He even became quite fond of several of his pupils, and described to like-minded friends the pleasure he took in caning them.
(Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, page 139)
Evelyn Waugh 28 October 1903 to 10 April 1966 (aged 62)
This is a long book, 724 pages, 627 of actual text i.e. without notes and index, but a hugely enjoyable read. I began to write my review as a chronological account but, as with my reviews of lives of Ian Fleming and Somerset Maugham, it just got too long. Too much happened to these fascinating authors. Instead I’m going to do it by themes.
Selina Hastings
It helps that Hastings is herself part of the posh world she describes, being the titled daughter of an earl – Lady Selina Shirley Hastings, eldest daughter of Francis, 16th Earl of Huntingdon – herself educated at private school and Oxford. (Indeed, according to her Wikipedia entry, ‘She and her sister, Lady Harriet Shackleton, are in remainder to several ancient English baronies, including those of Hastings and Botreaux.’) Hence the ease and confidence with which she writes about Waugh’s world, and the aristocratic characters and notable dynasties in it. She writes about this or that eminent personage of Waugh’s generation as if they’re old friends.
‘That’
After a while I noted a stylistic tic Hastings has which is to say of this or that person of the time (the 1930s, 40s and 50s) that they are ‘that noted figure’, ‘those notorious sisters’, and so on. She is signalling that she is inside this world, she is part of this world, that for her, with her privileged upbringing confidently swimming in the world of the English aristocracy, these figures from the literary world or aristocratic world are so well known that she assumes everyone knows about them.
- …that most influential reviewers, Arnold Bennett (p.180)
- Peter Rodd’s father was that exquisite flower of diplomacy, one-time ambassador in Rome, Sir Rennell Rodd. (p.260)
- Evelyn, together with Duff and Diana and Chips Channon, stayed at the Palazzo Brandolini as guests of that indefatigable social climber, Laura Corrigan… (p.265)
- Gabriel Herbert was 22, a handsome, amusing, athletic girl, daughter of that dashing adventurer, Aubrey Herbert 285
- the fourth Earl of Carnarvon had purchased a large expanse of that beautiful peninsula 287
This biography puts forward no great theories or revelations, but invites you to immerse yourself at great length (the Minerva paperback edition is 724 pages long) in Waugh’s world. It is a big, juicy Christmas cake of a book and a hugely enjoyable read. I like biographies which give you the confident feeling, no matter how spurious, that human beings and the society they move in can be understood.
Father, Arthur Waugh
Evelyn’s father, Arthur, was a author, literary critic, and publisher. Arthur attended Sherborne public school and New College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry for a ballad on the subject of Gordon of Khartoum in 1888. Arthur wrote a biography of Tennyson and achieved notoriety by having an essay included in the notorious Yellow Book magazine. From 1902 to 1930 he was Managing Director and Chairman of the publishing house Chapman and Hall, the publishers who were to publish most of his son’s novels. In 1893 Arthur married Catherine Raban and their first son Alexander Raban Waugh (always known as Alec) was born on 8 July 1898. Our hero, Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, was born five years later on 28 October 1903.
Bad relations with father
Evelyn’s relationship with his father was difficult and strained for at least 4 reasons:
1. Arthur idolised his first son, Alec, who went on to fulfil every paternal dream, becoming head boy at his school, playing for the First XI and First XV, writing poetry and generally being an all-round star pupil. For his boyhood and adolescence Evelyn was always in the shadow of his brother, a situation he exaggerated and dramatised in the short story ‘Winner Takes All’.
2. Arthur didn’t hide that he wished his second child had been a daughter.
3. As a young man Arthur delighted his friends with reading from literature in which he did all the voices. As a father of small children this was entertaining, but as he got older his manner hardened into a perpetual playing, mimicking, quoting and play-acting. After dinner the whole family would be taken to the ‘book room’ and subjected to readings from Pinero or singalongs from Gilbert and Sullivan. This began to grate on Evelyn’s nerves when he was a boy and by his later teenage years he had developed a real antipathy to his father (p.449). He hated the way it was impossible to break through Arthur’s pose of bonhomie to have any genuine communication. When he was irritated with him, Waugh referred to his father as ‘Chapman and Hall’, the publishing firm he was managing director of.
4. Easygoing, joking, Gilbert and Sullivan Arthur found his son’s character unnecessarily hard, haughty, vindictive and cynical. Once he became successful and well known Evelyn In the manner of the Bright Young Things he often said the kind of wounding and hurtful things which his hardened peers accepted and enjoyed, but which made Arthur very uncomfortable.
Home in North London
Initially the family lived in Hillfield Road, West Hampstead but in 1907 moved to a house Arthur designed and had built and named Underhill in the London suburb of Golders Green, which still abutted farms and fields. From 1910 to 1916 Waugh attended Heath Mount preparatory school. Although physically on the short side, Waugh didn’t lack confidence in his intellectual powers. He was a bully, he physically bullied smaller boys, including the famous photographer Cecil Beaton who never forgot or forgave him.
Family holidays were spent with the Waugh aunts at Midsomer Norton in Somerset. Here Waugh became deeply interested in high Anglican church rituals and served as an altar boy at the local Anglican church.
Waugh’s diary
But the key fact about him is that he wrote: he kept a detailed diary (which has survived), he wrote stories and poems which were published in the school magazine, which he edited, he wrote all the time, perfecting a style of clipped, witty gossip.
Lancing College
Alec had been sent to the same public school as his father, Sherborne, but in 1915 he was discovered in a homosexual relationship and expelled. All would have been hushed up if Alec hadn’t gone on – after joining the army and in intervals of officer training – to write a novel, The Loom of Youth, openly describing the gay affair at a school which was recognisably Sherborne. The result was that Waugh , much to his irritation, couldn’t go to Sherborne and instead was sent to Lancing public school on the South Downs (just the kind of aggrieved second bestness which he dramatised in ‘Winner Takes All’).
These days a year at Lancing College costs £37,000 plus all the extras (uniform and kit) x 6 years = easily £225,000.
Hastings is very good at conveying the atmosphere of Lancing which was founded in 1848 by Nathaniel Woodard, a member of the Oxford Movement in the Anglican church which aimed to reintroduce the pageantry and beauty and mystery which had been lost at the Reformation. The school is noted for the enormous chapel which dominates all the other buildings and, being built on a hill, the entire locality. The foundation stone was laid in 1868 but wasn’t completed and dedicated (to St Mary and St Nicholas) until 1911, shortly before Waugh arrived.
What comes over from Hastings’ evocative account is:
- the extreme religiosity of the school, with compulsory attendance at daily prayers plus the full roster of Anglican feasts
- the fantastic complexity of the rules and regulations which governed every aspect of dress and behaviour, with different rules for each year group and even for each of the four houses within the years – reading Hastings you begin to understand why order and ritual in every aspect of their lives, continued to structure the perceptions and ideas of this generation for the rest of their lives
- the boys were treated as ‘men’, and much was expected of them in terms of duty and responsibility
- the variety and eccentricity of many of the masters
- the overwhelmingly arts and humanities nature of the syllabus
- the surprising amount of homosexuality: it’s hard to understand why Alec was expelled from Sherborne when Hastings describes in detail, with quotes form letters and diaries, intense love affairs which Waugh had with a number of his fellow pupils: pretty younger boys were liable to be courted and wooed by rivalrous older boys, which resulted in all kinds of emotional tangles
Maybe what comes over most, though, is that although Waugh write continuously, pouring out stories and poems which populated the school magazine and continuing his astonishingly precocious diary, his first love was art and design. He was extremely interested in calligraphy and scribing. He was encouraged by masters of an artistic bent and spent some time visiting an eccentric aesthete who lived near the school and owned a full range of pens and knives and inks and precious papers. Waugh developed a real skill for art and design, designing the covers for books and magazines. He was thrilled when one of the masters took receipt of an old-style luxury printing press and was allowed to use it.
All of this is described in detail in the abandoned fragment ‘Charles Ryders’ Schooldays’ which appears to be a straight from life description of a few days from Waugh’s last year at Lancing.
Hertford College, Oxford
The drinking and writing continued on to Oxford. Waugh attended Hertford college. What surprised me is the extent of the homosexual activity. There are lots of descriptions of parties where the men danced with each other or snogged in corners or on sofas, descriptions of Evelyn rolling on sofas tickling the tonsils of another undergraduate. He had intense, long affairs with Richard Pares and Alastair Graham.
Graham was a small, beautiful young man who matched Evelyn in drinking but with pronounced aesthetic tastes. Graham sent him love letters with photographs of himself naked. It is from the period of this affair that Evelyn based his image of perfect, heady Romantic Oxford, and the portrait of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead is based on Alastair Graham.
Waugh did next to no work, no one ever saw him with a book open or reading and repeatedly came close to being expelled. He had won a £100 annual scholarship to study History, a subject in which, it turned out, he had absolutely no interest, to the immense frustration of the senior history don C.R.M.F. Cruttwell. The pair quickly came to dislike each other, Cruttwell’s lofty criticism of his attitude driving Waugh to real hatred. Hastings amusingly shows that Waugh got his revenge by naming a whole series of negative characters Cruttwell, for example the murderous lunatic in Mr Loveday’s Little Outing was originally named Cruttwell.
Instead of reading and studying, Waugh drank heavily all the time (see his recommendation to Tom Driberg to be drunk p.91 and his advice to be drunk all the time p.97).
Hastings describes the immense influence on his peers of the aesthete Harold Acton, part of the set of rich young aesthetes known as the Georgeoisie, also featuring Brian Howard, founder member of the Hypocrites Club. Acton dedicated his 1927 book of poems, Five Saints, to Waugh and Waugh dedicated his first, breakthrough novel, Decline and Fall, to Acton. As the years went by Acton was to surprise everyone who knew and adulated him at Oxford by never really making his mark in the world of letters, whereas Waugh surprised everyone who’d known him as a hopeless drunk at Oxford by turning out to be one of the most notable writers of the mid-century.
In the summer of 1924 Waugh took his final exams and got a solid Third after which his tutor cancelled his scholarship for the ninth and final term which he required to qualify for a degree. He left in high dudgeon with no prospects of a career.
Nicknames
Hastings brings out the way this post-war generation revelled in consciously infantile behaviour and language. They gave nicknames to each other and wrote and talking in a deliberately juvenile manner. Waugh loved nicknames, which pack his letters and diaries and fictional characters. As examples, he nickamed:
- his father ‘Chapman and Hall’, after the firm he worked for
- his brother ‘Baldhead’ or ‘Baldie’
- among the Lygon set Waugh nicknamed himself ‘Boaz’ or ‘Bo’, Maimie Lygon became ‘Blondy’, Dorothy Lygon ‘Pollen’ or ‘Poll’, Maimie’s Pekinese dog was ‘P.H.’ (standing for Pretty Hound)
- in his letters to Diana Cooper he was known as ‘Mr Wu’
- his future wife’s mother, Mary Herbert, was known as ‘Mrs What What’ as this is what she said all the time
- once remarried, Waugh’s pet name for his second wife, Laura, was ‘Whisker’
- the house he bought at Stinchcombe was nicknamed ‘Stinkers’
- it ran in the family: in letters to Alec’s wife Joan, Arthur Waugh refers to his wife, Kate, as ‘Mrs Wugs’ (p.412)
Teaching
Waugh left Oxford in the summer of 1924 with no plans and no career and no training. Exactly like the hero of his breakthrough novel, Decline and Fall, he looked for work as teacher in the kind of private school he attended and an agency found him a post at ‘Arnold House’, a preparatory school at Llandullas on the ‘bleak, beautiful Denbighshire coast’ where he commenced duties in January 1925 (p.127).
Thus commenced four years of drift and unhappiness. He was alright at the teaching although useless at games which never interested him. He savoured the quirkiness and eccentricities of the other masters, all fodder stored away for his first novel, but he was miles away from his partying friends in Oxford and London.
What made things worse was that when, during the holiday, he returned to London he had gotten embroiled in a love affair with the sexy, promiscuous, hard drinking but aloof Olivia Plunkett-Greene who slept with everyone but him, making him fall deeper and more bitterly in love with her. She was the basis for the fabulously fearless Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies.
‘Olivia as usual behave like a whore and was embraced on a bed by various people.’ (Waugh’s diary quoted p.141)
He took with him to Wales the manuscript of a novel titled The Temple at Thatch, but when he sent a copy to his friend the influential aesthete Harold Acton, Acton’s comments were so critical and dismissive that Waugh burned the only manuscript in the school furnace (p.135).
What really comes over from Hastings’ account of this period is the intensity of Waugh’s drinking. He got very drunk every night, and often started during the day. Some friends were scared by the intensity of his intake and his diary records thoughts of suicide. His autobiography records a particularly vivid suicide attempt, where he went down to the Welsh coast, stripped off and waded out to sea intending to drown himself (p.136).
All this was expressed in the relationship with Olivia, who herself drank till she passed out (by 1936 she had become an alcoholic and retired from society to live with her mother).
Writing
Waugh quit the post at Arnold House in order to be closer to London and took a job at a school in Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. His diary records that his status among the boys was transformed when he bought a motorbike (p.143) but he had only been here a few weeks when he sacked for allegedly making a drunken pass at the school matron (p.149).
He then secured a teaching post at a school in Notting Hill at £5 a week. Between all these short jobs he came home to stay with his parents at Underhill, the family home in Golders Green, under the increasingly disapproving glare of his father.
He still regarded himself as first and foremost a draughtsman, and enrolled in London courses in printing, cabinet-making and carpentry. Throughout his life Waugh applied metaphors and similes from carpentering and cabinet making to constructing well crafted novels.
His writing career didn’t exactly blossom. Having destroyed his draft novel, he managed to get a highly experimental short story, ‘The Balance’, published in a 1926 anthology published by his father’s publishing house, Chapman and Hall (p.145). He researched and wrote an extended essay on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which was printed privately by his lover, Alastair Graham. And it was on the basis of this that an Oxford acquaintance, Anthony Powell (Eton and Oxford) now working for the publishers Duckworths, commissioned a full-length biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which Waugh wrote during 1927 (pp.158 to 160).
It’s worth pausing at this point to reflect on how he got started as a writer. Obviously he had to be able to write and to have written things worth reading, but he had huge advantages: his father was managing director of the publishing house which published his first short story; his brother was an established novelist ready with tips and advice; his lover privately published his first extended work; and a friend from Oxford commissioned him to write his first published book.
The Establishment
That is how it works; the network of families and friends met through public school and Oxford which dominated the literary world, the professions, politics and the City for most of the twentieth century. Arguably Waugh’s main subject was also the focus of his life, which was gossip and stories about the intricately interlinked network of aristocratic families which dominated English life, linked via marriage, school, Oxford, the army, business and politics into a great matrix of power and influence wielded to protect and promote each other. The network of power and influence which satirists of the 1960s called ‘the Establishment’ and which still dominates English to this day: David Cameron Eton and Oxford; Boris Johnson Eton and Oxford.
Giving individual examples is not very impressive because it’s only the sheer number of examples of the intermeshing of families of power and influence on every page, it’s the cumulative affect of the matrices of power, which really conveys the ubiquity and control of this class.
Journalism
Waugh was never a qualified, full-time journalist. During this unsettled period he spent a couple of months (April to May 1927) as a trainee journalist at the Daily Express, during which, by his own account, he filed no stories and spent a lot of time at the cinema. Or, as usual, getting drunk (p.151). It was the first of several skirmishes with journalism which were to build up to his comic masterpiece, Scoop. The general conclusion is clear: the journalists he saw in action were lying scoundrels who mostly fabricated their stories or exaggerated trivial events into ‘stories’ using a defined and limited set of rhetorical sleights of hand. He wrote pieces for magazines and newspapers to the end of his career, but never lost his amiable contempt for journalism and journalists.
First marriage, to she-Evelyn
In 1927 he met the honourable Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner, the daughter of Lord and Lady Burghclere, who was sharing a flat with Pansy Pakenham (p.153). Waugh was on the rebound from the final failure of his intense and troubled relationship with Olivia Plunket-Greene, Gardner was tiring of being pursued by half a dozen suitors. Photos of her at the time confirm written accounts that she was boyish in appearance and no conventional beauty. She’s was described as unusually immature, almost childish (‘young for her age’, p.155), she referred to Proust as Prousty-Wousty, to all her acquaintance as angel face or sweety pie – and this in a generation which Hastings goes out of her way to describe as consciously, modishly immature and childish.
Portrait of the two Evelyns by Olivia Wyndham (1928)
Hastings gives a fascinating account of Evelyn’s proposal which was so casual as to be barely noticeable, along the lines of, ‘Why don’t we try it and see how it goes?’ Gardner, who had (allegedly) already been engaged nine times, thought about it over night and next day replied, ‘Yes, why not?’ (p.163).
They were both 24, very immature, on the rebound from other relationships and also both wanted to escape the smothering tutelage of their parents. They both thought that getting married would set them free of parental restraint and define their adult identities.
Unfortunately, it didn’t, but first ‘the Evelyns’ had to negotiate permission to marry with Gardner’s mother, the formidable Lady Burghclere. She successfully blocked Waugh getting a job at the BBC (p.168). When Waugh submitted the MS of Decline and Fall to the publisher Duckworth’s, the head of the firm, Gerald Duckworth’ brother was married to Evelyn Gardner’s aunt, Margaret, and was well aware of the family’s snobbish disapproval of Waugh, and so turned the novel down. This is how it, the English establishment, works. Someone’s cousin, brother, sister, mother, friend they were at public school or Oxford with intervenes to help out, give a leg up, or block their ambitions, in which case your turn to another set of brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts or uncles to help you out.
27 June 1928 the Evelyns got married despite all Lady B’s objections, almost on a whim, in a disgustingly low church (St Paul’s, Portman Square, p.175)), with few friends or family present. The writer Robert Byron (Eton and Oxford) gave Gardner away. Harold Acton (Eton and Oxford) was the best man. Brother Alec (Sherborne and Oxford) was a witness. A friend, Joyce Fagan, had moved out of a bijou little apartment in Canonbury and passed it on to the newly-married couple at a rent of £1 a week.
September 1928 Decline and Fall published to universal good reviews, from old timers such as Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestly to new kids on the block like Cyril Connolly (Eton and Oxford). Waugh invited these important contacts to dinner or luncheon at the flat, and they were all enchanted by the 25-year-old pixies.
Literary agent
Alec introduced Waugh to his literary agent, A.D. Peters ( Haberdashers’ Aske’s and Cambridge) who was to be central to his career (p.182). Peters immediately started finding Waugh commissions to write articles about the younger generation for magazines and papers. Hastings features numerous passages describing Peters’ complex and aggressive negotiations on his client’s behalf with newspapers, magazines and publishers, both in Blighty and America. Several themes emerge:
- the books were divided into two categories:
- hardly anybody liked his travel books, they didn’t sell, and Peters failed to find American publishers willing to take several of them on at all
- the novels were mostly well reviewed and received but during the 1930s he never had a bestseller and so was permanently strapped for cash
- this explains why Waugh continuously hustled for jobs from papers and magazines, endlessly coming up with ideas for features and articles: the problem here was that he often knocked them off at such great speed that magazines (such as Vogue, Harpers, Nash’s and so on) quickly became cautious and took to turning down Waugh articles and stories
- and this relates to something Hastings doesn’t explicitly state, but which becomes apparent as you read through the book, which is that Waugh didn’t really have many opinions about anything, or not opinions that could be translated into interesting articles; fresh off the back of Decline and Vile Bodies he could make some quids by claiming to be a spokesman for the generation of Bright Young Things; but by mid-1930s his actual opinions – conservative, reactionary Catholic in thrall to a rose-tinted image of the landed aristocracy was not very saleable
Travel books
Waugh came up with the idea of writing articles about a cruise, which could then be compiled into a book as he was, throughout the 1930s, to come up with wizard wheezes for travel books. A number of his pals were good at this – Hastings refers to ‘the intellectual avidity of Robert Byron…the exuberance of Peter Fleming’ (p.269) [both of whom went to Eton and Oxford] – and it was an obvious way to go on an adventure and be paid for it.
The odd thing is that Hastings makes it crystal clear that Waugh hated travelling. He invariably ended up feeling sad and lonely and was often excruciatingly bored. In fact the account of his first trip to Abyssinia, Remote People, includes three short interludes entirely devoted to the problem of boredom. Reviewing the book Rebecca West made the witty point that a writer who writes about boredom almost invariably creates boredom in the reader (p.240), but I found this to be wrong.
I have travelled widely on my own (Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Thailand) and can vouch for the fact that there often are moments or days of excruciating loneliness and boredom. So I found the short passage in Remote People about boredom more interesting than some of the straight travel writing. It felt more personal and more true in much the same way as his reporting on the coronation of Haile Selassie was painfully accurate about its shabbiness and lack of glamour, or his description of the ‘famous’ monastery at Debra Lebanos as sordid and squalid.
Although he fibbed about some of the details, there is, overall, about the travel books, as the letters and diaries, a fundamental honesty, a self-exposing, excoriating, merciless honesty about himself and others in Waugh’s writing which is, even when it’s unattractive, admirable.
Anyway, it’s interesting to learn that his four travel books were not well received. Publishers and reviewers didn’t like them as much as the novels and they didn’t sell anywhere near as well. I agree they don’t have the well wrought artfulness of the novels but I enjoyed the three that I read for what you feel is the blunt unvarnished truth of Waugh’s reporting and therefore accurate descriptions of faraway places in a long ago time which will never return.
His wife’s betrayal
Wasn’t a sudden, impulsive thing. Hastings gives good reasons why the Honourable Evelyn Gardner became unhappy.
- She never really loved Waugh, she liked him and admired him.
- She was a sickly child. In February 1929 they boarded the Stella Polaris for a cruise round the Mediterranean. This turned into a nightmare as Gardner fell very seriously ill and by the time they reached Port Said was taken off the ship and stretchered to the British hospital with double pneumonia and pleurisy. Despite his intense concern and nursing his sick wife every day, Waugh managed to turn in a creditable travel book, Labels, but Gardner continued to be frequently ill when they got back to London. A subconscious plea for more attention? Or indication of underlying unhappiness?
- Trouble in the bedroom: Hastings doesn’t give details but quotes Gardner saying Waugh was no good in bed and her suspicions that this was because he had learned all his sexual technique from sex with men (p.196); elsewhere Hastings links this with his sexual shyness and lack of confidence around women.
- Both Gardner and Waugh married to escape from being at home and dominated by parents. They thought it would make them free and independent. Instead, once the initial euphoria had worn off, they realised they were alone and in difficult financial straits, as neither of them had a job.
- Gardner’s loneliness. Precisely in order to earn some money Waugh had to take himself off to a study or, more often, go out of London altogether, to stay with friends or in country inns, so he could concentrate on writing. Gardner was a fun-time 1920s party girl, and hated being left at home all alone night after night.
Hence, Waugh encouraged her to go out and socialise, recommending a close cadre of ‘safe’ male friends, one of whom was John Heygate (Eton and Oxford) (p.192). She spent more and more time with him, dashing, clever (job as assistant news editor at the BBC) and eventually, in July 1929, sent Waugh a letter saying she’d fallen in love with Heygate and wanted a separation (p.193).
Waugh was devastated. The cosy new base he’d built for his professional and personal life came crashing down. Hastings quotes friends who say that from that point onwards, a new note of cynicism and anger entered his personality and his work. Disgusted, he managed to see Gardner only once more in the rest of their lives (at the legal divorce proceedings).
Waugh based the very commonplace, drab and casually immoral character John Beaver in A Handful of Dust on Heygate. It is interesting to learn from Heygate’s Wikipedia article that:
- He did marry Gardner, in 1930, which was jolly decent of him – but they were divorced in 1936.
- He was very right-wing, a Nazi sympathiser, and attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally in the company of his friend the writer Henry Williamson, next to Unity and Diana Mitford. Lovely people.
Childishness
Hastings repeatedly emphasises the childishness of Waugh and his friends (p.251-25 3). From one point of view the whole affair with and marriage to Gardner was an apotheosis of childishness. She was famous in her circle for her lisping childish pronunciation, for giving everyone nursery nicknames, for looking and dressing like a pre-pubescent boy (a page boy, in Diana Mitford’s description).
But it wasn’t just them. Hastings considers their entire generation cultivated a childish irresponsibility. Maybe it was a rebellion against their heavy Victorian and Edwardian parents, and against the enormous tragedy of the Great War which their older brothers fought and died in. But calculated frivolity and heedless hedonism was, of course, the signature mode of the bright young things of the 1920s, and much of this had a deliberately childish aspect, a refusal to grow up or take anything seriously.
In Waugh’s fiction this is probably best exemplified in various plotlines in Vile Bodies but in his social life Hastings shows how it was a deliberately cultivated pose in some circles of friends, for example the Lygon sisters. Hastings quotes postcards and letters they sent each other written in fake baby language, or with the interpolations of a fictional stupid character named Tommy (actually a joke at the expense of a neighbour of the Lygons, Tommy MacDougall, ‘a dashing master of foxhounds’, p.252) who interrupts the main text to ask stupid questions rendered in misspelt capitals:
When we meet again it will be gay and terribly exciting and not at all like a biscuit box
WY LIKE A BISKIT BOCKS PLESE?
Wait till you are a little older Tommy and then you will understand.
(quoted page 252)
I am going to live in Oxford all the summer and write a life of Gregory the Great.
WHO WAS GREGRY THE GRATE?
He was a famous pope, Tommy.
(quoted page 301)
This style of gushing naivety is used by Waugh in the funny short story ‘Cruise’ which consists of postcards from an archetypally dim, naive, semi-illiterate flapper on a cruise back to her parents. The story uses a phrase which recurs in the actual Lygon correspondence, obviously a catchphrase of their group or the time, which is to use the gushingly simple-minded phrase ‘God how sad’ for anything which goes wrong from tea not being nice to riots in foreign cities (eventually abbreviated in letters to ‘G how s’.p363). If you say it in a posh 1920s flapper voice it is quite funny.
Another notable group slang phrase was ‘lascivious beast’ for priest. For the rest of his life, in letters to close friends, Waugh regularly referred to priests he was meeting in England or abroad and even in Rome, as ‘lascivious beasts’ or just ‘beasts’.
The three Lygon sisters and their fabulous country estate at Madresfield were very important psychologically to Waugh after the trauma of his divorce from Gardner. He recreated a fake childish world with them, which was maintained in their lively correspondence, and he dedicated Black Mischief to ‘Mary and Dorothy Lygon’ when it was published in October 1932.
Conversion to Catholicism
Obvious roots:
- He was a very earnestly seriously Christian schoolboy.
- Many people of his generation and in his immediate circle converted to Catholicism in the late 1920s.
The most interesting thing about Waugh’s conversion is that it wasn’t romantic or mystical, it was entirely intellectual (pp.225, 227, 229). Talking it over with Catholic friends and then with one or two high society Jesuits he came to the intellectual conviction that:
- Christianity explained the world, humans and morality
- Catholic Christianity, established in Rome by the martyr Saint Peter, was the oldest, truest, most universal, most enduring form of Christianity (p.225)
And that was it. From this intellectual conviction he never strayed. Details of liturgy and practice, aspects of theology, his emotions or feelings about religion, all these could change and he could happily take the mickey out of them because none of it altered his deep intellectual conviction about the fundamental truth of Roman Catholicism.
Evelyn always insisted that his response to his faith was purely intellectual and pragmatic. (p.487)
Thus Waugh could jokingly refer to priests as ‘lascivious beasts’ and any amount of levity and satire about individual churchmen without a qualm because it wasn’t a question of respecting this or that piety; for Waugh Catholicism simply was the universal truth about the world, whether he was serious and solemn about it or messing about with friends. His own personal attitude didn’t change the Truth. The Truth carried on regardless of anything he wrote or thought or said, that was its appeal.
It didn’t do any harm that entering the Catholic church meant joining a small, embattled, unfashionable elite, and that Waugh identified solely with the old, aristocratic Catholic families and with only the best high society Jesuits – that suited his snobbish elitism very well. But it wasn’t the fundamental motive.
Politics
Waugh wasn’t very interested in politics (‘contemptuous as he was of political life and all politicians’, p.495). Arguably the one enduring subject of his work, diaries and letters was Gossip about people he knew or knew of. Even when he was ‘reporting’ from Abyssinia what excited him most was the court gossip as bruited among the catty diplomatic circles.
His politics followed his religion in the sense that he believed that Absolute Truth resided elsewhere, the human nature is fallen and deeply flawed, that perfection can never be achieved in this world and all attempts to achieve it inevitably end in repression. He handily defined his credo in an extended passage from the travel book he was commissioned to write about Mexico, Robbery Under Law, published in 1939 just as the world plunged into another world war. Because it’s so central to everything he wrote it’s obviously a carefully worded and thorough credo, it’s worth repeating in full:
Let me, then, warn the reader that I was a Conservative when I went to Mexico and that everything I saw there strengthened my opinions.
I believe that man is, by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth; That his chances of happiness and virtue, here, remain more or less constant through the centuries and, generally speaking, are not much affected by the political and economic conditions in which he lives; That the balance of good and ill tends to revert to a norm; That sudden changes of physical condition are usually ill, and are advocated by the wrong people for the wrong reasons; That the intellectual communists of today have personal, irrelevant grounds for their antagonism to society, which they are trying to exploit.
I believe in government; That men cannot live together without rules but that they should be kept at the bare minimum of safety; That there is no form of government ordained from God as being better than any other; That the anarchic elements in society are so strong that it is a whole-time task to keep the peace.
I believe that the inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and that it is therefore meaningless to discuss the advantages of elimination; That men naturally arrange themselves in a system of classes; That such a system is necessary for any form of co-operation work, more particularly the work of keeping a nation together.
I believe in nationality; not in terms of race or of divine commissions for world conquest, but simply thus: mankind inevitably organizes itself in communities according to its geographical distribution; These communities by sharing a common history develop common characteristics and inspire local loyalty; The individual family develops most happily and fully when it accepts these natural limits.
A conservative is not merely an obstructionist, a brake on frivolous experiment. He has positive work to do.
Civilization has no force of its own beyond what it is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all.
Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity.
Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace.
Fascist Spain and Italy
This explains Waugh’s support for Mussolini, when Fascist Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935, and for the forces of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Waugh visited Abyssinia three times and was appalled at the poverty, cruelty (read the description of Addis Ababa prison in Remote People) and barbarity of much of the country, which wasn’t a country at all but an empire of subject peoples held together by force. He saw Italy as bringing European law and order and culture and, above all, Religion, to a corrupt and failing country.
I was shocked when I first read of his support for the ‘noble cause’ of Franco and the nationalists in Spain but it, of course, makes perfect sense. The Spanish socialist government may have been democratically elected but it embarked almost immediately on a campaign of closing churches and arresting priests. If you believe the Catholic Church is a vital connection between the creator God and his people, as Waugh very deeply did, then this simply could not be allowed and Franco’s intervention to restore law and order and preserve the church of course received Waugh’s initial support. Until it became clear that the Franco forces were committing atrocities every bit as bad or worse than the communists he vilified – at which point he washed his hands of the whole affair.
Waugh’s Second World War
One quote says it all:
The ordinary soldiers disliked [Waugh] to such an extent that for a time [his superior officer, Lieutenant] Laycock felt obliged to set a guard on his sleeping quarters. (p.445)
Despite being every bit as committed to the war effort as his alter ego, Guy Crouchback, in the Sword of Honour trilogy, and despite showing real bravery in the face of enemy attack (Stuka divebombing in Crete) Waugh was universally disliked in the army. He had no idea how to deal with the ordinary working class soldiers, veering between heavy sarcasm and shouted orders, both of which failed to command affection or respect (‘He bullied and bewildered them’, p.445). His commander in 8 Commando, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Laycock (Eton and Sandhurst), told him he was so unpopular as to be virtually unemployable in the army (p.445).
He was an outsider to all the regular soldiers, bluff philistine types who instinctively took against this ‘bookish chappie’ with his smart repartee and corrosive cynicism. And when he did manage to wangle a place in a commando unit (as Crouchback does) Waugh was easily outclassed by genuine aristocrats such as Lord Randolph Churchill. His brown-nosing snobbish hero worship of these real blue blood types was so obvious, and repellent to onlookers, that Hastings is able to quote several written accounts describing it. His toadying to anyone with a title was a running joke with the WAAFs at the headquarters of Combined Operations (p.419).
Lord Lovat (Ampleforth and Oxford), the deputy brigade commander, wrote of Waugh:
‘I had known him vaguely at Oxford, and, while I admired his literary genius, had marked him down as a greedy little man – a eunuch in appearance – who seemed desperately anxious to “get in” with the right people.’ (quoted page 450)
I was surprised to learn that when Lovat ordered the scruffy, ill-disciplined Waugh to go to a barracks in Scotland to re-undergo basic training, and Waugh objected and took his complaint to Lovat’s superior, General Haydon, the latter sacked him on the spot for insubordination. This was August 1943. Waugh remained in the army but without a post or position. This marks the end of his romance with the army. From now on he just wanted to get out, to return to civilian life and resume his career as a writer.
This disillusion and demotivation is strongly conveyed in the short prologue and epilogue to Brideshead Revisited where it is assigned to the novel’s narrator, Charles Ryder.
Waugh’s real wartime career closely followed the narrative of the Sword of Honour trilogy, or the trilogy was very closely based on his own experiences. But having read Hastings’ account makes you realise that Waugh’s greatest achievement in the novel was putting Crouchback on the same social level as the blue blood heroes he describes, and accepted by his fellow officers. Waugh was an outsider because he was a social-climbing, bookish cynic. In the trilogy Waugh converts the reasons for Waugh’s outsiderness – bookish, sarcastic, cynical, bad at handling soldiers – into the far more noble and romantic and acceptable reasons for Crouchback’s outsiderness, namely long-running depression over being dumped by his wife and a stern commitment to Catholic values which none of the other officers understands.
Sex
It’s strange that sexual problems in the bedroom appear to have contributed to the swift collapse of Waugh’s first marriage, and that Hastings periodically thereafter describes him as lacking sexual self-confidence, strange because his diaries and letters are full of sexual encounters – homosexual ones at school and Oxford and for a while afterwards in London, and then various encounters with prostitutes abroad. In Tangier, January 1934, Waugh explored the red light district and visited a brothel where he bought a 16 year old girl for 10 francs:
but I didn’t enjoy her very much because she had a skin like sandpaper and a huge stomach which didn’t show until she took off her clothes & then it was too late.
(Diary quoted p.297)
He then takes a 15 year old concubine whose face is entirely covered in blue tattoos and he thinks about setting up in an apartment of her own for his sole use (p.297). I was very struck by Waugh’s own account of being in an Italian brothel and paying for a big black guy to sodomise a white youth on a divan, all artfully staged and arranged for the viewing pleasure of Waugh and his friends.
I suppose there’s all the difference in the world between staging such events or, in more general terms, paying for sex, and having to manage consensual sex with a female partner, with someone you have to talk to later, arrange all the domestic chores, go out to dinner with and so on. That is an infinitely more complex situation to deal with and Waugh wouldn’t be the first man to find it demanding and intimidating.
Waugh writes the word ‘fuck’ quite a lot. One of his female correspondents deprecated his use of the word in a letter to her, so it was obviously not freely used in his posh circles. I was struck by the bluntness of a letter Waugh wrote his second wife, Laura, about taking leave from the army at Christmas 1942, just after she had given birth to their third child:
There is an hotel at Shaftesbury with a very splendid sideboard. I think we might take a week end there soon when you are fuckable. (quoted page 444)
which certainly gives an indication of the way he wrote to her, and maybe spoke to her, but it is not necessarily indicative of the bluntly physical attitude he actually took to sex because we know from his countless other letters, that he cultivated a range of voices and styles (baby talk, high gossip, satire, facetious descriptions of army life) in his letters, depending on who they were written to. Everything he wrote was written for effect.
(The really surprising thing about that letter is that it was preserved and published. Who gave permission for it to be published? I wouldn’t want my casual notes or texts to my wife to be published for the world to read.)
Music
Strikingly, Waugh had no feel at all for music and hated almost all forms of it. At one point he comments that listening to Palestrina was purgatory while, at the other end of the musical spectrum, he loathed the loud jazz which became more and more dominant in London nightclubs as the 1920s progressed.
If you don’t perceive music as the complex interlinking of melody, harmony, rhythm and syncopation, you tend to register it simply as noise and ‘racket’. Waugh’s loathing of music took most concrete form in his detestation of the ‘wireless’, the new-fangled radio which came in during the 1920s and became more and more and more popular during the 1930s and 40s. His was one of the few middle class households in the country which didn’t possess a wireless and so didn’t listen to Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast about the outbreak of war in September 1939 (p.383).
Witness his short story ‘The Sympathetic Passenger’, lampooning a man who hates the wireless; or the scenes in Unconditional Surrender where Guy is convalescing in an RAF hospital whose ‘long-haired boys’ have radios everywhere in the building cranked up to full volume blaring out jazz music which drives Guy so mad he phones a friend and begs to be taken away.
Anti-Americanism
‘God, I hate Americans’, quoted on p.299
The brash, superficial, loud, vulgar consumer capitalism of America came to epitomise everything Waugh hated about the modern age (p.221). Like most British writers he came to rely on sales in America to keep him solvent but that didn’t stop him being very rude about America and Americans in correspondence and, sometimes, to their faces.
Evelyn had always referred with patronising contempt to Alec’s fondness for America, and since the war had come to regard the United States as the apogee of everything that was tasteless, vulgar and barbaric. (p.511)
This is exemplified in the easy-to-overlook joke at the start of The Loved One where the two British protagonists are depicted on the verandah of a rundown bungalow at dusk, surrounded by decay, thick vegetation and the sound of cicadas, so that you think they must be in some god-forsaken colony in darkest Africa or the Far East and only slowly do you discover that they are in fact in Hollywood. Hastings pulls out some choice quotes from his huge correspondence:
The great difference between our manners and those of the Americans is that theirs are designed to promote cordiality, ours to protect privacy. (p.512)
My book [Brideshead Revisited] has been a great success in the United States which is upsetting because I thought it in good taste before and now I know it can’t be. (letter to John Betjeman, quoted p.512) [Betjeman went to Marlborough and Oxford]
Post war
The last 100 pages of the novel are marked by three themes:
1. Writing for money
Waugh continued to write a lot but the quality was often poor. Hastings records the umpteen commissions he received from magazines and newspapers, driving a very hard bargain, demanding the maximum rate possible, and then very often disappointing with work which was so hurried or roughshod, the magazines quite frequently refused to publish it or asked for their money back.
Of similar dubious or debatable quality are his handful of post-war stories, the novellas ‘Scott-King’s Modern Europe’ (genesis, writing and reviews summarised pages 500 to 502) and ‘Love Among the Ruins’ (in Hastings’ opinion, ‘a nasty little tale’, p.553) and the oddity which is The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (origin and writing described pages 560 to 567).
The Loved One is another oddity, which begins well and is full of lusciously funny details, but somehow fizzles out: he fails to find a plot to match the comic richness of his subject (American funeral homes). (Its genesis, writing and reception described on pages 514 to 522.)
Students and fans often overlook the overtly Catholic books he wrote, such as the novel about the Roman Empress Helena, discoverer of the ‘True Cross’ (1950) which was slammed in his own day and has never sold well (described pages 538 to 541). The 1930s biography of the Elizabethan martyr Thomas Campion (1935) and the biography he promised to write of his good friend, Catholic convert and Jesuit priest Ronald Knox (The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox, 1959) [Knox attended Eton and Oxford].
Then there were two poorly received travel books ‘The Holy Places’ (1952) and ‘A Tourist in Africa’ (1960). In 1961 he was paid £2,000 by the Daily Mail to go back to British Guiana on the eve of independence and write five articles on his impressions. These were so flat and incurious the Mail printed only one and demanded their money back (p.606).
The exception to all of this, and all the more remarkable for the mediocrity of the rest of his post-war output, are the three novels of the Sword of Honour trilogy (Men at Arms, described page 546 to 551; Officers and Gentlemen pp.571 to 573; Unconditional Surrender pp.594 to 599) which I find magnificent, richly funny, fascinating with social history, and deeply moving.
2. Comic dislike of his children
Waugh genuinely disliked small children and his own were no exception.
I abhor their company because I can only regard children as defective adults, hate their physical ineptitude, find their jokes flat and monotonous…The presence of my children affects me with deep weariness and depression. (quoted op.527)
The Waugh children (all 6 of them) were exiled to the nursery and, as soon as possible, sent off to prep schools. Waugh hated Christmas because of all the noise and disruption and had a little private party when they went back to their schools (p.527ff.). Waugh cultivated the pose of a father who detested his children and, although this must have been horrible to experience, it is often very funny to read about, especially when expressed in his deliberately outrageous letters.
His eldest son, Auberon Waugh (1939 to 2001: Downside and Oxford) went on to become a novelist, journalist and literary editor. He wrote an autobiography describing his unhappy childhood in detail and said that, as a boy, he would happily have swapped his father for a bosun’s whistle (p.528).
3. Boredom and depression
Above all, Waugh was bored bored bored, often bored to death. He drank to excess to stave of boredom and depression, and the against-the-fashion pose of young fogey he cultivated in the 1930s, and which came to seem out of place during the People’s War, crystallised into the persona of an angry, overweight, red-faced old buffer after the war. Waugh knew what he was doing; the persona he cultivated is described with precision in the self-portrait which opens The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold:
It was his modesty which needed protection and for this purpose, but without design, he gradually assumed this character of burlesque. He was neither a scholar nor a regular soldier; the part for which he cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously, before his children at Lychpole and his cronies in London, until it came to dominate his whole outward personality. When he ceased to be alone, when he swung into his club or stumped up the nursery stairs, he left half of himself behind and the other half swelled to fill its place. He offered the world a front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass.
Hastings picks up the word ‘pomposity’ and quotes a passage from a letter to Diana Cooper:
Women don’t understand pomposity. It is nearly always an absolutely private joke – one against the world. The last line of defence. (p.568)
All this is interesting because you don’t find in fiction, or anywhere nowadays, a sympathetic explanation of the quality of pomposity. The idea of it being a sort of private joke is thought provoking, an insight into the way all kinds of people’s odd manners might be taken as very personal jokes against the world…
Hastings gives example after example of Waugh’s astounding rudeness to everyone he met, no matter how powerful and influential – the bitter arguments he had with even his closest friends, and the well-attested rows he had with his long-suffering wife, Laura.
One of the most loyal friends of his later years was the tough-minded socialite Ann Charteris (1913 to 1981) who had three husbands, first Lord O’Neill, secondly Lord Rothermere and then the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming (Eton and Sandhurst). Hastings quotes comments about Waugh from several of his close woman friends such as Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford, but Ann Fleming put her finger on it when she wrote to her brother, Hugo, in 1955:
‘Poor Evelyn, he is deeply unhappy – bored from morning till night and has developed a personality which he hates but cannot escape from.’ (quoted p.558)
Not only was he a martyr to boredom but to insomnia and since the late 1930s had been taking various sleeping draughts which he mixed, against all medical advice, not in water but with creme de menthe. It was when he began, in addition, dosing himself with bromide that he developed first the physical and then the mental symptoms so accurately described in Pinfold.
He was invited to stay at the Flemings house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica where he was irascible and ungrateful. Ann Fleming again: ‘Poor Evelyn – killing time is his trouble and not a night without sleeping pills for twenty years’ (quoted p.571).
And when Nancy Mitford asked him, after he had paid her a bad-tempered visit in Paris, how he could reconcile behaving so badly and speaking so spitefully about everyone with his religion’s words about loving your neighbour as yourself:
‘He replied rather sadly that were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible…& anyway would have committed suicide years ago.’ (quoted p.505)
Credit
Evelyn Waugh: A Biography by Selina Hastings (1994) was published by Sinclair-Stevenson in 1994. All references are to the 1995 Mandarin paperback edition.
Evelyn Waugh reviews
- Decline and Fall (1928)
- Vile Bodies (1930)
- Remote People (1931)
- Black Mischief (1932)
- Ninety-Two Days (1934)
- A Handful of Dust (1934)
- Waugh in Abyssinia (1936)
- Scoop (1938)
- Work Suspended (1942)
- Put Out More Flags (1942)
- Brideshead Revisited (1945)
- Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947)
- The Loved One (1948)
- Men at Arms (1952)
- Love Among the Ruins (1953)
- What is Waugh satirising in ‘Love Among The Ruins’?
- Officers and Gentlemen (1955)
- The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)
- Unconditional Surrender (1961)
- The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh
- Evelyn Waugh: A Biography by Selina Hastings (1994)
Books & Boots 