Read The Pursuit of Laughter Online
Authors: Diana Mitford (Mosley)
The Pursuit of Laughter (63 page)
Another solitary refuge he used when he was writing was the Spread Eagle at Thame; we once stayed with him there. The inn-keeper was a ‘character’ called John Fothergill, who was apt to stand by the table of favoured clients at dinner, talking. He made it clear that his
bugbear
was any motorists who came into the hall ‘and used the place as a hotel’, as he put it angrily. In other words, they had been to the lavatory. There were dreaded ‘
spécialités de la
maison
,’ such as cheese made out of reindeer’s milk. Probably Mr Fothergill had been indulgent to Evelyn and his friends when they were undergraduates at Oxford. Now it was Evelyn’s turn to be indulgent, and he made us swallow the reindeer cheese for fear of an outburst of disapproval from the choleric Mr Fothergill.
A very good portrait of him by Henry Lamb dates from this time. The artist has caught his fierce, unrelenting stare. It is probably fortunate that he suffered rather, staying with the Lambs at their cottage at Coombe Bissett. Lamb was on the edge of the Bloomsbury Group, through Lady Ottoline Morrell and Lytton Strachey, both of whom had been in love with him before the First World War. His portrait, in the Tate, of Lytton Strachey is masterly, and so is his portrait of Evelyn Waugh: the first languorous, the second pugnacious, two brilliant subjects for a painter. There was an element of low living and high thinking at the cottage, very much in the Bloomsbury tradition. Discomfort they scorned to notice. Evelyn disliked this, and Lamb perhaps saw a more discontented and more typical Evelyn than my kind, amusing companion; he painted what he saw. Evelyn wrote to me:
I have to sit for my picture for nearly six hours a day and that is too much
particularly
when I have work of my own I must get done. Yesterday some visitors came over from Wilton whom I have heard you speak of but whether with approbation or not I can’t remember. David Herbert, Michael Duff (this youth is awful) and his mother. I was quite glad to see a little company particularly when Lady Juliet asked me, had Mr Lamb any pictures in that big exhibition at Burlington House. But Lamb was so enraged by the invasion that he went to bed at nine o’clock.
The Royal Academy was so much despised in the art world in those days that to ask a painter whether he exhibited there was considered insulting to the last degree. However, some years later Lamb himself became an R.A. The letter went on:
The pity of living with such fastidious people as these [the Lambs] is that it makes one think so much vulgar. I am now convinced that
Vile Bodies
is very vulgar and I am sorry for dedicating it to you but I will write many more exalted works and
dedicate
them to you. May I? Mrs Augustus John (wife of well-known painter and
fornicator
.
Tell Nancy.) has just arrived for dinner.
In the same letter he says: ‘I am signing a contract for a life of Swift and shall settle in Dublin I think for the early spring… Do recuperate from Baby G. at Knockmaroon and then we would have fun.’ This projected life of Swift, which unfortunately was never written, gave us the idea of Jonathan as a name for Baby G. As Swift was Irish, it seemed a good
compromise
between English and Gaelic.
Evelyn often put enclosures in his letters if he thought they would amuse. One that has survived, and which, unlike his own letters in those days, is dated (1 March 1930), is headed
Vile Bodies
:
Sir.
I have read the above drivel, and strongly recommend you to take a course in English Prose. I am the possessor of two text-books which, I think, might promote your literary maturity. On receipt of an answer, I shall be happy to give more details.
This letter, which got a rapturous welcome, was from a Mr Fletcher, possibly a
schoolmaster
. He goes on to mention Evelyn’s ‘infantile view-point and inept mind’.
The birth of Baby G. was now imminent, and Evelyn wrote from Pool Place to describe an evening at Oxford, where he had been invited to speak at a dinner of a literary society.
Dearest Diana
I am back again in your house after my visit to Oxford. That was worse than I thought possible. I arrived very tired and miserable and went to Lincoln College where I had never been before and for a long time I stood in the porch being stared at by Indians. Then the president of that society I had to address came up and he looked like Matthew Ponsonby* and talked like Heygate**. I don’t think you would like any of the bucks at Lincoln because they are poorer than me and lower born. [
N.B
. for the literal-minded: this was a
JOKE, D.M.
] Then I had no evening clothes. You see I had been very ingenious as I told you about a ‘rook sack’ [sic] and all my plans depended on Mrs W. sending my evening clothes by post and all she sent was evening shoes. So I rang up James Alexander Wedderburn St Clair Ham [Hamish Erskine, friend of my sister Nancy] to borrow his but he was out so I said I didn’t mind
coming
in ordinary clothes but the bucks all looked shocked and said but we do so they borrowed a suit from a buck who was too low even to come to that dinner. Well I don’t want to sound snobbish but it was made by a tailor in Leeds. So I put on that suit and it was not very becoming. Then there was dinner, very nasty things to eat and drink. I sat next to a homosexual international footballer. He was the second best guest of honour. He made a speech and everyone interrupted so he said fuck off you buggers and that was a great success. Oh how bad my speech was! So then the
literary
society ran out into the quadrangle and broke all the windows of a man called Weinberg so I said why and they said he’s a Jew and I said so am I didn’t you know and that sobered them a bit. Then the worst thing of all happened which was a
theatrical
entertainment. Two hideous youths dressed up in women’s clothes and acted a scene from Noel Coward’s ‘Fallen Angels’ and they acted worse than I spoke. Then we drank whisky punch and I stood in a corner and relays of tipsy bucks came up to me in turn and said oh Mr Waugh you are so different from what I expected and went on to say how much they liked my books. Rather rude I thought. Next day I had breakfast with that footballer I spoke of and did some shopping—I am rich
suddenly
—and I had luncheon with Basil*** and caught some trains back.
Are you and Bryan very excited about the Sharky-Scott boxing match. Wenborne [the gardener] and I are. At least W. is. I try to induce him to see the humorous side of it but his patriotism and sense of fair play are too strong. He says we haven’t heard the last of it not by a long way. I think he expects us to declare war on the US.
I don’t know what to say about the imminence of Baby G. Dear Diana it seems all wrong that you should ever have to be at all ill or have a pain.
Talking of boxing I think that what with my skipping rope and high-minded [two words illegible] all think I am a bantam weight in training.
I have put
Pastors and Masters
back in your shelves here or shall I send it to you in London?
Here is a picture of the new cottage Mr Phillips has just built. I think it is one of his best don’t you or don’t you… Has Mrs Spearmint [Mrs Alexander Spearman] said how nice I am or anything like that no I suppose not or you would have told me.
Boast
I was asked for my autograph by one of the assistants at Blackwells… I will write again almost at once.
* Second Lord Ponsonby, a very untidy person.
** Sir John Heygate, Bart. co-respondent in Evelyn Waugh’s divorce.
*** Basil Blackwood, Earl of Ava, afterwards Marquis of Dufferin and Ava.
I have tried to transcribe this letter correctly; Evelyn did not bother with punctuation. But I am not certain about the word ‘buck’. If it is in fact buck, it must have been a reference to some forgotten joke of the moment.
My great friendship with Evelyn did not long survive the birth of Baby G. As a
godparent
he met Randolph Churchill at the font for the first time. The stormy friendship they then began went on until death parted them. Thirty six years later I wrote to ask him whether he could remember why, quite suddenly. we had almost stopped seeing one another. I was
considering
writing memoirs, I did so a decade later [in
A Life of Contrasts
]. He replied on 9 March 1966:
Dearest Diana
It was a delight to hear from you and to hear that you sometimes think of me… You ask why our friendship petered out. The explanation is very discreditable to me. Pure jealousy. You (and Bryan) were immensely kind to me at a time when I greatly needed kindness, after my desertion by my first wife. I was infatuated with you. Not of course that I aspired to your bed but I wanted you to myself as especial confidante and comrade. After Jonathan’s birth you began to enlarge your circle. I felt lower in your affections than Harold Acton and Robert Byron and I couldn’t compete or take a humbler place. That is the sad and sordid truth… I have become very old in the last two years. Not diseased but enfeebled. There is nowhere I want to go and nothing I want to do and I am conscious of being an utter bore. The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me. But you would find most of your English friends in a bad way. Bright young Henry Yorke I hear is quite decrepit… All you Mitfords seem to have great stamina.
All love, Evelyn
This generous letter was, needless to say, not really the whole story. At the time our
friendship
‘petered out’ I was 20, and after the long winter of my pregnancy I no longer wished to dine in bed nearly every night with a table set up in my bedroom for the guests. Evelyn had usually come when he was in London, and it was extremely cosy and agreeable. But now although I looked upon him as my ‘especial confidant and comrade’ there were parties every night, and they were not the sort of parties Evelyn liked. He had no desire to put on a white tie for a grand ball, nor yet to disguise himself in fancy dress as the more bohemian of our friends loved to do. Doubtless I was taken up with frivolity, but he too had ‘enlarged his
circle
’. He fell in love with Baby Jungman, a fascinating girl who attracted many suitors. He was already sought by hostesses who saw in him a potential lion, and he was bothered by
innumerable
fans.
Vile Bodies
was a bestseller. It was not a boast if he was asked for his autograph, because it happened the whole time.
In May we still saw each other nearly every day. At the end of the month we went, after lunching with Eddie Marsh, to look at a life-mask of me. According to Evelyn it was by ‘the German invented by Harold Nicolson. It is very lovely and accurate. She has promised me a copy in white and gold plaster.’ I had allowed myself to be talked into having it done, a
disagreeable
proceeding and the result dead and mechanical. Oddly enough, it came in handy a few years later. Its measurements were used by the surgeon Sir Harold Gillies when he restored my nose after a motor smash. He said everyone ought to have a life-mask, it would facilitate his work. The copy for Evelyn was never made.
From now on there is a change in his diary entries. For my twentieth birthday, in June, he gave me a tall, slender umbrella with an ebony crook handle and my name engraved on a gold band. He wrote:
Dearest Diana
Many happy returns of today. Here is an umbrella and Mr Brigg said oh how
old-fashioned
it will be interesting for my men to make one like that. Well I think it will go with your plumed hat.
I went to a cocktail party and Randolph insulted a young lady by throwing gin in her eye.
Fondest love, Evelyn
In his diary he says he gave me a Brigg umbrella which I broke next day. This is untrue; I treasured it for many years, until it was stolen. Perhaps the entry about the broken umbrella shows something of his state of mind when he wrote it. He was highly critical of me,
suddenly
. It would not be too much to say that he carped.
We invited him to stay with us in Ireland during August, but he refused. Yet only three months before he had written that if we were all at Knockmaroon ‘we would have fun’. He seemed not to approve the list of guests, all great friends of his: Nancy, Hamish, the Lambs, the Yorkes. But there was also Lytton Strachey, whom he admired. but who was a ‘new’ friend, and disapproved of as such.
He came down to Pool Place, and he says in his diary that we ‘quarrelled at luncheon and at dinner’ and he left. We may have argued, but we did not quarrel. He remained a great friend of Nancy’s, and they teased each other by post when, after the war, she went to live in France. When his collected letters were published, the best of all were to her.
Shortly after this rather disastrous visit to Pool Place, Evelyn noted in his diary that we met at a party and I looked reproachfully at him. He says he wrote me a letter, explaining ‘it was my fault I did not like her, not hers. I don’t suppose she will understand.’ This letter has survived:
Dearest Diana
When I got back last night I wrote you two long letters and tore them up. All I tried to say was that I must have seemed unfriendly lately and I am sorry. Please believe it is only because I am puzzled and ill at ease with myself. Much later
everything
will be all right.
Don’t bother to answer, E.
This was on 17 July 1930. A week before, he had been to see Father d’Arcy, S.J. ‘Blue chin and fine, slippery mind,’ was his comment. It was the beginning of something much more important to Evelyn than any friendship.
In August he went to stay with the Yorkes at Forthampton, and he says in his diary: ‘Henry and Dig left for Knockmaroon protesting their detestation of Bryan and Diana.’ Despite the detestation their visit was a success, because Lytton Strachey, a fellow guest, was so greatly appreciated by Henry. That is about all. From time to time he wrote to me; in one letter he says: ‘am a papist now, and quite different.’ Fortunately the statement about being
different, like the one about the broken umbrella, was untrue. He was the same witty writer and delightful, funny companion, but his companionship was bestowed on others. He
usually
sent me his books (not
Campion
, nor
Helena
) as they came out; they have disappeared over the years, taken by bibliophiles. I always remained his devoted admirer.