Mad World (44 page)

Evelyn initially saw them as Rupert Brooke’s spiritual sons: ‘There was something of the spirit which one reads in the letters and poetry of 1914.’ He loved the house party atmosphere, though he felt on the outside and could not afford to join his fellow officers at their fine restaurants or the gaming tables. His job as liaison officer he described as really meaning ‘being on the waiting list for a job’. But Laycock liked and admired Evelyn, and Randolph Churchill became a great, if tempestuous, friend.

He wrote to Laura, convincing her that he was not ‘drinking up all your children’s money’. She was in the late stages of pregnancy. The baby, named Mary, was born on 1 December and died soon afterwards. Evelyn came to Pixton to see her: ‘Poor little girl, she was not wanted.’ His father Arthur wrote: ‘There seems to me something quite pathetic in this little star of life, which just flickered and went out. She wasn’t wanted and she did not stay.’ It was at this time that Evelyn wrote to Laura telling her he was thinking of starting a new book for his own pleasure and not for publication – ‘a kind of modern Arcadia’. This would become
Brideshead
.

In the new year of 1941, Laycock’s Commandos (two battalions, 500 men, known collectively as Layforce) sailed for Egypt. They went by the
long route around the Cape, and reached Suez in March, too late to do anything about the German invasion of North Africa. Indeed, the company had been moved around so much that the unit was nicknamed ‘Belayforce’, and graffiti appeared on the ship, which Evelyn grimly enjoyed: ‘Never in the history of human endeavour have so few been buggered about by so many.’ ‘It is funnier if you are as familiar as Randolph makes us with Winston’s speeches,’ he told Laura. He said that he had found a
Country Life
book of English country houses and almost wept.

In April, still with no sign of action, they were permitted a raid on Bardia (a Libyan coastal town). Intelligence had reported that there were 2,000 Germans stationed there, but when they got there the Germans had gone. The one German that was left patrolling the town escaped, one of their own officers was shot and a group of men lost their way and had to be left behind. It was a catalogue of ineptness and embarrassment. Evelyn met Colonel Colvin, the commanding officer, and later regretted failing to report his incompetence. Colvin was the ‘Fido Hound’ of
Officers and Gentlemen
.

In his ‘Memorandum on LAYFORCE’, Waugh remarked on the tension between the Army and the Navy: ‘No 8 Commando was boisterous, xenophobic, extravagant, imaginative, witty, with a proportion of noblemen which the Navy found disconcerting; while the Navy was jejune, dull, poor, self-conscious, sensitive of fancied insults, with the underdog’s aptitude to harbour grievances.’ The Commandos both attracted and repelled him: he was gleeful when calling them ‘Buck’s toughs’ and even ‘scum’ in his letters to Laura. He was never a mere apologist for aristocratic thugs (remember the beginning of
Decline and Fall
) and his relationship with his ‘batman’ (soldier-servant) Ralph Tanner was anything but condescending.

Tanner was interested in archaeology, and so Evelyn arranged an interview for him with the curator of the Cairo museum. The men lived together in extremely arduous circumstances, and in 1975 Tanner was interviewed by
Punch
magazine, resisting at every turn the imputation of Evelyn’s snobbery:

‘There was a rumour, wasn’t there, that [Waugh] was so unpopular he had to be protected from the other soldiers?’

‘Absolute rubbish. He fitted in very well. He was everything you’d expect an officer to be, if you were an ordinary soldier.’

‘A bit of a tyrant, you mean?’

‘Not at all.’

‘He didn’t exploit you the teeniest, weeniest little bit?’

‘I’d say he behaved as a model employer to a servant.’

‘Waugh was famous for being irascible when bored. How did you cope?’

‘He wasn’t irascible with me.’

[Tanner is finally forced to concede] ‘ – Well, yes – maybe other people did say Waugh was ‘‘a bit fond of the Honourables’’.’

‘Didn’t Waugh ever get roaring drunk with them, or something like that?’

‘No.’

‘You never had to clean up his vomit, or rescue him from a cold bath in which he had fallen in full evening dress?’

‘Never. In fact he was so considerate, I’d wait up for him with some hot water, just to return the courtesy.’

In April 1941, German troops invaded Greece and Yugoslavia, but Crete remained in British hands until May, when there began a twelve-day battle for the island. Allied troops far outnumbered the Germans, but after suffering heavy losses in the first few hours, the British, to their astonishment, were ordered to retreat. On the seventh day the Commandos reached the island as reinforcements, only to learn that the situation was both dire and shambolic.

Their orders were to oversee the evacuation and to be the last to go, ‘to embark after other fighting forces but before stragglers’. Colvin, suffering from ‘battle fatigue’, had completely lost his head and Bob Laycock had to relieve him of his duties. After five dreadful days of battle, Laycock ordered his men to fight through the rabble and embark, leaving behind hundreds of Commandos, New Zealanders and Australians.

Evelyn’s personal memorandum of this disastrous campaign is an important eyewitness account. But he also played a major part in creating the official record – and in falsifying it. As an intelligence officer and Bob Laycock’s personal assistant, he took responsibility for the battalion diary.
Bob dictated to him an entry recording that the order was given for the Commandos to evacuate the island ‘in view of the fact that all fighting forces were now in position for embarkation and that there was no enemy contact’. This was patently untrue. After the ignominious withdrawal, a rumour went round that there would be a special evacuation medal for the survivors inscribed ‘
EX CRETA
’.

To all intents and purposes it was a cover-up. Evelyn, in private, felt enormous shame and dishonour. The feelings never left him. In a letter to Coote Lygon written in 1962 he referred to ‘Laycock’s and my ignominious flight’. And to Laura he wrote of ‘my tale of shame’ and ‘my bunk from Crete’. 1962, as he noted wryly, was the twenty-first anniversary of the Cretan disaster: ‘I celebrated … without pomp.’

It was difficult for him to relinquish his hero-worship of Laycock, to recognise that the supposed model commander had committed an act of cowardice. When Evelyn came to write his war novels, his complex feelings about his tainted hero were clear. In
Officers and Gentlemen
(the second novel in the
Sword of Honour
trilogy), Guy Crouchback burns the ‘Hookforce’ diary that contains the account of Ivor’s disgraceful flight. Evelyn based two characters in this novel on Laycock: Tommy Blackhouse and Ivor St Clair. In the fictionalised account of the battle for Crete, Tommy breaks his leg and stays aboard the ship. It is Old Etonian gentleman-soldier Ivor who abandons his men and saves his own skin. Guy’s destruction of the Hookforce war diary marks his complicity in the guilt, as did Evelyn’s real life falsification of the Laycock war record. Yet he continued to support Bob Laycock publicly and even dedicated the novel to him, with the words ‘To Major General Sir Robert Laycock KCMG CG DSO, that every man in arms should wish to be’.

By putting many of the positive aspects into the character of Tommy, Evelyn hoped that the identification with Ivor would be obscured. When
Officers and Gentlemen
was published in 1955, he was horrified that his friend Ann Fleming sent him a telegram. ‘Presume Ivor Claire based Laycock dedication ironical.’ He responded angrily: ‘If you suggest such a thing anywhere it will be the end of our beautiful friendship … For Christ’s sake lay off the idea of Bob=Claire … Just shut up about Laycock, Fuck You, E. Waugh.’ Ann replied calmly: ‘Panic is foreign to your nature and you rarely use rough words. Why do you become hysterical if one attempts to identify your Officers and Gentlemen?’ Evelyn’s diary says it
all: ‘I replied that if she breathes a word of suspicion of this
cruel fact
[my italics] it will be the end of our friendship.’

This altercation over the novel wasn’t the end of his friendship with Ann Fleming in the 1950s, but the debacle in Crete in 1941 was the beginning of the end of Evelyn Waugh’s love affair with the Army. In particular, it marked the onset of his deep disillusion with the stylish, handsome and brave gentleman-soldier figure he had revered since his hero-worship of J. F. Roxburgh at Lancing. A sentence in
Officers and Gentlemen
was omitted when the novel was republished as part of the
Sword of Honour
trilogy: it refers to 31 May 1941, when he bunked from Crete, as ‘the fatal day on which Guy Crouchback was to resign an immeasurable piece of his manhood’. This was exactly what Evelyn felt and it was only to the women he loved and trusted most, his wife Laura and his old friend Coote Lygon, that he confessed his true shame.

His return to England in June 1941 after the ignominy of Crete was followed by a frustrating two-year period of inactivity. Layforce was temporarily disbanded and Evelyn returned to duty with the Royal Marines, though he was not to serve overseas for nearly three years.

On the way back from Alexandria he had written the short novel
Put Out More Flags
(‘POMF’, he called it for short). He described it to his father as ‘a minor work dashed off to occupy a tedious voyage’. He wrote to tell Randolph Churchill that he had dedicated it to him and that it was quite funny.

That autumn saw Evelyn in hot water over an essay written for American
Life
magazine, ‘Commando Raid on Bardia’. Unknown to him, the article was syndicated to the London
Evening Standard
. Evelyn suddenly found himself being presented in a news story as ‘A Bright Young Man Who is One of the Toughest of Our Commandos’. But the Commandos were supposed to be a secret outfit, and there was a question about whether he had secured the appropriate permissions clearance for publication. Evelyn claimed that he was given permission by Brendan Bracken, who later ‘backed out of his responsibility and I got reprimanded’. After this, Evelyn was told by his agent to make sure that he cleared all permissions. The article damaged his standing with the Royal Marines and his military future was irrevocably jeopardised. He did not see combat until his Yugoslavian mission in 1944.

In these intervening years, he threw himself into his writing and his friends. His sixth novel,
Put Out More Flags
, was published in March 1942 and was an immediate success, selling 18,000 copies despite wartime paper restrictions. As usual, he hit the Zeitgeist: his chronicle of the ‘Phoney War’ or the Great Bore War, ‘that strangely cosy interlude between peace and war, when there was leave every week-end and plenty to eat and drink and plenty to smoke’, touched a vein of short-term nostalgia when British fortunes were at their low point. Small and perfectly formed, it is perhaps his most underrated novel.

Characters from his previous books reappear and are shown to be affected by the war. The first half is comic, centring on bureaucratic and official ineptness at the newly created War Office and Ministry of Information, while the second half shows a new seriousness in tone as it creates a sense of how the world of the Bright Young Things had vanished. This part of the book read like a valediction to both a lost age and his own youth. Characteristically, a great house under threat plays a major part in the story. Its name, Malfrey, is somewhat evocative of Mad, his own lost paradise, though architectural parallels are not established.

A new character makes his debut: Ambrose Silk, ‘a cosmopolitan Jewish pansy’, later to be transmogrified into Anthony Blanche. Silk is elegant, part Jewish, homosexual, flamboyant, melancholic, witty in speech, and has a German lover. He is a modernist with fashionable left-wing pretensions. He is,

an old queen. A habit of dress, a tone of voice, an elegant, humorous deportment that had been admired and imitated, a swift, epicene felicity of wit, the art of dazzling and confusing those he despised – these had been his; and now they were the current exchange of comedians. There were only a few restaurants, now, which he frequented without fear of ridicule, and there he was surrounded, as though by distorting mirrors, with gross reflections and caricatures of himself.

He was, to anyone in the know, an instantly recognisable portrayal of Brian Howard. His old Oxford friend was furious when he read the book. ‘Evelyn Waugh has made an absolutely vicious attack on me in his new
novel
Put Out More Flags
. You come into it, too,’ Howard complained to his German lover, Toni.

This reaction, though understandable, misses both the enormous affection with which Evelyn represented his witty monsters such as Basil Seal and Ambrose Silk, and the serious side to his depiction of his comic villains. At Oxford, both Howard and Peter Rodd (known as Prodd, married to Nancy Mitford and the primary original for Basil) had been arresting, precious talents, and very charming. Ten years on, everyone knew that they were pretty much failures who had simply not lived up to their stupendous promise, and, worse, that they only had themselves to blame for squandering their lives.

There is also affection in the portrayal of the ‘ghastly’ working-class evacuee children, the Connollys, and admiration for their street wisdom. But there is no mercy for cowards such as Parsnip and Pimpernell (thinly disguised portraits of Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden), who run away to America to escape the war.

In the second half of the novel, we see the altered mood in the transformation of a character called Alastair Trumpington, an Old Etonian and a member of the Bullingdon in Oxford. Before the war, he lives a futile life. But on the outbreak of war he abandons his useless life and finds a sense of purpose, joining up as a private soldier: ‘He went into the ranks as a kind of penance,’ says his wife. Alastair dies in battle. Likewise, the dandy aesthete Cedric, though initially ridiculous, dies a hero, fearlessly carrying his message through enemy fire. Even irresponsible Peter Past-master and Basil Seal do their duty as soldiers. Basil tells his mistress, Angela Lyne, ‘that racket was all very well in the winter, when there wasn’t any real war. It won’t do now. There’s only one serious occupation for a chap now, that’s killing Germans. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy it.’ Waugh’s own transformation by the war and his reaction to the social elite among the Commandos help to shape the pattern of the book, but there is also a profound sense in which Trumpington is his embodiment of what he imagines Hugh Lygon would have become, had he lived.