The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  My deep friendship with him lasted for one year only. When extracts from his diary were published in the Observer in 1973 I rather naturally wondered, as the date of our first meeting approached, what he was going to say about me. The Observer had carefully selected the nastiest pages (as was discovered later on, when the diary was published as an enormous book). The extracts showed Evelyn in a lurid light; he had something sarcastic to say about nearly all his friends, and probably the Observer’s choice of diary entries still colours many people’s view of their author. I felt angry to think that this brilliant and delightful man might be judged by a new generation, who had never known him, by his exaggerated self-caricature. ‘Don’t worry,’ said my son Alexander, ‘we’ve got the books.’

  I suppose I was partly relieved and partly sorry when it transpired that there was a gap of about a year in the diary, 1929-30, after the break-up of his marriage to Evelyn Gardner. It was exactly that year during which I saw him so often. Evelyn was lonely when his wife left him, but I am not at all sure that he was sad, though admittedly he wrote to Harold Acton and said he was unhappy. Of course, it is perfectly possible to be sad and at the same time full of the wonderful spontaneous gaiety which he epitomized. And yet… Pretty and charming though Evelyn Gardner was, Evelyn must have known that she could never have been his life’s companion. I often thought there was a large measure of relief, mixed no doubt with a certain amount of wounded pride, in him at that time. He knew he had made a mistake, and he was thankful that the result of it had been relatively painlessly set aside. After he had found in Laura Herbert his ideal wife, the short and rather tiresome episode which is all that his first marriage amounted to seemed erased from his mind as though it had never been.

  When we met I was just 19 and he was 25. I had been married for six months—to my first husband, Bryan Guinness—and I was pregnant. As usual with a first pregnancy, the nine months seemed like nine years; not in the least nine years of misery and pain, for I was in perfect health and surrounded by love and by delightfully amusing friends, but a seemingly endless time of physical and mental change and development.

  Like many of our brilliant but penniless contemporaries, when he left Oxford Evelyn had become a schoolmaster at a private school, where his wages kept body and soul together, just. The great point about being a schoolmaster was that there were endless holidays, so that however deadly the company of the other masters, however tiresome the children, there was plenty of time for one’s own activities. When, however, John Betjeman got a job on the Architectural Review and told him he was going to escape from being a schoolmaster, Evelyn said he was making a great mistake. ‘You will never laugh so much again,’ he warned. John agreed that his school, like Evelyn’s, was wonderfully funny, but all the same he took the more congenial work he had been offered. Perhaps the joke had palled.

  Most of the schools were in Hertfordshire, and there was always a wild rush after dinner to catch the last train. Evelyn’s name for the home counties was Metroland, and there is such a thing as spending too much of one’s life in suburban trains.

  The school in Decline and Fall was far from Metroland, in wildest Wales; by the time I met him, Evelyn had transmuted his experiences into this perfect book, as funny today as it was half a century ago. He had published a life of Rossetti, which had a modest success, but Decline and Fall had ecstatic admirers and he then decided he could make his living as a writer. He also contracted his hasty and disastrous marriage.

  His next novel was Vile Bodies, about what the newspapers called the Bright Young People. Evelyn himself was never a bright young person; his opinion of the group was unflattering, but he thought their antics were funny enough to make a novel. Bitter undertones have been discerned in Vile Bodies which are absent from the hilarious Decline and Fall, and this has been put down to bitterness within Evelyn resulting from his failed marriage. The betrayed husband is a recurring theme in his novels, but I am inclined to think that if he had loved his first wife enough to feel deep bitterness at her desertion of him he would also have suffered from jealousy, and there was little sign of this. Quite impossible, for example, to imagine him with the pain endured by Swann, waiting for hours outside the loved one’s house to see who went in. Evelyn would have been too proud to nag. He walked out. It was my great good fortune that he walked into our house. He had been an Oxford acquaintance of Bryan’s.

  In London, Evelyn lived with his parents in Hampstead, but he spent his days at our little house in Buckingham Street. Vile Bodies was in the process of being published, and he dedicated it to us. We had a joke exhibition that summer of paintings by Brian Howard, an Oxford contemporary, assisted by John Banting; we pretended they were the work of a German genius whom we had discovered. Evelyn wrote a preface to the catalogue and we invited all the art critics to see the masterpieces. Nobody was taken in, but for some reason there was massive publicity. On the strength of this we too became, for a moment, bright and young, according to the gossip columns. They called the Bruno Hat show ‘the art hoax of the year’, as though, as Evelyn said, art hoaxes were a frequent occurrence.

  No sooner had he finished Vile Bodies than he was obliged to start another book. Novelists with private means can probably hardly imagine the strain that need imposes. He never for one moment contemplated writing a novel which would not satisfy his own high standards, and therefore settled for a pot-boiler, Labels, a travel book for which he used various journeys he had made. He came with us to Ireland, and then in the autumn of 1929 he stayed with us at a flat belonging to my parents-in-law in Paris, but all his life Evelyn required solitude when he was writing, and we lent him an ugly villa called Pool Place almost on the beach in Sussex. He seemed indifferent to its hideous aspect, and to the freezing winds and noisy sea of the English Channel in autumn and winter. There was a cook, he was fairly comfortable, and when he felt the need for friends he came back to London, where I made him waste hours and hours at Buckingham Street, talking. He was the best company imaginable; as to disagreeable, never was there a more agreeable man. He had a very deep laugh, about an octave lower than his voice, and we laughed all the time.

  At Pool Place Evelyn was fascinated by work going on in the nearby fields, where my mother-in-law, Lady Evelyn Guinness, was building a ‘medieval’ house. She wanted gnarled old trees for it to nestle in, and these were brought from afar, carefully replanted in the best soil, bound round in straitjackets of thick straw, and tied down with great cables and pegs as if they had been marquees which might blow away; and indeed it was the windswept nature of the site which had hitherto prevented trees from growing there as they normally do in the country. Evelyn loved eccentricity, and the sight of the armies of men, lorries and cranes required for the trees was a great amusement to him. According to him, Mr Phillips, Lady Evelyn’s architect, had also imported squirrels and field mice to make the trees feel at home, and to impart an ancient, tapestry-like atmosphere to the surroundings of the ‘old’ house. Stones from demolished barns and cottages were used for the building of Bailiffscourt, as the place was called, and it did look old when it was finished, with its arrow-slit windows and half-timbered gatehouse. I went back there fifty years later (it is now a small, expensive hotel). Half a century had left no mark upon it. In fact it looked strangely new and had gathered no moss. Bailiffscourt reminded me of the song ‘You’re getting younger every day’. As to the trees, they had all died.

  If ever we were with Evelyn at Pool Place he insisted on being motored over to Bramber, to see the ‘museum’ made by a disgusting clergyman, who had killed and stuffed tiny creatures and made them perform unlikely tasks: a kitten pushing a guineapig in a pram, for example, and put them in glass cases round a room. It made me feel sick, but Evelyn cherished the oddity of the mind which had conceived it, and Bramber, in its way, charmed him almost as much as Bailiffscourt.

  In Paris he made a beeline for the Musée Grévin, which in those days was like Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors only muc
h more horrible. There was a particularly dreadful tableau of Christians and lions, and although even then Evelyn was a keen Christian, he was obviously sympathetic to the lions. There was sometimes menace in his brilliant eyes. He strongly disapproved of the French motto: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité; he could understand that it was written on town halls, but that it should also appear on churches outraged him. He was shortly to become a Roman Catholic, but I sometimes thought he might have been at home as a Calvinist, subscribing to the doctrine of the elect. Equality, in particular, seemed to him a patently nonsensical idea. Letters from this period of his life are almost as non-existent as his diary, but he wrote to Henry Yorke from our Paris flat in the Rue de Poitiers and told him, among other things: ‘We saw a magnificent Czech film called Erotikon. Also innumerable dress shows. And I have eaten a lot of nice food.’

  Another solitary refuge he used when he was writing was the Spread Eagle at Thame; we once stayed with him there. The inn-keeper was a ‘character’ called John Fothergill, who was apt to stand by the table of favoured clients at dinner, talking. He made it clear that his bugbear was any motorists who came into the hall ‘and used the place as a hotel’, as he put it angrily. In other words, they had been to the lavatory. There were dreaded ‘spécialités de la maison,’ such as cheese made out of reindeer’s milk. Probably Mr Fothergill had been indulgent to Evelyn and his friends when they were undergraduates at Oxford. Now it was Evelyn’s turn to be indulgent, and he made us swallow the reindeer cheese for fear of an outburst of disapproval from the choleric Mr Fothergill.

  A very good portrait of him by Henry Lamb dates from this time. The artist has caught his fierce, unrelenting stare. It is probably fortunate that he suffered rather, staying with the Lambs at their cottage at Coombe Bissett. Lamb was on the edge of the Bloomsbury Group, through Lady Ottoline Morrell and Lytton Strachey, both of whom had been in love with him before the First World War. His portrait, in the Tate, of Lytton Strachey is masterly, and so is his portrait of Evelyn Waugh: the first languorous, the second pugnacious, two brilliant subjects for a painter. There was an element of low living and high thinking at the cottage, very much in the Bloomsbury tradition. Discomfort they scorned to notice. Evelyn disliked this, and Lamb perhaps saw a more discontented and more typical Evelyn than my kind, amusing companion; he painted what he saw. Evelyn wrote to me:

  I have to sit for my picture for nearly six hours a day and that is too much particularly when I have work of my own I must get done. Yesterday some visitors came over from Wilton whom I have heard you speak of but whether with approbation or not I can’t remember. David Herbert, Michael Duff (this youth is awful) and his mother. I was quite glad to see a little company particularly when Lady Juliet asked me, had Mr Lamb any pictures in that big exhibition at Burlington House. But Lamb was so enraged by the invasion that he went to bed at nine o’clock.

  The Royal Academy was so much despised in the art world in those days that to ask a painter whether he exhibited there was considered insulting to the last degree. However, some years later Lamb himself became an R.A. The letter went on:

  The pity of living with such fastidious people as these [the Lambs] is that it makes one think so much vulgar. I am now convinced that Vile Bodies is very vulgar and I am sorry for dedicating it to you but I will write many more exalted works and dedicate them to you. May I? Mrs Augustus John (wife of well-known painter and fornicator. Tell Nancy.) has just arrived for dinner.

  In the same letter he says: ‘I am signing a contract for a life of Swift and shall settle in Dublin I think for the early spring… Do recuperate from Baby G. at Knockmaroon and then we would have fun.’ This projected life of Swift, which unfortunately was never written, gave us the idea of Jonathan as a name for Baby G. As Swift was Irish, it seemed a good compromise between English and Gaelic.

  Evelyn often put enclosures in his letters if he thought they would amuse. One that has survived, and which, unlike his own letters in those days, is dated (1 March 1930), is headed Vile Bodies:

  Sir.

  I have read the above drivel, and strongly recommend you to take a course in English Prose. I am the possessor of two text-books which, I think, might promote your literary maturity. On receipt of an answer, I shall be happy to give more details.

  This letter, which got a rapturous welcome, was from a Mr Fletcher, possibly a schoolmaster. He goes on to mention Evelyn’s ‘infantile view-point and inept mind’.

  The birth of Baby G. was now imminent, and Evelyn wrote from Pool Place to describe an evening at Oxford, where he had been invited to speak at a dinner of a literary society.

  Dearest Diana

  I am back again in your house after my visit to Oxford. That was worse than I thought possible. I arrived very tired and miserable and went to Lincoln College where I had never been before and for a long time I stood in the porch being stared at by Indians. Then the president of that society I had to address came up and he looked like Matthew Ponsonby* and talked like Heygate**. I don’t think you would like any of the bucks at Lincoln because they are poorer than me and lower born. [N.B. for the literal-minded: this was a JOKE, D.M.] Then I had no evening clothes. You see I had been very ingenious as I told you about a ‘rook sack’ [sic] and all my plans depended on Mrs W. sending my evening clothes by post and all she sent was evening shoes. So I rang up James Alexander Wedderburn St Clair Ham [Hamish Erskine, friend of my sister Nancy] to borrow his but he was out so I said I didn’t mind coming in ordinary clothes but the bucks all looked shocked and said but we do so they borrowed a suit from a buck who was too low even to come to that dinner. Well I don’t want to sound snobbish but it was made by a tailor in Leeds. So I put on that suit and it was not very becoming. Then there was dinner, very nasty things to eat and drink. I sat next to a homosexual international footballer. He was the second best guest of honour. He made a speech and everyone interrupted so he said fuck off you buggers and that was a great success. Oh how bad my speech was! So then the literary society ran out into the quadrangle and broke all the windows of a man called Weinberg so I said why and they said he’s a Jew and I said so am I didn’t you know and that sobered them a bit. Then the worst thing of all happened which was a theatrical entertainment. Two hideous youths dressed up in women’s clothes and acted a scene from Noel Coward’s ‘Fallen Angels’ and they acted worse than I spoke. Then we drank whisky punch and I stood in a corner and relays of tipsy bucks came up to me in turn and said oh Mr Waugh you are so different from what I expected and went on to say how much they liked my books. Rather rude I thought. Next day I had breakfast with that footballer I spoke of and did some shopping—I am rich suddenly—and I had luncheon with Basil*** and caught some trains back.

  Are you and Bryan very excited about the Sharky-Scott boxing match. Wenborne [the gardener] and I are. At least W. is. I try to induce him to see the humorous side of it but his patriotism and sense of fair play are too strong. He says we haven’t heard the last of it not by a long way. I think he expects us to declare war on the US.

  I don’t know what to say about the imminence of Baby G. Dear Diana it seems all wrong that you should ever have to be at all ill or have a pain.

  Talking of boxing I think that what with my skipping rope and high-minded [two words illegible] all think I am a bantam weight in training.

  I have put Pastors and Masters back in your shelves here or shall I send it to you in London?

  Here is a picture of the new cottage Mr Phillips has just built. I think it is one of his best don’t you or don’t you… Has Mrs Spearmint [Mrs Alexander Spearman] said how nice I am or anything like that no I suppose not or you would have told me.

  Boast I was asked for my autograph by one of the assistants at Blackwells… I will write again almost at once.

  * Second Lord Ponsonby, a very untidy person.

  ** Sir John Heygate, Bart. co-respondent in Evelyn Waugh’s divorce.

  *** Basil Blackwood, Earl of Ava, afterwards Marquis of Duffe
rin and Ava.

  I have tried to transcribe this letter correctly; Evelyn did not bother with punctuation. But I am not certain about the word ‘buck’. If it is in fact buck, it must have been a reference to some forgotten joke of the moment.

  My great friendship with Evelyn did not long survive the birth of Baby G. As a godparent he met Randolph Churchill at the font for the first time. The stormy friendship they then began went on until death parted them. Thirty six years later I wrote to ask him whether he could remember why, quite suddenly. we had almost stopped seeing one another. I was considering writing memoirs, I did so a decade later [in A Life of Contrasts]. He replied on 9 March 1966:

  Dearest Diana

  It was a delight to hear from you and to hear that you sometimes think of me… You ask why our friendship petered out. The explanation is very discreditable to me. Pure jealousy. You (and Bryan) were immensely kind to me at a time when I greatly needed kindness, after my desertion by my first wife. I was infatuated with you. Not of course that I aspired to your bed but I wanted you to myself as especial confidante and comrade. After Jonathan’s birth you began to enlarge your circle. I felt lower in your affections than Harold Acton and Robert Byron and I couldn’t compete or take a humbler place. That is the sad and sordid truth… I have become very old in the last two years. Not diseased but enfeebled. There is nowhere I want to go and nothing I want to do and I am conscious of being an utter bore. The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me. But you would find most of your English friends in a bad way. Bright young Henry Yorke I hear is quite decrepit… All you Mitfords seem to have great stamina.

  All love, Evelyn

  This generous letter was, needless to say, not really the whole story. At the time our friendship ‘petered out’ I was 20, and after the long winter of my pregnancy I no longer wished to dine in bed nearly every night with a table set up in my bedroom for the guests. Evelyn had usually come when he was in London, and it was extremely cosy and agreeable. But now although I looked upon him as my ‘especial confidant and comrade’ there were parties every night, and they were not the sort of parties Evelyn liked. He had no desire to put on a white tie for a grand ball, nor yet to disguise himself in fancy dress as the more bohemian of our friends loved to do. Doubtless I was taken up with frivolity, but he too had ‘enlarged his circle’. He fell in love with Baby Jungman, a fascinating girl who attracted many suitors. He was already sought by hostesses who saw in him a potential lion, and he was bothered by innumerable fans. Vile Bodies was a bestseller. It was not a boast if he was asked for his autograph, because it happened the whole time.