by Paula Byrne
Despite his great love for his wife and children he was beset by mood swings and fits of melancholy. When he was rude to his friends, his wife Laura made him apologise. On two occasions his rudeness provoked Ann Fleming to physical violence. She understood that his ill temper was partially due to his long-term insomnia, but that his bad moods were much improved by misadventures. Rafting on the Rio Grande he was delighted when the raft sunk and they had to swim to shore: ‘Evelyn doing a slow breast stroke, blue eyes blazing and mood much improved, for he liked things to go wrong.’
Evelyn’s problem after the war was that his life went right, so his fiction went wrong. His comedy depended on the misadventures and the sense of being an outsider. Settling down as a country squire with a happy brood of children was no recipe for the creation of another Decline and Fall or Handful of Dust.
Testimonies from his friends all emphasise his funniness, his incomparable companionship, his loyalty, his courage, his schoolboy sense of humour, his fierce intelligence and his humility about his own genius. He was a flirt (like his father) and adored fair, beautiful aristocratic women. All of his friends recall his blue eyes with their intense, piercing gaze. But no one gives a more accurate portrayal of the middle-aged Waugh than Evelyn himself. His autobiographical novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, published in 1957, recounts a nervous breakdown that he suffered aboard a ship. It was brought on by an overdose of sleeping draught. In a chapter entitled ‘Portrait of the Artist in Middle-age’ he observes that ‘the part for which he had cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously, before his children … and his cronies in London, until it came to dominate his outward personality’. This is late Waugh in a nutshell: a man who cast himself in a role that was really rather boring, with the result that he became a parody of himself, all too easily misunderstood as a curmudgeon, a snob and a testy misanthropist.
Gilbert Pinfold’s crisis was his own. He went mad, began hearing voices in his head. One of them kept telling him that he was a homosexual. He wasn’t – he loved women too much for that – but there is no question that the creator of Sebastian Flyte and admirer of Lord Beauchamp had one of the great bisexual imaginations of the English literary tradition.
His health was ruined prematurely by heavy drinking, smoking and addiction to the sleeping drugs that had blighted his life. But despite the ever more crusty persona, his late letters to his children reveal a tender, loving side that was rarely seen in public. To Bron, his eldest, he repeated his mantra: ‘Most of the interest and amusement in life comes from one’s friends.’
He died on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1966, of a heart attack. His friend Father Caraman said the Mass in Latin. He was deeply mourned by his friends. ‘Probably the greatest friend I ever had,’ said Nancy Mitford in a television interview just after his death: ‘what nobody ever remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything. That’s what none of the people who wrote about him seem to have taken into account at all.’ His son Bron echoed this in the Spectator that May:
The main point about my father, which might be of interest … is not that he was interested in pedigree – it was the tiniest part of his interests. It is not that he was a conservative – politics bored him … it is simply that he was the funniest man of his generation. He scarcely opened his mouth but to say something extremely funny. His house and life revolved around jokes. It was his wit – coupled, of course, with supreme accuracy of expression, kindness, loyalty, bravery and intelligence – which endeared him to everybody who knew him or read his books.
Late in life Evelyn Waugh completed A Little Learning, his memoir of his early years, in which Oxford plays such a vital part. When he heard that ‘Frisky’ Baldwin had had to buy a copy, he wrote a letter of apology, which Frisky inserted in his private proof copy of Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn said that the only reason he had not sent a complimentary copy was that Frisky had not really featured in the early years. ‘In the second volume,’ he explained, ‘you will be a prominent character and I shall send you proofs for your permission to disclose the pleasures of the early ’30s.’
All he managed of the sequel was a couple of pages concerning the brief period in 1925 when he was living in London with his brother Alec. His provisional title for the volume was ‘A Little Hope’, no doubt an allusion to his religious conversion. But if Evelyn Waugh had lived to complete the second volume of his autobiography, the centrality of Madresfield and the Lygons to his whole vision of life would have become fully apparent. The theme of the volume, like that of Brideshead, would have been ‘the household of the faith’. What might he have called the chapter on Mad that would have been at the centre of it? He could not have done better than borrow that of the first of the three parts of his biography of Ronald Knox, published a few years before: ‘Laughter and the Love of Friends.’
SOURCES
The following list is not intended as a display of industry nor as a guarantee of good faith. They are the books which, while I was working on this subject, I found chiefly interesting and relevant; which I can commend to any reader who wishes to amplify details that I have stated too briefly, too vaguely, or too allusively.
(Evelyn Waugh, Appendix to Edmund Campion, 1935)
Waugh prefaced his life of Edmund Campion with the comment that: ‘There is great need for a complete, scholar’s work on the subject. This is not it. All I have done is select the incidents which struck a novelist as important, and relate them in a single narrative.’ In the case of Waugh himself, there is no further need for a complete, scholar’s work on the subject: we already have one in Martin Stannard’s two large volumes, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years, 1903–1939 (1987) and Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years, 1939–1966 (1992), supplemented by Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (1994) and Douglas Lane Patey’s acute The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography (1998). The first biography, Evelyn Waugh (1975), by Christopher Sykes remains invaluable because it was based on personal acquaintance (with the Lygons as well as Waugh). The best account of Waugh’s Oxford friendships is Humphrey Carpenter’s ‘group biography’ The Brideshead Generation (1989), though perhaps the one weakness of this engaging book is its lack of attention to the Lygons.
My aim, by contrast to that of the ‘comprehensive’ biographer, has been to select, if I may adapt Waugh’s phrase, ‘the incidents which struck me as important’ in the genesis and aftermath of Brideshead Revisited, and relate them in a single narrative that illustrates what I believe to be the key themes of Waugh’s life. It therefore seems appropriately in the spirit of Waugh himself to offer, in place of detailed reference notes, a brief listing of the principal published and unpublished sources on which I have drawn while working on the subject, together with a chronological list of Evelyn Waugh’s book-length works and the major editions of his letters, diaries and shorter pieces.
For further details of sources and references, and background information on the writing of the book, please visit the author’s website, www.paulabyrne.co.uk
EVELYN WAUGH’S MAJOR WORKS OF FICTION
Decline and Fall: An Illustrated Novelette (1928)
Vile Bodies (1930)
Black Mischief (1932)
A Handful of Dust (1934)
Scoop: A Novel about Journalists (1938)
Put Out More Flags (1942)
Work Suspended (1942)
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945)
The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (1948)
Helena (1950)
OTHER WORKS BY EVELYN WAUGH
Rossetti, His Life and Works (1928; biography)
Labels, A Mediterranean Journal (1930; travel)
Remote People (1931; travel)
Ninety-Two Days (1934; travel)
Edmund Campion (1935; biography)
Mr Loveday’s Little Outing and Other Sad Stories (1936; short stories)
Waugh in Abyssin
ia (1936; travel)
Robbery Under Law (1939; travel)
Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947; novella)
The Holy Places (1952; travel)
Love Among the Ruins (1953; short story)
The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox (1959; biography)
A Tourist in Africa (1960; travel)
Basil Seal Rides Again (1963; short story)
A Little Learning (1964; autobiography)
The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Michael Davie (1976)
The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory (1980)
The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Donat Gallagher (1983)
Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper, edited by Artemis Cooper (1991)
The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, edited by Charlotte Mosley (1996)
The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Ann Pasternak Slater (1998)
UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS
Some of Waugh’s letters to the Lygon sisters are included in Mark Amory’s selected edition of the Letters of Evelyn Waugh, but others remain in manuscript. A collection of eighty of those to Maimie is in the library of Georgetown University in Washington DC, while those to Coote, together with a second batch to Maimie, are in private hands. The letters from Maimie to Evelyn are in his incoming correspondence, which is in the British Library.
The published edition of The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh has been censored in places. Where necessary, I have silently restored omissions by consulting the original, which is in the huge and indispensable Evelyn Waugh collection in the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson, has most generously allowed me to consult a wealth of material in his private family archive, including original manuscripts, transcripts of interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, photographs and Arthur Waugh’s diaries. He has also provided me with some key references to Madresfield in a recently acquired and extremely important collection of Evelyn’s letters that has long been thought lost.
Charles Linck, who unearthed the film The Scarlet Woman, kindly sent me a copy of his invaluable unpublished PhD dissertation, ‘The Development of Evelyn Waugh’s Career: 1903–1939’ (University of Kansas, 1962). His privately published correspondence with Terence Greenidge is also an exceptionally valuable, almost unknown source: Evelyn Waugh in Letters by Terence Greenidge (1994).
The letters from the Earl and Countess Beauchamp to Lady Dorothy Lygon are in the private family archive at Madresfield. Materials for the servant’s-eye view of Madresfield are in the local history collection of the Malvern Public Library and the Worcestershire Record Office.
The hitherto unseen Beauchamp divorce petition is in the National Archives at Kew. There are several small collections of unpublished Beauchamp papers, including his letters to Lloyd George, which are in the Library of the House of Lords. Correspondence and papers relating to his governorship of New South Wales (in the State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Library, Sydney) and his surviving papers at Madresfield provide the raw material for a full-scale political biography of this remarkable man, but because of the scandal nobody has yet undertaken one: perhaps it will now be possible.
OTHER SOURCES
Among the many other works consulted, the following have been especially useful:
Acton, Harold, Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948)
Amory, Mark, Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric (1998)
Barrow, Andrew, Gossip: A History of High Society from 1920 to 1970 (1978)
Beevor, Antony, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (1991)
Blow, Sydney, Through Stage Doors (1958)
Byron, Robert, Letters Home, edited by Lucy Butler (1991)
Chapman, Hester W., and the Princess Romanovsky-Pavlovsky (eds), Diversion: published for the benefit of the Yugoslav Relief Society (1946)
Cooper, Diana, Autobiography (1965; originally in 3 vols, 1958–60)
Davenport-Hines, Richard, ‘Lygon, William, seventh Earl Beauchamp (1872–1938)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
Davis, Robert Murray, Evelyn Waugh, Writer (1981)
De la Cour, John, Madresfield Court (undated guidebook)
Dickinson, Peter (ed.), Lord Berners: Composer, Writer, Painter (2008)
Dutton, David, ‘William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp’, Journal of Liberal History, Summer 1999
Field, Leslie, Bendor: The Golden Duke of Westminster (1983)
Fielding, Daphne, The Duchess of Jermyn Street: The Life and Good Times of Rosa Lewis of the Cavendish Hotel, with preface by Evelyn Waugh (1964)
Fothergill, John, An Innkeeper’s Diary (1931)
Glen, Alexander, Young Men in the Arctic (1935)
Green, Martin, Children of the Sun: A Narrative of Decadence in England after 1918 (1980)
Greenidge, Terence, Degenerate Oxford? (1930)
Hance, Captain J. E., School for Horse and Rider (1932)
Hollis, Christopher, Oxford in the Twenties (1976)
Isherwood, Christopher, The World in the Evening (1954)
Kavanagh, Julie, ‘Lady Mary Lygon Revisits Brideshead’, Harpers & Queen, October 1981
Knox, James, A Biography of Robert Byron (2003)
Lancaster, Marie-Jaqueline (ed.), Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure (1968)
Lygon, Lady Dorothy, ‘Madresfield and Brideshead’, in Evelyn Waugh and his World, edited by David Pryce-Jones (1973)
‘Madresfield Court, Worcestershire’, Country Life, 30 March 1907
Mosley, Charlotte (ed.), The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (2007)
Mosley, Diana, Loved Ones: Pen Portraits (1985)
——The Pursuit of Laughter: Essays, Articles, Reviews and a Diary (2008)
Mulvagh, Jane, Madresfield (2007)
Nicolson, Harold, Diaries 1907–1964, edited by Nigel Nicolson (2004)
Parker, Peter, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos (1987)
Powell, Anthony, Memoirs (vols 1–3, 1976–80)
Rolfe, Frederick, ‘Baron Corvo’, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1934)
Stannard, Martin (ed.), Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage (1984)
Strachey, Julia, Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey by Herself and Frances Partridge (1983)
Taylor, D. J., Bright Young People (2007)
Treglown, Jeremy, Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green (2000)
Waugh, Alec, A Year to Remember: A Reminiscence of 1931 (1975)
——My Brother Evelyn and other Profiles (1967)
Waugh, Alexander, Fathers and Sons (2004)
Waugh, Auberon, Another Voice (1986)
Weaver, Cora, A Short Guide to Charles Darwin and Evelyn Waugh in Malvern (1991)
Williams, Dorothy, The Lygons of Madresfield Court (2001)
INDEX
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader’s search tools.
Abdy, Diana 196
Abdy, Sir Robert 242
Abelson, Tamara (aka Talbot Rice) 63
Aberconway, Lady Christabel 132
Abingdon Arms (Beckley) 118
Abyssinia 245–6, 247, 252, 255
Acton, Harold 35, 39, 40–3, 48–9, 51, 52–3, 55, 56, 57, 60, 63, 71, 73, 78, 80, 89, 102, 105, 111, 113, 118, 120, 128, 238, 256, 271, 290
Humdrum 111
the Albany (London) 177
Alington, Lady 254
All Souls College (Oxford) 61
Ampleforth School 260
Ampthill, Dowager Lady 255
Anne, Princess 341
Armstrong, William 40, 255
Armstrong-Jones, Anne 196
Arnold House prep school (Denbighshire) 75, 76, 77–81, 107
Arnold, Thomas 20, 75
Ashbee, C. R. 132–3, 156
Asquith, Herbert 1
35
Asquith, Katherine 214–15, 219, 220, 240, 246, 260
Assisi 90
Aston Clinton (Buckinghamshire) 81, 85, 100–1, 102, 104–5
Athens 104
Auden, W. H. 75, 283
Austen, Jane
Pride and Prejudice 184
Sense and Sensibility 184–5, 318
Australian Sporting Club 198
Bakst, Leon 41
Baldwin, Arthur ‘Bloggs’ 165–6, 169, 172, 174, 177, 179, 180, 202, 349
Baldwin, Lady 166
Baldwin, Oliver 129, 166
Baldwin, Stanley 117, 129, 140, 143, 146, 147, 166, 168
Balfour, Patrick (later Lord Kinross) ‘Mr
Gossip’ 63, 87, 116, 122, 149, 150, 151, 172, 174, 246, 255, 263
Society Racket 116
Balliol College (Oxford) 61, 71, 226
Banks, Mr 75, 77
Barford House (Warwickshire) 62, 81
Baring, Poppy 138
Bartleet, Robert 165, 175, 220, 255
Bateson (Oxford University ‘scout') 44
Bath, Lord 238
Beaton, Cecil 16, 107, 193, 196, 209
Beaton, Reggie 216
Beauchamp, 7th Earl see Lygon, William, 7th
Earl Beauchamp
Beauchamp, Countess see Lygon, Lady Lettice
Mary (nee Grosvenor)
Beaverbrook, Lord 92, 140, 162, 201, 212, 255, 265
Beerbohm, Max, Zuleika Dobson 45
Bell newspaper 330
Belton House 222
Berlin, Isaiah 60
Bernays, Robert 133, 247–8
Berners, Lord 175, 189–90, 212, 225, 227, 261–2, 335, 343
The Girls of Radcliff Hall 344
Betjeman, John 75, 77, 106, 128, 307
Summoned by Bells 34
Bevan, Aneurin ‘Nye’ 219
Binyon, Laurence 253
