Mad World (33 page)
Authors: Paula Byrne
He paints a vivid and unromantic picture of a world in which corrupt officials gamble away their bribes and missionaries, drunk with rum, ‘have long forsaken their vows and live openly with native women infecting them with hideous diseases’. The contrast between the jungle and Madresfield could not be greater. There was a novel in that thought.
Evelyn was unimpressed with Georgetown. With his guide Haynes (in
Ninety-Two Days
he is called Bain), he left for Boa Vista, travelling by train, then boat, then horse. On the boat, a rancher joined them: ‘Conversation was all between Mr Bain and the rancher, and mostly about horses. Quite different standards of quality seemed to be observed here from those I used to learn from Captain Hance.’ Haynes was a farcical figure, prone to tales of exaggeration or pure fantasy. He had mood swings and wheezed with asthma. Evelyn grew increasingly worried, whilst also aware of his comic potential. Haynes told Evelyn to ‘Listen out for the six o’clock beetle.’ Why?
‘Because he always makes that noise at six o’clock.’
‘But it’s now quarter past four.’
‘Yes, that is what is so interesting.’
He was finally able to leave Haynes and head off for a Jesuit mission on the Brazilian frontier. The journey was fraught, with fierce heat and winds by day, freezing cold at night. On the way there was an incident that he related to the Lygon girls: his stallion reared and rolled on top of him, ‘but luckily he was so small that it did not kill me outright’.
His face was burned from the intense savannah heat, despite his broad-brimmed hat. ‘All through the blazing afternoon,’ he reported to Maimie
and Coote, ‘I found that I thought of nothing except drinking. I told myself very simple stories which consisted of my walking to the bar of my club and ordering one after another frosted glasses of orange juice; I imagined myself at a plage, sipping ice-cold lemon squashes under a striped umbrella, beside translucent blue water.’ He was plagued by insects, the worst being ‘jiggers’, the eggs of which had to be dug out of his feet with pins.
The only respite was to be found at travellers’ ranches, though these were hardly luxurious. At one of them he encountered a man called Mr Christie, reclining in a hammock and sipping cold water from the spout of a white enamelled teapot. Christie was a religious maniac. Evelyn was enthralled:
He had a long white moustache and a white woolly head … I greeted him and asked where I could water my horse. He smiled in a dreamy, absent-minded manner and said, ‘I was expecting you. I was warned in a vision of your approach … I always know the character of my visitors by the visions I have of them. Sometimes I see a pig or a jackal; often a ravening tiger.’
Evelyn could not resist asking: ‘And how did you see me?’
‘As a sweetly toned harmonium,’ replied Mr Christie politely.
Christie plied Evelyn with rum: ‘The sweet and splendid spirit, the exhaustion of the day, its heat, thirst, hunger and the effects of the fall, the fantastic conversations of Mr Christie, translated that evening and raised it a finger’s breadth above reality.’ The latter phrase recurs in
Brideshead
when Charles falls under the spell of Sebastian: ‘We … lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.’
Another ranch belonged to a Mr Hart. Evelyn examined his well-stocked library, ‘much ravaged by ants’. His next destination was the St Ignatius mission outside Bon Success, where he met and befriended a Jesuit called Father Mather. He stayed nine days, attending Mass in the mornings and reading during the day, as well as observing Father Mather’s
missionary work as priest and doctor. Despite the isolation and loneliness of the outpost, Evelyn found him ‘one of the happiest men I met in the country’. Father Mather gave him a haircut and made him presents of a walking stick and a camera case.
On leaving Father Mather, he tried to reach Manaos via Boa Vista on horseback. This journey was extremely arduous, with little water or food. The thought of Boa Vista, ‘a town of dazzling attractions’, assumed even greater importance in his mind, so he was vastly disappointed when he arrived to find that it was no more than a ‘squalid camp of ramshackle cut-throats’. He was bored and lonely. He wrote to Maimie and Coote:
Well I have gone too far as usual and now I am in Brazil. Do come out and visit me. It is easy to find on account of it being the most vast of the republics of South America with an area of over eight million square kilometres and a federal constitution based on that of the United States. You go up the Amazon, easily recognisable on account of its being the largest river in the world, then right at Rio Negro (easily recognisable on account of being black) right again at Rio Bianco (easily recognisable on account of being white) and you cannot miss this village on account of its being the only one. The streets are entirely paved with gold which gives a very pretty effect especially towards sunset. But otherwise it is rather dull.
He was, of course, homesick:
I am rather lonely and have to wait here for some weeks until it rains and there is enough water in the river to go to Manaos. When I get there it is quite near Malvern and I will come over if you will have me and take a glass of beer with you and Bartleet at the Hornyold.
His letters are peppered with references to their Malvern friends, especially the beer-drinking vicar’s son (‘Tell Bartleet the local beer is called Superale Amazona and is rather nasty on account of it being so warm’).
To relieve the boredom he turned to writing: ‘Wrote a bad article
yesterday but thought of a good plot for a short story.’ That story, based on his encounter with the deranged Mr Christie, would be a stepping-stone towards his masterpiece,
A Handful of Dust
.
He never made it to Manaos. He planned to return to Georgetown in what became an absurd misadventure that involved leaving Boa Vista, returning, leaving again, lost horses, lame horses and a potentially catastrophic attempt to return to Bon Success and Father Mather, in which he set off alone without his guide, Marco, and found himself hopelessly lost, without food or drink, exhausted and dehydrated. He was in danger of collapse and felt that he was close to death. In his desperation Evelyn turned to his faith: ‘I had been given a medal of St Christopher [patron saint of travel] before I left London. I felt that now, if ever, was the moment to invoke supernatural assistance. And it came.’ The odds he knew were against him – he later calculated them at 1:54.75 million. But he stumbled upon an old English-speaking Indian about to leave for Bon Success, who saved his life. He was equally grateful to Baby’s medal. He thanked God that he was a Catholic, and took the short ride to Father Mather at St Ignatius, who was amazed to see him arriving on his weary horse.
Whilst he waited to complete the last stage of his journey, Evelyn read books from Father Mather’s library, where he found copies of Charles Dickens. He had always associated Dickens with his father – sentimental Victorian tosh – but rediscovering the novels so far from home he felt reconnected to England and quintessential Englishness. He read
Nicholas Nickleby
with ‘avid relish’ and when he left he took with him a copy of
Martin Chuzzlewit
.
On the last leg of the return journey he reached a riverside camp belonging to a man he had met before, who ran a primitive trading-post that sold, amongst other things, mechanical mice. Like so many other details of his adventure, they would find their way into his novel. At the camp, he rested in a hammock, reading Dickens and recuperating, waiting for his feet to heal from the wounds gouged by the pins that extracted the jiggers.
By the first week in April he was back in Georgetown and able to dispatch a letter to Mad: ‘Darling Blondy and Poll, Well I am back in Georgetown and all the world is Highclere’ (Highclere was their phrase for all that was luxurious: Sibell had stayed at Highclere Castle and
declared it the epitome of splendour). Relieved to be alive and safe, he was full of jokes and high spirits, sending messages to Grainger the Pekingese: ‘Tell Grainger I had luncheon in a Chinese restaurant yesterday and ate a bird’s nest.’ Full, too, of plans for their reunion – ‘Will you lunch with me at 1.30 on May 7th’ – and telling them that he was so thin his trousers fell down and asking them if they’d like a present of a stuffed alligator. He longed for news of Madresfield, such as the meeting between Cecil Beaton and Captain Hance. He relished the thought of the effeminate ‘Sexy Beaton’ with the blustering Capt. G.B.H, but feared that the gossip would have left him behind: ‘I suppose that I shall not be able to understand any Madresfield jokes by the time I get home.’
The scheme was a Gothic man in the hands of savages – first Mrs Beaver etc. then the real ones.
(Evelyn Waugh to Henry Yorke, September 1934)
I believe that man is, by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth.
(Evelyn Waugh,
Robbery under Law:
The Mexican Object-Lesson
, 1939)
I wanted to discover how the prisoner got there, and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilised man’s helpless plight among them.
(Evelyn Waugh, ‘Fan-fare’,
Life
magazine, April 1946)
When Evelyn arrived back from South America on 1 May 1933 he went to his parents’ home, ‘cheery, red-cheeked, with a car load of luggage, and five stuffed crocodiles in a crate’. This was his last visit to Underhill, as his parents were moving to a small flat in Highgate. Evelyn visited the new flat the following day and offered to pay for the redecoration of the rooms.
He was shocked to read an announcement regarding
Black Mischief
that had been published in the Catholic newspaper
The Tablet
, while he had been in South America. Refusing even to name the title or the publisher, it said that a book of such ‘coarseness and foulness’ could not have been written by a true Catholic, which Mr Waugh purported to be, following the public announcement of his conversion a year or two before. Evelyn composed a long open letter in defence of his novel, addressing it to His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. His father described the letter as ‘masterly but libellous’. Evelyn and many of his friends were horrified by the viciousness of the attack on him. In the end, the open letter was not published, although Evelyn had copies privately printed and distributed to friends.
He went to the Yorkes for a visit and then it was to the Grand Pump Room Hotel in Bath, where he planned to read, sort and reply to his huge backlog of correspondence. Among the gossip to catch up on was the shocking news of the break-up of the Guinness marriage. Diana had been having an affair with the Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley. She had left Bryan to be Mosley’s mistress. ‘Don’t tell Hazel I am back,’ he also warned Yorke, for fear that Lady Lavery was still in pursuit of him. He was bored with the demands of this older society woman.
He also wrote to Maimie: ‘Well I have come back and I have bought you an Indian rubber boat with rubber Indians in it … I have a stick of Brazilian tobacco for Capt GBH and it will make him sick.’ He told her that he had seen her pictures in the press and that he would soon be back in London where they could get drunk together: ‘Bath is awfully decent and I drink some very old and expensive port … come and see me. No alright then lunch at the Ritz Wed May 17th.’ He promised to send Bath Buns to little Poll, whose healthy appetite was another standing joke. He would soon spend a few days at Mad, and wrote again to Maimie in advance: ‘Longing to see the dignity prosperity and peace of Mad again. Will come Tues and let you know with telegrams.’
The Lygon girls had still not seen their mother, though in the spring they had sent her violets from Madresfield and a letter. Lady Beauchamp was thrilled. She wrote back: ‘They slept near me, as did your dear letter.’ Violets, she pointed out, denoted ‘balm and healing’. If she thought, however, that forgiveness was on the way, she was very much mistaken.
Evelyn was deeply in debt and owed travel articles, which he was having
difficulty writing. For the first time in his life he was writing badly. His agent, A. D. Peters, apologised to his editors: ‘Evelyn has not been doing his best lately … he agrees it is time he pulled up his socks.’ But Evelyn, always honest about himself, knew that he was in trouble: ‘You can’t tell me a thing I don’t know about the quality of my journalism.’
Vogue
was refusing his articles because he was charging so much, although
Harper’s
remained faithful, perhaps because of Sibell and her relationship with Beaverbrook.
In July, he wrote a short story called ‘Out of Depth’, which would be published in the
Harper’s
Christmas number. He also wrote up ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’, which was published in America in September and then in England in November. Both are on the theme of exile and the loss of paradise.
‘Out of Depth’ tells the tale of a forty-three-year-old man who has lost his faith. He time travels to the future, London (Lunnon) in the twenty-fifth century. All civilisation has disappeared and the city is merely fifty or so huts on stilts raised above the mudflats of the Thames. The people are no more than savages. His sanity is saved by his faith and his discovery of a church in the wilderness: ‘Rip knew that out of strangeness, there had come into being something familiar; a shape in chaos.’ He finds a congregation in prayer, two candles burning. He then awakes from his ‘dream’ to find a priest at his bed, where he makes a confession: ‘I have experimented in black art.’ It is the first fictional work in which his faith plays a significant part, a first tentative step towards the Catholic apologetics of
Brideshead
.