Mad World (50 page)

A year later, Evelyn wrote a favourable review of Compton Mackenzie’s novel
Thin Ice
, applauding it for taking as its theme a subject that he says had been unduly neglected in English literature, ‘that of the homosexual male’. Evelyn bemoaned the fact that most homosexual writers falsified and transposed their material by heterosexualising their material (hardly surprising in view of the law of the land prior to the Wolfenden Report of 1957). Evelyn went on to argue that ‘normality’ – a word which he insisted on placing between inverted commas – is ‘certainly an almost meaningless expression’: ‘The absolute norm is an abstract from which all men vary in greater or less degree … the vagaries of human lust are fully catalogued … we have become less xenophobic in condemning sexual eccentricity … it is [Compton Mackenzie’s] intention to utter a temperate and sage call to order.’

He greatly admired the novel, which takes as its theme a brilliant, young and well-born politician named Henry Fortescue who is adored by women and is described as a ‘future Prime Minister’. He is also homosexual. Afraid to ruin his career, Fortescue exercises self-control in regard of his sexual appetites, but his political career fails for other reasons. Beset by his political failures, he throws caution to the wind and becomes ‘first indulgent and then reckless’ in his ‘lawless pleasures’. He embraces a seedy underworld of male prostitution: ‘It is this aspect of lawlessness, with the concomitant of blackmail, which characterises the life of the homosexual.’ Evelyn was aware that the cook at Madresfield
had tried to blackmail Lord Beauchamp and saw at first hand his rootless life.

Evelyn admired a scene in
Thin Ice
in which the politician is arrested in a gay bar, but then released by a merciful policeman, especially as it was based on a real incident that was common gossip during the latter stages of the war. ‘It is delightful to see this highly diverting anecdote, which was unlikely to find its way into the protagonist’s reminiscences, so admirably preserved for posterity.’ The anecdote in question involved Evelyn’s old school friend, the politician and journalist Tom Driberg. He was arrested for fellating a Norwegian sailor in an air-raid shelter, but released on the way to the station when the policeman discovered that Driberg was the author of the ‘William Hickey’ column in the
Daily Express
, of which he happened to be a great admirer. But in reading
Thin Ice
, Evelyn could not have avoided thinking about how Lord Beauchamp’s increasing sexual recklessness ruined his political career. The appealing thing about Mackenzie’s novel was its reversal of the pattern: ‘a man whose moral character is ruined by political failure’.

Evelyn may have joked about ‘buggers’ and ‘pansies’ in his letters, but he was irritated by an American play about homosexuals which showed them in a poor light: ‘they all commit suicide’ he complained to Nancy Mitford; ‘The idea of a happy pansy is incomprehensible to them.’ In his own way, Sebastian is entirely happy with the sponger Kurt: ‘It’s funny, I couldn’t get on without him, you know,’ he tells Charles in Morocco, ‘it’s rather a pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself.’

In
Brideshead
Waugh paid tribute to his formative homosexual affairs, and acknowledged the happiness they had brought. Despite the ‘grave sins’ committed at Oxford, ‘there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence’. In the face of cousin Jasper’s ‘grand remonstrance’ (based on a similar confrontation with his brother Alec), Charles has no regrets: ‘Looking back, now after twenty years, there is little I would have left undone or done otherwise. I could match my cousin Jasper’s game-cock maturity with a sturdier fowl … I could tell him too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.’ That lesson of the novel was what led Henry Yorke, who did not indulge in ‘Romanticism’ whilst at Oxford, to thank Evelyn for his personal copy of
Brideshead
with the wistful words ‘I wish
I had been in love at Oxford when I was up. I see now what I have missed.’

‘So true to life being in love with an entire family’

There was that slight, inherited stain upon her brightness … that unfitted her for the highest honours.

(
Brideshead Revisited
, regarding Julia Flyte)

Nancy Mitford’s reaction in her letter to Evelyn in Yugoslavia came to the heart of the novel. The story is that of the Golders Green boy who wrote it, lonely within his own family, so susceptible to falling in love with entire families: first the Fleming family, then the brotherhood of the Hypocrites, then the Plunket Greenes, and at last the enchantingly glamorous Lygons.

The Lygon sisters could not have failed to pick up on numerous specific details. The particular quality of the family’s beauty, with its underlying sadness, resonates throughout. Blanche describes Bridey as having a face that looked ‘as though an Aztec sculptor had attempted a portrait of Sebastian’. This is a brilliant description of Elmley, who nearly always looked so much more solemn than Hugh. Charles agrees with Blanche, but also sees that Bridey’s ‘smile, when it rarely came, was as lovely as theirs’ – though Evelyn had turned against Elmley, he still remembered their good times among the Hypocrites.

Lady Julia, like Maimie, has ‘A face of flawless Florentine quattrocento beauty’, but with an air of ‘Renaissance tragedy’. Cordelia has ‘the unmistakable family characteristics, but had them ill-arranged in a frank and chubby plainness’. As compensation, ‘all the family charm is in her smile’. This is the plump but smiling Coote, to a tee.

Elmley’s response to the novel, if he read it, is not recorded. His wife, Mona the Dane, is cruelly portrayed as the suburban Beryl Muspratt. The transformation of Elmley himself into Lord Brideshead (‘Bridey’) is not exactly flattering either. To those in the know, the identification becomes clear from the moment that Bridey is described as a Magdalen man. In Blanche’s eyes, he is ‘a learned bigot, a ceremonious barbarian, a snowbound lama’. When Bridey marries a naval widow with children who is
some years older than him, Julia remarks caustically: ‘I’ll tell you one thing, she’s lied to Bridey about her age. She’s a good forty-five. I don’t see her providing an heir.’ Beryl’s background is clearly a parody of Mona’s inflated claims of her own naval connections: ‘I imagine she’s been used to bossing things rather in naval circles, with flag-lieutenants trotting round and young officers on-the-make sucking up to her.’

Elmley, whom Evelyn increasingly despised, is depicted in the novel as a repressed, aimless waste of time, though with the redeeming feature that his voice has ‘a gravity and restraint’ that in anyone else would have sounded pompous, but in him sounds ‘unassumed and unselfconscious’. ‘Bridey was a mystery,’ muses Charles Ryder, ‘a creature from the underground; a hard-snouted, burrowing, hibernating animal who shunned the light. He had been completely without action in all his years of adult life … at Brideshead he performed all unavoidable local duties, bringing with him to platform and fete and committee room his own thin mist of clumsiness and aloofness.’ He lacks all the charm and charisma of his younger brother, Sebastian, and is deficient in social graces: ‘emanating little magnetic pools of social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarrassment about himself in which he floated with log-like calm’.

Bridey and his wife visit Lord Marchmain when they go abroad on their honeymoon, paralleling Elmley and Mona’s visit to Boom in Paris. Lord Marchmain dislikes Beryl: ‘She had no doubt heard of me as a man of irregular life. I can only describe her manner to me as roguish. A naughty old man, that’s what she thought I was. I suppose she had met naughty old admirals and knew how they should be humoured.’ Other than the reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, this is as close as we get to any hint of Boom’s homosexual proclivities in the portrayal of Lord Marchmain.

The Flyte girls feel ousted from Brideshead, as did the Lygons, who left Madresfield after their brother’s marriage. The good-natured Coote was revealingly and uncharacteristically acerbic when in her letter to Evelyn of 1956 she compared Elmley and Mona to Jane Austen’s Mr and Mrs John Dashwood, adding: ‘I often think of sending them an annotated copy.’ One can readily imagine the annotations to the sequence in which the John Dashwoods viciously disinherit the three lovely sisters and force them out of their beloved family home.

Coote was discreetly silent on the subject of her reaction to the youngest Flyte daughter, Cordelia. The character’s name is that of the youngest and most beloved daughter of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the one on whom he pins his hopes of being looked after in exile. Coote’s loyal correspondence with Boom was truly Cordelia-like. She was at Madresfield that first time Maimie brought Evelyn to the house in October 1931. Years later, she remembered ‘running out over the bridge in the starlight when she [Maimie] arrived and seeing this unknown and unexpected figure emerging from the car – it was Evelyn’. Charles Ryder’s first sight of Cordelia is his memory of this moment: she is a lively and engaging child, but without ‘the promise of Julia’s full
quattrocento
loveliness’. Later, Charles is shocked by how life’s circumstances have changed her: Cordelia, like Coote, goes abroad for the war, Coote to Italy, she to Spain.

It was odd, I thought, how the same ingredients, differently dispensed, could produce Brideshead, Sebastian, Julia and her. She was unmistakably their sister, without any of Julia’s or Sebastian’s grace, without Brideshead’s gravity. She seemed brisk and matter-of-fact … hard living had roughened her … she straddled a little as she sat by the fire and when she said ‘It’s wonderful to be home,’ it sounded to my ears like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket.

This is a harsh description, but Charles comes to see her inner beauty. Cordelia bluntly asks him whether he is disappointed in how she has turned out: ‘Did you think, ‘‘Poor Cordelia, such an engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works’’? Did you think ‘‘thwarted’’?’ Charles replied that he did, but now does not, so much: ‘she too had a beauty of her own’.

Lady Julia owes something to Olivia Plunket Greene, who was in love with religion, but she also owes much to Baby Jungman and Maimie Lygon: her beauty, her glamour, her spidery body, her way of talking, her flapper slang. Above all, Julia has a ‘magical sadness’ that draws Charles to her. Like Maimie, she graces the fashionable columns of the newspapers, is supremely elegant, well-dressed, wearing cloche hats and carrying her Pekingese, driving her motor car. She has none of the pomposity of Bridey, and all the ease and unaffectedness of Sebastian. In his various
revisions of the novel, Waugh changed Julia’s hair colour from dark to Maimie’s gold, and then back to dark. Children and dogs adore her, as they adored Maimie. And she does not make the marriage that is expected of her.

The most remarkable detail suggesting that Evelyn was thinking of Maimie when he created the character of Julia Flyte is based on a piece of very private knowledge. Julia is described as outshining all the girls of her age. She is an obvious candidate for an answer to the question that preoccupies all the ladies in high society: ‘Whom would the young princes marry? … They could not hope for purer lineage or a more gracious presence than Julia’s; but there was this faint shadow on her that unfitted her for the highest honours.’ That shadow is ‘the scandal of her father’. The sequence is clearly based on Evelyn’s knowledge of the reason why the affair between Maimie and Prince George did not lead to marriage.
^*

Waugh’s Hollywood memo said that when Charles first meets Julia ‘she has the world at her feet’. Maimie had the world at her feet, but, as with Julia, her father’s disgrace ensures that she is ostracised by society. Julia says: ‘I’ve grown up with one family skeleton, you know – papa. Not to be talked of in front of the servants, not to be talked of in front of us when we were children.’

Waugh’s memo emphasised that Charles Ryder’s love for Sebastian is in part a foreshadowing of his love for Julia. When Julia asks Charles why he married the awful Celia, he says:

‘Loneliness, missing Sebastian.’

‘You loved him, didn’t you?’

‘Oh yes. He was the forerunner.’

Julia understood.

Later he repeats that Sebastian was the forerunner: ‘I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was the Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian days.’ The idea of the forerunner, of a love for the brother and the sister that is somehow the same, is a brilliant device on Waugh’s part: it allows him to express the idea that
what he is really in love with is the family, not any one member of it, and at the same time it makes
Brideshead
into one of the great expressions of what might be called the bisexual imagination.

Nevertheless, few readers have felt as compelled by the character of Julia as by that of Sebastian, or indeed feel convinced by the passion between Charles and Julia. Whilst it is unfair to describe her as ‘dead as mutton’, as Christopher Sykes did, there is a strong sense that the passion between Charles and Sebastian is better executed. For example, Charles’s lingering gaze on Sebastian is intensely erotic: ‘We lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile … the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.’ Charles is mesmerised by his mouth, ‘watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches’. But there is much less eroticism when the image is repeated later in the story: when Charles lights Julia a cigarette, he takes it from his mouth to hers, revealing a ‘thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me’.

Late in life, Maimie laughingly dismissed any identification of herself with Julia, on the grounds that she and Evelyn were friends, not lovers: ‘Evelyn was the last person I’d have fallen in love with: ours was just a great friendship. I would confide all my love affairs to him and he would confide all his to me.’ The irony is that the relationship between Charles and Julia would have been more successfully portrayed if it had been closer to that in real life between Evelyn and Maimie: a deep friendship, not a love affair. But Waugh’s hand was forced. The structure of the novel required him to introduce a love affair between Charles and Julia for two reasons. First, it was the way of creating the potential for Charles actually to become a member of the family – he nearly inherits Brideshead. And secondly, for Julia to have been the friend and Sebastian the lover would have been too overtly homosexual. As Lord Beauchamp’s extra-marital involvements are made heterosexual in Lord Marchmain, so the sexual attraction has to be transferred from Sebastian to Julia. But it is no more than a bat’s squeak.