Evelyn!
Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love

Evelyn Waugh was the author whose books Duncan McLaren most enjoyed as a teenager in the '70s. In order to reassess Waugh’s work now, Duncan travels with Kate to the places in which Waugh lived and loved in the early decades of the Twentieth Century.

Cover blurb:
A most personal and surprising biography of Evelyn Waugh which, for the very first time, also examines in full the love triangle between Waugh, Evelyn Gardner and John Heygate. Adopting the same disruptive and inquisitive approach as his previous works, McLaren manages to produce an entirely new portrait of Evelyn Waugh to those painted by more traditional recent biographies.

Alexander Waugh writes:
I think it is absolutely brilliant, breezy, very funny, original, erudite, beautifully written, fascinating in every detail, moving, generous, charming and thoroughly deserving of a good publisher... It is written with magnificent zest and is, among so much else,  a wonderful advertisement for Waugh.

Duncan comments:
Alexander Waugh's endorsement of the manuscript is not just fabulous in itself, but led to previously unpublished photographs being made available for inclusion in Evelyn!, photographs that get right to the heart of Evelyn Waugh's life and my book. Which just goes to show that you can take a very subjective and playful approach to a subject and end up being taken seriously by those who really know and care about it.

Let's hear from Evelyn himself:
'There's only one thing I did wrong. Stayed up the Amazon a day too long.'

The book can be bought here: www.amazon.co.uk

Well, the book can't be bought there just yet. In the meantime, here is something Evelynesque to be going on with.

 

ALL EVELYNED OUT:

A REPORT ON THE 2011 EVELYN WAUGH CONFERENCE

 

ARRIVAL

Kate and I get to Downside School, Somerset, at 9pm, hoping that we're not too late for dinner. The private Catholic school is massive, dark and quiet. Is anybody there? A couple of security guards are. They know nothing about any Waugh conference but are aware that something was going on in the middle of the school earlier in the evening and are willing to escort me there.

So off I go between the two uniformed guards, and after five minutes march, I'm face to face with a couple of unsmiling organizers of the Waugh conference. Apparently, they have reported to the police someone making a drunken nuisance of themselves in the school grounds, and I think they suspect that the villain has been apprehended and brought before them. Not so: I come in peace, and, what's more, having paid for full board and lodgings. Accordingly, I ask if there's any food available. "Nope," comes the stony-faced reply. "Are any of the other confrères still around?" I ask, smiling. "Most of them have retired to their rooms." I'm told. I suppose that means that a few folk are still up and socializing. But by the time I've turned around his answer the pair have disappeared up a corridor, no doubt headed for some exclusive meeting in a bar. Christ, maybe Kate and I should have got up at 4am this morning in order to check-in on time and endure a tour of Downside Abbey.

The local pub has also stopped serving food, which is bad news in particular for Kate, who needs to eat little and often and who's been going on about her hunger since we touched down at Bristol Airport. I'm not bothered by the situation, indeed I'm quite excited by a coincidence. In the summer of 1946, when Evelyn Waugh attended – purely for the jollies - a conference in Spain, devoted to a lawyer he'd never even heard of, he wrote in his diary that he and his travelling companion, Douglas Woodruff, had 'no luncheon' on the first day. When he later came to fictionalize the event in Scott King's Modern Europe, where a dim classics scholar, accompanied by an academic called Whitemaid, goes to a conference in Neutralia devoted to the work of an obscure Seventeenth Century poet, Waugh transformed his experience into art in the following way:

A steward announced: 'We shall arrive at Bellacita at sixteen hours Neutralian time.'
'An appalling thought occurs to me, said Whitemaid. 'Can this mean we get no luncheon?'

They got no luncheon. A couple of pages later, Whitemaid informs Scott King:

'Exactly ten hours and a half since I had anything to eat.'

Back at the school, we punch the entry code and gain entry to Isabella. This is a six-floor accommodation block, normally a girls' dorm but used for conferences out of term. The hard, narrow, single beds soon distract Kate from her hunger. A light goes on in the corridor outside our room every time a door opens. Pipes make deeply ominous noises whenever the plumbing is called into action.

'Exactly twelve hours since I had anything to eat,' I announce, in an effort to lighten my partner's mood.

 

 

DAY ONE

1

A British-born, American-based confrère happens to be going to the refectory at the same time as Kate and me. Our dapper guide raves about the 'marvellous' food at Downside. Later we decide that we must have missed the irony when Tony said this. But at the time it puts a spring in our step.

Over a congealed egg breakfast, we learn that our guide is responsible for the Evelyn Waugh society website. Now Waugh has a poor online presence, as our new friend readily acknowledges, and so we discuss what can be done to amend this state of affairs. Citing the Enid Blyton Society website - to which I've contributed truckloads of posts - I tell him my ideas for an improved Waugh site. First, a 'Library of Books' for the bibliophile, with scans of every edition of each Waugh title. Second, the existing Evelyn Waugh newsletter, which appears elsewhere on the web at the moment, and which brings together all the academic developments, however pedantic. Third, and most important of all, a FORUM so that enthusiasts can have their say on any aspect of Evelyn Waugh's life and works.

Sure, there is a forum already on the net. But that is a sedate affair to which only learned dons seem minded to contribute. The forums I have in mind will attract BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS. I don't know how to achieve that exactly. But maybe while I'm blogging and tweeting about Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love the way forward will reveal itself.

It just so happens that I've recently been to Llanddulas in North Wales, where Evelyn Waugh taught as a schoolmaster for two terms back in 1925. I took photos of Arnold House, the ex-school, and of the Fairview Inn (which is referred to as 'Mrs Roberts pub' in both Waugh's diaries and in Decline and Fall), and of the spot on the beach where sad young Evelyn embarked on what was intended to be a suicide swim. The resulting essay, illustrated with my photos, is made for the internet.

'I'd like to see that essay.'

'You will see that essay.'

'I'll find a place for it on the website.'

'Now you're talking.'

Kate then takes over the conversation, explaining what motivated her to make a rudimentary 'GENTS' sign for one of the fifth floor bathrooms and a 'LADIES' for the other. If she must see the naked body of a fellow confrère stepping out of the shower, then let it be an echo of her own form.

The conference proper starts in a room where we're going to be presented with four papers in the two hours from 10am. To kick us off we hear from a gentle man who was at Heath Mount preparatory school in Hampstead, as was Evelyn, though not at the same time. Kate knits. I make no notes. Nor does the American who I'm sitting beside. In his case, possibly because the lecture has been given in an upper-class English drawl. One up to the old country, I'm thinking.

The second lecture focuses on Sherborne, the public school that Evelyn didn't attend because his brother wrote The Loom of Youth about it, where what was looming was adolescent homosexual experience. This lecture, which makes some fascinating points about Waugh's traumatic war experience in Crete and his subsequent visit to Sherborne as an umpire for a day of war games, is also delivered in a voice whose clarity seems to be impeded by the simultaneous sucking of a plum. As 11 o'clock strikes it's just possible that half the 40-strong audience have not yet been able to understand a single word of the papers. The Spanish delegate has been reduced to sketching portraits of the speakers. Two up to the old country.

An American lawyer is next. Seated, he eschews eye contact with the audience. Choosing to mutter away to himself, he pretty well eschews voice contact also. Things are going badly from a UK point of view this time around, until Alexander Waugh, who is chairing the conference, points out that the slide on display - which is supposed to be of a house that Evelyn Waugh considered buying but did not buy - is not in fact the house in question. Not that it matters, as the house is hidden behind a wealth of extraneous vegetation. Apparently it was the best picture that the speaker could download from the worldwide web to his laptop. And I have to say, I warm to this Yank's nerve.

There is no fourth speaker, it turns out, so we break early for coffee. There I learn that the absent speaker, whose talk was to be about sartorial elegance in Decline and Fall, was present at the opening dinner last night. However, apparently she expressed a lack of confidence in her paper. Moreover, the fracas that had disturbed the conference shortly before my own arrival, broke out again later in the night and this may have caused her to bolt come morning.

I'm left imagining the opening scene in Decline and Fall. The dons at Scone College are cowering in their rooms because the Bollinger Club is on the rampage. How does Evelyn put it again? In anticipation of engaging with the fourth paper I have a paperback copy of the novel to hand. Soon I'm reading:

A shriller note could now be heard; any who have heard that sound will shrink at the recollection of it; it is the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass.

No wonder our missing delegate was scared. I don't suppose she made the mistake of going out to investigate the strange noises late at night. But I doubt if she slept much. And, in the morning, stepping into the washroom on whatever floor of the Isabella block she was on, she might have come across a male delegate emerging from the shower, who she, in her delirium, may have taken to be Lumsden of Strathdrummond, swaying across her path like a druidical rocking-stone.

2

Lunch is a networking opportunity. For me, that means sitting alongside Kate and listening to her engage with humanity. She gets talking to a Canadian who teaches an English Literature course to 18-year-olds. He wants to include Waugh on the syllabus but thinks that his students wouldn't get the humour of Decline and Fall, so he may go for A Handful of Dust instead. But in any case he'll need a good book of lit crit and biography that his students can consult. Kate suggests that Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love would be the ideal companion for any reader of Waugh from 4 to 90. She has him smiling and when he mentions that he could order as many as twenty copies of my book he has us smiling as well. Warren was originally down to present a paper but decided that it wasn't quite ready. Well, the bar has been set pretty high this morning, says Kate, so perhaps he was wise to 'back off, buddy'. She leaves him chuckling into his pudding.

As Kate and I emerge from a lunch full of saturated fat, we bump into Alexander Waugh. He apologizes for the fact that he won't be at our talk tomorrow evening. Alas, he is not the first high profile attendee to tell us he can't make our slot. As I'm thinking this aloud, and mentioning that we're disappointed that Derek Granger, the producer of the 1981 Granada TV serial of Brideshead has had to pull out of speaking after dinner tonight, Alexander begs us to consider taking over this empty slot. Tonight? I'm up for it, but is Kate? She could be. So that's that, and I can't wait.

I'll have to wait, though. So I walk back into the lecture hall eager to crack on with four more papers crammed full of Wavian insight. First up is another academic from across the Atlantic whose talk is called 'The Mortuary Aesthetic of Secular Culture in The Loved One'. The paper, which is read aloud, is full of multi-syllabated jargon which goes way over my head. However, he walks as he talks, sometimes impersonating the slippery and calculating Dennis Barlow, sometimes the self-regarding and oily Mr Joyboy. On that level the talk works wonderfully well.

Next up is an academic from Turkey. She has lost her paper in transit but is willing and able to talk at random about H.G Wells and Evelyn Waugh. Does she make an effective connection between these two Twentieth Century writers? She does not. But then that kind of exercise is not easy. Try Evelyn Waugh and D.H. Lawrence. Or Waugh and Joyce. Compare and contrast Evelyn Waugh and John Steinbeck, for goodness sake. On the one hand it is, in fact, very easy. On the other, it's more or less pointless.

Suddenly an immaculately dressed Japanese man is standing before us. His paper is about Decline and Fall, but, as with our first speaker of the afternoon, much effort has been put into the visual impact he makes. Indeed I know from his lunchtime conversation with our Sherborne expert that the present speaker buys his shoes from Trickers on Jermyn Street, Mayfair, and his shirts from Brooks of New York. The tie though, with its pale blue and white stripes, is instantly recognizable as belonging to the Bollinger Club. Once again I extract my Penguin copy of Decline and Fall. This time I'm looking for a particular line spoken by Lumsden of Strathdrummond. Ah. Here it is:

'Here's an awful man wearing the Boller tie.'

But there's nothing awful about our neatly turned out speaker. In this context, I prefer to read the line in a more neutral way, so how about:

'Here's a Japanese man wearing the Boller tie.'

Again there is no fourth paper. The scheduled fourth speaker of the afternoon was the partner of the speaker who didn't turn up this morning. Perhaps, after a difficult night, the pair decided to cut their losses and run. For all I know, last night's disturber-of-the-peace broke up the missing speakers' grand piano, and stamped their cigars into their carpet, and smashed their china, and tore up their silk sheets, and threw their travelling Matisse into their water-jug. The rampager of Downside may well have found the missing speakers' papers and had fun with them, in the same way that, in the ever-rich pages of Decline and Fall, the Bollinger Club had great fun with the manuscript that Mr Sanders had been working on for the Newdigate Prize Poem.

Stuffed with the fruit of six - no, eight - academic papers, we board a bus that's to take us to Mells, a quaint old village that has Evelyn Waugh connections. Alas, Kate is an absentee. After the excitement of the lecture room, she has had to go and lie down on her hard, narrow single bed. So I sit beside someone else, James Morris, a poet who regularly contributes sharp, allusive poems to the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter. He's also had poems published in the Spectator recently, so we happily swop notes about the state of publishing today.

At Mells we go into the fine old church. But why? It's an Anglican church so Evelyn wouldn't have come here. Apparently, this is where we're meeting the Earl of Oxford, but I don't see the need to hang around for him to turn up.

Outside in the churchyard is the grave of Ronald Knox. Waugh wrote his biography, and Chapman and Hall published it in a volume that looks so forbiddingly boring that I've hardly been able to open it never mind read its chapters. On the grave it says 'Priest, Scholar, Preacher and Writer.' This echoes the strapline of Waugh's other straitlaced quasi-religious book, Edmund Campion: Scholar, Priest, Hero and Martyr. That was written in 1935, five years after Waugh converted to Catholicism. The Knox book was written in 1959, and on the title page Waugh notes that Knox was 'pronotary apostolic to his holiness Pope Pius the Twelfth'. Is this some private joke? If so, I wish someone would let me in on it.

Right next to the church is Mells Manor. Evelyn was invited here by Katharine Asquith in the early 1930s and after a fine weekend he sent her copies of his books and soon became great chums with the high-born, serious-minded Catholic. Our guide today is Katharine's grandson, and as I return to the group it's to overhear a useful piece of info. The present earl was Evelyn's godson, and he used to be given generous gifts from his godfather. I ask the earl how old he was when Waugh died. About 14, is the answer. And though his family lived abroad at the time, he still felt close to Evelyn at the time of his death.

As for Ronald Knox, he was invited to live at Mells Manor from 1947, and he stayed there, translating the Bible amongst other learned-cum-absurd projects, until his death ten years later. Evelyn would have been living at Piers Court in Gloucestershire for some of this time, then at Combe Florey in Somerset. Neither of these fine homes was particularly close to here, but both were within a couple of hours travel. However, Evelyn did regularly come here during his second life, by which I mean the devout family life he enjoyed with his second wife, Laura.

Indeed that's why the conference is being held at Downside. What I mean is, when living at Piers Court, Evelyn would stay at Downside for Holy Week. In other words, out of term, at Easter, Waugh may have done what we've been doing: sleeping in a hard, narrow single bed and turning up for meals at the refectory three times a day. The only real difference is likely to have been that he worshipped with the monks at Downside Abbey while we worship in a secular lecture room in the middle of Downside School.

I think Evelyn regularly travelled the six miles to Downside Abbey for mass while he was in residence at Mells. Though I may be wrong. There is a private chapel in a corner of the Manor garden, in which a service of some kind is going on as we shuffle up to the door. Standing alongside a Japanese man (not this afternoon's speaker), I find myself trying to explain why Evelyn might have once been found praying to God in this tiny converted shed, but on no account in the impressive church next door. Phrases like 'Roman Catholicism', 'High Anglicanism' and 'Pronotary Apostolic to his Holiness Pope Pius the Twelfth' roll off my tongue. But I'm not sure he quite gets what I'm driving at.

We walk en masse, as it were, to a lane where there is a thatched house. This is where Evelyn began Scoop in 1936, we're told. The earl further tells us that when Evelyn was offered the house, he turned up at the front door, ran up to the bedroom, jumped on the bed a few times, and declared it was fine, he would take it. He'd probably come straight here from sleeping on a bed at Downside School.

That reminds me. In 1925 or so, when Evelyn was still great friends with his ex-Oxford lover, Alastair Graham, the latter spent a week with the son of a canon at Wells Cathedral. (Wells is near Mells.) Alastair wrote to tell Evelyn that the authorities at Downside School kept an arc of female birds and beasts for their sexual delectation.

But let's try and be site-specific. We're still standing outside the thatched house in the lane. Let me unobtrusively extract the Diaries from my day bag. OK, Evelyn came back from Abyssinia in September 1936. He went straight to Mells because it was handy for seeing Laura Herbert, his wife to be, who lived at Pixton Park, Dulverton, about forty miles away. A diary entry written in Mells on September 14, states that he was 'living at Mrs Long's'. The house I'm looking at may well be Mrs Long's place, as was.

For a week or two, Evelyn was dining regularly at Mells Manor, house-hunting with Laura, and putting the finishing touches to Waugh in Abyssinia. By October 15, still living at this house, Waugh notes in his diary that he'd started a new novel (Scoop) and by October 29 he'd finished the second chapter and had sent it off to be typed.

On the coach on the way home to Downside, I'm sitting next to James Morris again. Can he give me a poem inspired by Scoop? He tells me he can do better than that, he can give me a poem based on the first chapter, which was written in the very house we've just been admiring.

'Great.'

The poet closes his eyes and recites:

Crossword

Mrs Stitch
Signing cheques,
Translating Latin text,
'Terracotta' she suggests,
Talking to the man up the ladder,
Viola Chasm on the phone?
It was a puzzle.

Neat. It's just a pity, from this afternoon's perspective, that Evelyn chose to start the book with a pen portrait of Diana Cooper, scatter-brained actress, rather than Katharine Asquith, Mells-based Catholic.

Jim tells me that he too is a Catholic. I ask him to enlighten me on that score. He recites a poem for me, one that takes as its starting point the Waugh short story, 'Out of Depth'.

Out of Depth

England abased
Before some African tribe,

The people debased,
Scavenging in the countryside,

Only the Catholic faith--
Giving some semblance of civilized life,

Same as it ever was.

Ha! This day just keeps getting better. Now for a quick dinner and then into the bar for our talk. I hope Kate's been learning her lines.

 

3

The bar is full of people sitting on chairs. I'm standing at the bar feeling slightly self-conscious, waiting for Kate. Alexander Waugh suggests I introduce myself by saying something about the book in my hand. Of, course! It's a proof copy of Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love, which will be published by Beautiful Books in hardback, and as an ebook, at the end of September. Then I read the endorsements that are printed on the back, one from Alexander himself, and one from John Howard Wilson, secretary of the Evelyn Waugh Society, both of whom are sitting at the back of the room, perhaps now regretting the fulsome generosity of their words. But this is no time for reserve, either British or American, and I know that reading the words of affirmation has been the right thing to do.

Kate arrives. She positions two barstools, one for herself and one for me, and we're off and talking. The first half of our presentation is about Alastair Graham. I introduce him in a few paragraphs, while Kate and I display board-backed A3 prints of photos taken at Barford House, where Alastair and Evelyn spent much quality time, in 1923 in particular. Some of the photos are blown up from tiny originals that Alexander has shared with me. Others were taken in 2006. The photos of the temple at the bottom of the garden, past and present, are stunning. We know they are. The photos that Alastair took of Evelyn Waugh and Evelyn Gardner together, just before their wedding in 1928, will double the number of photographs of the Evelyns that are in print. They too are stunning. While showing the pictures I'm conscious of someone getting up from the audience and helping himself to a drink from the bar behind me.

Soon Kate and I are reading from my book. The scene takes place at the Easton Court Guest House in Chagford, a place that Evelyn used to frequent in order to write his books in the 30s and 40s, when it was a hotel. In this scene, Kate tells me what she's discovered about Alastair Graham's post-Waugh life. How he ended up living in Newquay, and became a buddy of Dylan Thomas. Again, someone goes to the bar. It's Ginger, a Waugh enthusiast from Burnley, who was drinking heavily over dinner. And when he resumes his seat he interrupts our talk by complimenting us on how our talk has fundamentally changed his view of Brideshead. I thank him for his intervention and try to move things forward. But that does not prove an easy thing to do. Ginger is fixated on Barford and we have to listen to him formulating his new perspective. Eventually we get through the talk. Kate, who has read her half of our dialogue to perfection, is asked several questions, as if the discoveries she presented in the scene really were her discoveries, and not mine. But she fields those questions well enough. When asked why Alastair Graham moved to Newquay, she suggests it was for the mackerel. After all, hasn't she just told us all that Alastair wrote a pamphlet called 'Twenty ways to cook Newquay mackerel'?

The second half of our talk is about John Heygate, the man who helped destroy he-Evelyn's first marriage by having an affair with she-Evelyn. Again we have photos. Again we read a scene from the book that takes place while we're lying in bed at the Easton Court Guest House. And this time we're positively heckled. Ginger thinks that Kate is openly taking Evelyn Gardner's side against Evelyn Waugh. He tells her: 'Evelyn was a wonderful man but she used him right from the start.'

How many sides are there to a love triangle? Quite a few, and one needs to keep an open mind to get the full picture. While, it seems to me, our heckler's mind is closing fast thanks to the alcohol that's besieging it.

'She were a right bitch,' says our heckler to Kate.

'I didn't write this,' she tells him. I was reading from a book that Duncan has written.'

Over to me, I don't think. After the talk, a few of the audience join Kate and I for a drink at the bar. Ginger buys a couple of bottles of wine and suggests that Kate and I retire to a bench and drink them with him. This echoes a line of Alastair's that we delivered in our talk, where Alastair suggests that he and Evelyn retire to some bucolic spot and drink like Horace. I don't feel like drinking like Horace right now, not with Ginger having such a head start, and Kate suggests that he puts one of the bottles back behind the bar where it will keep until tomorrow. The last thing I see before leaving the bar is Ginger downing in one a half-pint glass full of white wine. It is a sobering sight. Evelyn Waugh used to be able to 'hit the bottle' in this scary way when he was young. But Ginger is pushing 50.

Later, Kate and I discover Ginger in the entrance porch of Isabella. He is lying on his back, unconscious, clearly having forgotten the four-digit code to get into the building. Well, he can't stay there all night, so I try and wake him. This proves difficult, since all he craves is oblivion, but eventually he does understand who it is that is trying to make contact with him, and he knows what we're advising him to do. Alas he can't stand up on his own. And I can't haul such a dead weight to its feet. So I get on my hands and knees and urge Ginger to roll over and to adopt the same position. Ginger says he'd rather not bother. But I persist, and, when I mention tomorrow's coach trip to Combe Florey, Evelyn Waugh's former home, he co-operates. From an all-fours position he is able to stand.

Inside Isabella we ask Ginger what his room number is. Sebastian hasn't a clue. Yes, my feelings of affection and pity for Ginger at this moment, echo my feelings for the charismatic character in Brideshead, who Charles comes across in a destructively drunken state both at Brideshead itself and at Sebastian's Oxford College. As we said in our talk tonight, Sebastian is twice named as Alastair in the manuscript, through slips of the pen. So there is another love triangle of a kind: Alastair-Sebastian-Ginger.

Meanwhile Kate has removed cushions from seats in the ground floor lounge and put together a mattress, having decided that Ginger is too tall to lie comfortably on one of the sofas. Ginger eagerly collapses on Kate's homemade bed, and may already be asleep again as Kate puts a rug over him and asks if he wants a glass of water placed by his bedside. No answer. Kate checks that he is lying on his side. Goodnight sweet prince. But can we really leave him in such a state? We consult with a passing colleague and the consensus is that Ginger has been in this position before, and that his body will somehow cope with the surfeit of alcohol that's been imposed on it this evening. Indeed it was our heckler, we now understand, that was responsible for the fracas the previous night. Oh dear.

Soon Kate and I are in bed also. That is we're lying on the hard, narrow single beds at opposite ends of our fifth floor room. 'Exactly thirty-six hours since we left the world of balanced diets,' I announce, in an effort to lighten my partner's mood.

 

(Author's note: There is a conference 'DAY TWO' and 'DAY THREE', and I'll add these here shortly.)