Mad World (52 page)
Authors: Paula Byrne
The important point, Evelyn stressed, was that Charles is reconciled to Julia’s renunciation: ‘He has realised that the way they were going was not ordained for them, and that the physical dissolution of the house of Brideshead has in fact been a spiritual regeneration.’ This message of hope, ‘that the human spirit, redeemed, can survive all disasters’, is made clear in the epilogue. Whilst the fountain is covered in barbed wire and debris, the chapel is unchanged. Charles comes full circle when he returns to the house, sees Nanny and then visits the chapel and kneels to pray.
The builders did not know the uses to\ which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate, and the work all brought to nothing;
Quomodo sedet sola citivas
. Vanity of all vanities, all is vanity.
And yet, I thought … Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work … something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame … the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs … It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.
This is the moment when Mad World is transformed into the Kingdom of Heaven. The big house slips away and the original title of
Brideshead
reasserts itself: ‘the household of the faith’.
Evelyn had helped to save Hubert Duggan’s soul. It was one of the great moments of his life. He had tried and failed to convert Hugh Lygon.
After the war, he tried to save Maimie, once Hubert’s lover, begging her to let him pimp for her with the Holy Ghost. This was serious business. There was simply nothing he would not do to save his friends.
Maimie wrote to him in 1959 to tell him that she had lost her faith. He responded by asking her whether he could introduce her to a real ‘beast’ (priest) and asks her to come and see him: ‘loss of faith is the saddest thing that can happen to one’. His next letter says that he knows a priest who was a friend of Hugh’s at Oxford:
I believe that everyone once in his (or her) life has the moment when he is open to Divine Grace … sometimes, like Hubert, on his deathbed – when all resistance is down and Grace can come flooding in … I don’t know, darling Blondy, whether that is your condition now, but if it is, it’s not a thing to dilly-dally about … I think it is just your soul opening up to God. I’d awfully like to pimp for you in that affair.
*
Maimie was being offered her own moment akin to Charles’s at the end of the novel. Like Hugh before her, she rejected the offer.
Snobs and Catholics
Those critics who disliked
Brideshead
did so on two grounds, that it was Catholic propaganda and that the novel venerated the aristocracy. The American critic Edmund Wilson, who greatly admired Waugh, was mortified: ‘Waugh’s snobbery, hitherto held in check by his satirical point of view, has here emerged shameless and rampant.’
When Evelyn was accused of being snobbish and in love with the aristocracy he defended himself vigorously: ‘Class consciousness, particularly in England, has been so much inflamed nowadays that to mention a nobleman is like mentioning a prostitute sixty years ago.’ In his diary he noted: ‘Most of the reviews have been laudatory except where they were embittered by class resentment.’
He was well aware of inverted snobbery and could not have cared less that he was writing about a now unfashionable subject, and that writing about the working classes was all the fashion. In fact, he revelled in his position, saying ‘I reserve the right to deal with the kind of people I know best.’ As his son, Auberon, later pointed out, Evelyn’s supposed romantic attachment to the aristocratic idea was employed chiefly to annoy people.
Evelyn loved to provoke his critics. In an interview in 1962 he said: ‘I don’t know them (the working classes) and I’m not interested in them. No writer before the middle of the nineteenth century wrote about the working classes other than as grotesques or pastoral decorations. Then, when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.’ When Nancy Mitford was asked why she wrote about aristocrats, she said that it was because she knew them best. To ask her to write about factory workers would be ‘like asking Jane Austen to write about Siberian Peasants’. Evelyn defended his position in the
Spectator
: ‘In place of the old, simple view of Christianity that differences of wealth and learning cannot affect the reality and ultimate importance of the individual, there has risen the new, complicated and stark crazy theory that only the poor are real and important and that the only live art is the art of the People.’
When he was accused of being a snob by the
Bell
, a paper widely read by Irish Catholics, he said: ‘I think perhaps your reviewer is right in calling me a snob; that is to say I am happiest in the company of the European upper classes; but I do not think this preference is necessarily an offence against Charity, still less against the Faith … Besides Hooper there are two characters in
Brideshead Revisited
whom I represent as worldly – Rex Mottram, a millionaire, and Lady Celia Ryder, a lady of high birth. Why did my reverence for money and rank not sanctify those two?’
Ryder and his creator do not love lords indiscriminately. Viscount Mulcaster is a mindless oaf, without the aristocratic grace of Sebastian. In the manuscript version of the novel, Mulcaster is ‘a peer like pig’, he is fat, badly dressed, with ‘an idiot gape’. The members of the Bullingdon are presented as illiterate upper-class thugs, ‘disorderly footmen’, repressed homosexual Neanderthals. The Flytes themselves are deeply flawed. Lady Marchmain is cold and pious; Sebastian is a drunken wastrel and Bridey a pompous fool. Lord Marchmain also has his dark side: ‘I had always been aware of a frame of malevolence under his urbanity.’
Only Cordelia, like the sister in Shakespeare’s
King Lear
after whom she is named, is purely good.
The irony of Waugh’s career is that having written this book for himself, not caring whether it sold well or not, knowing and believing that his subject was out of time and kilter (and loving it for all of these things), it became an immediate bestseller in both Britain and America. A Labour government was elected in 1945, the year of its publication, ushering in the age of the common man, the age of Hooper (and it must be said that the portrayal of Hooper is not without warmth, say, in comparison with that of Bridey the heir to Brideshead). By a further irony, the very same forces that led to the egalitarian aspirations which swept Labour to power also fed the nostalgia that made
Brideshead
a bestseller. Evelyn yet again found himself in tune with the Zeitgeist. Although his higher-brow literary friends and his sterner critics objected to his subject matter, ordinary readers were fed up with war, rationing and deprivation, and they loved the escapism of
Brideshead
, suffused as it was ‘with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language’. The country had been through so much that people no longer wanted to read about poverty and ordinariness. Waugh thus confounded his critics.
What really stung Evelyn was the impugning of his faith as a Catholic. To Conor Cruise O’Brien, who attacked him in
The Tablet
for his ‘almost mystical veneration for the upper classes’, he was quick to respond: ‘In England Catholicism is predominantly a religion of the poor. There is a handful of Catholic aristocratic families, but I knew none of them in 1930 when I was received into the Church. My friends were fashionable agnostics and the Faith I then accepted had none of the extraneous glamour which your reviewer imputes to it.’
Edmund Wilson, in a wilful misreading of
Brideshead
, declared that ‘what has caused Mr Waugh’s hero to plump to his knees is not, perhaps, the sign of the cross, but the prestige, in the person of Lord Marchmain, of one of the oldest families in England’.
Yet Lord Marchmain is a social pariah, ignored by the great and good, hounded out of society. He is more like the gospel’s woman taken in adultery than the protagonist of a traditional English ‘silver spoon’ novel. ‘We were knights then, barons since Agincourt, the larger honours came with the Georges. They came the last and they’ll go the first; the
barony goes on.’
*
One can hear the family pride of Lord Beauchamp in Lord Marchmain’s deathbed speech, but, with the Lygons as with the Marchmains, the ultimate irony is that the barony does
not
go on. Bridey and Beryl are childless, as Lord Marchmain reminds the reader in the marvellous phrase ‘why should that uncouth pair sit here childless while the place crumbles about their ears?’ It is hard not to think of Elmley and Mona, even to wonder whether Maimie told Evelyn the family story that Boom’s last words to his beloved David Smyth, as he lay on his deathbed in Manhattan, were: ‘Must we dine with the Elmleys tonight?’
The fountain is abandoned and vandalised; it is the faith that endures. Though Lord Beauchamp had seven children, there was no one to take the title to his grandchildren’s generation. Hugh and Elmley and three of the sisters died childless. Only Lettice and Richard had issue – and both Richard’s children were girls. The Earldom of Beauchamp is now extinct.
*
Waugh revised the text of
Brideshead
on several occasions. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are from the first mass-market edition of 1945.
*
This was altered by Waugh in proof. In the original manuscript Blanche speaks of Marchmain ‘indulging in what my step-father calls ‘‘English habits’’’ – a clear allusion to the purported English predilection for homosexuality.
*
Maimie herself was spared from reading this passage in precisely this form: in the version she was sent in 1944, ‘the scandal of her father’ is mentioned as a reason for her not making a royal match, but it is secondary to the ‘much blacker taint’ of Julia’s Catholicism.
*
Like Dickie Lygon.
*
Remarkably, but typically of the relationship with Maimie, immediately after this heartfelt passage of the letter Evelyn changed the subject to a recently published memoir by Diana Cooper in which ‘She plainly accuses Alfred [Hubert Duggan’s brother] and me of buggery.’
*
Wording in this quotation follows Waugh’s revised text of 1960.
P.S.
Ideas, interviews & features …
About the Author
The Waugh Generation: Sarah O’Reilly talks to Paula Byrne
About the Book
Read On
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Sarah O’Reilly talks to Paula Byrne
You reveal that to write, Waugh often escaped to the Easton Court Hotel in Chagford, explaining in a letter to Maimie and Coote Lygon ‘the trouble about poor Bo is that he’s a lazy bugger and if he was in a house with you lovely girls he would just sit about and chatter and get d.d.[disgustingly drunk] and ride a horse and have a heavenly time but would he write his book? No …’ What distractions do you try to escape from when writing, and where do you go to escape them?
Evelyn Waugh made it clear, when he married Laura Herbert, that he would always need to be alone for his writing, and that he would find it impossible to write if surrounded by noisy children. With three young children of my own, I have huge sympathy for this viewpoint and, in an ideal world, I would love to escape to a remote location and immerse myself in the writing of my biographies. Practically, this rarely happens: my children would never forgive me and I would miss them too much. Happily, noise has never been a distraction. Coming from a large Catholic family, I learnt very quickly to write and read amongst chaos. Still, I secretly harbour fantasies of escaping to somewhere like Burgh Island in Devon, where I would be completely cut off – it worked for Agatha Christie!
Your last work of biography told the story of the eighteenth-century actress, poet, novelist, feminist, celebrity and royal mistress Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson. In turning to Waugh you swap the eighteenth for the twentieth century. Did writing about a different age bring different challenges?
I spent many happy years writing about the eighteenth century, which is where I am most comfortable, but I have always been drawn to the Jazz Age. I just adore the literature, the fashion, the excess, the music, the cars and the flappers. The research for
Mad World
was enormously exciting. I am also fascinated by the two world wars: one cannot fully appreciate the Roaring Twenties without understanding what came before and after, and I was mindful in writing this book that the Waugh generation was also a war generation.
‘I have always been drawn to the Jazz Age. I just adore the literature, the fashion, the excess, the music, the cars and the flappers.’
Mad World
was a challenging book to write in terms of the research – the Crete fiasco, for example, was so crucial to Waugh’s disillusionment with the Army, but tricky to navigate. I also found writing about Waugh’s (to my mind delightfully) irreverent and outrageous humour a challenge in an era obsessed with political correctness. When I wrote about Mary Robinson, I wasn’t worried about offending any of the family, as it was so far in the past. It was quite different with
Mad World,
where family and friends are still alive – this led to some ethical considerations that I had never had to think about before.