My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (24 page)

The pace was so keen that Evelyn, who had to get the back of his new novel broken, decided to go into the country for three weeks, to the coenobitic refuge of a small hotel bedroom; She-Evelyn had two sisters in London and innumerable friends. She would be all right. On the third day of his retreat, he telegraphed ‘Novel moving fast all characters seasick'. The novel was
Vile Bodies
. A novelist is at his most serene when he is working in a small hotel bedroom, for the sake of somebody he loves, thinking at the end of each day's work, ‘I'm five pages nearer to her'. I imagine that those three weeks must have been very happy ones for Evelyn. He must have been well aware of how supremely excellent those first chapters were.

To myself, not working at the time and caught up by the movement of a crowded season, it seemed only half a week later, when dining at Underhill my mother said, ‘Did you know that Evelyn was back?' ‘Already, I must ring up.' I called directly after dinner. She-Evelyn answered. Her voice sounded strange. A sentence or two and I realized that she was crying. ‘It's terrible, it's terrible. I can't talk on the telephone. Can I meet you somewhere?' We arranged to have supper at the Gargoyle. My parents were next door in the book-room while I was telephoning; they had not heard the conversation. My
mother was expecting me to stay the night, but I explained that I had writing to do next day and that I wanted to wake early beside my papers.

In the Gargoyle, my sister-in-law told me that she had fallen in love with John Heygate, a young man on the fringe of authorship, who later inherited a baronetcy from his uncle, and who was currently employed on the B.B.C. I had met him once or twice. He was a perfectly pleasant fellow. There was nothing against him; most people liked him, mildly. He was not particularly good looking. He was not particularly anything. ‘How long has this been going on?' I asked.

‘It's only just begun.'

We were together for close upon two hours. It was one of those long, wandering discussions that keep returning on its tracks.

‘How is Evelyn taking it?' I asked.

‘It's terrible. He's drinking much too much. It makes him feel ill. And he thinks I'm trying to poison him.'

Poor, poor Evelyn, racked by a ‘Belladonna' hallucination.

‘You always seemed so happy together,' I said.

‘Yes, I suppose I was,' then after a pause, ‘but never as happy as I've been with my sisters.'

That seemed an extraordinary thing for a wife to say about a husband.

‘What are you going to do?' I asked.

‘That's what we've not decided yet.'

They did not take long deciding. Within a week Evelyn telephoned to ask if he could come round to see me. He told me that he was going to divorce his wife, and asked me to tell our parents. ‘It's going to be a great blow to them,' I said. He laughed wryly. ‘What about me?' At the end of our talk, he said, ‘The trouble about the world today is that there's not enough religion in it. There's
nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.'

I have no doubt that the break-up of his marriage hastened his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. Recently I wrote and asked Christopher Hollis whether Evelyn had ever discussed the matter with him previously. Hollis replied that he had not; and that when
File Bodies
was published in January 1930, he made, in a letter of congratulation, a light-hearted reference to Father Rothschild. To his surprise Evelyn told him that he was taking a course of instruction. Evelyn was received into the Church that summer.

The news was a great shock to my parents, particularly to my mother. My father was distressed primarily on her account. ‘Your poor mother,' he said, ‘your poor, poor mother.' Everyone who discussed it at the time talked of it in terms of her. Only she thought of it in terms of Evelyn.

It was a blow that left a permanent scar on Evelyn. He had given himself to She-Evelyn and to his marriage, without reservations. He had trusted her completely; he was vulnerable from every angle. He had no armour against her betrayal of his trust. He was too much an artist to indulge a personal resentment in his novels, yet the characters of Tony Last and Charles Ryder show how incessantly the old wound throbbed. His tongue would not have been so sharp, his riposts so acid, had not that throbbing needed to be assuaged.

The whole thing was tragic, yet even so, it is impossible to doubt that ‘the divinity that shapes our ends' was serving its own purposes in bringing Evelyn Gardner into Evelyn's life. But for her he might never have begun to write. My mother indeed who was distrustful of the written word, said more than once, ‘If it hadn't been for
that She-Evelyn, he might have designed lovely furniture.' ‘But Mother dear,' I would protest, ‘think of the books he's written.' ‘I know, Alec dear, I know; but furniture is so useful; besides he would have been happier designing furniture.'

There she was no doubt right; but the implacable destiny, whose slave he had become, is unconcerned with the individual's happiness. ‘Half a beast is the great god Pan.' Maugham would not have been the writer he became had his marriage been a success. Nor would Evelyn. He made his first trip to Abyssinia in the autumn of 1930; for six years he was on the move. Until his marriage had been annulled he could not remarry. Those six years of travel gave him the material he needed. He could not have taken a wife upon those travels, certainly not She-Evelyn, who was delicate in health. A novelist to get the material he needs must travel alone or with another man. Had the Evelyns' marriage been a success, he would with his absorption in the world of fashion, have concentrated as Maugham would have done, on social satires that might well have become brittle and superficial.

Did She-Evelyn subconsciously realize that? Her marriage to John Heygate was short-lived, but she was genuinely in love with him at the beginning. Would she though have been prepared to let herself fall in love with him—there is always a point at which one can draw back—had she not felt that since the success of
Decline and Fall
she was cast in the wrong role? The ‘He-Evelyn, She-Evelyn, “Orphans of the Storm” Idyll' had been one thing; it was quite another to be the wife, companion, confidant, counseller and bastion of a great man of letters—the role that Laura Herbert was to fill later, so gladly, so proudly, so lovingly, and with so triumphant a success. I do not suggest for a moment that She-Evelyn argued
it out to herself that way, but I believe that her instinct warned her that the marriage would not work.

Evelyn did not remarry till the spring of 1937. It was an extremely successful marriage. The war intervened and he was not able to settle down to domestic life until the autumn of 1945. By then he had assembled his material. The conditions of a happy home life which he described in
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
provided him with the calm he needed for his writing. But all the time he was drawing on his past—on his years of travel and the war years.

Our mother was afraid that the break-up of his marriage would cause a collapse similar to that which followed his failure in schools. She was afraid that he would start drinking. She thought of him still as her little boy, who needed protection, for whom she provided sanctuary, but now that he had at last accepted his destiny, there was no looking back. He was armoured, professionally. He started the legal machinery for his divorce, disposed of his interests in Canonbury Square, moved his clothes back to Underhill; then went into the country to complete
Vile Bodies
. There is no sign in that brilliantly comic book of the unhappiness through which he was passing; there is no change of tempo or of temper between the later grief-shadowed chapters and those earlier ones which he had written in the excited expectation of a return to Canonbury Square as soon as he had earned his right to be there. There is no undercurrent of gloom.

He worked fast; and the novel was finished by December. I read it in proof at Christmas, which we both spent at Underhill; the last Christmas, as it proved, that we were both to spend there. It was very far from being an unhappy time. My father had just retired from the managing
directorship of Chapman & Hall. We were happy for his sake that he was spared those bleak, chill hours on the windswept platform at Golders Green tube station. Evelyn was constantly in the company of the Bryan Guinnesses, who had a share in a large family house on the edge of the Whitestone pond. Diana's first child was shortly to be born. Evelyn must have had these weeks in mind when he wrote
Work Suspended
. Their friendship was a great consolation to him then. They gave him for Christmas a gold pocket watch that he dearly prized. A year before at my good-bye dinner at the Gargoyle, I had thought of how much had happened during the last year. How much more had happened during this.

Vile Bodies
was published in early January. My father had little doubt that it would, in terms of sales, largely surpass
Decline and Fall
. ‘The Bright Young People' and the eccentricities of the Cavendish hotel had far more popular appeal than the staff of an unusual school. His prophecy was abundantly fulfilled. Best-sellerdom depends on timing, and the timing of
Vile Bodies
was exactly right. When I read the MS., I asked if the slang of ‘drunk-making' and ‘shy-making' was his own invention. No, he said, the young Guinness set was using it. A month later, a few days before the publication of the book, I noticed that its use had spread beyond the narrow radius of that set. In another two months it would have reached the far fringes of the fashionable world. Within six months it would have been ‘old hat'. Evelyn caught the tide at its flood. Ten days after publication, every conversation was peppered with ‘poor-makings', ‘drunk-makings', ‘rich-makings'; Evelyn had set a vogue.

In early February I caught a French liner for East Africa. I had planned to go to Zanzibar, but I learnt on
my arrival at Mombasa, that my travel book
Hot Countries
was the Literary Guild choice for May. I ought certainly to be in America for its publication. I shortened my visit and made back for France, where I would be within easy reach of letters and of cables. I decided to spend two weeks in Villefranche, before sailing for New York. Evelyn wrote to me that he was planning a trip to Monte Carlo and that he would leave a little earlier, so as to join me on the way.

We had five days together. Though we did not know it, they marked the close of that succession of shared experiences that had begun in boyhood. We had each reached a watershed. When I had received that cable at Mombasa, I had visualized its consequence in terms of an Elizabethan, piratical plundering of the Spanish Main. I did not realize that my projected visit to the U.S.A. would begin that absorption in and ultimate identification with the American scene that was eventually to make New York my operative base instead of London.

Evelyn, too, was at the start of a new life. He was without responsibilities; he had money in the bank; there was every reason for believing that the flow of money would be maintained, as indeed it proved to be. He had, he told me, a romantic rendezvous in Monte Carlo. He was able for the first time in his life to say to an attractive female: ‘What ghastly weather we are having. Don't you think three weeks in Monte Carlo would be a good idea?'

He was undergoing instruction as a Roman Catholic and expected to be received into the Church during the summer. This would involve a complete reorientation of his inner life. Mentally and spiritually he would be at peace. Socially too, his life would have a different focus. He was to find himself increasingly at ease with fellow Catholics, and less at ease with members of other faiths.
The fact that he could not, until his marriage to Evelyn Gardner was annulled, remarry with the Church's sanction, was to place him in an anomalous position. He was neither bound nor free.

C. M. Bowra in a warm and interpretative passage about him in his
Memories,
speaks of his falling in love but not with the right girl, and from this he suffered acutely. The incident is placed between the annulment and his second marriage. I do not know to whom Sir Maurice refers, and I wonder whether he has not chronologically misplaced Olivia Greene. I suggest this because he gives the date of Evelyn's marriage as 1936 when it was 1937, and writes on the previous page, ‘In the later twenties Evelyn led a very varied social life, if only to console himself for the collapse of his marriage.' Evelyn's social period was 1930–6.

It is my belief that such
passades
as Evelyn may have had in this period were brief and shallow, and I do know that he drew back from what might well have been a profound emotional experience with a young and prominent actress, who was in a mood to welcome enterprise from him, because he did not want to involve a women whom he respected in the kind of confusion in which the Catholic hero of Graham Greene's
The Heart of the Matter
involved the heroine. ‘I am sorry,' says the priest, ‘for anyone happy and ignorant who gets mixed up, in that way, with one of us.' Evelyn was resolved to avoid that. In compensation his emotional nature was consoled and released by one or two deep Platonic friendships—
tendresses
is, I think, the word for them—in particular that with Lady Diana Cooper.

But all that lay in the future. At the moment he was on the brink of things, as I was. We were both at anchor, waiting to embark on the high seas, in a state of suspended animation.

That is the reason, probably, why I can remember so little of what we talked about during those five days. I can remember the things we did; he gave me an excellent champagne luncheon at the Ruhl. Josef Bard—Dorothy Thompson's first husband—was living at Cap d'Ail with his second wife, the painter Eileen Agar, and we lunched there, cosily and amply. Evelyn had brought a sword stick, I cannot think why, which he flashed very impressively in the sailors' bar in the Rue de Poilu that I frequented. There was a shop in Nice that advertised as
‘fou rire'
practical jokes of which we used to take back samples to the waitresses who served that bar. It was a happy, harmonious time. Most days there would be in my hotel box the grey-green envelope of a cable and I would walk up the hill to the post office to send an answer. Where so much has been pulled down there and rebuilt, the post office is unaltered behind its flowering garden plot. I never pass it now without remembering those almost daily visits. My thoughts were in America; I was really living somewhere else, as Evelyn was.