The Pursuit of Laughter (62 page)

The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II
, Radzinsky, E.
Evening Standard
(1992)

The conquest of Mexico is the most extraordinary adventure story imaginable. That four hundred men should have conquered, by force of arms, a large, rich, highly civilised
country
, inhabited by a race of fearless fighters, seems too fantastic to be believed; yet it
happened
. That it did so can be attributed in almost equal measure to two things: the
incredible
hardihood, courage and intelligence of the Spaniards, and the fact that Montezuma and the Mexicans knew, through their magic, that they were coming, and that they would be victorious.

It had long been magically known to the priests that in 1519 a god would come to their shores from the East, and that he was destined to rule Mexico. It was even known that he would have a white face, a black beard and a high hat. When he heard that Cortes had
landed
, therefore, Montezuma at first offered him no resistance, but sent him presents of gold and hoped he might go away again. It was by no means certain that the other gods would welcome his arrival, and war between the gods was a contingency dreaded by Montezuma.
Cortes sent the golden treasures back to Spain to the Emperor Charles V; they were seen, and admired, by Albrecht Dürer.

Mexico was a theocracy, and Montezuma, the ruler, was also high priest. The gods required unending human sacrifices; and when the Mexicans fought neighbouring tribes they were careful not to kill their enemies; prisoners were valuable, they were fattened up, lain on the stone of sacrifice, and the priest (sometimes Montezuma himself) cut the heart from the living body and offered it to the god. Afterwards the arms and legs of the
victims
were ritually eaten. Many of the Spaniards were to die in this way.

The curious thing is that the magic worked; all religions indulge in a certain amount of prophecy, but seldom with such accuracy as that of the faithful worshippers of Smoking Mirror, Humming Bird, and the other cruel divinities of the Mexicans.

After burning his boats to make retreat impossible, Cortes led his men across the arid, snowy mountain range towards Mexico City. They carried not only their armour,
ammunition
and arquebusses, but also a supply of crosses and images of the Virgin, and were accompanied by priests. Their aim was first and foremost to enrich themselves with the legendary gold of El Dorado, and secondly to convert the population to Christianity. When they reached the summit, after bloody battles and unspeakable hardships, they beheld, spread out before them, the rich plains and the distant lake upon which was built fabulous Mexico City, fated to be conquered and destroyed by them.

The character of Cortes typifies the striving, thrusting European of the age of the Conquistadores: brave, religious yet practical, greedy for gold, chivalrous and courteous, ruthless and cruel, subtle and intelligent; Montezuma, on the other hand, was rigid, defeatist, rich and doomed.

A short review can give no idea of the fascination of Mr Maurice Collis’s book.

Cortes and Montezuma,
Collis, M. (1954)

Douglas Chadwick worries about the fate of the elephant in its wild state. Africa and Asia are experiencing population explosions, jungle and bush are shrinking rapidly as man invades them with agriculture, forests are being destroyed and suitable habitat for
elephants
will soon be non-existent, except in wild-life parks. In the last few decades
thousands
of elephants have been killed with revolting cruelty by poachers who sold their tusks for enormous sums. This threat is dwindling since trade in ivory is banned, and the elephant listed as an endangered species; but it still goes on, poachers using powerful weapons and working in gangs.

On the positive side, ranchers in East Africa realize they can make much more money from wild animals than from farming. Sportsmen will pay thousands of dollars to be
allowed to shoot an elephant or a lion, the creatures feed on each other and are less
trouble
than cattle. The elephant, a terrible enemy of farming which will eat and trample crops by the square mile, has turned into a money spinner. This fact is a gleam of light in a
fascinating
but gloomy book by a knowledgeable elephant-fanatic. He will endure any amount of danger and discomfort in order to have the joy of watching them. His time in the Congo jungle forest matches Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, which most people would do anything to avoid. Eaten alive by swarms of pestilential insects, threatened by snakes, annoyed by sub-human bureaucrats, the odd glimpse of forest elephants compensates. Even charged by a bull elephant and within an ace of death, his love did not grow less. He says elephants talk to each other and can communicate from a distance, and gives
convincing
proof. But what do they say? Probably soon their ‘words’ will be picked up by some instrument and we shall know. They do very well in wild-life parks and become so numerous that they have to be ‘culled’ (murdered) for the sake of their well-being. They probably talk a lot about this, and may have difficulty distinguishing between cullers, sportsmen and poachers.

Elephants have been tamed for thousands of years, used in battle, for heavy work and for carrying kings, priests and children. They perform in circuses and are miserably
imprisoned
in zoos. They are unpredictable, and sometimes kill their keepers.

We are told elephants are smart, and so they are when dressed for a procession in India. But in American smart means clever. Men are even smarter, but they must make an effort and be smart enough to curtail their breeding. Over-population is by far the worst plague in our planet, beside which other plagues are relatively easily contained. Chadwick’s clever book makes this all too plain.

The Fate of the Elephant
, Chadwick, D.H.
Evening Standard
(1993)

Portraits

EVELYN WAUGH, VIOLET HAMMERSLEY, LYTTON STRACHEY

(NEW IN THIS EDITION) LORD BERNERS, SIR OSWALD MOSLEY

Evelyn Waugh has been called the greatest English novelist of his day; high praise. He has also been attacked as a man, and is said to have been disagreeable, rude, drunken and
snobbish
. To take the last accusation first; in my experience of Evelyn, it is nonsense. His friends came from different walks of life and were never chosen on account of their rank, or
worldly
position. Such a criterion would never have occurred to him, although he was obviously aware, as any observant person must be, of its curious importance in England. He liked
people
, as I suppose most of us do, because they amused him, or he was fond of them, or he found them stimulating; sometimes he sought their company because of some oddity which delighted the novelist in him. He disliked those who bored or irritated him, and needless to say they, too, were all sorts of men and women and, as bores are perhaps in a majority, he confined his true friendship to a fairly narrow circle.

To give but one example, a very great friend of his at the time of which I write,
1929-30
, was Tom Driberg, who had been at school and at Oxford with him. A journalist who wrote a gossip column in the
Daily Express
, he was a wonderfully funny man, though one might not have guessed it from his lugubrious aspect, nor from his journalism; his column contained few jokes. He was also a madly rash homosexual, at a time when the activities he indulged in could easily lead to prison. His employer, Lord Beaverbrook, got him out of
several
scrapes, and the old Fleet Street rule ‘dog don’t eat dog’ worked, so that other gossip writers never gave him away.

Evelyn and he laughed together. In their political views they were at opposite poles—Driberg a Communist and Evelyn excessively right-wing—but they shared a deep interest in religion. Driberg was certainly not the sort of man a snob would choose as his boon
companion
. He subsequently rose to a high position in the Labour Party and was made a life peer, but he would have been shunned by any self-respecting snob. Perhaps this could be said of the majority of life peers, but it is nonetheless true. It was with Driberg that Evelyn went to midnight mass (high Anglican) on Christmas Eve 1929, and Driberg was the only friend whom Evelyn invited when he was received into the Catholic Church.

The last time I myself saw Driberg was in about 1972. He said he had got lost in the Paris Métro and had been helped by a Frenchman, with whom he fell into conversation. As this man got out of the train, and just before it rushed on, he turned to Driberg and said: ‘And I
so
much admire your Mr ’Eat.’ The idea of Mr Heath being
his
quite upset Driberg; almost as much as, one imagines, it might have annoyed Mr Heath to have to own him as an adherent. When Driberg told me this my thoughts flew to Evelyn, who would have enjoyed
it very much.

The more I think about Evelyn the less snobbish does he seem. Not that snobbishness is a grave fault, and it may not be without significance that three great twentieth-century
novelists
, Henry James, Proust and Evelyn Waugh, have all been accused of it. Proust was
fascinated
by Paris society as an outsider looking in, but his portrait of Jupien is as grotesque as that of M de Charlus, and Françoise is as memorable as the Duchesse de Guermantes. In between is the whole range of middle-class characters: the narrator’s grandmother, Mme Verdurin, Odette, Bloch and the rest. He appeared snobbish to the Guermantes because of the effort he made to get into what was in those days a closed circle, but he had to do it in order to understand the whole human comedy, the subject of his novel. For Evelyn, who came upon the scene after the First World War, there was never any question of trying to get to know grandees. The boot was on the other foot.

My deep friendship with him lasted for one year only. When extracts from his diary were published in the
Observer
in 1973 I rather naturally wondered, as the date of our first
meeting
approached, what he was going to say about me. The
Observer
had carefully selected the nastiest pages (as was discovered later on, when the diary was published as an enormous book). The extracts showed Evelyn in a lurid light; he had something sarcastic to say about nearly all his friends, and probably the
Observer’s
choice of diary entries still colours many people’s view of their author. I felt angry to think that this brilliant and delightful man might be judged by a new generation, who had never known him, by his exaggerated self-
caricature
. ‘Don’t worry,’ said my son Alexander, ‘we’ve got the books.’

I suppose I was partly relieved and partly sorry when it transpired that there was a gap of about a year in the diary, 1929-30, after the break-up of his marriage to Evelyn Gardner. It was exactly that year during which I saw him so often. Evelyn was lonely when his wife left him, but I am not at all sure that he was sad, though admittedly he wrote to Harold Acton and said he was unhappy. Of course, it is perfectly possible to be sad and at the same time full of the wonderful spontaneous gaiety which he epitomized. And yet… Pretty and charming though Evelyn Gardner was, Evelyn must have known that she could never have been his life’s companion. I often thought there was a large measure of relief, mixed no doubt with a certain amount of wounded pride, in him at that time. He knew he had made a mistake, and he was thankful that the result of it had been relatively painlessly set aside. After he had found in Laura Herbert his ideal wife, the short and rather tiresome episode which is all that his first marriage amounted to seemed erased from his mind as though it had never been.

When we met I was just 19 and he was 25. I had been married for six months—to my first husband, Bryan Guinness—and I was pregnant. As usual with a first pregnancy, the nine months seemed like nine years; not in the least nine years of misery and pain, for I was in perfect health and surrounded by love and by delightfully amusing friends, but a seemingly endless time of physical and mental change and development.

Like many of our brilliant but penniless contemporaries, when he left Oxford Evelyn
had become a schoolmaster at a private school, where his wages kept body and soul
together
, just. The great point about being a schoolmaster was that there were endless holidays, so that however deadly the company of the other masters, however tiresome the children, there was plenty of time for one’s own activities. When, however, John Betjeman got a job on the
Architectural Review
and told him he was going to escape from being a schoolmaster, Evelyn said he was making a great mistake. ‘You will never laugh so much again,’ he warned. John agreed that his school, like Evelyn’s, was wonderfully funny, but all the same he took the more congenial work he had been offered. Perhaps the joke had palled.

Most of the schools were in Hertfordshire, and there was always a wild rush after
dinner
to catch the last train. Evelyn’s name for the home counties was Metroland, and there is such a thing as spending too much of one’s life in suburban trains.

The school in
Decline and Fall
was far from Metroland, in wildest Wales; by the time I met him, Evelyn had transmuted his experiences into this perfect book, as funny today as it was half a century ago. He had published a life of Rossetti, which had a modest success, but
Decline and Fall
had ecstatic admirers and he then decided he could make his living as a writer. He also contracted his hasty and disastrous marriage.

His next novel was
Vile Bodies
, about what the newspapers called the Bright Young People. Evelyn himself was never a bright young person; his opinion of the group was unflattering, but he thought their antics were funny enough to make a novel. Bitter
undertones
have been discerned in
Vile Bodies
which are absent from the hilarious
Decline and Fall
, and this has been put down to bitterness within Evelyn resulting from his failed marriage. The betrayed husband is a recurring theme in his novels, but I am inclined to think that if he had loved his first wife enough to feel deep bitterness at her desertion of him he would also have suffered from jealousy, and there was little sign of this. Quite impossible, for
example
, to imagine him with the pain endured by Swann, waiting for hours outside the loved one’s house to see who went in. Evelyn would have been too proud to nag. He walked out. It was my great good fortune that he walked into our house. He had been an Oxford acquaintance of Bryan’s.

In London, Evelyn lived with his parents in Hampstead, but he spent his days at our
little
house in Buckingham Street.
Vile Bodies
was in the process of being published, and he dedicated it to us. We had a joke exhibition that summer of paintings by Brian Howard, an Oxford contemporary, assisted by John Banting; we pretended they were the work of a German genius whom we had discovered. Evelyn wrote a preface to the catalogue and we invited all the art critics to see the masterpieces. Nobody was taken in, but for some reason there was massive publicity. On the strength of this we too became, for a moment, bright and young, according to the gossip columns. They called the Bruno Hat show ‘the art hoax of the year’, as though, as Evelyn said, art hoaxes were a frequent occurrence.

No sooner had he finished
Vile Bodies
than he was obliged to start another book. Novelists with private means can probably hardly imagine the strain that need imposes. He never for one moment contemplated writing a novel which would not satisfy his own high
standards, and therefore settled for a pot-boiler,
Labels
, a travel book for which he used
various
journeys he had made. He came with us to Ireland, and then in the autumn of 1929 he stayed with us at a flat belonging to my parents-in-law in Paris, but all his life Evelyn required solitude when he was writing, and we lent him an ugly villa called Pool Place almost on the beach in Sussex. He seemed indifferent to its hideous aspect, and to the freezing winds and noisy sea of the English Channel in autumn and winter. There was a cook, he was fairly
comfortable
, and when he felt the need for friends he came back to London, where I made him waste hours and hours at Buckingham Street, talking. He was the best company imaginable; as to disagreeable, never was there a more agreeable man. He had a very deep laugh, about an octave lower than his voice, and we laughed all the time.

At Pool Place Evelyn was fascinated by work going on in the nearby fields, where my mother-in-law, Lady Evelyn Guinness, was building a ‘medieval’ house. She wanted gnarled old trees for it to nestle in, and these were brought from afar, carefully replanted in the best soil, bound round in straitjackets of thick straw, and tied down with great cables and pegs as if they had been marquees which might blow away; and indeed it was the windswept nature of the site which had hitherto prevented trees from growing there as they normally do in the country. Evelyn loved eccentricity, and the sight of the armies of men, lorries and cranes required for the trees was a great amusement to him. According to him, Mr Phillips, Lady Evelyn’s architect, had also imported squirrels and field mice to make the trees feel at home, and to impart an ancient, tapestry-like atmosphere to the surroundings of the ‘old’ house. Stones from demolished barns and cottages were used for the building of Bailiffscourt, as the place was called, and it did look old when it was finished, with its arrow-slit windows and half-timbered gatehouse. I went back there fifty years later (it is now a small, expensive hotel). Half a century had left no mark upon it. In fact it looked strangely new and had
gathered
no moss. Bailiffscourt reminded me of the song ‘You’re getting younger every day’. As to the trees, they had all died.

If ever we were with Evelyn at Pool Place he insisted on being motored over to Bramber, to see the ‘museum’ made by a disgusting clergyman, who had killed and stuffed tiny
creatures
and made them perform unlikely tasks: a kitten pushing a guineapig in a pram, for example, and put them in glass cases round a room. It made me feel sick, but Evelyn
cherished
the oddity of the mind which had conceived it, and Bramber, in its way, charmed him almost as much as Bailiffscourt.

In Paris he made a beeline for the Musée Grévin, which in those days was like Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors only much more horrible. There was a particularly dreadful tableau of Christians and lions, and although even then Evelyn was a keen Christian, he was obviously sympathetic to the lions. There was sometimes menace in his brilliant eyes. He strongly disapproved of the French motto:
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
; he could understand that it was written on town halls, but that it should also appear on churches outraged him. He was shortly to become a Roman Catholic, but I sometimes thought he might have been at home as a Calvinist, subscribing to the doctrine of the elect. Equality, in particular, seemed
to him a patently nonsensical idea. Letters from this period of his life are almost as non-
existent
as his diary, but he wrote to Henry Yorke from our Paris flat in the Rue de Poitiers and told him, among other things: ‘We saw a magnificent Czech film called
Erotikon
. Also
innumerable
dress shows. And I have eaten a lot of nice food.’