it. She remembered that he ‘talked on for some time in this vein, at pains to emphasise that, although he had chosen a situation which might be compared to ours at one time, he was going to treat it in a very different way – he had taken the bare bones, the skeleton, and intended covering it with muscles creating tensions, quite different from those which had influenced us’.

  Evelyn was clearly anxious not to hurt Coote and the family that he loved. He told her that the Roman Catholic element was a key part of the novel and that the matrimonial problems of the fictional Flytes were very different from those that beset Lord and Lady Beauchamp. Nevertheless, it was bold of him to admit how close the parallels were. It shows the depths of Coote’s devotion that she chose to accept Evelyn’s excuse for using her family as copy. She loyally continued to claim that the resemblances between her own family and the fictional Marchmains were much exaggerated.

  Evelyn was sent to Rome to convalesce before he and Randolph departed a second time for Yugoslavia. Coote went too to look after Evelyn, giving up her leave in order to nurse him, just as Maimie had taken him in after his parachuting accident. He stayed in a charming flat, 5 Via Gregoriana.

  He was also treated for a carbuncle that had grown on his neck. It was a painful procedure: ‘Suffering was intense and continuous.’ Eventually they gave him antibiotics and it began to heal. He relished the fact that Coote was there to administer to him and soon he was enjoying Rome – ‘a week of easy living, getting strong and eating better’. Their days were spent visiting churches and dining quietly in the evening. He was in pain and had lost most of his luggage in the crash, including his shoes, forcing him to walk in ‘creepers’ both made for the same foot. It must have been a difficult time for Coote, given the memories of Rome with Boom. She was short of money and Evelyn, always generous to his friends, insisted on loaning her 5,000 lire.

  In September, Randolph and Evelyn returned to Topusko. Evelyn set about collecting information for an official report on church affairs. He was also awaiting the proofs of Brideshead Revisited.

  Randolph proved to be an uncongenial comrade. Being together in close proximity was a great strain upon both men. ‘He is not a good companion for a long period,’ Evelyn wrote, ‘but the conclusion is always the same – that no one else would have chosen me, nor would anyone else have accepted him.’ The weather was dreadful, it rained night and day for a week, and he had run out of cigars. Nor did he have the comfort of hard drinking, since he despised the local spirit, Rakia. He thought that it had ‘an all-pervading stench part sewage part stickfast paste’.

  Coote, with typical understatement, observed that the two men had got on each other’s nerves when they were together in hospital in Italy. In Yugoslavia, nerves frayed by lack of cigars and drink, Evelyn vented some of his most glorious invective upon his less intelligent companion. Randolph was a ‘flabby bully who rejoices in blustering and shouting down anyone weaker than himself and starts squealing as soon as he meets anyone as strong. In words he can understand he can give it but he can’t take it … He is a bore – with no intellectual invention or agility.’ All he and Lord Birkenhead, who had joined them, could do were repeat witticisms spoken by their fathers. ‘Of conversation as I love it – a fantasy growing in the telling, apt repartee, argument based on accepted postulates, spontaneous reminiscences and quotation – they know nothing.’ At the end of his tether with Churchill’s volubility, Evelyn laid a wager that he could not read the Bible in a fortnight. The wager backfired as Randolph had a wonderful time rediscovering the Bible. As Evelyn described it: ‘He sits bouncing about on his chair, chortling and saying ‘‘I say, did you know that this came in the Bible ‘bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave?’’’ Or simply, ‘‘God, isn’t God a shit.’’’

  Evelyn wrote to Coote, complaining that he was short of reading materials, and she dutifully sent him packages of books. He thanked her for repaying the Roman loan and told her that Freddy Birkenhead’s arrival was ‘most opportune as I was beginning to have qualms about a winter tête-à-tête with Randolph’. He also told her how grateful Laura was for Coote’s nursing of him while he recovered from the plane crash and that his wife had said, ‘I always thought her the nicest of all your friends.’ To which Evelyn added ‘Hear hear’.

  Evelyn told her that he was hoping to see her again in Bari, where he had applied for a transfer. Coote was much on his mind, not least because the novel, in which her younger self figured as Cordelia Flyte, was also consuming him. On 20 November the proofs finally turned up and Evelyn spent every minute that Randolph was out of the room correcting them. He later gave them to a Jesuit institution in Baltimore, who had awarded him an honorary doctorate. He described their extraordinary trajectory in war-torn Europe: ‘This set of page proofs was sent in October 1944 from Henrietta Street to 10 Downing Street; from there it travelled to Italy in the Prime Minister’s post bag, was flown from Brindisi and dropped by parachute on Gajen in Croatia, then an isolated area of ‘‘resistance’’; was corrected at Topusko and taken by jeep, when the road was temporarily cleared of enemy, to Split; there by ship to Italy and so home, via Downing Street.’ Having Winston Churchill as his father was one compensation for Randolph’s awkward company.

  The proof corrections made by Waugh in Yugoslavia between 20 and 26 November were, he told his agent, ‘extensive and very important’. He changed such crucial passages as the one in which he described the trajectory of Charles’s love from Sebastian to Julia to God; he introduced many alterations to the architectural history and layout of Brideshead Castle; he made Charles’s wife Celia even less sexually desirable than she was in the manuscript; he inserted a key passage into Sebastian’s letter and expanded upon the theme of Charles’s aesthetic conversion to the baroque. There were numerous other minor changes, some of them bearing upon the Lygon connection: in the manuscript, Beryl Muspratt is a year or two younger than Bridey, but in proof she becomes a
year or two older, heightening the resemblance to Elmley’s wife, Mona the Dane. The question of explicit homosexual reference was a cause of some soul-searching. In the manuscript, when Bridey wonders whether Kurt’s relationship with Sebastian is ‘vicious’, Charles replies that it can’t be because, ‘For one thing, I happen to know the man has syphilis.’ In proof, this becomes a gentler ‘I’m sure not. It’s simply a case of two waifs coming together.’

  Once he had inserted the final proof corrections (undertaken while Randolph Churchill was out at the cinema), Evelyn dispatched his magnum opus and asked for a new posting to Bari. He remained there a fortnight, meeting up once again with Coote. She loved Bari, describing it as ‘Paris, London and New York rolled into one after San Severo’. He was still short of reading matter, so she lent him some Trollopes. She was so keen to spend time with him that she got herself to Bari whenever she could, even on some occasions hitchhiking in lorries. It was a long and tiring journey from San Severo, but his company was usually worth the effort. Not always though – once she came to see him looking ‘very thin and almost pretty’, arriving early, ‘rather importunately, at 3.30’. ‘I had a rather sticky time with her until 6,’ Evelyn complained, ‘failed to get a bath, took two Benzedrine tablets, found I had lost all appetite through fatigue and could eat little of the very fine feast we had arranged. For myself I found it a dull evening and wondered whether Coote found it worth the long hitch-hike.’

  Evelyn was then posted to Dubrovnik. His role was to serve as intermediary between the Partisans and the Allies, but the Partisans, allied with the Soviet Union, were increasingly hostile to the British, and to Waugh especially. He responded by helping the townspeople (many of whom were desperate to escape the coming communist regime) with their requests for help and food: ‘Looking back on the last few days I find that everything I have done, which is not much, has been benevolent – giving jobs to the needy, food to the hungry, arranging to get a Canadian moved towards Canada, helping a Dominican priest swap wine for flour. There are few in the Army can say this.’ He was also collecting material on religious conditions for his report ‘Church and State in Liberated Croatia’.

  On Christmas Day 1944 he wrote to Coote, telling her that he had had a pleasant Christmas ‘in unbroken solitude, which next to Laura’s company and that of the few friends I can count on the toes of ones foot, is what I should have chosen’. He described his surroundings as tolerable and apologised for his behaviour at their last meeting. He also told her how Christmas made him think a lot about Madresfield:

  Mr H and the Capt and the handsome presents Blondie made us give them, and Jessel’s boy’s foie gras and the time we went to the top of the noble line after dinner and someone gave the late Maj Duggan a push and he could not stop running until he reached the gates of St James girls school and you and me and Hamish popping into Lord Beauchamps Home for Impotent Clergymen. Well well never again.

  He sat for a bust in support of a local artist: ‘it will be the next best thing to having myself stuffed’. And he arranged for fifty sets of proofs of Brideshead to be sent as Christmas presents to his friends. He waited anxiously to hear what they thought about his magnum opus. Laura was requested to keep all thank-you letters in a safe place and to copy out the most interesting sentences for him.

  It was to his fellow novelist Nancy Mitford that he turned to discuss his book. She ‘got the joke’ about everything and saw the point of the central relationships: ‘so true to life being in love with an entire family’. He begged her: ‘Please tell me what everyone says behind my back.’ He was anxious because the book was such a departure from all his previous novels, yet he felt in his heart that it was his most important book. Financially, it was to be in that it became his first bestseller in America. He was always grateful for that, but he later changed his mind about the book’s merits, thinking it too sentimental and seeing it as a reaction to wartime deprivation.

  Nancy also said: ‘I’m so glad you are nice about Brian this time.’ Along with all Waugh’s friends, she had seen cruelty in his portrayal of Brian Howard as Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags. But, as Evelyn confirmed, Anthony Blanche was a composite of Brian and Harold Acton. Harold was very upset by the portrayal. The general consensus among those in the know was that it was a clever idea to combine the two Eton boys who had offered an inseparable embodiment of the Oxford Aesthete.

  He asked Nancy to continue to ‘keep your ear to the ground and report what they say. For the first time since 1928, I am eager about a book.’ He was less pleased with Laura, who was too lazy to read it: ‘What do you think of the book? … Can you not see how it disappoints me that the book which I regard as my first important one, and have dedicated to you, should have no comment except that Eddie is pleased with it.’

  He had to be content with the approval of his literary friends, all of whom believed Brideshead to be a masterpiece. He was delighted with Nancy’s next two ‘splendid letters. What a bob’s worth.’ She had written to tell him that many of their friends thought it was ‘subtle clever Catholic propaganda’. But this was the bit that delighted him:

  Now about what people think:

  Raymond [Mortimer]: Great English classic.

  Cyril [Connolly]: Brilliant where the narrative is straightforward. Doesn’t care for the ‘purple passages’ i.e. deathbed of Lord M. Thinks you go too much to White’s. But found it impossible to put down (no wonder).

  Osbert [Lancaster]: Jealous, doesn’t like talking about it. ‘I’m devoted to Evelyn – are you?’

  Maurice [Bowra]: Showing off to Cyril about how you don’t always hit the right word or some nonsense but obviously much impressed and thinks the Oxford part perfect.

  SW7 (European royal quarter) [i.e. Maimie]: Heaven, darling.

  Diana Abdy: Like me and Raymond, no fault to find.

  Lady Chetwode: Terribly dangerous propaganda. Brilliant.

  General view: It is the Lygon family. Too much Catholic stuff.

  The response of the Lygon girls was what he most wanted and feared. Maimie’s ‘Heaven, darling’ was encouraging, but it wasn’t until the end of January that he heard from her in person. She did not reveal much: ‘Darling Bo. Your book is very very interesting and is the talk of all the sages who think it is wonderful … Darling, thank you very very much for sending it.’ Some weeks later Coote was a little more forthcoming: ‘I read it once at a furious pace, and now more slowly, and like it very much, Sebastian gives me many pangs.’

  CHAPTER 22

  Brideshead Unlocked

  Most novels are confessions in disguise; most ‘Confessions’ … are novels in disguise.

  (Harold Acton)

  I reserve the right to deal with the kind of people I know best.

  (Evelyn Waugh)

  On 25 April 1945 the politician and inveterate gossip ‘Chips’ Channon wrote in his diary: ‘I am reading an advance copy of Evelyn Waugh’s new novel ‘‘Brideshead Revisited’’. It is obvious that the mis-en-scène is Madresfield, and the hero Hugh Lygon. In fact, all the Beauchamp family figure in it.’

  To Channon and everyone else in the know, it was clear that the exiled Lord Marchmain was a version of Boom and Lady Marchmain of the Countess Beauchamp, that Sebastian was Hugh, Bridey was Elmley, Julia Maimie and Cordelia Coote. And yet – or because the identification was so obvious – Waugh’s epigraph to the book read: ‘I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.’* This is the paradox of Brideshead.

  In 1947, Evelyn wrote a memo to MGM in Hollywood regarding a proposed film adaptation of the novel. It clarifies the fundamental point for those ‘Californian savages’: ‘the theme is theological’. The particular theological point on which the book turns is ‘in no sense abstruse and is based on principles that have for nearly 2,000 years been understood by millions of simple people, and are still so understood’. In short, ‘the novel deals with what is theologically termed ‘‘the operation of grace’’, that is to say, the unmerited and un
ilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to himself’.

  ‘Too much Catholic stuff’ was the general view of his friends and has remained the view of many of his critics. The novel is about the hero Charles Ryder’s conversion to Catholicism and the ‘twitch upon the thread’ that reels in Sebastian and Julia, lapsed Catholics who have rebelled against their mother and their religion, but who are in the end powerless to resist God’s grace. As Evelyn’s Hollywood memo made clear, ‘the Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control on human souls which have once been part of her’. Though Charles and Julia must renounce one another, each is the catalyst for the other’s spiritual redemption: ‘The physical dissolution of the house of Brideshead has in fact been a spiritual regeneration.’

  Many ordinary readers ignore the theological and spiritual element, so caught up are they by the glamour of the Flytes and the glorious locations – Oxford, Venice, Paris, Morocco, Mayfair and the stately home of Brideshead Castle – just as Charles is entranced by all the splendour that Brideshead and the Marchmain family represent. This distraction of surface is deliberate. But the clues are planted in the narrative all the way through from the prologue, when Hooper, visiting the Arts and Crafts R.C. chapel at Brideshead, the great house that has been requisitioned as army barracks, says to Ryder ‘More in your line than mine’, through to the all-important scene at Lord Marchmain’s deathbed when atheist Charles prays for a miracle and witnesses ‘God’s grace’. The novel urges you to read it backwards.

  Brideshead mattered so much to Evelyn because he put so much of himself into it: his distance from his father, his sentimental education at Oxford, his early love affairs, his initiation into the aristocratic world of the Lygons, his conversion to Roman Catholicism, his abortive love affair with the Army. Like his creator, Charles Ryder is born in October 1903 and wants to be a painter; like his creator, he hails from a minor public school and is an atheist. All the things that mattered most to Evelyn in the years up until the end of the Second World War went into the novel, even though many years later (now bitter and disillusioned) he grew rather ashamed of its excesses, its sentimentalism and richly ornate language. At the time he believed that it was his great work and that it would go on being read for many years to come.