Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead

Thank you for your letter. Evelyn, it was very serious for a poor, careless, happy person like me. Of course I want you to treat me like your nature wishes to. I don’t understand how one could treat anyone otherwise without being insincere. Travail [?] is a charming spiced memory that I am most pleased to think of in my quiet moments. It is those memories that I live on.

Another one reads:

My dearest Evelyn, I feel very lonely now. But you have made me so happy. Please come back soon … My love to you, Evelyn; I want you back again so much.

Though ‘The Temple at Thatch’ had been consigned to the boiler of Arnold House, its opening chapter in the style of a film seems to have been recycled in a short story called ‘The Balance’, which Evelyn finished by the end of that summer of 1925. He thought sufficiently well of it to send it to Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press and Geoffrey Whitworth at Chatto & Windus.

The cinematic beginning has four unattributed voices. This kind of dialogue – like the telephone conversation – became one of Waugh’s literary trademarks. Each voice reveals the character of the speaker with precision and economy. In creating such voices, Evelyn was finding his own literary voice for the first time.

The main narrative is presented as a silent film whose captions are commented upon by a cinema audience that includes two housemaids and a Cambridge undergraduate. Evelyn drew upon much of his own experience for the hero, Adam Doure (the surname should presumably be pronounced to rhyme with ‘Waugh’). Physically, though, the character is created more in the image of Alastair than Evelyn.

Adam, like his creator, is a student at a London art school. He is still spiritually attached to Oxford, from where he has graduated and where his friends still reside. And he tries to commit suicide, leaving a self-dramatising note (albeit in Latin as opposed to Greek). His suicide attempt is thwarted when he vomits up the poison he has administered himself. Adam decides, on balance, that pursuit of his art is better than suicide.

There are other autobiographical details woven into the narrative: Evelyn’s sense of not belonging, his sadness, his unrequited love for Olivia (who becomes the excellently named Imogen Quest). Even his sale of his Oxford books is included. Adam’s library is ‘remarkable for a man of his age and means’, consisting of admirably bound volumes, some of them rare editions. Like Evelyn, Adam returns to Oxford in search of his friends and the happiness of his undergraduate existence. The Oxford scene is headed with the line from Quiller-Couch that Evelyn quoted so often: ‘KNOW YOU HER SECRET NONE CAN UTTER?’ The camera is imagined following Adam from the station through the city of dreaming spires to King Edward Street. Adam is visiting a special friend:

LORD BASINGSTOKE’S ROOMS. KING EDWARD STREET.

Interior of Lord Basingstoke’s rooms. On the chimney-piece are photographs of Lord Basingstoke’s mother and two of Lord Basingstoke’s friends, wearing that peculiarly inane and serene smile only found during the last year at Eton and then only in photographs. Some massive glass paperweights and cards of invitation.

On the walls are large coloured caricatures of Basil Hay drawn by himself at Eton, an early nineteenth-century engraving of Lord Basingstoke’s home; two unfinished drawings by Ernest Vaughan of the Rape of the Sabines and a wool picture of two dogs and a cat.

Lord Basingstoke, contrary to all expectation, is neither drinking, gaming, nor struggling with his riding boots; he is engaged on writing a Collections Paper for his tutor.

Lord Basingstoke’s paper in a pleasant, childish handwriting.

‘BRADLAUGH v. GOSSETT. THIS FAMOUS TEST CASE FINALLY ESTABLISHED THE DECISION THAT MARSHAL LAW IS UNKNOWN IN ENGLAND.’

He crosses out ‘marshal’ and puts ‘martial’; then sits biting his pen sadly.

‘Adam, how lovely; I had no idea you were in Oxford.’

They talk for a little while.

‘RICHARD, CAN YOU DINE WITH ME TO-NIGHT. YOU MUST. I’M HAVING A FAREWELL BLIND.’ Richard looks sadly at his Collections Paper and shakes his head.

‘My dear, I simply can’t. I’ve got to get this finished by tonight. I’m probably going to be sent down as it is.’

Adam returns to his taxi.

In this poignant little scene, Hugh Lygon enters the fictional world of Evelyn Waugh. His mother is a dominating spirit, as, by way of that nineteenth-century engraving, is Madresfield. Hugh’s passions are captured: drinking, gaming, riding. As is his academic weakness: the childish handwriting, the inability to spell ‘martial’. But hanging over the pen portrait are the qualities that Evelyn so loved. On the one hand, the capacity for friendship – the photographs of fellow Old Etonians, the invitations revealing that everyone wants his company. And on the other, the sense of sadness and hopelessness. In the flesh, Lord Basingstoke is Hugh Lygon. In the imagination, he is Sebastian Flyte in embryo.

As Waugh developed as a writer, he perfected a technique of combining the characteristics of his friends, enemies and acquaintances in order to create composite characters. His later portraits of Hugh are not of Hugh alone. In that sense, the glimpse of Lord Basingstoke in his Oxford rooms, so clearly evocative of Hugh and no one else, is the closest we ever come to the most elusive of Evelyn’s lovers.

Another aspect of Waugh’s creative sophistication was his way of splitting his own identity into more than one character. The full extent of this practice has not always been noticed by his critics and biographers. They have seen that Adam Doure is a self-portrait, but a second double has escaped observation. Adam goes around Oxford trying to find an old friend to dine with. Everyone is engaged. But then as a last resort he calls on a certain Ernest Vaughan. This E. V. has ugly rooms in a second-rate college. They are situated (symbolically) between ‘the lavatories and the chapel’. Caricatures and messy drawings line his walls. Among them is an ‘able drawing of the benign Basingstoke’. Ernest is carefully described, sitting in his wicker chair as he mends darts ‘with unexpected dexterity’. He is ‘a short, sturdy man, with fierce little eyes and a well-formed forehead’. His well-made tweeds are stained with drink and paint. The two men proceed to get drunk over dinner. Ernest sketches Adam. Later, after more drinking in another Oxford pub, Ernest ‘beset by two panders, is loudly maintaining the abnormality of his tastes’. Then with ‘swollen neck and staring eye’, Ernest almost gets into a fight with Imogen Quest’s brother. He is violently sick at the last minute, foreshadowing Adam’s reprieve when he vomits up the poison.

The story ends with a conversation between the Quests and some aristocratic Oxford friends who pass judgement on the hapless Vaughan: ‘Just the most awful person in the world … Isn’t he short and dirty with masses of hair.’

Imogen, bored and repelled by Adam, is intrigued by a glimpse she has had of the awful Ernest: ‘I think he looked very charming. I want to meet him properly.’

‘Imogen, you can’t, really. He is too awful.’

The story ends with Imogen determined to persuade Adam to orchestrate a meeting with his funny little friend. Ernest Vaughan is on his way to becoming an unlikely romantic hero.

Adam Doure is Evelyn Waugh, but so is Ernest Vaughan. On returning to Oxford, Adam meets his own other self, a doppelganger who is also drawn to Basingstoke/Hugh, and who becomes a device for Waugh to fantasise about succeeding in his doomed quest for the love of Imogen/Olivia. Many things are in the balance in this most accomplished of Waugh’s early stories: not only the choice between life and death, but also the question of sexual orientation and the writer’s need to hold together his personal experience and his gift for fantastical invention.

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September 1925 and the new term at Aston Clinton beckoned. It was time once again for Evelyn to say goodbye to Alastair. He felt more ready on this occasion. Alastair and his friend Christopher Hollis were beginning to bore him with their endlessly rehashed conversations about just two subjects, ‘Catholicism’ and ‘the Colonies’.

Aston Clinton did not meet expectation. Its common room (always the key to a teacher’s happiness) was ‘frightful’. The boys were ‘mad’ and ‘diseased’ (i.e. spotty). It was no more than a crammer for the rich and thick. There was a pub close by, which was something. ‘Taught the poor mad boys and played football with them’ is a typical diary entry. Or ‘Taught lunatics. Played rugby football. Drank at Bell.’ Evelyn was trapped here for the next seventeen months. The one compensation was that he was closer to his friends.

Most weekends were spent at Oxford or London. In October, Evelyn and Richard Plunket Greene returned to Oxford, where they dined with Hugh Lygon and John Sutro: ‘they gave us champagne and we gave them brandy’.

He was disappointed when he hosted an early birthday dinner and not one of his Oxford friends turned up. The day before his birthday, he began a drawing intended as a present for Hugh on his twenty-first, which was to be a week later. Richard, meanwhile, had got a new job at Evelyn’s old school, Lancing. The prospect of Aston Clinton without a real friend in the common room was grim.

He was not invited to Hugh’s twenty-first birthday party at Madresfield. But around the same time, Evelyn and Richard had a party of their own. Three carloads of Oxford friends came down to play a rugby match against the schoolboys. It was a great success. The grown-ups won, though not by such a large margin as Evelyn had feared that they would. He even scored a few tries himself, which would have been an unusual sight. In the course of the drunken evening that followed, Arthur Tandy, a Magdalen man of a thespian bent who hung around on the fringes of their Oxford set, ‘made love’ to Evelyn – that is to say, professed his love for him. He spoke in no uncertain terms: ‘Everything that I said about him cut him to the very soul; throughout the giddy whirligig of his life – and he had been up against things, in his time, face to face with the scalding realities of existence – the one constant thing that had remained inviolate in spite of all else had been his love of me.’ This all took time to say and, according to Evelyn, it bored him inexpressibly. Tandy eventually became British ambassador to the European Economic Community.

Two days later, at the beginning of half term, Evelyn headed for Oxford. He had promised to act in Terence Greenidge’s latest film. They were filming in the Woodstock Road but Evelyn was cross about the other actors, who were people he couldn’t stand: ‘After an hour I could bear it no more and when we came to a scene in which a taxi was to be used I got in it and drove away, rather to everyone’s annoyance.’ That evening he went with friends to the George Bar. A scandal ensued from the night’s activities, though Evelyn managed to escape all the trouble.

A party was in full swing. But not solely with the usual Oxford set. A gang of wealthy homosexual stockbrokers and businessmen had come to Oxford to see Hugh Lygon. There was a rumour that one of them owned 107 newspapers and wore platinum braces. When they arrived, they discovered that Hugh was not there. He was still at Madresfield, celebrating his coming of age. His failure to turn up for the party to which he had invited the stockbrokers was characteristic: Hugh was notorious for bad time-keeping, always arriving late, or sometimes not appearing at all, despite assurances given when arrangements were made. So great was his laxness in this regard that a considerable number of his friends and family had the same idea for a twenty-first birthday present: he was overwhelmed with numerous gifts of clocks and watches of all sizes and designs.

Robert Byron, one of the most active homosexuals among the Hypocrites, opportunistically took Hugh’s place and enjoyed a wild night with the Londoners. Writing to Patrick Balfour with a graphic account of their activities, he cautioned him not to leave the letter lying about. There was, according to Anthony Powell, a fear that the police might become involved. Though homosexuality was tolerated when indulged in privately by undergraduates, group encounters between gentlemen and stockbrokers were a step too far in an era that had not forgotten the trials of Oscar Wilde.

Evelyn was in at the start of the evening, but not its climax. The ‘syndicate of homosexual businessmen’ stood him champagne cocktails at the George, but he then went off to another bar, the Clarendon, with some friends of his cousin, Claud Cockburn. He was then pursued by Richard Plunket Greene and his fiancée, Elizabeth. Feeling perverse, he didn’t want their company. In order to escape them, he climbed out of a window and broke his ankle on his descent.

(#ulink_4a701780-a053-53ce-b6cf-e4fc161b791a) There seem to be two private jokes for Hugh Lygon’s benefit in the story’s names. ‘Ernest’ inevitably evokes Oscar Wilde’s play: Evelyn would have known of Hugh’s triumph at Eton in the role of Cecily, who is in love with ‘Ernest’. And in Gilbert and Sullivan’s well-known comic opera Ruddigore, ‘Basingstoke’ is famously used as a code word by Sir Despard Murgatroyd to soothe his new wife, Mad Margaret, when she seems in danger of relapsing into madness – the name of Lord Basingstoke is thus linked to the Lygons by way of the code name ‘Murgatroyd’ used by Elmley when they filmed The Scarlet Woman.

CHAPTER 6 The Lygon Heritage (#ulink_989c05d6-0cdb-51ed-b243-c08615ba5b94)

‘A party of queer men from London arrived to see Hugh yesterday,’ wrote Robert Byron to his mother from Oxford. ‘As he is at Madresfield celebrating his majority with becoming pomp, I looked after them.’

A night in their company provided some compensation for his not being at Hugh’s party himself. The previous year, by contrast, Byron had attended the coming-of-age party of Hugh’s older brother, Elmley. He had been overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the event, and deeply impressed by the organisation of Lord Beauchamp, who had conducted the celebrations as if they were a military campaign. Hugh’s coming-of-age party was also held at Madresfield Court. Once again, no expense was spared – even though Hugh was the ‘spare’ and not the ‘heir’.

Until Evelyn Waugh appeared at Madresfield in 1931, Robert Byron was the most favoured Oxford friend of the aristocratic Lygons. He had known them since Eton. During the summer months he stayed with them at Walmer Castle in Kent, where Lord Beauchamp put in an annual stint in his capacity as Warden of the Cinque Ports. It was there that the earl acquired his family nickname (only to be used behind his back) ‘Boom’. At Walmer, Byron met the striking Lygon sisters. Lettice, the oldest of them, was particularly lovely. He judged her ‘the most beautiful human being I have ever seen – oversize feet and yet the most lovely figure’. Byron in turn made a lasting impression on eleven-year-old Coote: she never forgot his ‘café au lait suit’ and his pince-nez spectacles.

In 1923, Lord Beauchamp invited Byron to accompany him and his sons on a tour of Italy during the Easter vacation. Byron later credited Hugh’s father as the man who opened his eyes to the world and the wonders of foreign travel. He himself became a renowned travel writer. Many critics consider his book The Road to Oxiana (1937) to be the foundation stone of the modern genre of literary travel-writing.

Byron kept a diary, and his remarks about the earl shed light on how someone of Evelyn’s generation (with their well-documented anger at their fathers) saw this rather unusual patriarch. Venice was Lord and Lady Beauchamp’s favourite Italian city, so the travel party went there first before moving on to the historic towns of northern Italy, after which they headed south to Naples and the island of Capri.

Byron remembered that Hugh’s father was an indefatigable sightseer ‘who maps out every moment of every day, weeks beforehand’. Whilst they were in Venice their travel bible was Ruskin. In Florence and Rome, it was Augustus Hare. Byron’s diary details the churches and galleries they visited, as well as the obscure little restaurants that Lord Beauchamp insisted upon frequenting – he had a passion for local Italian dishes. Byron was suspicious that the secondi piatti sometimes consisted of horse meat.

It was this visit that first inspired Byron’s love for Byzantine art, and he had the most knowledgeable of teachers in Lord Beauchamp. Byron’s greatness as a travel writer came from his way of finding the essence of a culture in a magical alchemy of its architectural history and the customs of its people. It was Beauchamp who sharpened the young man’s eye, wherever he went, for both the buildings and the locals. For his part, the earl was delighted to have a boy in the party who shared his interests and enthusiasms. Hugh was emphatically uninterested in culture – his boredom was an endless source of exasperated amusement to the other men. Lord Elmley took a little more interest, but Robert was the passionate sightseer. He was the kind of son for whom Beauchamp had longed. In Florence the party dined with Harold Acton at his exquisite family home, La Pietra. Acton took them to the famous tea-rooms, Doney’s, and to the nightclub, Raiola’s. This was the first time that Hugh became animated.

Byron recalled his wonder as the party climbed to the top of Giotto’s bell tower in Florence. Hugh showed little interest in the magnificent view. He stood reading the Daily Sketch whilst Robert was overcome by the view of the Duomo and the other historic buildings. Hugh was more interested in the racing news and the gossip column report on the London party scene.

In Assisi, Lord Beauchamp and Robert Byron inspected in minute detail Cimabue’s frescoes in the vault of the upper basilica of the church of St Francis. Hugh complained about missing breakfast and then moaned about the luncheon menu. Doting father that he was, Beauchamp could not help calling his adored second son ‘something of a little philistine’. But Hugh, tall, languid and charming, could get away with anything.

They had arrived in Florence by train. Having exhausted the sights of the city, Beauchamp hired an enormous motor car for the drive south to Assisi and Rome. By this time they were all beginning to be fatigued by their exertions with Ruskin and Baedeker in hand. After ten days’ recuperation on the island of Capri, they left for England.