Mad World
Authors: Paula Byrne
PAULA BYRNE
Mad World
Evelyn Waugh and the
Secrets of Brideshead
Contents
Chapter 1: A Tale of Two Childhoods
Chapter 2: Lancing versus Eton
Chapter 3: Oxford: ‘… her secret none can utter’
Chapter 8: Bright Young Things
Chapter 9: The Busting of Boom
Chapter 10: Madresfield Visited
Chapter 11: The Beauchamp Belles
Chapter 13: An Encounter in Rome
Chapter 16: Fiasco in the Arctic
Chapter 17: Ladies and Lapdogs
Chapter 18: A Year of Departures
Chapter 19: Three Weddings and a Funeral
Chapter 21: The Door to Brideshead
Chapter 22: Brideshead Unlocked
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features …
About the Author
The Waugh Generation: Sarah O’Reilly talks to Paula Byrne
About the Book
Read On
If You Loved This, You Might Like …
Coda: ‘Laughter and the Love of Friends’
Early 1944 and Captain Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh has fallen out of love with the army. He has turned forty and is considering his options. To become a screenwriter? An overture to Alexander Korda comes to nothing. To join MI5, the intelligence service? He is turned down without an interview. Only one possibility remains: to revert to his pre-war occupation.
On 24 January he writes a letter to Colonel Ferguson, Officer Commanding, Household Cavalry Training Regiment. Copies are sent to the Secretary of State for War and to Brendan Bracken, Winston Churchill’s Minister of Information and string-puller in chief on behalf of Captain Waugh. ‘I have the honour to request,’ the letter begins, ‘that, for the understated reasons I may be granted leave of absence from duty without pay for three months.’ The understated reasons are various. That his previous service in the Royal Marines, the Commandos, the Special Services and the Special Air Service Regiment does not qualify him for his current position in a mechanised unit of the cavalry. That he no longer has the necessary physical agility for active service. That he is no good at admin, so can’t do a desk job. And that he doesn’t have the foreign languages to make him useful for the purposes of intelligence work.
Assurances are given: the novel to which he will devote his leave ‘will have no direct dealing with the war’. But expectations are dampened: ‘it is not pretended that it will have any immediate propaganda value’. The necessity of immediate action is stressed: ‘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.’
Colonel Ferguson responds by ordering Waugh to go and train the Home Guard at Windsor. A less determined man than Evelyn might have capitulated and the book would never have been written. But he perseveres. By the end of January he has been granted his three months’ leave, qualified only by a commitment to a little light part-time work for
the Ministry of Information. He leaves his comfortable billet in the Hyde Park Hotel and his military uniform with it.
On the morning of Tuesday 1 February 1944 he is settled in another hotel, deep in the West Country: Easton Court, Chagford, Devon – a thatched fourteenth-century farmhouse with low, dark rooms and small windows. He has been there before, in the late autumn of one of the momentous years of his life, 1931. It is a place that in his memory he cannot separate from a house and a family with which he had fallen in love that year.
In London he had regularly lain in till mid-morning. At Chagford he is up at 8.30 and at work by 10. By dinnertime on that first Tuesday, though his mind is ‘stiff’ from the tedium of army life, he has written and rewritten 1,300 words. He reports to his wife that he has made a good beginning on what he calls his ‘magnum opus’. He has ‘bought a very expensive concoction of calcium and halibut liver oil which the chemist thought would restore me to strength but on reading the label more closely I find it to be a cure for chilblains’. This may prove handy, since the lounge he has been given as a private room in which to write has a fire that smokes so badly that he has to choose between streaming eyes and frozen extremities.
By ‘close of play’ on Wednesday the score is ‘3,000 words odd’. Through the ensuing weeks he works steadily at the rate of up to 2,000 words a day, occasionally more. He revises arduously as he goes. In the end it takes him closer to five months than three, but the book that he knows in his heart he has to write is completed. The idea that had ‘become fully formed’ in his mind is ‘exploited without deterioration’.
What was that idea? The book’s original working title was ‘The Household of the Faith’. The story of a household, a family. A journey shaped by religious faith. These are its key themes. But the working title does not find its way into print. When the book is published the following year, its title page reads
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder: A Novel
.
On the reverse side of that title page there is a notice to the effect that the volume has been ‘produced in complete conformity with the authorised economy standards’ of wartime publishing. You can tell that this is true when you hold a first edition in your hands and turn the coarse, rough-hewn pages.
Above the routine announcement concerning production standards, there is something more intriguing. A mysterious Author’s Note is signed ‘E. W.’, Evelyn Waugh. It reads: ‘I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.’
‘I am not I’: yet Charles Ryder manifestly
is
Evelyn Waugh.
Brideshead Revisited
contains as large a dose of autobiography as Charles Dickens’s
David Copperfield
or Marcel Proust’s
À la recherche du temps perdu
. So who, then, was the ‘thou’ who was and was not ‘he or she’? The ‘they’ who were and were not ‘they’? What was ‘the household of the faith’ that was and was not Brideshead? What were the events that inspired the novel?
This biography sets out to find the hidden key to Waugh’s great novel, to unlock for the first time the full extent to which
Brideshead
encodes and subtly transforms the author’s own experiences. In so doing, it illuminates the obsessions that shaped his life: the search for an ideal family and the quest for a secure faith. The solution to the mystery can be found in that magical year of 1931. The hidden key will also unlock several of Waugh’s other major novels, including his very best one,
A Handful of Dust
. And it will bring us to a secret that dared not speak its name.
But we must begin with two very different childhoods. And then we must go, as Captain Charles Ryder does when he begins his recollections, to Oxford, in the years immediately after the Great War.
CHAPTER 1
A Tale of Two Childhoods
‘My name is Evelyn Waugh I go to Heath Mount school I am in the Vth Form, Our Form Master is Mr Stebbing.’
So begins his first extant literary composition, a brief self-portrait called ‘My History’, written in September 1911, at the age of seven. It is the work of a boy of strong opinions and sharp wit:
We all hate Mr Cooper, our arith master. It is the 7th day of the Winter Term which is my 4th. Today is Sunday so I am not at school. We allways have sausages for breakfast on Sundays I have been watching Lucy fry them they do look funny befor their kooked. Daddy is a Publisher he goes to Chapman and Hall office it looks a offely dull plase. I am just going to Church. Alec, my big brother has just gorn to Sherborne. The wind is blowing dreadfuly I am afraid that when I go up to Church I shall be blown away. I was not blown away after all.
The child, William Wordsworth once said, is father to the man. Here is Evelyn Waugh the writer in embryo: a good hater of bad masters, a spectator of the world who can make ordinary things (like sausages) look funny. He is just going to church: eventually he will be blown in the direction of Rome. His household is comfortably middle class: prep school, domestic servants (Lucy in the kitchen with sausages), the home
dominated by Daddy, with his important-sounding job (Publisher) in his dull London office. And a big brother who has just gone to a big, renowned public school: Sherborne. Some years later, an ill wind will blow dreadfully from there, redirecting Evelyn to another school.
Mother is not mentioned in this first little sketch. But Evelyn was closer to her than he was to his father, chiefly because Arthur Waugh, managing director of the publisher Chapman and Hall, idolised his first-born son Alec to an absurd degree. Albeit with good intentions: Arthur was determined not to be like his own father, a sadistic bully who rejoiced in the nickname ‘The Brute’. Arthur, educated at Sherborne School and then New College, Oxford, had married Catherine Raban, a gentle girl from an English colonial family originally hailing from Staffordshire, in 1893. Their first child, Alexander (‘Alec’) was born in 1898. Arthur called him ‘the son of my soul’ and, as the boy grew, developed a relationship with him that was intense, exclusive and all consuming.
Evelyn was born on 28 October 1903 at the family home in Hampstead. When Evelyn was four and the family moved to a larger house, closer to Golders Green, Alec left for boarding school. This might have been the moment when the younger son could have come out from under the wing of Mother and Nurse. But he didn’t. Evelyn’s relationship with his father always remained difficult. There is already a hint of irreverence in that early sketch, with its dismissal of Chapman and Hall’s offices as ‘a offely dull plase’. Evelyn would grow into a rebellious teenager who carefully cultivated a satirical, worldly, disengaged persona, not least in order to set himself against what he perceived to be his father’s nauseating sentimentality and histrionic tendencies.
Arthur Waugh, who was very well respected and connected in the London literary world, had the tastes of his age and class: Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Dickens and cricket (this was the era of the legendary Dr W. G. Grace). The Dickens copyright was the jewel in Chapman and Hall’s crown. Arthur Waugh was rotund, diminutive, with twinkling eyes and candyfloss white hair. Ellen Terry, the greatest actress of the age, had the perfect name for him: ‘that dear little Mr Pickwick’.
In such a literary household, it was probably inevitable that Evelyn should grow up literary – or at the very least that he should view his own family through the filter of books and plays. Arthur Waugh seemed to spend all his time acting out roles. When he greeted visitors, he was the
over-hearty Mr Hardcastle of Oliver Goldsmith’s
She Stoops to Conquer
. In deploring the ingratitude of his sons, he was Shakespeare’s King Lear. Above all, he was Mr Pooter in George and Weedon Grossmith’s
Diary of a Nobody
. ‘Why, I am Lupin!’ Evelyn cried out delightedly when he first read the book, identifying instantly with Pooter’s rebellious, loutish and troublesome son. It remained a favourite book, which he regarded as the funniest in the English language. The hilarious clashes in values and attitude between the respectable lower-middle-class civil servant Pooter and his reckless, extravagant son mirrored to a tee Evelyn’s sense of his own disjointedness from his father. It is no coincidence that in
Brideshead Revisited
Lady Marchmain reads
Diary of a Nobody
aloud to lighten the tension generated by her son Sebastian’s drunken behaviour at dinner.