Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (88 page)

As did his Oxford contemporary, Cyril Connolly, Waugh probably cursed the gods that he was born with no title before his name. But at least he could put ‘Esquire’ after it. He was raised in the upper middle classes. His father, Arthur Waugh, was a director of Chapman and Hall. A brilliant young publisher he became, in age, like the house itself, stuffy and self-important. Edward Chapman and William Hall had grown fat on their ownership of the Dickens copyright – the author whose career they had inaugurated, when they too were brilliant young publishers, in 1836. Waugh allegorised this stultifying
trade
legacy in
A Handful of Dust
(1934) where Tony Last is imprisoned in the jungle, doomed to read Dickens aloud, until the day he dies. Meanwhile his country house, Hetton, with its ‘Carpet and canopy, tapestry and velvet’ is modernistically vandalised by Bauhaus glass and chrome. ‘Your head aches, does it not?’ asks Tony’s illiterate Negro captor, solicitously. ‘We will not have any Dickens today… but tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Let us read
Little Dorrit
again. There are passages in that book I can never hear without
the temptation to weep.’ Arthur Waugh, like any Victorian paterfamilias, read out Dickens to his children and was the President of the Dickens society. It left a lasting bruise.

Arthur Waugh was fixated, to the point of passion on his ‘firstborn’, Alec (see below), some five years older than Evelyn. Waugh minor felt unwanted (it was rumoured in the family he was an ‘accident’), and, if a child
were
wanted, the Waughs preferred it should be a girl: ‘I always longed for a daughter,’ confessed Arthur. Hence, it is plausibly suggested, the androgynous name. By Tolstoy’s cruel law, the Waugh family had their distinctive way of being unhappy. Evelyn was benignly overlooked and arguably it soured something in him – and the satirist was born: cold, domestically exiled, bitter. He came to despise his father – ‘decrepit’ enough to be his grandfather – a fat Pickwickian figure, with obscurely dubious fetishisms to do with young girls, bicycles and bottoms. Asked why he was so charming to friends and so unkind to his father, Waugh retorted, with the frigidity of Prince Hal, ‘I can choose my friends, but I cannot choose my father.’

After day school in Hampstead, Evelyn went as a boarder to Lancing. He describes it, with razor-sharp class analysis, in
Scott-King’s Modern Europe
(1947): ‘Grantchester [i.e. Lancing] is not the most illustrious of English public schools but it is … entirely respectable; it plays an annual cricket match at Lord’s; it numbers a dozen or so famous men among its old boys, who, in general, declare without apology, “I was at Grantchester.”’ In short, it was not Eton. He later said he liked none of the boys at Lancing and disliked most of the masters, although he got a sound education there. Waugh won a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford. It was not Christ Church, just as Lancing was not Eton. A ‘subdued little college’ he calls it in
Brideshead Revisited
. Like Golders Green, it added to his insecurities. Oxford was, none the less, ‘Arcadia’ and he fell in with the brilliant set orbiting around Harold Acton. His boyish looks helped. He was ‘a prancing faun’, Acton thought, if a little unadventurous in his style of dress. Waugh would grow more flamboyant in later years, with a preference for check and houndstooth.

Dandyism and insolence was the Actonian ‘criticism of life’. Sex-starved, obscenely privileged, drunken, moneyed, they relieved their
ennui
with surrealistic pranks. Their great bequest to civilisation, other than Waugh’s chronicles, were Oxford Bags (the invention of Acton himself) and the cult of the ‘party’:

Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford
where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity…Those vile bodies …

The whole point of the party was that – unlike the orgy, the revel, or the carnival – it affronted conventional morality and, like Poe’s masque of the red death, signalled the end of a civilisation. At Oxford, Waugh partied with all the rest – with the cold satirical eye which glints maliciously in the passage above, from his 1930 novel
Vile Bodies
. It was published, elegiacally, as the universal party came to an end with the Great Slump.

Waugh had some unsensational homosexual adventures, commemorated in the furtive Latin inscriptions of his late fiction. He wrote diaries all his life but destroyed those of his three Oxford years. He worked not at all: to spare himself even minimal labour he switched from history – a ‘heavy reading’ subject – to English, losing his scholarship in the process. Daring as his set was, Humphrey Carpenter surmises that Waugh was a heterosexual virgin until he married in his mid-twenties. There may, others surmise, have been a prostitute or two. Like others of Acton’s set, Waugh earned a gentleman’s third which he did not trouble to collect. The outside world was less insouciant about unqualified young men who felt they were owed a living. The main embarrassment, of course, was the necessity to
earn
a living in the first place; something that Guy Crouchback, Sebastian Flyte or Tony Last need never concern themselves with.

Waugh was a gifted painter and wanted to pursue a career in art in Paris. His father, however, would not fund that nonsense. Nor would Evelyn, like Alec (or his college friend Anthony Powell), go into publishing – his father’s trade. For a while he tried carpentry – a craft dignified by Christ’s apprenticeship to it and by Waugh’s own predilection for William Morris. But, inevitably, he accepted the advice which he puts into the mouth of a college scout in
Decline and Fall
(although, unlike Paul Pennyfeather, Waugh’s delinquencies did not lead to his being sent down): ‘I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.’ As what would now be called a ‘supply teacher’ (never, perish the thought, ‘permanent’), Waugh was very unhappy. He attempted suicide by drowning but was foiled by an inconvenient shoal of jellyfish. None the less, during these dreary years, he picked up raw material for his first novel.

His aimlessness was compounded by a disastrous marriage in 1928. His bride, Evelyn Gardner, was referred to among friends as She-Evelyn and in Debrett as the Hon. Evelyn. Her mother, Lady Burghclere, was frosty. Waugh records that in her eyes he was of that class which one might
know
socially, but never marry into. Waugh’s career dilemmas and social humiliations are given comic expression in
Decline and Fall
, published in the same year he married, 1928. Paul Pennyfeather, after being unfairly expelled from Oxford, is robbed of his inheritance, undergoes Candide-like misfortunes as a Gabbitas and Thring temp-teacher, is tricked into marriage ‘above’ his station in life, and imprisoned (unfairly) for white slavery. He returns, finally, under an alias, to Oxford to study for religious orders.

Two years after marriage the Evelyns divorced: she had brazenly cuckolded him, although his sexual nervousness may have pushed her in that direction. Alec Waugh’s first marriage was dissolved about the same time, on grounds of non-consummation. Waugh’s furious hurt is chronicled, just this side of the libel law – a well-trodden patch in his fiction – in
A Handful of Dust
. It was exacerbated by the co-respondent being the Etonian heir to a baronetcy – one of She-Evelyn’s own class and not at all like the socially verminous John Beaver in the novel. ‘I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live,’ he later wrote. It is to this traumatic misery that one traces the persistent vein of violence against women in Waugh’s fiction. In
Black Mischief
(1932), his sardonic
Heart of Darkness
satire, Basil’s girl-friend Prudence is cooked in a cannibal pot and eaten with some relish by her unwitting lover. At the end of
The Loved One
, Dennis eats his lunch sandwich while the blameless young girl, Aimee, whom he has driven to suicide, is cremated in the pets’ funeral home oven. He had kept both sandwich and corpse in the pet’s icebox.

Waugh’s bitterest novel,
Vile Bodies
, was published in the same year – 1930 – that he separated from Evelyn and joined the Catholic Church. He was drawn to Rome on historical rather than doctrinal grounds; he needed something ‘solid’ his friend and fellow convert Graham Greene deduced. His model in going over was Edmund Campion, whose biography he wrote at this time. Campion too had converted at a relatively late age. Waugh’s biography of Campion is his least read work of non-fiction. His least read work of fiction,
Helena
(1950), was the one he chose to read aloud to his family, more than any other of his works. He regarded
Helena
(perversely to most minds) as his best novel. Helena, the English daughter of Old King Coel, is memorable in the annals of Roman imperial history for being the mother of Constantine, the Caesar who made Christianity the Empire’s official religion. He reigned at that moment that the Empire was declining. Gibbon argues, in his famous fifteenth chapter, that Christianity caused Rome’s decline. Waugh disagrees: it was rebirth. And the well-born English lady Helena it was who, as recorded in the annals of Roman Catholic history, went to Jerusalem and discovered the sacred fragments of the true cross on which Christ was crucified.

A dispensation from Rome, annulling his first marriage, allowed Waugh to marry again, in 1937, this time more congenially. His bride, Laura Herbert, was Catholic and the daughter of a Conservative MP with aristocratic connections. She
was thirteen years younger than him and unassertive. Her main interest in later life was prize cattle. Again, however, the bride’s family disapproved. Waugh, they felt, was ‘a common little man’ who left a ‘bad smell’. There would be children – seven of them – and, thanks to a munificent wedding present, Waugh at last came into possession of the country house he always felt was his due, Piers Court, in Gloucestershire.

Waugh joined the colours, eagerly, in 1939, fired by the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact which put all the hated anti-Christs in the same basket. ‘The enemy’, he wrote in the first volume of his
Sword of Honour
trilogy, ‘at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.’ The Modern Age in arms proved, alas, to be the Modern Age of Cock-up. A slightly superannuated, diminutive and pudgy ‘commando’, wholly unlike the popular image of that feared brigade, Waugh saw little action other than in Crete (another royal cock-up) where he efficiently assisted the inglorious evacuation of the British expeditionary force, under the merciless assault of German dive bombers. It was his finest moment. He did not love his ‘men’, nor they him. One, perhaps apocryphal, anecdote from this wartime period, is that guards were posted at his quarters lest he be assassinated. Even less did he love the jumped-up conscript junior officers whom the war had allowed into the officers’ mess – a genus immortalised in Lieutenant Hooper in the prelude and epilogue to
Brideshead Revisited
. Waugh saw the post-war world as Hooperism everywhere.

Waugh hated post-war England under the ‘Attlee-Hooper terror’ even more than he had hated the licentious 1930s. Literature, along with everything else, had now decayed beyond saving. In
The Loved One
(1948), two British poets, one old, the other young, sit in a shabby Beverly Hills bungalow alongside an empty, decaying swimming pool. Neither troubles to write poetry any more. Somewhere else, in the real world a couple of miles away, Aldous Huxley was prostituting his mind with scripts for Walt Disney’s
Alice in Wonderland
and Sam Goldwyn’s
Pride and Prejudice
. Disgust and mental breakdown (who could stay sane in such a world?) fuels Waugh’s fine memoir-novel,
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
(1957); the Pinfolds were the ancestral owners of Piers Court – a telling little identity theft. The hero’s ‘strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz–everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity, which came to him through his religion, sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom.’

According to Anthony Powell, Waugh longed for a knighthood but queered his pitch by testily not accepting an interim CBE. ‘Irritability’, he confessed in a late TV interview (satirically immortalised in
Pinfold
), was his cardinal fault. He had
moved, in his last ten years, to another country house, Combe Florey, Somerset. For Waugh ‘the country … is a place where I can be silent’. He died, young in years, old in spirit, and largely silenced. His posthumous reputation received a huge boost from the 1981 TV version of
Brideshead Revisited.
‘How I found God and lived in a big house,’ Kingsley Amis, as dyspeptic himself as Waugh, called John Mortimer’s adaptation. It pulled in viewing figures of 10 million – most of whom Waugh would have despised, along with their ghastly colour television sets. It would, however, have amused Waugh mightily, had he lived to 2010 (alas impossible given his birth date) to see former members of the Bullingdon Club, vandals whom he had immortalised in the first paragraph of his first novel, lording it in 10 and 11 Downing Street and the London Mayor’s Office. Was there no glass left in Oxford to break? he would have asked.