Mad World (35 page)

‘Sponger’ was Murrough O’Brien, a major in the Irish Guards, who
was one of the models for the character of John Beaver. But the claim that the people who are not married for long were ‘imaginary’ is disingenuous: Evelyn was drawing, in different ways, both on his own brief marriage and on the separation of the Earl and Countess Beauchamp. The novel was developing into a much more serious work than his earlier ones. In another letter he told Katharine Asquith that he was pegging away at it, but that it was ‘very difficult to write because for the first time I am trying to deal with normal people instead of eccentrics. Comic English character parts too easy when one gets to be thirty.’

Meanwhile he told Diana Cooper that he had seen the English papers and that the latest news was Lady Sibell’s row with her uncle, the Duke of Westminster. There was a ‘huge photograph’ of her on the front page with the headline ‘DUKE SUES NIECE’. He clearly knew all about why they were at loggerheads, but was discreet and even made a joke: ‘the consul’s wife said ‘‘Let me see, Lady Sibell Lygon is the Duke of Westminster’s
fourth
wife isn’t she?’’’ He also joked: ‘Has Maimie married the pauper prince?’ This is a slightly mysterious allusion: either she had renewed her involvement with Prince George or she had begun her relationship with the exiled nephew of the last Tsar of Russia.

Sibell allegedly libelled her uncle in the
Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
, causing him to issue a writ. The matter was eventually settled with an apology. She had accused him of being unpatriotic and ‘unwholly indifferent to his responsibilities to this country’. The story of course hit the headlines, with only those in the know guessing the underlying reason for her attack upon his extravagant lifestyle.

Controversy dogged Sibell, not least because of her on-off affair with Lord Beaverbrook, the great press baron. It was he who introduced her to a rising young Labour politician, Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan. He converted her to socialism and she celebrated her conversion in 1932 by drinking Black Velvets. Bevan fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. She famously said: ‘Anyone who knows Aneurin for six months either becomes a Socialist or goes mad.’

Evelyn reported from Fez to his friends that he had become attached to a young prostitute called Fatima. She had a gold tooth and was covered in blue tattoos. Since they could not speak each other’s language, there was ‘not much to do in between rogering’. Maimie had given him a Lalique glass ring, which he didn’t like. He told her: ‘I gave Fatima that
milk ring you gave me, now if you are angry I shant be able to send it back and be forgiven.’ He asked her to send all the gossip, as he claimed not to see many newspapers and was eager to keep in touch with Mad World: ‘Tell Bartleet the beer is no good here … best love to Mr Grainger and your dear sisters.’ He did not tell Katharine Asquith, his more pious female correspondent, about Fatima. The friendship with Maimie was robust enough to take the confession – and, given what she had been through in relation to her father, nothing sexual could shock her.

He was pleased with the progress of the novel: ‘My good taste book is two thirds done. I think I shall finish it in three weeks and then I shall come to England for a day or two and hope to see you and Poll and that ill-behaved Lady Sibell’ (a reference to the Westminster libel case). He asked for Maimie’s advice for his hunting scene, where the child is killed: ‘I have written a hunting scene and I expect it will be full of mistakes so I will read it to you and you can correct it … Please keep writing to me.’ Sibell always admired Evelyn’s great loyalty to her family, especially to her sister Maimie, but they were also loyal to him; their letters to him whilst he was abroad meant a great deal. He told Diana Cooper: ‘I get constant letters from the Lygons but no one else.’

When he returned to England at the end of February he sent Maimie a postcard from Chagford, where he was putting the finishing touches to the book. He mentioned the resolution of the libel case and jokingly told Maimie: ‘I have got a pipe for you to smoke hashish in.’ He also alluded once again to her aspirations to princessdom: ‘I suppose by now the pauper prince will be on the high seas and you will be in the soup again.’ That October, Prince George was created Duke of Kent and the following month he married Princess Marina of Greece.

In late March, Evelyn turned up at his parents’ door with the Lygons’ car. He had come to move his clothes to their home in Belgrave Square. Arthur chatted to him while he packed. The same month he went to Madresfield with the sisters and accompanied them to the Cheltenham Races. In Hugh’s absence, Evelyn was their surrogate brother.

Hugh and Boom, meanwhile, were travelling from Australia to America. They arrived in New York, where they stayed at the Waldorf, in the company of Robert Harcourt Byron, the tall handsome valet-cum-secretary. The passenger list says that Lord Beauchamp’s final destination was England – but this was not so. His exile seemed interminable
and the strain was telling. His striking black hair had by now turned grey.

A Handful of Dust
, the novel Evelyn was working on all this time, was published in September 1934. The title – taken from one of the avant-garde poems that Harold Acton had recited through his megaphone at Oxford, T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
– was a signal of the new seriousness of Waugh’s theme: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’

The novel’s great themes are exile and barbarianism. The twist is that the true savages are not those in the Amazon jungle but rather the selfish monsters from the world of the Bright Young Things – Brenda Last and John Beaver. The most savage moment in the novel comes not in the depth of the jungle, but in the moment of Brenda’s relief at hearing that it is her young son John Andrew who has been killed and not her lover John Beaver:

‘What is it, Jock? Tell me quickly, I’m scared. It’s nothing awful, is it?’

‘I’m afraid it is. There’s been a very serious accident.’

‘John?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dead?’

He nodded.

She sat down on a hard little Empire chair against the walls, perfectly still with her hands folded in her lap, like a small well-brought-up child introduced into a room full of adults. She said, ‘Tell me what happened. Why do you know about it first?’

‘I’ve been down at Hetton since the week-end.’

‘Hetton?’

‘Don’t you remember? John was going hunting to-day.’

She frowned, not at once taking in what he was saying. ‘John … John Andrew … I … oh, thank God …’ Then she burst into tears.

John Andrew, the precocious child who is killed, was partly modelled by Diana Cooper’s clever son, John Julius (who grew up to become the writer John Julius Norwich). The riding accident was perhaps inspired by a combination of the story about the death of the only son of ‘Bendor’
Duke of Westminster and a hunting accident involving the child of a Lygon neighbour, which Evelyn had heard about at Mad.

The old-fashioned gentleman exiled from his country home is called Tony Last. He is the last of his kind. And the creation of his story owes a profound debt to Evelyn’s knowledge of the last man to be hounded out of England: Earl Beauchamp. ‘A whole Gothic world had come to grief … there was no armour glittering through the forest glade, no embroidered feet on the greensward; the green and dappled unicorn had fled.’ Last’s sense of betrayal and dispossession is Boom’s.

Waugh’s art of composite character portrayal reached a new sophistication in this book. At a superficial level – though Waugh denied the identification, as he always did – Tony and Brenda Last have elements of a well-known high-society couple, Lord and Lady Brownlow. ‘I am so afraid that Periwinkle will think it is about him – it isn’t but bits of it are like,’ Evelyn had admitted to Maimie in a letter from Fez. Peregrine Francis Adelbert Cust, sixth Baron Brownlow (Eton, Sandhurst and the Grenadier Guards), sometimes called ‘Perry’ or ‘Winkle’, would be personal lord-in-waiting to Edward VIII at the time of the abdication crisis. He drove Mrs Simpson across France, pursued by the press, the week before the final announcement. But that was to come: at this time, he loved his ancestral home, Belton House, while his wife, Katherine, daughter of a brigadier, preferred to spend time in London. At another level, Brenda Last, with her marital infidelity, is shaped by She-Evelyn. But the profoundest and subtlest identification is that whereby Tony is fashioned out of a combination of Evelyn himself and Boom.

Hetton Abbey, Tony’s ancestral home, is manifestly Madresfield Court. The architectural resemblance is much more obvious and thoroughgoing than that between Madresfield and Brideshead Castle. If we must attach to Madresfield the dubious phrase ‘the real’ – dubious because all Waugh’s fictional people and places are subtle transformations, not direct portrayals, of ‘reality’ – then it was ‘the real Hetton’ more than ‘the real Brideshead’. Like the real Mad, the fictional Hetton was ‘entirely rebuilt in 1864 in the Gothic style’. Like Mad, it has a central clock tower and a moat. The medieval Great Hall and the dining room are described in language that could come out of a
Country Life
article about the architecture of Madresfield – the hammer beam roof festooned with red and gold flags; the lancet windows of armorial stained glass; the huge chandelier
with twenty electric bulbs to light it by night, the minstrels’ gallery. The comfortable smoking room just off the library, the shuttered drawing room, the dark inner courtyard, the cloistral passages, the chapel where daily prayers were once said: all were instantly recognisable to the Lygon girls when they read the novel. The collections of china and snuff boxes are the same; the treasures and the oil paintings, the rare books and manuscripts in the library. Evelyn even describes the fireplace in the Drawing Room of Mad, the dado rail and the plaster work. As at Mad, each bedroom has a medieval name, though these are changed so as not to make the identification too obvious. The champagne is decanted into large jugs in Hetton, just as Boom insisted on in Mad. Countless memories are woven into the texture of the narrative: autumn light filtering in through the stained-glass windows, green and gold, gules and azure on the emblazoned coats-of-arms; Brenda walking down the great staircase with the light falling on her; patches of coloured reflection, the mingling of dusk and rainbow. The description of Christmas reads like a diary account of festivities at Mad. All of this must have been very amusing for the Lygon sisters. Jokes about an ill-tempered Pekingese called Djinn were included for the special benefit of Maimie.

The novel is peppered with references to old houses being demolished to make flats, often for people like Brenda so that they can take a lover – the moral degeneracy of modern times. The desire to cover the drawing-room walls with chromium plating and to replace the priceless rugs with sheepskin carpets is a sign of the new barbarism.

When Tony, beginning to feel the heat, has a delirious vision of the Lost City in the jungle, it is Hetton that he sees: ‘It was Gothic in character, all vanes and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements, groining and tracery, pavilions and terraces, a transfigured Hetton, pennons and banners floating on the sweet breeze, everything luminous and translucent.’ As he is sucked further and further into the darkness of the Amazon, he continues to see transmutations of his lost paradisal home. The writing is partly inspired by Evelyn’s own memories of Mad, reactivated every time he wrote to the Lygon girls, on his own Amazonian adventure.

But the longer shadow is that of Lord Beauchamp: the man whose ancestors had remodelled his house in the style of English Gothic and who was now exiled in a hot climate and an alien culture thousands of miles from the gentle landscape of the Malvern Hills. In
The Stones of
Venice
, John Ruskin argued that Gothic was the true architecture because of the ‘sacrifice’ of the stonemasons in the work they put into the intricate decoration of every stone. Gothic was accordingly the model for a life of service to the greater good. Boom believed that he had lived just such a life of service to his God, his country and his family heritage. But he fell among savages, Bendor Duke of Westminster above all, and was himself sacrificed on the altar of sexual hypocrisy, then condemned to wander the earth. When Waugh created the figure of Tony Last, in exile from the petals of almond and apple blossom in the orchard of an ancestral home, in the depths of his imagination he was thinking of how Boom must have dreamed of the sights and the smells of the Madresfield that he had lost: ‘Carpet and canopy, tapestry and velvet, portcullis and bastion, waterfowl on the moat and kingcups along its margin, peacocks trailing their finery across the lawns; high overhead in a sky of sapphire and swansdown silver bells chiming in a turret of alabaster.’

^*
This sentence was suppressed from the published text in
The Letters of Evelyn Waugh
(1995).

CHAPTER 16
Fiasco in the Arctic

A fiasco very narrowly rescued from disaster.

(Evelyn Waugh)

Hughie … was a sweet, sweet man. He was the gentlest of them all, very knowledgeable, very quiet, lovely companion … Evelyn was very unfit, but enormously brave, you see, he just never gave up.

(Sir Alexander ‘Sandy’ Glen)

Evelyn had in mind that his next project would be a biography of Pope Gregory the Great. In April 1934 he wrote to Maimie Lygon telling her that he had finished
A Handful of Dust
, which he called his Good Taste (‘G.T.’) book. He told her that he had hunted – ‘a very good run and did not fall off’ – and that he was going to stay with Gabriel Herbert on the way to London. This was his first visit to Pixton, the Herbert family home near Dulverton, Somerset, and probably where Laura first properly caught his eye. He told Maimie that all three ‘tender Miss Herberts’ were at home: ‘there are so many dogs in this house and they all sit in chairs so that I have to stand all the time and that is tiring’.