Mad World (19 page)

The 1920s was a good time to be a posh girl. The popular press was buoyant, with numerous daily newspapers and weekly magazines seeking
to fill their column inches with society news and the doings of the upper classes. It was a celebrity culture: people wanted to read about the antics of the Bright Young Things and their latest crazes, which might be sunbathing or conducting treasure hunts through London’s department stores. Lady Lettice Lygon, Hugh’s eldest sister, made the headlines for her appearance in a circus party where she performed a comic cycling act, while her hostess danced the Charleston in a top hat and red shoes.

Not everyone was quite as idle as they sometimes made out. Because of income tax and death duties, some young aristocrats needed to earn a living, training as journalists, selling cars or working in fashion stores. Nancy Mitford was a typical cash-poor aristocrat who spent most of her time weekending with richer friends while making abortive attempts to work during the week, before finding her niche as a novelist. There was a feeling that the new regime had finally overthrown fusty Edwardian society. Socialists had forced their way into Parliament and the wealthy had taken to trade. Patrick Balfour (later Lord Kinross) became a journalist with the
Daily Sketch
. He depended on his friends to give good copy for his society columns; some years later he wrote a book called
Society Racket
that remains the definitive factual account of the Bright Young Things – as Waugh’s
Vile Bodies
is the definitive fictional account.

Though she didn’t need the money, Lady Sibell Lygon worked variously as a journalist and in a hairdressing salon in Bond Street. The
Illustrated London News
carried a photograph of her having a manicure, while in another photoshoot her sister Maimie posed in a fur coat as part of an advertising campaign for the department store Marshall & Snelgrove. Hugh, meanwhile, was a fixture on the party scene. A caricature in
Punch
called ‘Our Cartoonist in a Savage Mood – at a Bright Young Party’, shows him draped over the banisters, looking distinctly the worse for wear.

Nightclub owners and professional hostesses such as Rosa Lewis of the Cavendish Hotel provided venues for the young people to drink to late hours. The parties got wilder and drug abuse – particularly cocaine and hashish – was rife. Fast cars, faster women and sexual experimentation: Evelyn Waugh scrupulously chronicled every excessive detail for the satirical novel that was germinating in his mind.

One account of the mad antics of the aristocracy caught his eye and provided one of the great comic set pieces for
Vile Bodies
. This was a
story to top them all, involving the unlikely collision of Bright Young People and politics. It was probably passed on to Evelyn via Hugh Lygon.

Lady Sibell and Lady Mary Lygon had been to a party and stayed out late. Dressed in their white Norman Hartnell party dresses, they enjoyed a night’s dancing and drinking. But when they returned to their London home off Belgrave Square, they found the door locked and the night footman fast asleep. The girls had only five shillings between them, so instead of going to a hotel they decided to beg a bed from a friend. There was another family they knew well who had a night porter: the Baldwins, near neighbours from Worcestershire. So they traipsed from Belgravia to Whitehall. The Baldwins’ current address was 10 Downing Street.

The night porter woke the Prime Minister and his wife. They came downstairs in their nightclothes. Mr Stanley Baldwin was wearing striped pyjamas. Mr and Mrs Baldwin greeted the Lygon girls and arranged for them to sleep in one of the spare rooms. In the morning, Mr Baldwin rang Lord Beauchamp to ask if he would send a maid round with day clothes for the girls. ‘Balderdash and Poppycock!’ he retorted – and made them walk home in broad daylight in full evening dress.

In Evelyn’s hands, this episode was transmuted into the sublime comic episode where the wild flapper girl Agatha Runcible unwittingly gatecrashes 10 Downing Street and then appears for breakfast in her party clothes, to the incredulity of the Prime Minister and his wife.

Once he had an agent and a critically acclaimed novel to his name, Evelyn was keen to present himself as the voice of the young generation. He wanted to be seen as the Modern Young Man. He began to take a keen interest in the marketing of his own image. In an article on ‘The Way to Fame’ he advised writing a shocking novel, and taking little notice of the reviews, ‘as long as people talk about it’. For several years, he had been trying out a range of voices in his diaries – the dissolute drunkard, the coolly detached outsider, the outright cynic. Now he saw that in a world dominated by the popular press, he needed a public image that would get people talking.

This is something that he never forgot. The key mistake of his critics and biographers would be to assume that his later pose – as the old buffer, the crusty colonel – revealed his true self rather than originating as a comic impersonation of the type. But the mistake is easily made, not
least because – as Waugh would ruefully recognise – he ended up becoming his own caricature.

He became very good at self-promotion. He so desperately needed the money, writing to his agent: ‘Please fix up anything that will earn me anything – even cricket or mothers’ welfare notes.’ When the
Evening Standard
misread a proposal of his for a piece on ‘The Manners of the Younger Generation’ as ‘The Mothers of the Younger Generations’, he was not deterred. The misunderstanding ‘is unfortunate, but not disastrous’. He duly dashed off an article about the Mothers.

Evelyn decided that he would return to the scene of his honeymoon to write his new novel. He would spend the weeks in isolation, working hard at the Abingdon Arms in Beckley, and then return to his wife at the weekends. The Evelyns invited Nancy Mitford to sublet a room in their Islington flat. She-Evelyn was delighted to have Nancy as a flatmate, and Evelyn asked his male friends to keep an eye on them and chaperone them at parties.

On 25 June 1929, Bryan and Diana held a magnificent 1860s party at their house in Buckingham Gate. Nancy was photographed for the papers wearing a huge crinoline skirt whilst She-Evelyn went dressed as a street-urchin in cami-knickers, carrying a bowling hoop. Harold Acton wrote to Evelyn to say that he had danced with his wife at the party.

Evelyn was engrossed in his novel at Beckley. He described it as ‘rather like a P. G. Wodehouse all about bright young people … I hope it will be finished by the end of the month’. Despite his appetite for hard drinking and good company, he was never really a party animal. He preferred the intimacy of small gatherings with people that he knew and loved. At large parties, he reverted to the stance of the outsider. This made him an effective fly on the wall. He wrote to Harold Acton and Henry Yorke, asking them if they were going to Bryan and Diana’s party. ‘I might go up for it,’ he said, ‘if I thought there would be anyone who wouldn’t be too much like the characters in my new book.’ The pub at Beckley suited him. He could drink beer in companionable silence, without the pressure of being witty and interesting, of singing for his supper. And he enjoyed the company of the working classes. ‘I like so much the way they don’t mind not talking.’

He didn’t go to the party. His next letter was written to his parents: ‘Dear Mother and Father, I asked Alec to tell you the sad and to me
radically shocking news that Evelyn has gone to live with a man called Heygate. I am accordingly filing a petition for divorce.’ They had been married for little more than a year.

‘So far as I knew,’ he told his parents, ‘we were both serenely happy.’ The shock was devastating. Adding to his distress was the fact that she had betrayed him with a friend, a handsome man called John Heygate, who worked for the BBC. He was also an Old Etonian. He-Evelyn had entrusted She-Evelyn to his care.

One of the most popular venues for partying was an old sailing ship moored at Charing Cross Pier. It was called
The Friend Ship
. Nancy and She-Evelyn attended a party there, chaperoned by Heygate. Shortly afterwards, She-Evelyn became his lover. He was descended from the famous seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn. His parents had debated long and hard as to whether they should give their son the first or the second name of their famous ancestor. They finally chose the former. Had they gone for the latter, Evelyn would have left Evelyn for Evelyn.

He-Evelyn returned immediately to London. The Etonian had rewarded the Lancing boy by sleeping with his wife on his first wedding anniversary. He-Evelyn promised to forgive She-Evelyn if she never saw Heygate again. At first she agreed and they tried to make a go of the marriage. They attended a tropical-themed party on board
The Friend Ship
. A photograph of them in fancy-dress costume, taken at this time, reveals their deep unhappiness. The press commented that the famous author looked rather scared.

The salvage attempt did not work out. On 1 August, He-Evelyn returned home to a cold and empty flat. The cleaner told him that his wife had moved out. She had gone to Heygate, whom she later married.

It was a massive blow to Evelyn’s confidence and self-esteem. His marriage had brought him acceptance and love, but now he felt a fool. The marriage was over almost before it had begun and the manner of its ending had been most degrading. For the rest of his life he found it hard to talk about his ‘mock marriage’ and he expunged most of the references to Evelyn Gardner from his diary. He removed the dedication to her from all later editions of his biography of Rossetti. Many years later John Heygate, by then a converted Catholic, asked for Evelyn’s forgiveness. He responded with a postcard bearing the briefest of messages: ‘O.K. E.W.’

His friends were little comfort, except the ones who unequivocally took his side and refused to have anything to do with She-Evelyn. Nancy Mitford was horrified by her friend’s behaviour and severed the relationship, perhaps feeling a little guilty at her part in facilitating the affair, however unwittingly. Best man Harold Acton was hopeless. Evelyn wrote to him: ‘Evelyn has been pleased to make a cuckold out of me … I did not know that it was possible to be so miserable and live.’ Harold’s response was tactless: ‘Are you so very male in your sense of possession?’ Evelyn noted: ‘it is extraordinary how homosexual people however kind and intelligent simply don’t understand at all what one feels in this kind of case’. His Oxford life seemed to be very remote from him.

There has been speculation that the main reason for the failure of the marriage was sexual incompatibility. She-Evelyn suspected that her husband preferred men to women, and that his technique, learnt from men, ensured that he was ‘bad in bed’ with women. Whilst it is true that Evelyn lacked experience with women, he had several affairs with women after his divorce, which indicate that he was at least capable of inspiring sexual passion. Evelyn Gardner, on the other hand, found it difficult to stay faithful. She married three times. John Heygate killed himself in 1976.

Like the cuckolded Tony Last in
A Handful of Dust
, Evelyn could hear nothing but ‘the all-encompassing chaos that shrieked about his ears’. He explained his position to Harold Acton: ‘my reasons for divorce are simply that I cannot live with anyone who is avowedly in love with someone else’. Unlike the fictional Tony, who does the gentlemanly thing and lets his wife Brenda divorce him (leading to a hilarious scene in a seedy hotel in Brighton where he pretends to commit adultery for the benefit of some private detectives), Evelyn initiated the proceedings, citing Heygate as co-respondent.

The divorce, finalised in September, had very important consequences. His male friends noted a change in character: he became more brittle and harsh. Neither Alastair nor Harold could comfort him. His deep humiliation would be reflected in his novels for years to come: the theme of the betrayed husband is reprised throughout his literary career. More practically, and ultimately more significantly, the break-up of his first marriage meant that Evelyn had no settled base for a number of years, from 1930 to 1937. Friendship, always important to him, now became
something sacred, as many of his friends old and new opened their homes to him. He became an honoured guest in their world.

Many commentators have presented Evelyn Waugh as a social climber, a parvenu who was hopelessly in love with the aristocracy and deeply ashamed of his middle-class upbringing. This view does not chime with the people who loved him the most. Diana Guinness, Nancy Mitford, Coote and Maimie Lygon, Diana Cooper, all members of the aristocracy by birth, emphasised that it was they who sought out his company rather than the other way round. He judged people not by their class but by their ability to be funny and entertaining.

Diana Guinness gave him hospitality in the months after the divorce. She was the first in a long line of devoted, beautiful, intelligent friends that fell under his spell (as he fell under hers). Physically, she was a female version of the ethereal blond man he had fallen for in his youth, and the forerunner of the three women he idolised throughout most of his life: Maimie Lygon, Diana Cooper and his second wife, Laura Herbert. Like all of those women, Diana Guinness was aristocratic, blonde and fragile-looking, but with a steely inner strength. She was just nineteen and pregnant with her first child. Her capacity for laughter was the single most important aspect of their friendship, which was no less intense for being short-lived, especially since the year after his desertion by She-Evelyn was such an important time in his life.

They were barely apart for the whole autumn and winter. He did not inflict on her any sense of the depression he felt over the collapse of his marriage. In a very English way, she helped him to cope with adversity through laughter. ‘When Evelyn was there,’ she later recalled, ‘it was impossible to be dull for an instant.’

It was in the company of Diana that he finished his novel about the Bright Young Things, now called
Vile Bodies
. He dedicated it to her and her husband. He was also still working on his travelogue,
Labels
, and that too would be dedicated to Diana and Bryan ‘without whose encouragement and hospitality this book would not have been finished’. He spent Christmas with them and was touched when they presented him with a handsome gold watch, which he treasured for years. He told them that he had nothing to give in return except his friendship and talent.