Mad World (17 page)

The long school holidays were spent almost entirely in Alastair’s company. First they went to see Mrs Graham in Scotland. Evelyn loved Edinburgh. As a mark of their intimacy, Alastair took him to see his old nanny,
to whom he was devoted. But the ‘Queen Mother’, as they called Alastair’s redoubtable mama, was not in the best of tempers. She resented Evelyn’s presence and accused him of being consistently rude to her.

In late August, Alastair and Evelyn went to Paris. Evelyn was delighted to hear that Elmley and Hugh Lygon were there. They dined together in a fashionable restaurant, visited the Luna Park, and drank a great many champagne cocktails. Being in the company of the Lygons was exhilarating and turned Evelyn off Alastair: ‘I did not see much of Alastair, nor did I want to. He is so ignorant about Paris and French. I think I have seen too much of Alastair lately.’ Evelyn was fascinated by the Luna Park and especially the big wheel. In
Decline and Fall
Otto Silenus illustrates his philosophy of life by reference to this particular fairground attraction.

These were the years during which the wheel was turning for Evelyn and Hugh. With the Pre-Raphaelites book Evelyn had found his vocation as a writer and over the next few years his career would rise spectacularly. Hugh, by contrast, was descending rapidly from the giddy heights of Eton, Oxford and his coming-of-age party at Madresfield. He was now working at a bank in the Boulevard St Germain. He was drinking heavily. One night, Robert Byron, who was also in Paris, had a call from a hungover Hugh, who had slept in and failed to arrive at the bank. He was in a bad way and asked Robert to go around and help him. The younger sons of the upper classes who dabbled in merchant banking in the capital did not have to put in a great deal of work or show a high degree of financial acumen, but Hugh could not live up even to the limited expectations that were placed upon him. An understanding with the bank was reached and he soon returned to England.

Evelyn went to Oxford and paid off his creditors with a pocket-book full of £5 notes lent by his mother. He dined and partied with Hugh Lygon and the ‘smart set’ at Christ Church. But he was depressed by the parties, describing one of them as ‘all gramophones, cocktails and restlessness’. He resolved upon a life of ‘sobriety, chastity and obedience’.

He published his very short book
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
in November – printed, with copious typographical errors, by Alastair Graham on his private press in Stratford-upon-Avon. He began writing a new book called
Noah: or the Future of Intoxication
. He also finally got his short story ‘The Balance’ into print in an anthology called
Georgian Stories
and was pleased to be paid £2. 5s. 6d. The book was edited by Alec Waugh and published by Arthur Waugh’s firm, Chapman and Hall.

A Christmas holiday with Alastair in Athens was disastrous. Alastair had finally escaped his mother, and taken up a post as honorary attaché to the British legation. Evelyn was repulsed by what he saw as the sordid life of the homosexual expatriate. The talk was all of male prostitutes and Alastair’s flat was ‘usually full of dreadful Dago youths called by heroic names such as Miltiades and Agamemnon with blue chins and greasy clothes who sleep with the English colony for 25 drachmas a night’. This is the kind of expat life that Waugh would recreate so brilliantly in his depiction of Sebastian’s downward spiral in
Brideshead Revisited
. Evelyn chose instead to spend his time visiting churches and a deserted monastery.

He set off for Italy, hoping that Alastair might rejoin him there. In Rome, he played the tourist, ‘gaped like any peasant at the size of St Peter’s’, took a cab to the Forum ‘and enjoyed myself shamelessly marching about with a guide book identifying the various ruins’. He took a conducted Cook’s tour to the Vatican and was disappointed with the Sistine Chapel. He enjoyed the Colosseum and then one of the sights that made the most impression on him: the Church of St Sebastian Outside the Walls, ‘where I saw the footprints of Our Lord and arrows of St Sebastian’. This was an ancient basilica housing a beautiful and highly eroticised horizontal statue of Sebastian, by the baroque sculptor Antonio Giorgetti, together with alleged relics such as one of the arrows that pierced him and part of the column that he was tied to when he was martyred.

Alastair never turned up, so Evelyn headed home. The new term began and ‘an admirable’ new matron arrived at Aston Clinton. She had previously been a dame in Hugh Lygon’s house at Eton. She gave Evelyn a ham very soon after becoming acquainted with him, but she was to be his nemesis. On 20 February 1927 he wrote in his diary: ‘Next Thursday I am to visit a Father Underhill about being a parson. Last night I was very drunk. How odd those sentences seem together.’ Five minutes later, the headmaster came in and fired him. The matron had told the head that Evelyn had tried to seduce her. This would have made a very amusing story to tell Hugh Lygon: that he was sacked for trying to seduce his friend’s old school matron. Evelyn ‘slipped away feeling rather like a housemaid who has been caught stealing gloves’.

It all seemed like an awful and distorted replay of the Alec Waugh
expulsion. He told his mother that he had been sacked for drunkenness rather than indecent behaviour. He was sad that he had been unable to say goodbye to Charles and Edmund, his favourite pupils, though he had written to them. Edmund sent a charming letter in reply: ‘Dear Evelyn, I cannot tell you how sorry I am that you have left. I do not know what Pig and I will do now without your room to go up and tidy or wash.’

‘It seems to me the time has arrived to set about being a man of letters,’ Evelyn wrote in his diary. This was another turning point. After a lunch with Gwen and Olivia Plunket Greene, he realised that his love affair with the family was over. Olivia was boring him with her constant harping on jazz, drink and, above all, ‘Negroes’. All she seemed to want was a big black man. He began to see why many of his closest friends had disapproved of his obsession with her. Harold Acton thought that he was well rid of the entire family, whom he condemned as ‘esurient narcotics’.

He decided to write a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The publisher Duckworth showed initial interest in the project. As Evelyn pondered his future, he made a further note in his diary: ‘I have met such a nice girl called Evelyn Gardner.’

Dudley Carew, Evelyn’s old Lancing friend, claimed that he introduced the two Evelyns, adding that she was impossible to dislike, ‘or, rather, I could imagine only one person who might dislike her, and that was Evelyn Waugh’. It may, however, be that they were introduced by Alec Waugh, who had recently interviewed Evelyn Gardner for an article he was writing about the ‘Modern Girl’ – otherwise known as the ‘flapper’. The slang term was purportedly a description of the physical awkwardness of the fledgling woman as she hovered between girlhood and womanhood.

Evelyn Gardner epitomised the ‘Modern Girl’. She smoked, drank and danced. She cut her hair short, wore lipstick and went to parties, ‘jazzing her way over a floor parqueted with broken hearts’. She was very pretty, with a snub nose and round eyes, and very androgynous. Some of her contemporaries said that she looked like a painted doll. She wore her hair not just bobbed, but in a pixieish Eton crop. She often cross-dressed for parties. In order to create the ‘garçonne’ (female little boy) look popularised by Coco Chanel, girls tied tight strips of linen around their chest to flatten their breasts. F. Scott Fitzgerald, America’s bright young novelist who immortalised the flapper, described the ideal girl as ‘lovely, expensive and
about nineteen’. As with Fitzgerald, who wrote
This Side of Paradise
with the express purpose of winning over the family of Zelda Sayre, Evelyn Waugh’s relationship with an upper-class young flapper was the catalyst for his writing career: brother Alec suggested in his memoirs that Evelyn wrote his first novel in order to raise money for his marriage to Evelyn.

Duckworth’s interest in the Rossetti biography was now translated into a formal commission. By July Evelyn had written 12,000 words without much difficulty. ‘Think it will be fairly amusing,’ he noted in his diary. By the end of August, he had reached 40,000, more than half the acceptable length for a decent book. The noise of the traffic outside Underhill was a distraction, but he was becoming the complete man of letters, consumed by his work, reviewing for
The Bookman
and mentioning in his diary for the first time that ‘I have begun on a comic novel.’

Rossetti
, dedicated to Evelyn Gardner, was a colourful, opinionated biography mixing a grandiose manner with an informal, chatty tone (the brother of the model Lizzy Siddal is described as ‘slightly dotty’). Evelyn had great sympathy with Rossetti. They both hated music, loved craftsmanship, suffered from insomnia and felt that they had been born out of their time. To a greater or lesser extent, all biographers project themselves into their chosen subjects. Evelyn was no exception: even Rossetti’s mother seems to be an exact description of Catherine Waugh. There is more than a little of himself in the description of Rossetti as ‘sensual, indolent, and richly versatile … a mystic without a creed; a Catholic without the discipline or consolation of the Church’. He ultimately describes his subject – as he thinks of himself – as second rate, lacking the ‘moral stability of a great artist’.

He rounded off his endeavours with the words: ‘The End. Thank God’. With his school-teaching experiences fresh in his mind, he was keen to turn his full attention to the comic novel. He was happy to share his work with his friends. He read the first fifty pages of the story aloud to Anthony Powell and then Dudley Carew, who would never forget ‘the happiness, the hilarity, that sustained him that night … he roared with laughter at his own comic invention and both of us at times were in hysterics’. Waugh’s first biographer Christopher Sykes remembered Tom Driberg reading passages to him but being unable to continue because they were both laughing so much. John Betjeman said that when he read it, it seemed so ‘rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again’.

Its working title was ‘Untoward Incidents’, which seemed to set the ‘right tone of mildly censorious detachment’. Like all of his novels, Evelyn’s first had a strong element of autobiography. The novel initiated the ‘spot the portraiture’ game that his friends revelled in, though he sometimes went too far in this regard and risked trouble. Grimes was clearly based on Dick Young from Arnold House, Lady Circumference on Mrs Graham, ‘little Davy Lennox’ was Cecil Beaton, ‘Jack Spire’ of the
London Hercules
was J. C. Squire of the
Mercury
. Philbrick, the Balliol flagellant who beat up Evelyn as an undergraduate, gives his name to the mysterious school butler, and the egregious Cruttwell becomes a burglar. Two homosexual characters called ‘Kevin Saunderson’ and ‘Martin Gaythorn-Brodie’, clearly based on his acquaintances Gavin Henderson and Eddie Gaythorne-Hardy, were too close to the bone. Evelyn was forced to change the names to ‘Miles Malpractice’ and ‘Lord Parakeet’.

Another working title for the book was ‘Picaresque: or the Making of an Englishman’. As in the great satirical novels of the eighteenth century, Paul Pennyfeather is a picaresque hero. He is unjustly sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour and stumbles from one disaster to the other. His adventures revolve around three worlds, Oxford, a grotesque private school in North Wales, and Mayfair in London. He ends up exactly where he began, though now studying to become a clergyman. Paul Pennyfeather is clearly a version of Evelyn himself.

The novel skewers every aspect of English society from the establishment’s education system to the Church to high society to the legal and penal code. With unerring skill, Waugh satirises cowardly unscrupulous dons and aristocratic philistines (‘the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass’). Its most brilliant comic creations are Captain Grimes the pederastic schoolmaster and the redoubtable Lady Circumference, based on Alastair’s mother, who is forever complaining of her son, ‘The boy’s a dunderhead. If he wasn’t he wouldn’t be here. He wants beatin’ and hittin’ and knockin’ about generally.’ In many ways it is the perfect comic novel. Every sentence is delicately weighted, every joke impeccably timed.

It also introduces those macabre fantasy elements that make Waugh’s world so different from the gentler comic universe of P. G. Wodehouse. A schoolmaster called Prendergast has his head sawn off in Egdon Mire Prison with one of the tools issued to the Arts and Crafts School. One of
the little boys, Lord Tangent, is accidentally shot in the ankle at sports day – a comic incident, save that he dies. Grimes, who stages his own apparent suicide, is the only true victor among the characters. An unrepentant pederast and bigamist, he is the ultimate survivor, ‘one of the immortals’: ‘He was a life force … he would rise again.’

Nevertheless, despite its anarchic elements, morality is at the very heart of the novel. One of the questions it poses is how a person can be ethical in an unethical world. Paul Pennyfeather is the only one, despite his passivity and weakness, who is moral and who does the right thing. He doesn’t lie or cheat, and he protects Margot, the upper-class girl he adores, even though he knows that she is unworthy of the sacrifice. He is an innocent in a world of unscrupulous monsters. Waugh also introduces one of the concerns that would become a refrain throughout his novels: the destruction of the country house. The wanton demolition of the ancestral home King’s Thursday, the ‘finest piece of domestic Tudor in England’, and its replacement with a modernist nightmare is indicative of Margot’s inner corruption.

At the end of the novel, the tone changes dramatically. Back in Oxford there is a poignant scene between Paul Pennyfeather and handsome aristocratic Peter Pastmaster. Peter is an alcoholic, and has become a member of the very Bollinger Club that had been responsible for Paul’s debagging and his unmerited expulsion from Oxford:

Peter Pastmaster came into the room. He was dressed in the bottle-green and white evening coat of the Bollinger Club. His face was flushed and his dark hair slightly disordered.