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

by Paula Byrne

  Evelyn Waugh made it clear, when he married Laura Herbert, that he would always need to be alone for his writing, and that he would find it impossible to write if surrounded by noisy children. With three young children of my own, I have huge sympathy for this viewpoint and, in an ideal world, I would love to escape to a remote location and immerse myself in the writing of my biographies. Practically, this rarely happens: my children would never forgive me and I would miss them too much. Happily, noise has never been a distraction. Coming from a large Catholic family, I learnt very quickly to write and read amongst chaos. Still, I secretly harbour fantasies of escaping to somewhere like Burgh Island in Devon, where I would be completely cut off – it worked for Agatha Christie!

  Your last work of biography told the story of the eighteenth-century actress, poet, novelist, feminist, celebrity and royal mistress Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson. In turning to Waugh you swap the eighteenth for the twentieth century. Did writing about a different age bring different challenges?

  I spent many happy years writing about the eighteenth century, which is where I am most comfortable, but I have always been drawn to the Jazz Age. I just adore the literature, the fashion, the excess, the music, the cars and the flappers. The research for Mad World was enormously exciting. I am also fascinated by the two world wars: one cannot fully appreciate the Roaring Twenties without understanding what came before and after, and I was mindful in writing this book that the Waugh generation was also a war generation.

  * * *

  ‘I have always been drawn to the Jazz Age. I just adore the literature, the fashion, the excess, the music, the cars and the flappers.’

  * * *

  Mad World was a challenging book to write in terms of the research – the Crete fiasco, for example, was so crucial to Waugh’s disillusionment with the Army, but tricky to navigate. I also found writing about Waugh’s (to my mind delightfully) irreverent and outrageous humour a challenge in an era obsessed with political correctness. When I wrote about Mary Robinson, I wasn’t worried about offending any of the family, as it was so far in the past. It was quite different with Mad World, where family and friends are still alive – this led to some ethical considerations that I had never had to think about before.

  You reveal in your preface that you set out to write this book ‘because I believed that Evelyn Waugh had been persistently misrepresented as a snob and a curmudgeonly misanthropist. I did not recognise Waugh in the popular caricature of him. I wanted to get to the real Waugh …’ Where did your conception of the ‘real Waugh’ come from, or rather, how did you happen upon this other, lesser-known Waugh, which in turn led you to write your account of his early writing life?

  I had long been convinced that people had got Evelyn Waugh wrong. Why would a man who was so unpleasant be so beloved by such a wide circle of friends? I admired Waugh’s published letters and diaries, and thought that many of Evelyn’s letters to his children were some of the most poignant, loving and wise letters ever written from father to child (especially those to his beloved daughter Meg). I felt the same way when I finally read Waugh’s unpublished letters to Mary and Dorothy Lygon: here was a man who was generous, loving, loyal – and always uproariously funny. I felt that many of the reviews of the letters and diaries had quoted phrases out of context to perpetuate the caricature of the snobbish misanthrope. I was determined to show another side to Waugh. His relationship with the Lygon family was my key to unlocking that other side.

  To what extent do you think that your own approach to the Lygon family has been shaped by Waugh’s fictionalised portrayal of them? Dissenting voices such as Mona’s – who argued that the girls were pretty, glamorous and spoilt, ‘financed by their father in a big way’ – are few and far between in Mad World.

  I do think that, inevitably, my view of the Lygon sisters was shaped by Waugh’s fictional portrayal of them. For example, I argue that Julia Flyte’s beauty and glamour owed much to Mary Lygon – her furs, her cloche hats, her Pekingese, her habit of always calling people ‘darling’ and, also, of course, her great sadness caused by her father’s disgrace. However, my view of the Lygons was also influenced by the voices I heard in their own letters and essays, and by what their friends and contemporaries thought of them. Many of their friends stressed the sisters’ courage and spirit in the face of the tragedies that tore apart their family.

  You make the point, midway through Mad World, that ‘instead of having children themselves, the Lygon girls were serving as midwives to Evelyn’s books’. The girls’ chances of making good marriages were blighted by the scandal surrounding their father, but were there also downsides to being involved with a man who demanded so much from his friends?

  Yes, I think that there were downsides to the friendship. Evelyn’s dependence, in later years, on sleeping drugs and alcohol made him a sometimes difficult friend. He could be irritable and rude. He also found it hard to conceal his dislike of Maimie’s husband: ‘Maimie is lost to me,’ he wailed after she married her ‘pauper prince’. Like many friendships that endure for years, theirs had ups and downs, but Evelyn never abandoned the sisters. He was the first to lend money to Maimie and to support her when her marriage and mental health collapsed. He helped Coote get published and encouraged her in her writing endeavours.

  * * *

  ‘Like many friendships that endure for years, theirs had ups and downs, but Evelyn never abandoned the sisters.’

  * * *

  In his 1944 letter to Colonel Ferguson of the Household Cavalry Training Regiment, Waugh sought a leave of absence from duty to write Brideshead Revisited, arguing that ‘it is a peculiarity of the literary profession that once an idea becomes fully formed in the author’s mind, it cannot be left unexploited without deterioration. If, in fact, the book is not written now it will never be written.’ Do you, as a writer, share Waugh’s need to plunge immediately into a new book once the idea has been hatched?

  Biographers are very different from novelists. They don’t necessarily have to wait for the Muse to strike or write quickly before inspiration fades. Evelyn’s novels were often written very quickly whereas biographical research inevitably slows down the creative process. Also I like to spend a lot of time thinking as well as ‘footstepping’ – that is walking in the shoes of the writer, visiting important places. One of my happiest moments researching this book was finding Lord Beauchamp’s palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice.

  * * *

  ‘I like to spend a lot of time thinking as well as ‘footstepping’ – that is walking in the shoes of the writer, visiting important places.’

  * * *

  Graham Greene wrote of the ‘splinter of ice in the heart of a writer’, the element of the artistic personality which uses others’ suffering for the writer’s own creative ends. To what extent can it be said to be inevitable that a writer’s friendships will be exploited in their work? And what made Waugh’s use of the Lygons different?

  Writers are indeed ruthless people. It is well known that Evelyn used his friends for copy, sometimes sending a postcard to friends saying ‘Your turn next’. I think that, on some level, the Lygons would have felt a tiny amount of betrayal, but were too loyal to say so.

  You refer to Stephen McKenna’s dedication to Hugh Lygon of his novel An Affair of Honour, ‘to whom I am indebted for the seed of truth from which this fantasy has grown’. With reference to your own work, should the origins of the fantasy always be looked into? What is the use of knowing about an author’s life if what brought him to prominence was his work? How can – and should –biography inform our reading, enjoyment and interpretation of Waugh’s novels?

  I would always prefer to know biographical details about writers and their works. The very best of literary biographies bring writers alive for a new generation and encourage us to go back to the works. I’m thinking here of Richard Holmes’s wonderful biography of Coleridge and Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf. There is no doubt that these literary biographies increased
my understanding and enjoyment of the works. Nevertheless, I would always sound a note of caution when considering the relationship between fact and fiction. A novel is above all a work of the imagination.

  You say, in discussing Waugh’s biographical study of Rossetti, that ‘To a greater or lesser extent, all biographers project themselves into their chosen subjects.’ What aspects of you are revealed in your portrait of Waugh and his Mad World?

  I come from a large, chaotic Catholic family, so I think that I was drawn to Evelyn’s world. Like him, I am attracted to the panache and glamour exemplified by the English upper classes, whilst retaining a healthy cynicism towards them. I share Evelyn Waugh’s irreverent sense of humour and I admire his generation and their ‘stiff upper lip’ mentality. I can’t bear the self-pity and the victim culture that characterise our own age.

  Did having his own family and family life put an end to Waugh’s habit of falling in love with other families?

  I think so. From the time he met Laura Herbert his search was over.

  You refer to the decline and fall of the ‘heavily footnoted biographical doorstopper’ and champion the emergence of the ‘partial life’ in biography. As a practitioner of the craft, where do you foresee the next innovation in biography coming from?

  I’m unsure as to how the genre of biography will develop, but I am convinced that partial life biographies are the way of the future. Nevertheless, there will always be a place for the ‘cradle to grave’ biographies. I think that the two can happily co-exist.

  A Writing Life

  When do you write?

  I always write best in the mornings. During the rest of the day, I read or revise the morning’s work.

  Where do you write?

  Usually at my lovely Georgian desk in my study. Sometimes I write at the kitchen table, so that I can see my hens (Dannii, Cheryl and Holly) clucking about.

  Why do you write?

  I write because I love it. When it goes well, time flies and then I feel like I deserve a nice glass of wine in the evening.

  Pen or computer?

  I like to write notes in ink (fountain pen is best), but then it’s typing all the way.

  Silence or music?

  Music – always classical, usually Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.

  How do you start a book?

  I buy a pretty notebook, a new fountain pen and then I start to take notes and it grows from there.

  And finish?

  My husband and children wrestle the pen out of my hand and take my laptop away and then I know that it’s time to finish. ?

  Which writer has had the greatest influence on your work?

  Jane Austen – because she makes me laugh and she makes me cry.

  What are your guilty reading pleasures?

  The Twilight series, Harry Potter and E. Nesbit.

  Life at a Glance

  BORN

  Birkenhead, 1967

  EDUCATED

  Marian RC High School for Girls; University of Liverpool

  CAREER TO DATE

  Schoolteacher, university lecturer, Royal Literary Fellow, writer

  FAMILY

  Husband: writer and critic Jonathan Bate. Three fabulous children: Tom, Ellie and Harry Sebastian.

  LIVES

  In a small village in Warwickshire

  About the Book

  Other Worlds

  by Paula Byrne

  THE LYGONS WERE not the first family that Evelyn Waugh fell in love with. At the beginning there were the Flemings, then the Plunket Greenes, and then the Lygons: ‘So true to life being in love with an entire family,’ wrote Nancy Mitford.

  Why do people fall in love with other people’s families? That was the question with which I began my journey into Waugh’s world. In Evelyn’s case, he was in flight from his own upbringing. He was never close to his father. To all intents and purposes he felt like an only child – his brother was six years older and they moved in different circles. Waugh was drawn to large, chaotic households, often where there was a strong female presence. He loved, for example, hearing Nancy Mitford’s tales about her eccentric clan. She was one of six sisters – infamous as the ‘Mitford Girls’. It was Evelyn who, encouraging her literary endeavours, advised her to write about her own ‘mad’ family. The Pursuit of Love (he also gave her the title) was Mitford’s most successful novel: a hilarious and poignant recreation of her home life in the Cotswolds.

  * * *

  ‘Why do people fall in love with other people’s families? That was the question with which I began my journey into Waugh’s world.’

  * * *

  Like Nancy Mitford, I hail from a large family. She was one of six sisters, I am one of five. I understand Waugh’s fascination with big families. Whenever I have had a boyfriend from a small family, they have been enamoured of my own noisy, rambunctious siblings. We are drawn to the opposite of what we know. I think that one of the reasons why Brideshead is so beloved by readers (if not critics) is because of the way Waugh captures other worlds and reveals their magical quality.

  He loved Alice in Wonderland – a book that was key to his comic vision. In his first, hilarious novel, Decline and Fall, Waugh depicts a hapless hero who unwittingly finds himself in a crazy, anarchic and topsy-turvy universe, full of lunatics and criminals masquerading as respectable people. Paul Pennyfeather’s very dullness and conventionality only serve to highlight the contrast between him and the outrageous characters that inhabit his society.

  Though far different in tone and style, Brideshead Revisited also takes its hero through ‘that low door in the wall’ which leads to an enchanted world. The sheer beauty of Oxford, with its ancient buildings of grey and gold, its tranquil, lush gardens and dreaming spires, casts the first spell over our shy lonely hero. Then at Brideshead, another magical castle, the hero finds Arcadia – not only in the bricks and mortar of the stately home, but also in the love of another human being.

  One of the reasons why we read books is to escape into other worlds. Biographers, too, must enter imaginatively into the world they are trying to recreate. One of the reasons why I became a biographer is that I wanted to write about the books and authors that I love. I didn’t want to be an academic critic and I don’t see myself as a novelist. But in biography I found a form where I could do what novelists do – bring alive fascinating characters and relate a compelling plot – whilst also exploring how great books came to be written. I am always intrigued by the way in which writers draw upon their own experience but transmute it into their art, making all sorts of subtle changes. As I show, nearly all the characters in Brideshead are composites of different friends and acquaintances.

  The other thing about biography is that it amply fulfils the desire to enter into a whole world totally different from your own experience. As a working-class girl from impoverished Birkenhead, I have always loved being transported to the elegance of the eighteenth century and the glamour of the Jazz Age. One aspect of the research for a biography that I especially enjoy is the process of bringing alive the atmosphere of the age. I immerse myself in newspapers and magazines, prints and photographs, gossip columns and memoirs. For Mad World, I pored over Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue’s Book of Etiquette and the Lygon family scrapbooks at Madresfield.

  I regard Evelyn Waugh as one of the funniest writers in the English language, and, along with Jane Austen, he is one of my two favourite authors. Waugh and Austen have much in common: they are supreme social satirists, incredibly witty, masters of dialogue and character. Waugh’s motto, ‘laughter and the love of friends’, could very well have been Jane Austen’s – and it is certainly mine.

  Read On

  Have You Read?

  Other books by Paula Byrne

  Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson

  To Coleridge she was ‘a woman of undoubted genius’, to others she was simply ‘the most interesting woman of her age’. Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson was, in her time, the darling of the London stage, mistress
to the most powerful men in England, a renowned feminist thinker, and a bestselling author more famous for her poetry than Wordsworth. In this enthralling biography, Paula Byrne captures her life in all its extraordinary, disgraceful, triumphant and romantic glory.

  ‘Enthralling and perceptive. A fine biographer has conjured up a dazzling personality and brought her, laughing, back to life’

  Sunday Times

  Jane Austen and the Theatre

  Jane Austen was passionate about the stage. She went to the theatre in London and Bath whenever she could, acted in private theatricals and wrote a number of her early works in play form. Living in a great age of English stage comedy, she drew inspiration from Sheridan as well as Shakespeare. In this fascinating book, Paula Byrne traces the dramatic impact of the theatre on her masterpieces Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Mansfield Park.