Mad World (47 page)
Authors: Paula Byrne
Evelyn was then posted to Dubrovnik. His role was to serve as intermediary between the Partisans and the Allies, but the Partisans, allied with the Soviet Union, were increasingly hostile to the British, and to Waugh especially. He responded by helping the townspeople (many of whom were desperate to escape the coming communist regime) with their requests for help and food: ‘Looking back on the last few days I find that everything I have done, which is not much, has been benevolent – giving jobs to the needy, food to the hungry, arranging to get a Canadian moved towards Canada, helping a Dominican priest swap wine for flour. There are few in the Army can say this.’ He was also collecting material on religious conditions for his report ‘Church and State in Liberated Croatia’.
On Christmas Day 1944 he wrote to Coote, telling her that he had had a pleasant Christmas ‘in unbroken solitude, which next to Laura’s company and that of the few friends I can count on the toes of ones foot, is what I should have chosen’. He described his surroundings as tolerable and apologised for his behaviour at their last meeting. He also told her how Christmas made him think a lot about Madresfield:
Mr H and the Capt and the handsome presents Blondie made us give them, and Jessel’s boy’s foie gras and the time we went to the top of the noble line after dinner and someone gave the late Maj Duggan a push and he could not stop running until he reached the gates of St James girls school and you and me and Hamish popping into Lord Beauchamps Home for Impotent Clergymen. Well well never again.
He sat for a bust in support of a local artist: ‘it will be the next best thing to having myself stuffed’. And he arranged for fifty sets of proofs of
Brideshead
to be sent as Christmas presents to his friends. He waited anxiously to hear what they thought about his magnum opus. Laura was requested to keep all thank-you letters in a safe place and to copy out the most interesting sentences for him.
It was to his fellow novelist Nancy Mitford that he turned to discuss his book. She ‘got the joke’ about everything and saw the point of the central relationships: ‘so true to life being in love with an entire family’. He begged her: ‘Please tell me what everyone says behind my back.’ He was anxious because the book was such a departure from all his previous novels, yet he felt in his heart that it was his most important book. Financially, it was to be in that it became his first bestseller in America. He was always grateful for that, but he later changed his mind about the book’s merits, thinking it too sentimental and seeing it as a reaction to wartime deprivation.
Nancy also said: ‘I’m so glad you are nice about Brian this time.’ Along with all Waugh’s friends, she had seen cruelty in his portrayal of Brian Howard as Ambrose Silk in
Put Out More Flags
. But, as Evelyn confirmed, Anthony Blanche was a composite of Brian and Harold Acton. Harold was very upset by the portrayal. The general consensus among those in the know was that it was a clever idea to combine the two Eton boys who had offered an inseparable embodiment of the Oxford Aesthete.
He asked Nancy to continue to ‘keep your ear to the ground and report what they say. For the first time since 1928, I am eager about a book.’ He was less pleased with Laura, who was too lazy to read it: ‘What do you think of the book? … Can you not see how it disappoints me that the book which I regard as my first important one, and have dedicated to you, should have no comment except that Eddie is pleased with it.’
He had to be content with the approval of his literary friends, all of whom believed
Brideshead
to be a masterpiece. He was delighted with Nancy’s next two ‘splendid letters. What a bob’s worth.’ She had written to tell him that many of their friends thought it was ‘
subtle clever
Catholic propaganda’. But this was the bit that delighted him:
Now about what people think:
Raymond
[Mortimer]: Great English classic.
Cyril
[Connolly]: Brilliant where the narrative is straightforward. Doesn’t care for the ‘purple passages’ i.e. deathbed of Lord M. Thinks you go too much to White’s. But found it impossible to put down (no wonder).
Osbert
[Lancaster]: Jealous, doesn’t like talking about it. ‘I’m devoted to Evelyn – are you?’
Maurice
[Bowra]: Showing off to Cyril about how you don’t always hit the right word or some nonsense but obviously much impressed and thinks the Oxford part perfect.
SW7 (European royal quarter
) [i.e. Maimie]: Heaven, darling.
Diana Abdy
: Like me and Raymond, no fault to find.
Lady Chetwode
: Terribly dangerous propaganda. Brilliant.
General view
: It is the Lygon family. Too much Catholic stuff.
The response of the Lygon girls was what he most wanted and feared. Maimie’s ‘Heaven, darling’ was encouraging, but it wasn’t until the end of January that he heard from her in person. She did not reveal much: ‘Darling Bo. Your book is very very interesting and is the talk of all the sages who think it is wonderful … Darling, thank you very very much for sending it.’ Some weeks later Coote was a little more forthcoming: ‘I read it once at a furious pace, and now more slowly, and like it very much, Sebastian gives me many pangs.’
Most novels are confessions in disguise; most ‘Confessions’ … are novels in disguise.
(Harold Acton)
I reserve the right to deal with the kind of people I know best.
(Evelyn Waugh)
On 25 April 1945 the politician and inveterate gossip ‘Chips’ Channon wrote in his diary: ‘I am reading an advance copy of Evelyn Waugh’s new novel ‘‘Brideshead Revisited’’. It is obvious that the mis-en-scène is Madresfield, and the hero Hugh Lygon. In fact, all the Beauchamp family figure in it.’
To Channon and everyone else in the know, it was clear that the exiled Lord Marchmain was a version of Boom and Lady Marchmain of the Countess Beauchamp, that Sebastian was Hugh, Bridey was Elmley, Julia Maimie and Cordelia Coote. And yet – or
because
the identification was so obvious – Waugh’s epigraph to the book read: ‘I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.’
*
This is the paradox of
Brideshead
.
In 1947, Evelyn wrote a memo to MGM in Hollywood regarding a proposed film adaptation of the novel. It clarifies the fundamental point for those ‘Californian savages’: ‘the theme is theological’. The particular theological point on which the book turns is ‘in no sense abstruse and is based on principles that have for nearly 2,000 years been understood by millions of simple people, and are still so understood’. In short, ‘the novel deals with what is theologically termed ‘‘the operation of grace’’, that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to himself’.
‘Too much Catholic stuff’ was the general view of his friends and has remained the view of many of his critics. The novel is about the hero Charles Ryder’s conversion to Catholicism and the ‘twitch upon the thread’ that reels in Sebastian and Julia, lapsed Catholics who have rebelled against their mother and their religion, but who are in the end powerless to resist God’s grace. As Evelyn’s Hollywood memo made clear, ‘the Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control on human souls which have once been part of her’. Though Charles and Julia must renounce one another, each is the catalyst for the other’s spiritual redemption: ‘The physical dissolution of the house of Brideshead has in fact been a spiritual regeneration.’
Many ordinary readers ignore the theological and spiritual element, so caught up are they by the glamour of the Flytes and the glorious locations – Oxford, Venice, Paris, Morocco, Mayfair and the stately home of Brideshead Castle – just as Charles is entranced by all the splendour that Brideshead and the Marchmain family represent. This distraction of surface is deliberate. But the clues are planted in the narrative all the way through from the prologue, when Hooper, visiting the Arts and Crafts R.C. chapel at Brideshead, the great house that has been requisitioned as army barracks, says to Ryder ‘More in your line than mine’, through to the all-important scene at Lord Marchmain’s deathbed when atheist Charles prays for a miracle and witnesses ‘God’s grace’. The novel urges you to read it backwards.
Brideshead
mattered so much to Evelyn because he put so much of himself into it: his distance from his father, his sentimental education at Oxford, his early love affairs, his initiation into the aristocratic world of the Lygons, his conversion to Roman Catholicism, his abortive love affair with the Army. Like his creator, Charles Ryder is born in October 1903
and wants to be a painter; like his creator, he hails from a minor public school and is an atheist. All the things that mattered most to Evelyn in the years up until the end of the Second World War went into the novel, even though many years later (now bitter and disillusioned) he grew rather ashamed of its excesses, its sentimentalism and richly ornate language. At the time he believed that it was his great work and that it would go on being read for many years to come.
‘General View: It is the Lygons’ was the other side of the coin. Despite his protestations to Coote in Bari that it isn’t really Boom or Hughie, or Mad, and despite the prefatory author’s disclaimer, the Lygons suffuse the book. The portrayal of their ancestral home with its Arts and Crafts chapel, their painful domestic situation, their startling beauty (like faces carved out of Aztec stone), the father as a disgraced Liberal politician who is now a social pariah exiled in Italy, the young people left to run wild in the great house, the pious mother, the alcoholic second son drifting from failure to failure, the lovely daughter who becomes a society beauty in an unhappy marriage, the cold and pompous heir to Brideshead unable to produce an heir himself, the plain and tender-hearted youngest daughter. The Lygons inspired all of these elements and more.
In his war trilogy, Evelyn satirises
Brideshead Revisited
by having one of his characters, Corporal Ludovic, spend his war writing an impossibly baroque novel that is described as ‘a very gorgeous, almost gaudy, tale of romance and high drama … The plot was Shakespearian in its elaborate improbability. The dialogue could not have issued from human lips, the scenes of passion were capable of bringing a blush to readers of either sex and any age … [it was a book] which could turn from the drab alleys of the thirties into the odorous gardens of a recent past transformed and illuminated by disordered memory and imagination.’ But the extra joke here, as he pokes fun at his own novel’s perceived weaknesses, is that the elaborately improbable Shakespearean plot of
Brideshead
was a watered-down version of the real Lygon story. How much more improbable the plot would have been if Evelyn had retained the homosexual element instead of inventing the more socially acceptable figure of Lord Marchmain’s exotic mistress, Cara.
Nancy Mitford, who loved the book, wondered how all the glamorous Flytes could fall in love with such a ‘dim’ character as Charles Ryder. Evelyn half agreed: ‘Yes, I can see how you think Charles is dim, but then
he’s telling the story.’ He was telling his own story and he knew that the Lygons had indeed fallen in love with him, as he had with them.
Charles has two love affairs, first with Oxford/Sebastian, and later with Brideshead/Julia. For many of his readers the first is much the more convincing. Evelyn sensed this himself, anxiously asking Nancy: ‘The crucial question is: does Julia’s love for [Charles] seem real or is he so dim that it falls flat; if the latter the book fails plainly.’
The problem is Julia, who, as Waugh’s first biographer Christopher Sykes says, is ‘dead as mutton’. Sykes believed that this was because Julia did not have a real life model; she was no more than a waxwork. The reality is a little more complicated: she did have a partial model in Maimie, but Evelyn’s difficulty was that his platonic and playful relationship with her did not have the dramatic and emotional potency to match his translation of Boom and Hugh into Lord Marchmain and Sebastian.
Oxford Revisited
Beware of the Anglo-Catholics – they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents.
(Cousin Jasper’s advice on going up to Oxford)
The Oxford part is especially haunting and beautifully written, to such an extent that Evelyn worried (to Nancy) that he had kept lapsing into verse. As befits the title of Book One, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, these chapters are suffused with a glow of sunlight on grey-golden stone, flowering chestnuts, young men on bicycles, light falling over the spires, grassy meadows, dappled streams, men in cricket whites, green spaces, punting and strawberries. Small wonder that many readers love the Oxford part of the novel best. Maurice Bowra, the quintessential don, thought the Oxford part ‘perfect’, while Harold Acton, Roger Fulford and Christopher Sykes loved the first third of the novel and thought that there was a falling off once Sebastian has left the story. Acton said that the Oxford part of the novel was ‘the most successful evocation of the period I know’.
It is a testimony to how much Evelyn was loved by his friends that so few took offence when he used them as copy for his novels. Harold Acton
loyally defended the novel’s brilliance in public, but privately was hurt by Evelyn’s depiction of him in the sinister Anthony Blanche. Evelyn had hoped to get round the problem by combining the characters of Brian Howard and Harold Acton, a neat device since the two men who revolutionised Oxford in the twenties were so close as to be indistinguishable in the eyes of their friends – or at least their enemies. Evelyn told his friends that Blanche was one-third Acton and two-thirds Howard. He recognised that people mistakenly assumed the character was pure Harold (‘who is a much sweeter and saner man’).