Mad World (29 page)

Paddy was intrigued by his schoolboy humour and his love of fantasy. There was a fire in the hotel and Evelyn re-enacted a preposterous scene of a character groping for his false teeth in panic: ‘It was odd to find, despite his very sophisticated comic books, he seemed to adore slapstick, the cornier the better. I found this very bizarre. Our completed treatment was never filmed and I don’t think either of us was very surprised.’

He frequently took Maimie to lunch at the Ritz. Their friendship was going from strength to strength. Often when she was in London, Maimie would meet Evelyn for cocktails
à deux
before supper with a larger party. They discussed their love lives. He dwelt incessantly on Baby Jungman, always making a joke of his haplessly unrequited passion. Far from being ashamed of his parents, as is sometimes suggested, Evelyn invited the girls to meet them. Coote remembered visiting Mrs Waugh in Highgate. She was given a warm welcome and a glass of sherry.

When he was out of town writing in Chagford, or they were down at Mad, they exchanged letters. These are as filled with private jokes as their conversation was. Evelyn reported that his friend, Eleanor Watts, was in love with a one-eyed actor, ‘as it might be Grainger’. The one-eyed Pekingese was a constant point of reference. Evelyn sent him invitations to cocktail parties, addressing the envelope to Mr Grainger. Many of his letters were written when he was drunk. In that condition, he could be
lewd, but the girls never regarded this as an insult or a breach of decorum: ‘I hope you have fun with SOCIETY this week. Look after that dear dutch girl [Baby] and don’t let her roger anyone with clap … I hope your clitoris is very well. Good idea for Hughie to marry Sykes, then he will be catholic like me.’ He would chide Maimie for not writing to him as often as he did to her: ‘sad that all your letters to me have been stolen in the post’. But she offered him the use of the Belgravia home, ‘Halkers’, and of Mad, whenever he wanted to write in peace. Some of his letters are written from Belgrave Square, with thanks for letting him sponge.

In April 1932 the Vaudeville Theatre staged a dramatisation of
Vile Bodies
. It was not a roaring success. Arthur Waugh noted in his diary, ‘a good show but an indifferent audience’. There would have been even more empty seats had it not been for the presence of a large body of Waugh friends and relations. Evelyn was determined to make the most of his venture into theatreland, and planned a lavish party to celebrate the opening. He wrote to the Lygons, boasting that it was the hottest ticket in town: Lady Cunard (‘the old trout’) had just phoned to complain that she had been given seats in the eighteenth row – how could she take her guest Prince George and sit him in the eighteenth row? Lady Castlerosse, meanwhile, refused to pay for her tickets: ‘oh dear these great ladies … still it makes me feel like a social figure which is good for my low spirits because no one knows how despised I am in the theatre’. Evelyn had given his parents front row seats. He took his mother dressed in her best to dine at the Ritz. The Lygons, whom he now considered to be part of his family, were at the top of his guest list.

Sadly, there was a poor showing from them. They all had ailments of one sort or another. Little Poll, as he called Coote, had broken her collarbone in a riding accident, Sibell was in a nursing home ‘having her wisdom teeth removed’ (which seems to be a euphemism for a more embarrassing operation), and Maimie had hurt her ‘arse’. Baby Jungman was in Ireland: ‘Did little Miss Jungman send me a line of good wishes from Ireland? Not on your life,’ he complained to Frisky. He also wrote to Coote to commiserate on her injuries, joking that he had put up a monument to her bravery and popularity: ‘nothing like suffering to sweeten the soul’. Then to Frisky: ‘The slow extermination of our Lygon chums saddens me. First little Blondy’s arse. Now Pollen’s
breastbone. Blondy came to see my play but went away in great pain before supper.’

Still, at least Blondy had made it to the show. His party also included Hubert Duggan and an assortment of minor aristocrats. Among them was Hazel Lavery, wife of the famous painter Sir John Lavery. An Anglo-Irish beauty, now in her early fifties, and an artist herself, she sat for her husband over four hundred times (his image of her as the personification of Ireland appeared on the banknotes of the Irish Free State). She was intimate with figures as various as George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill and the Irish Republican, Michael Collins. She was having a casual, on-off affair with Evelyn. He joked to Frisky about his social success, though drawing attention to the renowned hostess Lady Cunard rather than his part-time lover Lady Lavery: ‘So Boaz is momentarily a social lion and Lady Cunard … calls him Evelyn and makes him sit on her right hand at luncheon and dinner … but is his head turned by these favours? NO: he remains the same simple lad who bounced around Malvern Academy on the broad back of Mater.’

He was deep into
Black Mischief
, known to the Lygons as ‘his feelthy novel’. He wrote to Coote from the Savile Club:

Darling Pollen,

God how sad about tiny breastbone. What an unfortunate family you are to be sure. There was little Blondy with her arse too and Hugh with his baldness. Well I am ill too and despondent and I have no money and I get so despised at the theatre where they are acting my play that it has given me that distressing and well nigh universal complaint the inferiority complex.

I have had a lot of SOCIETY of a pretty high and dashing kind so on Sat I am going to a monastery for three weeks to write my feelthy book. How I long to see you all again and will too when I have written the smut.

My word I am miserable about everything

xxxxxx

Evelyn needed to write in peace. He spent time at the Catholic School, Stonyhurst, where his Oxford friend Christopher Hollis was a teacher.
And he also went back to Chagford. Coote wrote to him there with the latest family update. As always with the Lygons, it was black news borne with grim good humour and delivered with a light touch. But Evelyn was able to find just the right tone for his response: ‘Sweet Poll, Golly what a family. Hugh in a mad house and now Sibell at my ex-aunt Almina’s abortionist parlour. How my heart bleeds for you all.’ The nursing home where Sibell was ‘having her wisdom teeth removed’ was run by a relation of She-Evelyn’s. Hugh was in even more serious trouble, despite the jokes about his premature baldness and being in a madhouse.

His drinking had worsened. His good looks were being ravaged by hard living and his reluctance to write to his father meant that there was no one left to bail him out financially. On 18 March 1932, shortly before Evelyn’s play opened, a notice appeared in the
London Gazette
to the effect that the Honourable Hugh Lygon of ‘The Elms’, Tilshead, Wiltshire, had petitioned for bankruptcy in the court at Bath. This disaster seems to have precipitated some sort of mental collapse.

Evelyn had seen Hugh and Sibell at Halkers. He had taken brandy with them and had long talks with Hugh saying, as he put it in his letter to Poll, ‘a great many things that I can’t say now’. Lady Beauchamp was informed of the disaster. She wrote to Coote: ‘I am so grieved for all you are suffering … let us be united in facing the sadness of this tragedy which has befallen us.’ On the same day that she wrote from Saighton Grange, Lord Beauchamp sent a letter to his daughter from Australia, telling her that he had received a cable telling him the shocking news of Hugh’s bankruptcy: ‘Never would it have happened if I had known.’

In later years, Coote blamed Lady Sibell and her brother Elmley for refusing to save Hugh from bankruptcy. For Coote, this was the beginning of the end for her beloved brother. She (like Cordelia Flyte with Sebastian) had always been the sister who had loved him best. Following this disaster his drinking increased. Over the years he would have abortive attempts to go on the wagon, but all were unsuccessful.

Hugh made plans to go to Italy with Evelyn in the summer, where they would meet Lord Beauchamp. Meanwhile, Maimie and Coote begged Evelyn to come to Madresfield to write his novel. He tried to put them off, knowing that he needed isolation and no distractions from his work. A lovely letter thanks them and explains his dilemma:

Now I am going to write the important part of my letter. Oh how I should love to live in your Liberty Hall but the trouble about poor Bo is that he’s a lazy bugger and if he was in a house with you lovely girls he would just sit about and chatter and get d. d. [disgustingly drunk] and ride a horse and have a heavenly time but would he write his book? No, and must he? By God he must. So you see, but listen.

How would it be for me to stay in some inn or farm in your neighbour[hood] and then every time I have written 5,000 words I could have a reward and walk to your lovely house and have heavenly tea party with you? … Not too far away so that when you have week-end orgies [Madspeak for ‘parties’] I could come tripping in to see them and get ideas that way for my famous book.

Despite their entreaties he remained in Chagford. ‘How I wish I were in your stately home with all you popular girls. But it cannot be … I can’t leave this hotel until some money comes for me. But that ought to happen in a day or two if that Interesting Play [
Vile Bodies
] is still going on and then Heigh Ho for the Lygons’ arms. Will you be there
next
weekend? Say Yes?’

He kept them up to date with his novel, especially Coote, the sister who took most interest in his work. He even copied into her letter passages from it, such as the menu for a character’s dinner party.

For all his good intentions, he could not stay away. Liberty Hall was too much of a draw. He was back at Mad in May, sending a telegram to announce his arrival. It was a return to Arcadia and an entrance into the full embrace of a substitute family. This was the summer when he really got to know Mad intimately, living and working there as a member of the family. In the course of 1932 he stayed at Madresfield in January, February, May, June, August, October and several times in November and December.

His friend from his Oxford days, Peter Quennell, used a striking phrase in reflecting on Evelyn and the Lygons: ‘I’d heard from Coote Lygon that when Evelyn first joined the Lygon family, they told him he ought to become a hunting man.’ ‘Joined the Lygon family’: the girls treated him as if he were their own brother. He had always wanted a sister, and now
he had a whole gaggle of them. Quennell added that from the moment Evelyn went to Madresfield ‘he felt that was his world’. Mad World and Waugh World were as one.

He arrived on 7 May, determined to finish
Black Mischief
as quickly as possible. Like Charles Ryder at Brideshead, he had found his ‘enchanted palace’. Being treated as family meant that, again like Charles, he could ‘wander from room to room’ and undergo a new aesthetic education. His feelings were the same as those he projected onto Ronald Knox years later: the theologian was also drawn into ‘an enchantress’s palace’, a big country house with ‘expanses of carpet and parquet, abundant well-conducted servants, roaring fires, glittering leather bindings, laughter and music … deliciously exciting to those reared in narrower circumstances’.

He leafed through rare books in the library and walked in the extensive grounds. The gardens were at their best in May: the Moat Garden, the Rock Garden, the Yew Garden, the Lime Arbour, the Herbaceous Garden, the Greek Temple and Caesar’s Lawn, with its busts of twelve Roman emperors. A dapper-looking Evelyn posed next to the Emperor Vitellius for the benefit of a
Tatler
photographer. The picture appeared with a caption that provided good publicity:

Mr Evelyn Waugh, the young novelist whose book,
Vile Bodies
, has been transformed into a successful play, was snapshotted recently as above when staying at Madresfield Court, the seat of Lord Beauchamp. He is posed beside a bust of the gluttonous Roman Emperor Vitellius – certainly a classical ‘vile body’! Mr Waugh’s new novel, which contains an account of a cannibalistic banquet, will soon be published.

With no parents to spoil the fun, they could all be Mad Hatters at a tea party. Innumerable details of daily life amused Evelyn and were embellished in surreal fashion. The mundane and its capacity to be transformed into something fantastic was the key to his comic vision.

The Lygons and Evelyn shared an irreverent sense of humour. Coote kept a juvenile diary that was ‘remarkable only for its dullness’. Evelyn found the diary entries ‘confined to weather, dogs and horses’, and enlivened them with references to incest and an assortment of other
immoralities. He pretended that Coote was engaged in orgies and sexual misconduct. This was all the more funny because, in sharp contrast to her older sisters, she was the epitome of innocence. A watercolour of a carthorse that she had carefully painted in the diary was defaced by Evelyn and given a large penis – just as carefully painted. A present of handkerchiefs from Maimie elicited the response: ‘I have tied them to my cock, they look very becoming.’

‘It was,’ recalled Coote, ‘like having Puck as a member of the household.’ The description is apt: there was definitely something of the malicious sprite about him, and he was (at this time) slim and small and extremely attractive, with his intense stare and piercing wit. What the girls loved most was his ‘consistent, spontaneous, irreverent wit and his capacity for turning the most unlikely situations into irresistibly funny jokes which continued to be woven into our conversations and letters with an increasing richness of texture over the years’. He was always cheerful and rarely showed them his darker side during these halcyon days.

Plays and books were incorporated into their daily chat. Sibell remembered him selecting books from the library and reading aloud to the girls in the evenings, eliciting shrieks of laughter. Favourites included
Letters of a Diplomat’s Wife
by Mary King Waddington, which ‘missed the point of everything’, and also the memoirs of an Arctic explorer entitled
Forty Years in the Frozen North
, in which a character called Pitt underwent terrible hardships and privations. When his nose became frostbitten he rubbed it with snow: ‘The best thing in the world, the only remedy.’ This became another catchphrase that they applied to a good many unsuitable things. The sisters also remembered there was a novel set in India, which included the line: ‘The East has got me, Granger, but thank God I’m still a pukka sahib.’ ‘Evelyn loved that’ – especially because of Grainger’s presence. Evelyn proposed that Maimie’s dog should be made a member of the Lord’s Day Observance Society under the name of P. H. Grainger, the initials standing for Pretty Hound.