Mad World (34 page)

The image of the ‘savages’ and their huts by the muddy river obviously came from his experience up the Amazon, but the notion of placing a man of deep faith who has lost his way in the ruins of a once great civilisation suggests that he was also thinking about Lord Beauchamp sitting on Lord Berners’s balcony looking out on the ruins of the Forum. The sometime proconsul is exiled among the remains of the great empire that he has served.

‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ is based more directly on the Amazonian adventure. It combines Evelyn’s meeting with the sinister Mr Christie and the Dickens library of Father Mather. The Christie figure, Mr McMaster, detains the traveller in the jungle, reading Dickens to him. There will be no escape: ‘We will not have any Dickens today … but to-morrow, and
the day after that, and the day after that. Let us read
Little Dorrit
again. There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.’ The hapless traveller, ironically named Henty (after G. A. Henty, the author of popular imperial adventure stories for boys), is a young man of means who has closed up his country house and gone abroad while his wife remains in London, ‘near her young man’.
A Handful of Dust
would be developed as a back story to the set piece of reading Dickens in the Amazon. The short story, slightly reworked, and with Christie renamed Mr Todd, suggestive of the German word for death, would form the climax of the novel.

That summer found him back at Madresfield for extended visits throughout May, June and the first half of August. Hugh had returned from Australia and there was yet another upsetting incident involving his alcoholism.

Evelyn wrote to Baby Jungman from Madresfield on 2 August, telling her that no one was there except for Maimie, Coote and Hughie. Hugh was in serious disgrace as he had been drunk all weekend and had ‘Sykesed’ the servants and tried to ‘murder’ Charlie Brocklehurst (a landowner from Sussex who was in love with Baby and many years later left her money). Wally Weston, the boxing maestro, had given Hugh what-for and Hugh was deeply remorseful. Evelyn described him sloping about not raising his eyes from his plate all weekend. He had been put into ‘Lady Sibell’s old room’, which, he wrote, was full of bad taste objects and Eastern squalor. And he had once again been given the old day nursery as his study. Instead of having children themselves, the Lygon girls were serving as midwives to Evelyn’s books.

Hugh’s disintegration was devastating for his family and friends. His looks were fading and his violent outburst towards the staff and a family friend showed that he was no longer the gentle and sensitive young man of Oxford days. His guilt over his homosexuality was also part of the story. Evelyn tried to assist his old friend, but Hugh was beyond help. His battle against alcoholism continued, and in the meantime, Evelyn, unable to do anything, tried to save another Oxford friend who was also alcoholic, Alfred Duggan. From Madresfield he wrote to Nancy Mitford to tell her his latest plan: ‘You will think me insane when I tell you that I am just off for Hellenic Society Cruise.’

The cruise was an attempt to return Alfred Duggan to the faith and help him abandon his heavy drinking – as well as being a more relaxing jaunt than the journey up the Amazon. Evelyn wrote from shipboard to the Lygon girls in the highest of spirits:

Darling Blondy and Poll,

So I am in the sea of Marmora and it is very calm and warm and there are lots of new and old chums on board and I have seen numbers of new and old places and am enjoying myself top-hole … Alfred (brother of bald dago) has behaved very well so far except for once farting at Lady Lovat … The ship is full of people of high rank including two princesses of ROYAL BLOOD. There is not much rogering so far as I have seen and the food is appalling … Perhaps that handsome Dutch girl is staying with you. She was expelled from Capri by Mussolini for Lesbianism you know.
^*
Give her my love and a kiss on the arse and take one each for yourselves too.

Bo

And kiss Lady Sibells arse too if she is with you

And Mims

And Jackies

I don’t think Mr Hood would like it but give him one if he would.

(Mims was Captain Hance’s wife, Jackie’s mother; Mr Hood was the Birmingham boxer trained by Wally Weston.)

This new gang in which Evelyn had started to move became known as the ‘Catholic Underworld’. After dinner they would form a group and listen to Father D’Arcy expound on doctrine. Prominent among them was Katharine Asquith, a friend of Diana Cooper, who was a Catholic convert and had inherited a large house in the West Country called Mells Manor. She noted in her diary that there was the ‘usual rather unusual conversation’ with Father D’Arcy explaining religious principles to Evelyn and Alfie, ‘Mr Duggan rather drunk, but very attentive.’ Evelyn added Katharine to his list of beauties. He noted that she ‘spreads scandal and
nicknames them all … is exceedingly amusing and a great collector of ship’s gossip’.

At the end of the cruise Evelyn and Alfie Duggan found themselves at a loose end. They accepted the invitation of one of the other passengers, Gabriel Herbert, to stay at her family’s house in Portofino. It was there that he met for the first time Laura, Gabriel’s younger sister, whom he described as a ‘white mouse’. She was blonde, very pretty and fragile looking. The Herberts, all Catholic converts, were related by marriage to Evelyn Gardner. The visit was marred by Duggan’s attempts to find strong liquor and Evelyn’s attempts to stop him – all distressingly reminiscent of Hugh, but good originating material for the portrayal of alcoholism in the figure of Sebastian.

Evelyn was still desperately in love with Baby Jungman, though he felt that his prospects were bleak because of their Catholicism. The only hope was an annulment of his first marriage. On his return to England in October he began the first stage of what was to become a protracted and painful process. His case was submitted to the Ecclesiastical Court in five sittings during October and November and a report was sent to Rome. The whole business, he hoped, would be settled in six months. The case rested on whether there was a ‘lack of real consent’: according to canon law, if a couple married with the explicit understanding that the union might not endure for life, this was defective consent and therefore possible grounds for an annulment.

Evelyn gave his ex-wife lunch, where they discussed the tribunal. She-Evelyn had agreed to testify. He wrote to Coote telling her: ‘I shall be in London on Wed to take my poor wife to be racked by the Inquisition.’ The judgment at Westminster looked favourable, but the petition that was sent to Rome got lost and forgotten about for almost two years through a clerical error. Evelyn expected to hear from Rome by the following Easter, but in the end the annulment was not granted until 4 July 1936.

Following the Adriatic adventure, Evelyn increased his involvement with the Mells Catholic set. Like Madresfield, the lovely manor house in the Mendip Hills of Somerset became a haven for him. But it wasn’t quite the same: he had to behave himself at Mells, something he always found difficult.

This was not a happy time. He needed money and his journalism was drying up. Diana Cooper had a house near Bognor in West Sussex, which was a present from her mother. It was a large cottage with Gothic windows separated from the shingle beach by a walled garden. In October 1933 she lent it to Evelyn who needed a period of isolation to write up his South American travel book
Ninety-Two Days
, which he dedicated to Diana. He wrote to Maimie, making light of his depression: ‘had my hair cut in a bad taste way and came back to solitude, sorrow and my tear drenched pillow … yesterday I couldn’t stand the disillusion, death, bitterness any more … I will see you on Wednesday when the sun has passed its zenith. In the evening, unless shes dutch I shall be with Miss J. Can’t help loving that girl.’ He also jokily alluded to thoughts of suicide: ‘wish I was dead like Reggie Beaton’ (Cecil’s elder brother had just thrown himself under a tube train).

Maimie and Diana held very special places in his heart not only because they were beautiful but also because they were vulnerable and prone to unhappiness. His letters to them released his sentimental side. In Bognor, he wrote to Diana, opening with a parody of Noël Coward’s
Private Lives
(a joke that he shared with the Lygon girls). He mentioned a ‘tearful dinner with little Blondy when she talked about Duggan, very drunk, with such shining generosity that I could only say don’t say any more you are making me cry so terribly’ (the latter phrase is also a quotation from
Private Lives
). He also said in this letter that Blondy was expecting a proposal from Captain Malcolm Bullock, whose wife had died in a hunting accident in 1927. If he did propose to Maimie, she must have refused him. Evelyn was further depressed by a ‘severe beating from my agent for idleness’. He signed the letter off with the words: ‘Hate everyone except you and Maimie.’

Out of courtesy he told Diana that he liked the house, but he revealed the truth to Poll: ‘It is a very sad life I lead, very lonely, very uncomfortable, in a filthy cottage in the ugliest place in England with only mice for company like a prisoner in the tower.’ He found it hard to work and was still thinking of Baby, telling Diana Cooper: ‘Trouble is I think of dutch girl all day and not sweet voluptuous dreams, no sir, just fretful and it sykeses the work.’ To Maimie he revealed more: ‘The Pope GBH won’t let me use her (nor will she). God how S[ad].’

On 28 October he wrote to Maimie again: ‘I was thirty on Saturday
and feel sixty. I celebrated the day by walking into Bognor and going to the Cinema in the best 1/6 seats. I saw a love film about two people who were in love; they were very loving and made me cry … I bought myself Sitwell’s new book and find it as heavy as my heart … It is very hard to be 30 I can tell you … oh dear oh dear I wish I was dead.’

Two letters to Coote also date from this time: ‘Darling Poll,’ he begins before launching into some typically affectionate abusive banter: ‘Filthy Bitch – so much for your promise to write to me and cheer me up.’ He complains of being lonely and miserable, writing his boring book, ‘while you meanwhile are having lesbian fun with six toes and Capt GBH … so yesterday I went to London to get more divorced and I lunched at Ritz with little Blondy and saw a lot of repulsive people … it was awful going by train and not having you to see me off … But the important thing I have to say is that GRAINGER KISSED ME spontaneously and with evident relish.’

In the other letter to Coote, sent from Bognor, he noted it was ‘the 2nd anniversary of my first visit to Mad’. And, ‘So you were not really a filthy bitch because you were writing to me just when I had despaired of a letter.’ He told her that he had grown his hair and a beard and looked ‘very effeminate and bohemian’. ‘I am very lonely and very well and sober … I am looking forward to the next war. I shall get a medal and lose a leg and that is irresistible for sex appeal.’

Hugh was also travelling that year. After his long stay in Australia with his father over Christmas 1932 and into the New Year, he returned via the Pacific route, with a month’s stop-over in New York in April 1933. The passenger list describes his occupation as ‘horse trainer’. He is listed as six feet one inch tall with fair hair, fair complexion and blue eyes. ‘In good mental and physical health’, says the documentation for the immigration department, but that was hardly the case. He stayed with a friend named John Steward; it was his first time in the United States.

After spending the summer back in England – when he saw Evelyn at Mad during August – he departed from Southampton, returning to Australia again via New York. Boom was still in Carthona, but had broken a finger, and for a while had to have his letters dictated as his finger was wrapped in plaster of Paris. He wrote to Coote to tell her the news that his servant George had recently married, but would carry on doing things
for him until Hugh came out. Then, in November 1933, he wrote that Hugh had arrived, full of news of a trip with Coote to Ireland with his greyhounds.

Hugh stayed with his father for Christmas 1933.

Evelyn returned to Mad for a few days at the end of November. He wrote to Maimie, thanking her for her hospitality: ‘God how sad not to see you and say thank you thank you for all your kind hospitality. It has been lovely staying with you. Thank you. Thank you.’ His big news was that in anticipation of the annulment he had proposed to Baby: ‘Just heard yesterday that my divorce comes on today so was elated and popped question to Dutch girl and got raspberry. So that is that, eh. Stiff upper lip and dropped cock.’

Mad proved a haven at this time of disappointment. He was back there in early December and again for Christmas. Then he returned home and told his parents that he planned to go to Fez in Morocco, where, as Arthur Waugh noted in his diary, ‘he hopes to complete his new novel’. This would be
A Handful of Dust
.

What I have done is
excellent
. I don’t think it could be better. Very gruesome. Rather like Webster in modern idiom.

(Evelyn Waugh, letter to Diana Cooper)

Diana Cooper saw him off on the boat bound for Tangier. Letters from Maimie and Coote arrived in no time: ‘How very decent and surprising to get letters from you both so soon. It made me feel less than a thousand miles away.’ He went on to describe Fez, which he found ‘very decent’ with little streams running through it and old houses with pretty walled gardens. In the tongue-in-cheek tone reserved for the sisters, he told of seeing ‘little Arab girls of fifteen and sixteen for ten francs each and a cup of mint tea. So I bought one but I didn’t enjoy her very much.’ In the midst of this letter he mentioned that he was at work on the new book: ‘I have begun the novel and it is excellent, first about sponger and then about some imaginary people who are happy to be married but not for long.’