Mad World (20 page)

Among the guests at their Christmas party was Hugh’s beautiful sister,
Mary – ‘Maimie’ – Lygon. Hugh himself was with Patrick Balfour when a satirical Christmas card arrived from Evelyn – sending these was one of his annual customs. On one side it printed a gallimaufry of newspaper headlines (‘Women and Bones Mystery’, ‘18 Atrocities This Year’) and advertisements (‘Why Have Indigestion?’, ‘Nearly Everyone Can Write’, ‘Bunions Go!’, ‘Be a Successful Artist: There is Joy and Profit in Creative Art’). On the other side were extracts from unfavourable reviews of
Decline and Fall
.

Evelyn noted at this time that ‘I was not one of the young men to whom invitation cards came in profusion’ and that he thought of himself ‘less as a writer than an out-of-work schoolmaster’. This was to change. On 14 January 1930, three days before the granting of his decree nisi,
Vile Bodies
was published. It was an instant success.

BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE AND OTHERS KINDLY NOTE

THAT ALL CHARACTERS ARE WHOLLY IMAGINARY

(AND YOU GET FAR TOO MUCH PUBLICITY ALREADY

WHOEVER YOU ARE).

This light-hearted epigraph to the novel was later removed, but, as would always happen with Evelyn Waugh’s novels, his friends and enemies pored over the pages to find portraits of themselves. Evelyn got into the habit of writing to his friends: ‘Your turn next.’

In fact, only a few minor characters were the result of direct portraiture: the radio evangelist Aimée Semple MacPherson as Mrs Melrose Ape, the ‘Duchess of Duke Street’ Rosa Lewis as Lottie Crump and, most importantly, the party-mad politician’s daughter Elizabeth Ponsonby as Agatha Runcible. The novel’s aristocratic gossip columnists were based on Lord Castlerosse and Lord Donegal, as well as Evelyn’s two friends Tom Driberg (‘Dragoman’ of the
Express
) and Patrick Balfour (‘Mr Gossip’ of the
Daily Sketch
).

Rosa Lewis was so furious with Evelyn that she banned him from her establishment, the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street (which is easily recognisable in the novel as Shepheard’s Hotel in Dover Street). ‘There are two bastards I’m not going to have in this house,’ she declared: ‘One is rotten little Donegal’ (she was threatening to sue him for libel) ‘and
the other is that swine Evelyn Waugh.’ She also sent a letter to Chapman and Hall threatening litigation. Evelyn responded by writing a column in the
Daily Mail
entitled ‘People Who Want to Sue Me’.

As was becoming his custom, the novel is peppered with private jokes. The egregious Cruttwell becomes a Conservative Member of Parliament, while the life of Miles Malpractice is based on those of Alastair Graham and Mark Ogilvie-Grant in their diplomatic postings abroad, where they lived their homosexual lives – an existence ‘punctuated by ambiguous telephone calls and the visits of menacing young men who wanted new suits or tickets to America, or a fiver to go on with’.

One of the novel’s themes was the ease with which the public could be duped into slavish conformism. Thus Adam Fenwick-Symes’s gossip column invents the kinds of fashions that were lapped up by the Bright Young People, such as the combination of black suede shoes and green bowler hats or a taste for scruffy cafés on the Underground. Bizarrely, real events fictionalised by the novel were turned into real events by admiring readers. So for example, Evelyn’s account of the Lygon escapade at 10 Downing Street gave rise to a real bottle party at Number 10, given by Isabel MacDonald in honour of
Vile Bodies
.

With its treasures hunts, nightclubs, parties, sexual experimentation, motor racing, ocean liners and aeroplane travel,
Vile Bodies
is
the
English novel of the Jazz Age, as the very different
Great Gatsby
is the definitive American imagining of the era.

Waugh’s ear for idiom enabled him to breathe life into his characters: ‘ ‘‘
Well
,’’ they said. ‘‘
Well!
how too, too shaming, Agatha, darling,’’ they said. ‘‘How devastating, how unpoliceman-like, how goat-like, how sick-making, how too, too awful.’’’ ‘Goat-like’ is a private joke for the benefit of the Mitford girls – young Jessica Mitford adored sheep and disliked goats, so the adjective ‘sheepish’ became a term of approbation and goat-like was used for anything bad. In 1962 Evelyn said in an interview that the flapper slang was one of the key ways in which his novel had captured the spirit of its age: ‘I popularised a fashionable language, like the beatnik writers today, and the book caught on.’

The shallow Nina owes much to She-Evelyn. Her brittleness, her slang, her beauty and her callous infidelity to both her husband and her lover are brilliantly conveyed through the dialogue, often via the briefest of telephone calls (a device pioneered in ‘The Balance’). Nina’s moral
blackness is rendered brilliantly in the sparse dialogue of the telephone conversation in which she makes it quite clear that she intends to marry a man she doesn’t love at all (Ginger, for his money) while expecting to carry on being the lover of Adam.

Evelyn later confessed that a ‘sharp disturbance in his private life’ changed the tone of the book ‘from gaiety to bitterness’. What had started out as a light-hearted satire on the Bright Young People became a brutal castigation. The selfish, drifting Bright Young People unconsciously condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Their language is the mark of their shallowness.

Never afraid to take revenge in print, he includes many a dig at She-Evelyn and Heygate. But a more serious point as well as a personal one is being made when Adam says: ‘I do feel that marriage ought to
go on
– for quite a long time. That’s the thing about marriage.’ Waugh was perfecting the art of simultaneously laying out a moral vision and turning his private quarrels into art.

This was the book that propelled Evelyn into the big time, establishing him as a brilliant young author, the voice of the young generation. It was ironic that he became identified as the leading spokesman of the Bright Young Things at the time when, because of She-Evelyn’s betrayal, he felt most alienated from them. But he relished his new status. The Lancing boy had trumped the Etonians: Evelyn suddenly found himself much sought after by the newspapers and magazines. He could up his price for articles and reviews. With mock pomposity he insisted on ‘feature articles (not side columns like Heygate) – with photograph of me and general air of importance’. He wrote regularly for the
Daily Mail
and had a slot reviewing books for a glossy society magazine called the
Graphic
.

He had risen from relative obscurity at Christmas 1929 to become the most widely discussed author of his generation by the end of January 1930. His diaries begin to read like the roll call of the rich and famous. He was feted in London’s most fashionable circles, while remaining loyal to Diana Guinness, who was now in the last trimester of her pregnancy. He always preferred the company of his good friends to wild parties. Even at the height of his fame, he was happy just to ‘chat’ – Diana’s favourite pastime. In the final weeks of the pregnancy, he would sit in her bedroom eating at a small table and telling funny stories while she ate in bed. In
the afternoon, they would visit London Zoo. He felt that he had her undivided attention and it was personal attention of this kind more than public fame that rebuilt the confidence that had been shattered by his wife’s infidelity.

For all the success of
Vile Bodies
, he had to work hard to keep his name in the public eye. He quickly finished writing up
Labels
. Diana gave him the necessary privacy by lending him her country house in Sussex. He travelled back to London for weekends.

In March, Diana gave birth to her son Jonathan and asked Evelyn to be a godfather. The other godfather was an Eton and Christ Church man: Randolph Churchill, son of Winston. Evelyn met him for the first time over the font at the christening. The relationship between the two men would be long-standing and tempestuous.

It was at this time that Evelyn sat for his portrait. Diana and Bryan commissioned Henry Lamb, a follower of Augustus John and the ‘Camden Town’ school. His finely executed oil reveals an attractive young man with auburn hair, pipe to his mouth and the fierce and piercing stare that all his friends remembered so vividly. In tribute to the couple who paid for it, and who did so much for him at this time, he is holding a glass of Guinness in his large craftsman’s hands.

Sadly, however, the friendship came to an end. Once Diana’s baby was born, she was keen to rejoin the social scene. But Evelyn wanted her all to himself. There were quarrels and then Evelyn severed the friendship. Many years later, she wrote asking what went wrong. He gave a forthright answer:

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 friend and confidante. 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.

To her credit, Diana remained loyal to his memory, always considering him ‘a perfect friend’ who to her infinite regret ‘bestowed his incomparable companionship on others’.

But there were more complicated undercurrents. Both friends were at
crossroads and would take paths that would lead them in very different directions: Evelyn to the Catholic Church and a new circle of friends, Diana to the Bloomsbury set of Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington and then to an intense passion with Fascist leader Oswald Mosley, which would take her to Adolf Hitler’s Germany and then Holloway Prison during the Second World War.

In the end, politics divided Diana from most of her friends, and she and her second husband, Mosley (whom she married in Goebbels’ drawing room in the presence of Hitler), became in her own words ‘social pariahs’. Diana’s most endearing and most destructive quality was her loyalty. Her loyalty to Mosley ruined her life. She remained loyal to Evelyn, upset and angry when he was attacked in the press or in reviews. She was deeply upset by the publication of his diaries, which she felt gave a ‘totally false picture’ of him: ‘I felt angry to think 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,’ her son Alexander comforted her, ‘we’ve got the books.’

But she was right to worry: the caricature has stuck. A great many entries in Evelyn’s diaries smack on first reading of malice or inveterate snobbery. They need the gloss that Diana added to a letter from Evelyn in which he noted that he had been with a group of people whom she wouldn’t like because they were even more humbly born than he was: ‘for the literal-minded: this is a JOKE’.

Without the stabilising friendship of Diana, Evelyn became the very thing he had made his name by satirising: a shiftless Bright Young Thing. Through the summer of 1930 he was feted by society hostesses and the Ritz became his second home. His days were filled with luncheon parties, his evenings with cocktails, dinners and dances.

Then he fell in love. The girl’s name was Teresa Jungman, known to her friends as ‘Baby’. She was a famous flapper, noted for starting the craze for treasure hunts and private theatricals. She and her sister Zita were frequently photographed in the
Tatler
, wearing fancy-dress costumes or lovely flapper dresses. As well as being beautiful and intelligent, Baby was Roman Catholic. And it would be Baby who would provide the link through which he finally found himself in Hugh Lygon’s family home.

The autumn of 1930 was marked for Evelyn Waugh by a momentous event. On 29 September he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. It is often said that the failure of his marriage propelled him into the arms of Rome. This is probably because when he was asked whether he was a Catholic when writing
Vile Bodies
he said: ‘Not at all, I was as near to an atheist as one could be.’ Then shortly after the novel was published he converted. But this was a path that Evelyn had been travelling for some time. His father called it his ‘perversion to Rome’.

After Olivia Plunket Greene’s death, Evelyn claimed: ‘She bullied me into the Church.’ Though Evelyn’s friends blamed the Greenes, his confessor Father Martin D’Arcy SJ denied the charge, saying that ‘his close friends Gwen Plunket Greene and her daughter helped to make him act, but they did not make up his mind for him’. His diary records his meetings with Father D’Arcy, whom he described brilliantly as having a ‘blue chin and fine, slippery mind’. They talked about ‘verbal inspiration and Noah’s Ark’, then, on another morning of instruction, ‘infallibility and indulgences’. In
Brideshead Revisted
Waugh is exceptionally funny on the subject of conversion. The scenes of Rex Mottram’s instruction are based upon Evelyn’s own readiness and willingness to accept the tenets of Catholicism without demur. Rex, like his inventor, is ‘matter of fact’ about the whole business – and, like Evelyn, he starts going to the Roman Catholic church at Farm Street, Mayfair. D’Arcy wrote: ‘I have never myself met a convert who so strongly based his assents on truth … he had convinced himself very unsentimentally – with only an intellectual passion, of the truth of the Catholic faith, and that in it he must save his soul.’

In July, he had met and lunched with Noël Coward, himself a Roman Catholic, and told him of his plans for conversion. Coward advised that conversion was such a grave step that it was best preceded by a trip around the world. Evelyn did things the other way around. He converted at the end of September and then went abroad in October. He got himself a journalistic assignment covering the coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie in Abyssinia.

During the Second World War Evelyn was forced to undergo a psychometric test (he abhorred psychology – ‘the whole thing’s a fraud’). After being asked a number of questions about his parents and childhood, he countered: ‘Why have you not questioned me about the most important
thing in a man’s life – his religion?’ He took his Catholicism very seriously, believing in the supernatural element, the ‘Alice-in-Wonderland side of religion’ as Lady Marchmain memorably describes it in
Brideshead
. He was convinced that his life was saved by divine intervention. One of the most spiritual moments of his life came at the deathbed conversion of one of his closest friends.