by Paula Byrne
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The Mitford Girls
by Mary S. Lovell
Born of ‘minor provincial aristocracy’, the Mitford sisters came to epitomise the Bright Young Thing generation lampooned by Evelyn Waugh. They were Nancy, the literary dry wit; Diana, the iconic beauty who fell for the charms of Oswald Mosley; Pam, a countrywoman who married one of Europe’s leading scientists; Unity, a member of Hitler’s inner circle before her attempted suicide on the eve of World War Two; Jessica, the family rebel, who declared herself a communist in the schoolroom; and Debo, a future Duchess of Devonshire. This glittering group biography charts the disparate paths chosen by the blue-eyed sisterhood whose lives spanned the twentieth century.
Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939
by Virginia Nicholson
Subversive, eccentric and flamboyant, the artistic community in the first half of the twentieth century was engaged in a grand experiment. The bohemians ate garlic and didn’t always wash; they painted and danced and didn’t care what people thought. They sent their children to co-ed schools; they explored homosexuality and Free Love. They were often drunk, broke and hungry but they were rebels. In this fascinating book Virginia Nicholson examines the way the bohemians refashioned the way we live our lives.
Memoirs of an Aesthete
by Harold Acton
Harold Acton listed as his principal recreation ‘hunting the philistines’. From the balcony of his Oxford rooms he famously declaimed passages from The Waste Land through a megaphone, an event later recorded by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead. In this remarkable memoir, he gives a witty and vivid account of the first thirty-five years of his life, from boyhood among the international colony of dilettanti in Florence before the First World War, to maturity in Peking. Between the two, he describes his experiences at the heart of a brilliant generation of postwar Oxford scholars, and his adventures amongst the bohemians of Paris.
Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper, 1932–66
The correspondence between Evelyn Waugh and the celebrated beauty Lady Diana Cooper spanned thirty years. Prolific and candid, their letters are rich in anecdote, wicked, mischievous, affectionate, astringent, funny and, above all, fascinating for the insight they give into two of the most remarkable figures of their times.
Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt
by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
Consuelo Vanderbilt was one of the greatest heiresses of the late nineteenth century: a fabulously wealthy New York socialite and a glittering prize for suitors on both sides of the Atlantic. When she married, a crowd of over two thousand onlookers gathered, and newspapers frenziedly reported every detail of the event, right down to the bridal underwear. Even by the standards of the day the glamorous eighteen-year-old had made an outstanding match: she had ensnared the twenty-four-year-old Duke of Marlborough, the most eligible peer in Great Britain. Yet the bride’s swollen face, barely hidden under the veil, presaged the unhappiness that lay in the couple’s painful twelve-year future. It was not Consuelo, but her domineering mother who had forced the marriage through. This captivating biography tells of the lives of mother and daughter: the story of the fairytale wedding and its nightmarish aftermath, and an account of how both women went on to dedicate their lives to the dramatic fight for women’s rights.
Find Out More
WATCH:
Evelyn Waugh’s caustic observations on British society brought to life in Bright Young Things, an adaptation of Vile Bodies, directed by Stephen Fry; A Handful of Dust, directed by Charles Sturridge; and the original Brideshead Revisited television series, directed by Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
LISTEN TO:
Evelyn Waugh, a British Library CD which draws on previously unpublished BBC broadcasts from a period of over twenty-five years. The recordings range from the earliest surviving example of Waugh’s voice, dating from 1938, to a speech given at the Royal Society of Literature in 1963, just three years before his death.
SURF:
http://www.evelynwaughsociety.org/index.php
The Evelyn Waugh Society was founded in 2005 to promote interest in his life and works. This is the homepage of their website, with links to further sources of information.
CODA
‘Laughter and the Love of Friends’
That day is wasted on which we have not laughed.
(inscription composed by Lord Beauchamp and his sister
for the sundial at Madresfield)
Oh dear friendship, what a gift of God it is. Speak no ill of it.
(Fr Bede Jarrett, quoted by Evelyn Waugh
in his biography of Ronald Knox)
In literary calendars 1945 is marked as the year that Waugh ended.
(Brigid Brophy)
The war ended the world that Waugh loved and he would never be the same again. Nor would the Lygons. Evelyn wrote to Coote on 3 March 1945: ‘Here are the Trollopes, with many thanks – I enjoyed The Way We Live Now very much. I am glad my book about the way we lived then arrived safely.’ His book about the way they lived then – in their Mad World before the war – was of course Brideshead Revisited.
His emotional and intellectual development ended in 1945. The writing afterwards is retrospective, the author estranged from the modern age. He became prematurely aged and embittered. If England was bad after the war, worse was to come: the Second Vatican Council would take the Roman Catholic Church in a direction of which he did not approve. And worst of all, he became a caricature of himself.
The Lygon girls were of more sanguine temperament. None of them seemed to be worried about their decline in prosperity. In an interview in the 1980s Lady Dorothy said that she saw the old days ‘as a part of one’s life that’s now over. I was lucky to live the life I did, though I didn’t think of it as privilege at the time.’
Maimie
After the war, Maimie descended into a haze of alcoholism and depression. Her mental condition caused much despair to her loved ones. Evelyn and Coote wrote to each other regularly to discuss the problem. She was suffering from persecution mania and was in a delicate state. Her friends claimed that Vsev had spent all her money. The prince and princess had no children, were heavy drinkers and were devoted to their Pekingese dogs. They got into the habit of throwing pots of boiling hot tea at each other.
In February 1946, Maimie wrote to Evelyn from the Georgian apartment in Alexander Square SW3 to which she and Vsev had moved. She had been to a ball and danced with a Colonel de Jouray, who was frightened of ladies: ‘I suppose if we had all been great pansy sheiks with our pockets and shoes full of sand it would have been alright.’ Somewhat incongruously, she had discussed modern novels with him, but did not dare to say that she liked Brideshead ‘as now it is so popular in the USA he would despise me for bad taste’. Waugh’s novel had become a hugely successful Book Club selection in America. Maimie also joked that a Danish count who was in love with Coote had asked her hand in marriage and promised a lot of certificates saying that he was not infected with the clap, ‘but of course she has said no’.
Some months later, Evelyn told Nancy Mitford that Maimie’s ‘nasty little dog has been kidnapped and held to ransom. She paid up.’ He was writing a treatise on wine for her husband in exchange for champagne. Two months later he reported that she had been burgled, losing wine and a gold cigarette case. Maimie wrote again with news that a different colonel had asked for Coote’s hand in marriage but that she had refused, unimpressed by his great wealth. She also wrote: ‘I think I have 2 pansy servants – Decent.’
Evelyn responded: ‘My male instinct told me that your news was connected with Poll’s nuptials. I thought you would tell me she was at least engaged but no it is no again. I think it would have been injudicious to marry Col Britain on account of his low birth, ungainly manners, insanitary and immodest habits with the chamber-pot. I hope she did not flatter him with a moment’s hesitation but snapped o
ut her No before he had finished his declaration.’ Meanwhile he was negotiating to buy a house in Somerset – perhaps Coote could live there ‘and keep out the vigilantes until I have sold this little house’.
He sent a postcard in September asking if she would eat oysters with him and then go to the cinema: ‘Please do or are you too busy with your literary career?’ This is a reference to her editorship of Diversion, a book she was producing to raise money for the Yugoslav Relief Society. It included short stories by Henry Yorke, Peter Quennell, Eddie Sackville-West and many other mutual friends. Elizabeth Bowen’s contribution, a beautiful little story about the declining Anglo-Irish aristocracy, would have given Maimie a peculiar pang: entitled ‘The Good Earl’, it told of a lord who died far from home and of his daughter witnessing the unloading of his coffin from an ocean liner and taking his body home to bury it. On a lighter note, there was a story by Lord Berners that rewrote Evelyn’s short story about Maimie – the beautiful girl with the snub nose and the Pekingese that damages her mistress’s marital prospects. It even included the detail, taken from the life of Grainger, of the dog becoming a member of the Lord’s Day Observance Society. When the book came out, Evelyn attached a clipping about it to a letter:
Blondie, What is this I read? A book of stories composed by you and Mrs Chapman. Why has this been kept a secret? Are they obscene? Am I to have a copy? Are you trying to take the bread out of my children’s mouths? ‘Diversion’ indeed. Is this the time for diversions with a labour government and squatters and famine and Poll still unmarried?
Maimie duly sent a copy and Evelyn replied gracefully: ‘Thank you very much indeed for sending me your beautiful ‘‘Diversion’’. I am ashamed now that I didn’t contribute. If I had known that Tito was not to profit I would have done so eagerly. I am sure it will be a very great success.’
He subsequently sent her a new book of his own, a slight novella entitled Scott-King’s Modern Europe. The protagonist, a dim schoolmaster at a conference in an imaginary continental country, gets into conversation with an Anglophile engineer who asks him if he knows the Duke of Westminster. ‘No,’ replies Scott-King. ‘I saw him once at Biarritz,’ his interlocutor says; ‘A fine man. A man of great propriety.’ ‘Indeed?’ says Scott-King, his quizzical tone that of the Waugh who knew what Westminster had done to Beauchamp. ‘Indeed, London is his propriety,’ comes the answer – the misprision not only a joke at the expense of the foreigner but also an allusion to the legendary scale of the duke’s property portfolio. ‘I hope you are not furious at my mentioning the Duke of Westminster in my book,’ Evelyn wrote to Maimie. ‘You know how we love to gossip about our social superiors.’
Most of their letters during these years are a mix of gossip, booze, jokes, ‘filthiness’ and book talk. Maimie asked Evelyn if he would put her up for membership of the London Library. He made her claim on the basis of the publication of Diversion: ‘I said you were a scholar of international repute but they said there was no chance of priority. It should not take longer than 9 months at the rate members are dying this winter of exposure and malnutrition.’ She was duly elected and he gave her some solemn advice on the rules of the Library:
NEVER write ‘balls’ with an indelible pencil on the margins of the books provided. Do not solicit the female librarians to acts of unnatural vice. When very drunk it is permissible to fall into a light doze but not to sing. Fireworks are always welcome in the reading-room but they should be of a kind likely to divert the older members rather than to cause permanent damage to the structure.
Maimie had a beautiful voice. A tribute by a friend after her death noted that she was incapable of singing out of tune and that she would warble out Gilbert and Sullivan or Victorian ballads as ‘unself-consciously as a bird’, to the piano accompaniment of Bloggs Baldwin – but there is no record of her having tried it out in the reading room of the London Library.
‘How I dread Christmas,’ she wrote towards the end of 1946; ‘Do come to London soon and cheer us up.’ Those joyous Christmases at Mad were now a very distant memory. Her letters revealed increasing signs of having been written when drunk. An obsession with homosexuality runs through many of them: an Isherwood novel that she ‘thought would be about a pederast’; repeated references to a story that eighty people had been arrested in Hampstead for sodomy. ‘How much my mind has sunk,’ she commented.
Every now and then she wrote with Madresfield gossip, such as the news that Miss Bryan, her old governess, was very ill and that the cook who blackmailed Boom was dead. She said that Dickie, her youngest brother, had phoned to say that he had sent a wreath and written a card from her (noblesse oblige, even to a blackmailer) and then Elmley rang to say he had done the same and so did Lady Sibell, ‘all after I had rung the gardeners at Mad and done the same so I expect many people will think I am heart-broken’. The one thing she never lost was her sense of humour. Her letters to Evelyn are peppered with references to her father (‘high time someone wrote a lovely life of Boom’) and with nostalgia for the good old days (‘just think 18 years ago we were all in Venice’).
By 1952 Evelyn informed Nancy Mitford that ‘poor Maimie is broke’. She and her husband were following ‘the old, almost abeyant custom, of residing together without speaking. Difficult without servants.’ The next year she moved to Hove on the Sussex coast, where she had a bad fall down the stairs, probably when drunk, and was left concussed and bruised. Evelyn thought that she was going a bit crazy. Her lawyers and bankers were refusing to allow her to cash cheques. She had begun to pawn her jewellery. This provided short-term relief: ‘I have £350 in notes and no bills,’ she wrote to Evelyn, ‘so come up and let’s make whoopee.’ She told him that she was in deep disgrace with her brother Lord Beauchamp and her sister Lady Lettice, who had asked her and Vsev to live ‘as jagger in turns with them to save money’. Maimie was desperate not to have to resort to this – ‘So darling,’ she asked, ‘suggest a way I can earn my living.’
Her Christmas was dreadful: ‘Not like the old days with the Capt. G. B. H.’ At this point Vsev was still living with her, but he was shortly to leave for good. Maimie had been reading her old letters to Boom: ‘My word! I was hypocritical. I expect they made good reading for Boom all the same … I never see a soul nowadays. However have got used to being lonely.’ She had also been reading diaries from the early thirties (alas, now lost): ‘Plenty of you – all to your credit. Well deserved!’ But her brave front was not fooling her loved ones.
In 1954, Coote wrote to Evelyn: ‘I long to see you; we are all very concerned about Little Blondie. Being married to Vsev is bound to make anyone nuts.’ Coote told Evelyn that she had made an appointment to see Maimie’s doctor but had deemed it wise not to tell her sister of her plans. Coote was pretty much resigned: ‘I don’t think it will do any good. Why didn’t we kill him [Vsev] at Hove?’
Maimie’s mental condition worsened until she was admitted into a rest home for the mentally ill in central London in June 1954. Naturally, she faced it head on and wrote to Evelyn: ‘So here am I in the bin … I have been ill since before Whitsun.’ She longed to return to her little flat in Hove, but was persuaded to stay at the home in Weymouth Street. Evelyn was distressed to hear the news and wrote to comfort her and sympathise that he too had lost his reason in February and March. He made jokes about her being mad with the coming eclipse of the sun, asking ‘is it not very expensive in your bin?’ Like the rest of her friends and family, he was worried about her financial position. He wished he could come to see her with ‘grapes, and flowers, and filthy stories’.
A letter she wrote to him in August 1954 reveals her fragility: ‘Darling, What are the saddest words in the English language – If Only, Never Again, Kept Waiting, Too Late, No Answer, Just Because. I think If Only is the Saddest.’ By the end of the year, Evelyn was writing that ‘Poor Maimie is sunk in madness.’ There were rumours of suicide attempts and desperate drinking, though she made periodic attempts to give up for Lent or out
of ‘vanity and parsimony’.
Maimie was divorced in 1956. Vsev had gone off with his Hungarian mistress and would soon remarry. She abandoned Hove, wrote off her car and reverted to her maiden name. Several collections of her jewellery appeared as star items in the sale rooms at Christies. She explained to Evelyn that Vsev’s old wine firm had sacked him and offered her a job: ‘There is quite a future for me in the Booze business.’ The willowy debutante was becoming an overweight middle-aged lady.
In December 1954, the year he found Maimie ‘sunk into madness’, Evelyn had visited the don, Richard Pares, who was dying of motor neurone disease. He wrote to Nancy Mitford: ‘I went to Oxford and visited my first homosexual love, Richard Pares. At 50 he is quite paralysed except his mind and voice and awaiting deterioration and death … No Christian Faith to support him. A very harrowing visit.’ He could not bear the idea of his friends dying without faith. So when Maimie wrote to him some years later to tell him that she had lost her faith, he acted quickly. She had said she was: ‘Poor, Persecuted, cold, tired, hungry and I have lost my faith which I mind but what to do?’ The letter was signed: ‘Yours despairingly, Blondie’. Evelyn asked her to elaborate and she tried to explain:
When I say I have lost my faith I do not mean belief exactly as who am I to dare say that something is untrue which has been known to be true for centuries by ones of far greater learning and intelligence than I could ever have had a glimmer of. Perhaps I meant courage and the insight which I had. Perhaps it is that things have been too easy for me. Anyway perhaps I could see your Beast one day … I do value your friendship.
