Mad World (10 page)

In hall, they drank fine port and joined in with some enthusiastic singing. But Harold insisted on leaning over the chair in front of him and loudly addressing Hugh as ‘darling’. To which an Athlete countered: ‘None of your tricks here!’

There was then a break, during which they all went down into the Oxford night for ‘a breather’. Six members of the rowing crew spotted Elmley and Plunket Greene in the quad. ‘Here are two of those bloody Aesthetes,’ they said; ‘Let’s chuck them in the river.’ But Elmley was a burly six-footer and Plunket Greene even taller. The rowers had second thoughts and retreated, saying: ‘Let’s have another drink first, and chuck them in the river afterwards.’ At the end of the evening, Elmley had to hurry his friends out of the college in order to save them from a large group of now very drunk Athletes. Hugh just drifted away. He was, according to Greenidge, more secure than the others ‘because the
jeunesse dorée
type is not considered pre-eminently Aesthetic and Athletes are apt to respect a man with an Honourable in front of his name’.

Hugh’s life at Oxford developed into one of idleness alleviated by pranks. On one occasion he and a group of friends staged a mock duel, complete with pistols and seconds, having previously leaked the news of it to the editor of the
Oxford Times
in an effort to provide a lively story to increase the paper’s flagging circulation. Stephen McKenna, a gentleman of leisure who wrote popular fiction about aristocratic life, used the incident as the basis for a novel, published in 1925, called
An Affair of Honour
. He dedicated it ‘To Hugh Lygon, to whom I am indebted for the seed of truth from which this tree of fantasy has grown’.

‘The record of my life there,’ wrote Waugh of his Oxford years, ‘is essentially a catalogue of friendships.’ In his view, what undergraduates learned they learned from one another, not from the dons: ‘the lessons were in no curriculum of scholarship or morals’. He also admitted that ‘Drinking had a large part in it.’

Evelyn was a noisy drunk. Once when asked why he was so aggressively
loud, he responded: ‘I have to make a noise because I am so poor.’ This reply delighted his new friends: it had the right sort of panache. Shared drunkenness became a bond. Beer was cheap at the Hypocrites (8 pence a pint), enabling Evelyn to indulge himself to excess. The sight of a drunken Evelyn became familiar: ‘very pink in the cheeks, small, witty and fierce, quite alarming, but fascinating’. He lit up the gloomy room like ‘a bright spark from the fire’, though once he got into trouble for smashing up the furniture with that cudgel-like stick of his.

He was appointed Hypocrites club secretary at his very first meeting. He performed no duties in the role. Alfred Duggan, who was frequently rendered speechless with drink, began to invite Evelyn to luncheon parties. At last the boy from suburban Golders Green and minor public school Lancing was moving among the wealthy, the aristocratic and the debauched. Duggan instructed his scout always to lay an extra place at the luncheon table just in case he had invited someone when he was drunk. The place was always occupied. There were often thirty or forty guests and the parties went on for most of the day. In winter, they drank mulled claret followed by port until long after dusk. Waugh learnt how to finger long-stemmed glasses, sniff the wine and hold it up to the light that slanted in through the narrow Gothic windows. Often Duggan had to be put to bed by his friends.

The Hypocrites’ Club found a friend in John Fothergill, proprietor of an old inn called the Spreadeagle at Thame, a town about fifteen miles from Oxford. This was a location where club members could indulge in gaudy nights far from the patrols of the ‘bulldogs’ (the university’s bowler-hatted private police force). Fothergill was an eccentric former art dealer and historian who was very sympathetic to Harold Acton and his set, though less kind to more run-of-the-mill guests. He once charged a party extra money for being ugly. He seemed especially partial to the antics of the Hypocrites; their aristocratic connections no doubt added to their allure.

Fothergill wanted to make the Spreadeagle ‘an Eton or Stowe of public houses’. He had a reputation for being an incorrigible snob who bullied his working-class clientele while being ‘all over’ the aristocrats. But in fact it was appearance, intelligence and style that mattered more to him. His motto was ‘not only to have proper and properly cooked food but to have only either intelligent, beautiful or well-bred people to eat it’. The
inn was furnished like a home rather than a hotel, filled with Georgian and early Victorian furniture and fine china. As a gentleman innkeeper, he was exactly the sort of man Evelyn admired: rude to those he despised, determined to maintain the standards of a better age. On the publication of his first novel,
Decline and Fall
, Waugh sent a copy personally inscribed to ‘John Fothergill, Oxford’s only civilising influence’. Fothergill chained it up in the loo and said that it was ‘the best comedy in the English language’.

In 1924, Elmley held a twenty-first birthday party at the Spreadeagle for sixty young men, including all members of the Hypocrites’ Club. It doubled as a wake for the demise of the club, which had been closed down by the proctors after complaints by the neighbours about riotous behaviour and noise. They went down from Oxford in a fleet of hearses. Elmley, dressed in a purple velvet suit, provided the champagne. Harold Acton made a speech about the beauties of the male body; Evelyn got silently drunk; Robert Byron (wearing lace) passed out and the evening ended in dancing, persimmons thrown against the wall, and couples (all male) having sex in the hearse. In his memoirs, Fothergill noted the impressive amount of champagne that was consumed. Among his abiding memories were Terence Greenidge looking ‘quite mad’ and after-dinner dancing that reminded him of ‘wild goats and animals leaping in the air’.

Evelyn enjoyed heavy drinking because it made him uninhibited. He later acknowledged to his first biographer, Christopher Sykes, that he experienced an acute homosexual phase at Oxford. For the short time it lasted, his homosexual activity ‘was unrestrained, emotionally and physically’. This was not at all unusual for male students at Oxford. There were few women at the university (undergraduettes were kept in purdah with the exception of eight weeks) and other heterosexual relationships were frowned upon because they usually meant consorting with the undesirables of the town. Some of Evelyn’s friends went up to London for sexual experiences, coming back on the last train, which was known as the ‘fornicator’. But in the main, homosexual encounters were more common.

Homosexuality was considered by many to be a passing phase, which young men would grow out of once they had left Oxford and begun to meet young women. In those days it was chic to be ‘queer’ in the same
way that it was chic to have a taste for atonal music and Cubist painting. Even old Arthur Waugh acknowledged as much: ‘Alec called on me the other day with a new friend of his, a sodomite, but Alec tells me it is the coming thing.’

‘Everyone in Oxford was homosexual at that time,’ said John Betjeman, who was there. Though homosexuality was illegal, many senior members of the university, most notably the flamboyant don Maurice Bowra, actively encouraged it, sometimes acting as go-between in setting up assignations for their pupils. Tom Driberg enjoyed
soixante-neuf
with a young don in the rooms where more cerebral tutorials were supposed to take place. The Hypocrites’ Club was the epicentre of what would now be called the university’s gay scene. According to Sykes, who knew Waugh extremely well, Evelyn was never shocked by homosexuality and remained very interested in the subject. He was, after all, ‘interested in all things which shed light on human character’. But later in life he would worry about his son discovering his past indiscretions.

In the spring of 1924, Evelyn informed his old school friend, Dudley Carew, that his life had become ‘quite incredibly depraved morally’. Drunkenness at the Hypocrites was part of the story, but hardly sufficient to qualify as incredible depravity. Something else was being hinted at. Tom Driberg, dancing with a fellow member, saw a drunken Evelyn rolling on the sofa with another boy, ‘with (as one of them later said) their tongues licking each others’ tonsils’. Anthony Powell’s first encounter with Evelyn was a sighting of him at the Hypocrites sitting on the knee of another member, Christopher Hollis. A club guest, Isaiah Berlin, also saw him on a settee kissing a friend. Evelyn later teased Christopher Sykes for not having had a homosexual phase, saying that he had missed out on something special.

But it was not just sexual experimentation. There were genuine love affairs. When the staunchly heterosexual Henry Yorke read
Brideshead Revisited
, he told Evelyn that it made him regret not falling in love at Oxford himself: ‘I see now what I have missed.’ What he missed was what Waugh experienced: real passion. Evelyn’s sexual abstinence at school seemed to make his Oxford love affairs even more intense.

Though Evelyn relished the companionship of eccentric and slightly crazed friends like Terence Greenidge and Harold Acton, romantically he was drawn to fragile, beautiful boys. Before being seduced by the Hypocrites,
he had become intimate with a shy and scholarly left-wing Wykehamist from Balliol called Richard Pares. Evelyn described him as ‘abnormally clever’. In a later letter to Nancy Mitford, he also described Pares as ‘my first homosexual love’.

Pares was pale skinned, with a mop of fair hair and large blue eyes that somehow seemed blank. Their affair began in the summer of 1922. Evelyn later recalled: ‘I loved him dearly, but an excess of wine nauseated him and this made an insurmountable barrier between us. When I felt most intimate, he felt queasy.’ In other words, Waugh needed to be very drunk to release his strongest emotions, whereas Pares could not hold his drink. Nevertheless the young men spent two intense terms together. They only drifted apart when Waugh developed his ‘indiscriminate bonhomie’ among the Hypocrites. Being drunk was becoming his greatest ‘aesthetic pleasure’, whereas Pares was more interested in his research on the West Indian sugar trade. He was duly rescued from Bohemia by a homosexual don called Urquhart (known as ‘Sligger’), Dean of Balliol, who encouraged him to become an academic. He took a first and was elected to a fellowship of All Souls. Evelyn always remembered him with great affection and late in life Pares, happily married and respectable, remembered the affair as one of the most passionate and intense of his life.

Christopher Hollis, on whose knee Anthony Powell had first spotted Evelyn at the Hypocrites, wrote a memoir of
Oxford in the Twenties
, in which he said that Waugh had two homosexual lovers, first Richard Pares and then Alastair Graham. In
A Little Learning
, Waugh records that Richard Pares’ successor as what he called ‘the friend of my heart’ was a boy that ‘I will call Hamish Lennox’. ‘Hamish’ is described as ‘no scholar’: he ‘soon went down to take a course in architecture in London; but he continued to haunt Oxford and for two or three years we were inseparable or, if separated, in almost daily communication, until like so many of my generation, he heard the call of the Levant and went to live abroad’. ‘Hamish,’ says Waugh, ‘had no repugnance to the bottle and we drank deep together. At times he was as gay as any Hypocrite, but there were always hints of the spirit that in later years has made him a recluse.’ This account precisely fits Alastair Graham and Waugh’s relationship with him.

The two boys drank deep together of both alcohol and love. In one of his letters Alastair enclosed a naked photo of himself, leaning against a rock face, with arms outstretched, buttocks in full view, along with a
description of the best way to drink fine wine: ‘You must take a peach and peel it, and put it in a finger bowl, and pour the Burgundy over it. The flavour is exquisite.’ The letter ended: ‘With love from Alastair, and his poor dead heart.’

Alastair came from the Scottish borders. His father was dead, his mother ‘high-tempered, possessive, jolly and erratic’. A southern belle from Savannah, she was the model for the character of Lady Circumference in
Decline and Fall
. She had settled in Warwickshire for the sake of the hunting. She devoted herself to frenzied gardening, disingenuously claiming that she was keeping the place on solely for the sake of Alastair (who in reality was no huntsman).

Alastair invited Evelyn home. His mother’s residence in the village of Barford, between Stratford-upon-Avon and Warwick, gave Evelyn his first taste of country-house living. Though on nothing like the scale of Madresfield, Barford House is much the grandest building in the village. It still stands behind a high wall. Albeit more shabby genteel than aristocratic grand, it was still a world away from Underhill. There was a ballroom that had been built especially for Alastair’s coming-of-age party.

Alastair, like Hugh Lygon, was a dreamer. He loved lying in the garden looking at flowers, or searching the fields for edible fungi. He drove his mother mad. She befriended Evelyn in the hope that he would persuade her son to cut down on his drinking and start living a less indolent life. He did not oblige.

Though Alastair frequently visited Evelyn in Oxford, he was resident in London. So did Evelyn have another undergraduate lover? Most biographers follow Hollis in identifying only Pares and Graham, but according to the Oxford don A. L. Rowse, Evelyn had three lovers at Oxford. The third man was Hugh Lygon. Rowse was convinced that Evelyn was bisexual and that as a novelist he ‘made use of every little scrap of his experience – he wasted nothing’. He remembered a conversation with Lady Sibell, eldest of the three Lygon sisters, who knew Evelyn well. ‘He was in love with my brother,’ she recalled.

Evelyn’s three lovers were of a very similar type: pale and beautiful, with the aura of Rupert Brooke. Richard and Hugh were both blond. After Oxford he fell in love with women of the same ethereal beauty: Diana Mitford, Teresa Jungman, Diana Cooper, Laura Herbert.

Evelyn was drawn to Alastair and Hugh not only because of their delicate beauty and gentility, but also because they were hard-drinking and self-destructive. He liked their child-like qualities and their lack of intellectual fervour (he never fell in love with Harold Acton or Brian Howard, much as he admired their abilities). He definitely had a type: the objects of his desire were invariably richer and better-looking, though never funnier, than he was. They had a dreaminess about them and a fragility that he found irresistible. They brought out his protective instincts. Waugh was speaking equally of himself when he wrote in his biography of the theologian Ronald Knox that he was susceptible to good looks and drawn to those with an air of sadness, of ‘tristesse’. Hugh Lygon had exactly this quality. He drifted round Oxford like a lost boy, a Peter Pan who refused to grow up. Terence Greenidge remembered him carrying a teddy bear.