Mad World (39 page)

Evelyn had turned against Elmley. What had happened to the champagne-swilling man in the purple suit, carousing in the Hypocrites’ Club and making irreverent films with Evelyn Waugh at his home in Underhill? He had grown pompous and stiff. He found it very hard to
get along with people and was still very angry with his father. In later life, perhaps fittingly for a man who met his wife on a train, Elmley’s greatest pleasure as a peer of the realm came from sitting on House of Lords committees to do with the railways.

Evelyn was hard at work on Campion, even refusing invitations to Maimie’s cocktail parties as he pushed towards the end. He was still depressed about his relationship with Laura, but hoped that the biography of one of England’s greatest Catholic martyrs would help to convince her and her family that, notwithstanding the divorce, he was a good Catholic writer who was worthy of her.

He then made plans for a return trip to Abyssinia and secured an assignment for the
Daily Mail
, expenses paid, as war correspondent reporting on Mussolini’s invasion. Diana Cooper had put in a good word on his behalf with Lord Rothermere – as Julia Stitch does with Lord Copper of the
Daily Beast
on behalf of William Boot (though the wrong William Boot, with hilarious consequences) in the great comic novel that came out of the trip,
Scoop
. Diana was delighted to have inspired the character of Mrs Stitch.

Arthur Waugh’s diary records two visits that Evelyn had from Oxford friends before he left for Abyssinia. The first was probably Joyce Gill, whom Evelyn had known since his college days (she had been renowned in Oxford for dressing as a boy). Despite being desperately in love with Laura, Evelyn asked Joyce to leave her husband and go with him to Abyssinia. She later told one of her daughters that choosing not to go had been one of the most painful decisions of her life. She was in love with Evelyn. A letter written to him after the birth of his first child shows the extent to which he could induce strong passion in others: ‘I think of you all the time when I am making love, until the word and Evelyn are almost synonymous! … I have only to remember your eyes – your mouth and my heart aches as if it were a stone cut by a diamond.’

The other person he saw was Hugh Lygon, who arrived by car on 27 July and took him down to Madresfield for a couple of days. Once again, the house would represent the last of England as he set off for foreign parts.

En route to Abyssinia, Evelyn visited Rome to try and move along his annulment. He wrote to Maimie from the Grande Hotel de Russie,
possibly the most luxurious establishment in the city (the
Daily Mail
expense account was being well used): ‘Now I must go to Naples and then sail to Africa. I do not want to go. Not at all. I cry a great deal on account of not seeing LAURA.’ From Addis Ababa he wrote love letters to Laura: ‘The thing I think about most is your eyelashes making a noise like a bat on a pillow.’ He told Laura how unpopular he was with the authorities in Abyssinia, that his name was mud at the legation ‘because of a novel I wrote which they think was about them (it wasn’t)’. His friend Patrick Balfour, who was representing the
Evening Standard
, told his mother: ‘I rather dread his arrival as his name is mud here since
Black Mischief
and half the European population is out for his blood.’ Sir Sidney Barton and his family at the British legation had been deeply offended by Evelyn’s cruel caricature of them as the Courtenays in ‘Blackers’. Sir Sidney’s daughter Esmé, who was convinced that she was the model for the promiscuous Prudence, was so angry with him that when she bumped into him at one of the town’s three nightclubs, the Perroquet, she threw a glass of champagne in his face.

Once again it was ‘wait wait wait wait’. Evelyn kept himself going by writing ribald letters to his women friends back home and gathering material for his next comic novel. He hinted to Maimie that he would love another Christmas invitation to Mad. In fact he was in Jerusalem for Christmas, first at a Franciscan monastery and then moving to a hotel for Christmas Day. He paid a visit to Bethlehem: ‘It was decent to have Christmas without the Hitlerite adjuncts of yule logs and reindeer and Santa Claus and conifers,’ he wrote to Katharine Asquith, ‘but I was appalled to discover that we have no altar at all in the Basilica at Bethlehem … I don’t really want to return to Europe until I know one way or another about my annulment and can arrange things accordingly.’

CHAPTER 18
A Year of Departures

Evelyn Waugh arrived back in England from Abyssinia in January 1936. This was a very significant year for him and the Lygon family. His biography of Edmund Campion won the country’s most distinguished literary award, the Hawthornden Prize, and in July his long wait for news from Rome was over. It was also a year heralded by the death of King George V on 20 January. His last words were reportedly ‘bugger Bognor’, a sentiment which Evelyn would have heartily echoed in view of the miserable time he had spent there working on his travel book.

Lord Beauchamp was still living his peripatetic existence, writing to Coote of excursions from Sydney to Tahiti and to Wellington in New Zealand. In February 1936 he was aboard the SS
New Holland
. Coote had written with news of Christmas and the Hunt Ball. Her father wrote that he had sent her a birthday telegram but that it had been misdelivered to Malvern, Australia. In this letter he mentioned the names of his two travelling companions: ‘Byron and I go straight to some mountain hotel in Java while David inspects Bali and then we motor along to Batavia.’ He was still the tourist even in his exile. ‘Byron’, identified by his surname, was the tall and handsome valet. ‘David’, always referred to by his first name, had taken the position of Beauchamp’s secretary. They would stay together for the rest of his life.

On landing in Europe, Beauchamp stayed in Paris. His former secretary, the Liberal politician Robert Bernays, stayed with him and reported that
‘he was still vainly hoping that with the change of monarchs he will be allowed to return’ to England. This suggests that he was fully aware that it had been King George V as much as the Duke of Westminster who had been his nemesis. The new King, with his own unorthodox sexual arrangements and his closeness to Prince Georgie, might take a more relaxed view of the exile.

Evelyn was back at Madresfield in February. He then borrowed a remote place in Shropshire to bang out his ‘serious war book’, for which he had no appetite. It was published under the punning title
Waugh in Abyssinia
. He told a correspondent: ‘If the book bores its readers half as much as it is boring for me to write it will create a record in low sales.’ Much more importantly, during this time, spring 1936, he sent a quietly honest letter to Laura asking her to marry him: ‘I can’t advise you in my favour because it would be beastly for you, but think about how nice it would be for me.’ He went on to give a typically accurate self-portrait: ‘I am restless and moody and misanthropic and lazy and have no money except what I can earn and if I got ill you would starve … Also there is always a fair chance that there will be another bigger economic crash in which case if you had married a nobleman with a great house you might find yourself starving, while I am very clever and could probably earn a living of some sort somewhere.’ He also told her that he had a small family: ‘You would not find yourself involved in a large family and all their rows … All of these are very small advantages compared with the awfulness of my character.’

From Shropshire he also wrote Maimie some letters entirely in (cod) French, in honour of her being on the continent with her father. As well as giving the information that he had won ‘un cadeau’ for ‘le livre de bon gout,
Edmund Campion
’ and that ‘M. Jackson a coupé un ‘‘arser’’ dans les cours de chevaux à Worcester’, he asked about her father, expressing the hope that he found himself well ‘avec tous ses aimants’ (‘with all his lovers’). Maimie travelled on from Paris to Venice where Boom had taken a palazzo for the summer.

The flame-haired mistress of the last Kaiser of Germany leased Lord Beauchamp the
piano nobile
of the Palazzo Morosini on the Grand Canal, a stone’s throw from the Rialto. Inside, the palace was peaceful, with only the sound of water lapping against stone, but outside was a hive
of activity as cargo boats unloaded fish and vegetables for the nearby markets.

Venice had long been known for its tolerant attitudes towards sex. And it was a city that had always attracted writers, painters and exiles. All about this city of domes and bell-towers lurk the shadows of famous men. Casanova was born in Venice; Wagner wrote the gloriously erotic second act of
Tristan
there; Robert Browning died in the house of the Doge; Byron’s lover threw herself from the balcony of the Palazzo Mocenigo.

Foreigners had always rented Venetian palaces for the season. For Virginia Woolf, the watery city was ‘the playground of all that was gay, mysterious and irresponsible’. In the early part of the twentieth century, Baron Corvo, the noted homosexual ex-priest and writer, set himself up in a palazzo on the Grand Canal, where he conducted numerous love affairs with the beautiful young gondoliers who moonlighted as rent-boys servicing rich English lords. Beauchamp knew Baron Corvo’s work from
The Yellow Book
.

Corvo’s novel,
The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole: A Venetian Romance
, published in 1934, was a thinly veiled homosexual romance involving an English man and a boy-girl child called Zilda. He also wrote
The Venice Letters
, detailing his uninhibited real life sexual adventures with teenage Venetian male prostitutes. In lurid detail, Corvo described his exploits with stevedores called Piero, Gildo, Carlo and Zildo and with the sixteen-year-old Amadeo Amadei, who looked as if he came out of a Renaissance painting – ‘young, muscular, splendidly strong, big black eyes, rosy face, round black head, scented like an angel’.

Amadeo is in search of an English lord to supplement his paltry wage, as are scores of his friends, who have lost custom to the university boys from Padua. At a Venetian trattoria he shows the baron what he has to offer by stripping off his clothes: ‘he was just one brilliant rosy series of muscles, smooth as satin … he crossed his ankles, ground his thighs together … and stiffened into the most inviting mass of fresh meat conceivable, laughing in my face as he made his offering of lively flesh. And the next instance he was up, his trousers buttoned, his shirt tucked in and his cloak folded around him.’ When the baron tells him that he is not rich, Amadeo begs him to recommend him to other rich English nobles. He will do anything for his patron – full anal sex is on offer and a lurid description ensues. Amadeo tells Corvo that many of
his friends model for foreign painters and offer sexual services as an added extra. Baron Corvo knows that he must act immediately. ‘Amadeo is ripe, just in his prime … he’ll be like this till Spring … then some great fat slow cow of a girl will just open herself wide, and lie quite still and drain him dry.’ Then his bloom will be gone; ‘he’ll get hard and hairy’ and he will be ‘just the ordinary stevedore to be found by scores on the quay’.

There is no way of knowing whether Lord Beauchamp availed himself of the services of such stevedores and gondoliers. His secretary, David Smyth, and the aptly named valet, Byron, may have sufficed to fulfil his needs by this time in his life. But he would have enjoyed looking at the dancing, prancing stevedores unloading their cargo outside his palazzo, just as he loved looking at the young Australian men sunning themselves on Bondi Beach.

In
Brideshead
, just after describing Lord Marchmain as a Byronic voluptuary, Anthony Blanche alludes to the gondolier at the Marchmain palazzo: ‘once I passed them and I caught the eye of the Fogliere gondolier, whom, of course, I knew, and, my dear, he gave me
such
a wink’. Waugh obviously knew all about the Venetian homosexual underworld.

From his palazzo, Lord Beauchamp heard the news that his eldest son had got married. There was no question of his attending. The couple were married on 16 June at St Clements Dane, a small Christopher Wren church on the Strand. The bride’s dress was by Maggy Rouff, who designed gowns for silver screen legends such as Greta Garbo. Rouff was known for evening dresses that clung close to the body and were sewn with airy, slanting tiers of ruffles. For the wedding, Mona wore a gown of cream lace with a gold embroidered floral pattern and a fashionable cream cap trimmed with white flowers. She carried orchids.

The wedding was one of the most glittering society occasions of 1936. Guests included Beauchamp’s old political master, Lloyd George. Evelyn was there; it was shortly before he received the Hawthornden Prize. The Countess Beauchamp attended the wedding and Hugh was his brother’s best man. This was one of the few times after 1931 when the Lygons saw their mother.

The man conspicuous by his absence was, of course, Lord Beauchamp. He wrote to Coote to beg for news. Never had he felt his isolation more. David Smyth, who had become a trusted figure, almost a member of the
family, had been invited to the wedding. He had now returned to Venice: ‘David is safely back and has given news of the wedding … Did you give a dinner that night. Who came? Was Dickie asked? What besides miniatures (by whom?) did your mother give? I hear her memory is getting worse.’

The wedding reception was held at Halkyn House and then the couple went to Vienna and Budapest for their honeymoon. On a later occasion they went to see Boom. Mona vividly recalled the first time she met her father-in-law: ‘I liked him very very much. A charming man. He had a flat in Paris and we stayed with him.’ She remembered that he would send her a little present every morning on her tea tray. Her husband, she said, was ‘not kind to his father. He never answered his letters.’ According to her own account (which may of course be self-serving), it was only her intervention that brought them together. Mona knew that her father-in-law was not a happy man and knew that it was to do with his sexuality, though she had a somewhat simple-minded view of his homosexuality: ‘I don’t think he was very happy. He was really bisexual and if he’d had a very sexy wife he might not have been homosexual.’ Mona was not particularly enamoured of the countess, whom she described as ‘very very dull’, though granting that she must have been very pretty when she was young. She acknowledged that the countess was very kind to her – ‘nothing wrong there’. She never met the Duke of Westminster, but took the view that, ‘He was pretty awful. It was jealousy. My father-in-law had so many high offices … and Westminster had nothing. He had money but no office.’ She did meet Evelyn, whom she remembered as ‘a great friend of my sisters-in-law’.