Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead

Evelyn was drawn to Alastair and Hugh not only because of their delicate beauty and gentility, but also because they were hard-drinking and self-destructive. He liked their child-like qualities and their lack of intellectual fervour (he never fell in love with Harold Acton or Brian Howard, much as he admired their abilities). He definitely had a type: the objects of his desire were invariably richer and better-looking, though never funnier, than he was. They had a dreaminess about them and a fragility that he found irresistible. They brought out his protective instincts. Waugh was speaking equally of himself when he wrote in his biography of the theologian Ronald Knox that he was susceptible to good looks and drawn to those with an air of sadness, of ‘tristesse’. Hugh Lygon had exactly this quality. He drifted round Oxford like a lost boy, a Peter Pan who refused to grow up. Terence Greenidge remembered him carrying a teddy bear.

Greenidge, a fervent socialist, admired Hugh’s classical good looks and thought he had ‘charm and elegance’, but said that he was ‘rather empty’. But Evelyn found him full of humour. The same things made them laugh. He loved Hugh’s eccentricities and was impressed by his lack of snobbery.

Hugh, along with Robert Byron, Patrick Balfour and Brian Howard, was regarded as one of the most sexually active of the Hypocrites. Harold Acton wrote to Evelyn after the publication of A Little Learning to reprove him for singling out his homosexuality, whilst failing to mention ‘Robert’s, Patrick’s, Brian’s and Hugh’s promiscuities’. Evelyn himself called Hugh the ‘lascivious Mr Lygon’.

Tamara Abelson (later Talbot Rice) was an exotic White Russian exile, who knew Evelyn at Oxford where she was one of the rare under-graduettes. As far as she was concerned, ‘everyone knew that Evelyn and Hugh Lygon had an affair’. She reported that John Fothergill let Evelyn have rooms in the Spreadeagle at Thame at a special midweek rate so that he and Hugh could meet in private.

Not everyone approved of Evelyn’s translation to a new set. His brother Alec came to remonstrate about his dissipated lifestyle. But Evelyn was not going to give it up and go back to the loneliness that he had felt as a child. He had found a surrogate family and he had found glamour, wit and intelligence: the ‘congenial people’ for whom he had longed. No amount of lecturing from an older brother to whom he had never been particularly close was going to change anything. Among the Hypocrites he had found the love that he had been longing for all his life. He was happy.

But there was an element of bravado about his entry into the world of cigars, champagne and Charvet silk ties. In his heart he knew that he did not really belong there. Rather like one of his heroes, Toad of Toad Hall, he had a child-like quality that manifested itself in acute mood swings between hilarious gaiety and sullen gloom. He often felt that he was being treated as a specimen, even a freak. His friendships flared brightly and intensely, but sometimes burned themselves out. He was still the outsider looking in, glimpsing rather than actually passing through the low door in the wall that opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden.

Intimate as they were at Oxford, Hugh did not invite Evelyn to visit his ancestral home while they were still undergraduates. Nor was he invited to Lord Elmley’s lavish twenty-first birthday celebrations at Madresfield in August 1924. That was a high-society occasion, very different from the celebration of the same event at the Spreadeagle. Evelyn was never very close to Elmley, who had a more pronounced sense of his status than Hugh.

Evelyn took his final examinations in the summer of 1924, but since he had come up a term late, he was supposed to return to Oxford for a further term in the autumn, so as to fulfil the residence requirement necessary for him to receive his degree. He planned to share lodgings with Hugh Lygon in Merton Street. They were going to take an expensive little house next to the tennis courts. With no exams to worry about, it would be a term of ‘pure pleasure’ and ‘comparative seclusion’.

The plan was aborted with the news that Evelyn had obtained a third-class result. His scholarship was not renewed for the further term and his father did not think that a third was worth the cost of the extra term. Evelyn therefore left Oxford without completing his degree.

Of Evelyn’s three Oxford lovers, Hugh Lygon is the one about whom he was most reticent in A Little Learning. The name Lygon only appears fleetingly in the book. An aura of concealment hangs over that first naming of Hugh in the passage where Quiller-Couch’s line ‘Know you her secret none can utter?’ is quoted, together with the mysterious remark that it is not given to all Oxford’s sons ‘either to seek or find this secret, but it was very near the surface in 1922’. What was the secret none could utter? In the context of an aspiring writer and a beautiful young aristocrat, could it have been something reminiscent of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas? ‘I am the Love that dare not speak its name.’

Hugh Lygon’s name appears last in Evelyn’s list of his fellow Hypocrites: ‘Hugh Lygon, Elmley’s younger brother, always just missing the happiness he sought, without ambition, unhappy in love, a man of the greatest sweetness; and many others …’ The wistfulness and the drift into ellipses suggest that something is being left unsaid. Why was it, when Evelyn could be comparatively open about Richard Pares and Alastair Graham, that his love for Hugh dared not speak its name? We may find an answer when Hugh’s family story is known.

CHAPTER 4 The Scarlet Woman

After Evelyn’s humiliating departure from Oxford, he returned home to Underhill. For a few happy weeks, he hung out with Alastair. They wandered around greater London like Parisian flâneurs. But then Alastair departed for Kenya, leaving Evelyn with nothing to look forward to save ‘heart-breaking dreariness’. He anticipated ‘bills, over-fastidious tastes and a completely hopeless future’.

Evelyn was bored. He resented his father, missed his friends and most of all missed Oxford. He made an abortive attempt to kick-start a career in art, enrolling in a course at Heatherley’s Art School in Chelsea. His first assignment was to draw a thin man sitting cross-legged ‘with no clothes but a bag about his genitalia’. The place was full of girls in gaudy overalls, who, Evelyn thought, drew badly and distracted the young men who were hoping to make commercial careers for themselves in advertising or ‘by illustrating Punch’. The model for a ‘quick sketch’ class was ‘a young girl with a very graceful body and a face rather like Hugh Lygon’s when very drunk’.

He also began, but soon abandoned, a novel called ‘The Temple at Thatch’. It was about an undergraduate who inherited a property of which nothing was left except an eighteenth-century classical folly where he set up house and practised black magic. Later, he destroyed the manuscript, so we will never know whether the (presumably aristocratic) protagonist was in any way inspired by Hugh Lygon or whether a line can be traced from the classical temple at Thatch to the Catholic chapel at Brideshead.

Every morning he walked to Hampstead tube station, hiding pennies along the way, which he then collected on the way home to alleviate boredom. This new life was a shock after the intensity of Oxford. He complained to friends about the dull routine of dinner and early nights after desultory conversation with ‘Chapman and Hall’ (his nickname for his father). His social life only improved when his brother Alec took him in hand, inviting him to parties and nightclubs. He became a parasite upon his more successful sibling. In his fragmentary second volume of autobiography, he acknowledged his debt to Alec ‘as a host who introduced me to the best restaurants of London, on whom I sponged, bringing my friends to his flat and, when short of money, sleeping on his floor until the tubes opened when I would at dawn sway home to Hampstead in crumpled evening dress among the navvies setting out for their day’s work’. In fact, home was not Hampstead but Golders Green – Evelyn would walk to a pillar box in Hampstead so that the postmark would not be Golders Green. Alec once remarked that ‘there is no stronger deterrent to one’s enjoyment of an evening than the knowledge that one has to at the end of it to get to Golders Green’.

The most popular of the nightclubs that they frequented was the Cave of Harmony in Charlotte Street, run by Harold Scott and his partner, Elsa Lanchester. She was a fragile, red-haired beauty who was trying to become an actress. Later, she would become famous for playing the title role in The Bride of Frankenstein. The Cave of Harmony was patronised by journalists and actors, who drank late and tried out their short plays and cabaret acts. Alec went there every Saturday night, taking his brother with him. They befriended Elsa, and Evelyn persuaded her to take part in an amateur film that he was making with his Oxford friend Terence Greenidge.

Greenidge had bought a 16-millimetre camera and become a keen amateur cinematographer, casting his fellow Hypocrites in outrageous roles. The first we hear from Evelyn himself of his involvement with this activity is in a diary entry of 5 July 1924, when he and Christopher Hollis go to see one of Terence’s films at a dive in Great Ormond Street. Lured by the expectation of seeing Hugh Lygon there, Evelyn was disappointed to find instead ‘a sorry congregation of shits’.

Greenidge’s short films had been shot under the aegis of the Hypocrites and the Oxford Labour Club in the summer term of 1924. They had such enticing titles as 666, The Mummers, Bar Sinister and The City of the Plain. The latter was subtitled A Story of the Oxford Underworld. A ‘burlesque of the American moralising melodrama’, it was a celebration of the immorality of the Hypocrites.

Evelyn had acted in at least two of these films, alongside such friends as Hugh Lygon and Chris Hollis. Greenidge was especially impressed with Hugh’s performances, especially the lead role he played in The City of the Plain. All the reels are, alas, lost: they were last glimpsed in the hands of the Official Receiver in the late 1960s, when Greenidge was a bankrupted dying actor. Little is known of their content, but the biblical titles are suggestive: 666 is the number of the Beast, while ‘the City of the Plain’ is evidently an allusion to Sodom in the Old Testament. Sin, and sexual ‘beastliness’ in particular, must have been the (suitably Hypocritical) subject matter. There may also have been some dabbling in black magic, another Hypocrite preoccupation. In one of the films Waugh played the part of a lecherous black clergyman, wearing what Greenidge remembered as ‘horrible scarlet make-up, which came out black in those early days’.

Homosexuality certainly seems to have been on Waugh’s mind at this time. A few days after the evening in Great Ormond Street when they watched one of Greenidge’s films, he recorded an anecdote of Hollis’s in his diary:

Chris turned up in the morning and told me a good story. Mr Justice Phillimore was trying a sodomy case and brooded greatly whether his judgment had been right. He went to consult [Lord] Birkenhead. ‘Excuse me, my Lord, but could you tell me – What do you think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?’ ‘Oh, 30 s[hillings] or £2 – anything you happen to have on you.’

The Hypocrites’ flirtation with early cinema continued over the summer of 1924. Evelyn, whose most significant early short story (‘The Balance’) was written in the style of a film script, wrote the screenplay for a new Terence Greenidge production. Entitled The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama, it was rediscovered in the 1960s and can now be seen on DVD. The outlandish plot turned on an attempt by ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, Dean of Balliol (the man who had returned Richard Pares to the academic straight and narrow), to convert England to Roman Catholicism by exercising his dastardly Papist influence on the Prince of Wales. The title plays on the fact that ‘scarlet woman’ was a colloquial expression for both a prostitute and the Church of Rome. A favourable review in the Oxford student newspaper, Isis, had particular praise for Waugh’s method of introducing the audience to the leading characters:

Each figure in this drama of intrigue is disclosed indulging in his favourite sport. So we have a scene in the Papal gardens with the Papal whisky and its owner, the private chamber of the King and the royal gin, the Count of Montefiasco with the Romish cognac, and the eminent Catholic layman [Sligger] with his academic vodka. This convivial introduction had the effect of making us feel that we had known the characters for years.

Filming took place in July, shooting locations being Oxford, Hampstead Heath and Arthur Waugh’s back garden. Elsa Lanchester played the heroine, an evangelical cabaret singer called Beatrice who saves the day by drawing the Prince from Urquhart’s clutches. Evelyn, kitted out in a blond wig, played Sligger, alluding freely to the dean’s homosexuality by fondling the Prince of Wales (played by Greenidge’s brother John, known as ‘the Bastard’). John Sutro was Cardinal Montefiasco and Alec Waugh the cardinal’s mother. Elmley played the Lord Chamberlain, whose real life counterpart would without doubt have banned the script had there been an attempt to release it commercially. Old Arthur Waugh enjoyed the shenanigans immensely.

Evelyn also doubled in the role of a penniless peer called Lord Borrowington who appears to be a cocaine addict. He was unapologetic about advertising the setting of some scenes in the distinctly unglamorous location of North End Road, Golders Green. Elmley was less eager to advertise himself: he acted under the assumed name Michael Murgatroyd for fear of offending his father, who was close to becoming leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords. An officer in the Guards, who played the part of the king, also hid behind an assumed name. Elsa (who later married Charles Laughton) took no fee, only free lunches. The main purpose of the film was to poke fun at Sligger Urquhart for being ‘Roman Catholic and a snob’. We do not know if he ever saw The Scarlet Woman but it was shown at the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) in 1925. Greenidge came to believe that the film had caught the subversive spirit of Oxford in the twenties, and represented ‘an Evelyn who had seen through Roman Catholicism and the British aristocracy’ – something that could not exactly be said of Brideshead Revisited. The script undoubtedly reveals Evelyn’s interest in religion, his gift for farce and his early attraction to the more glamorous aspects of modernity embodied in the world of movie-making. The film also features a very fine motor car, which probably belonged to Elmley.

The Scarlet Woman was acted in a style that would now be called high camp. Greenidge was an active homosexual, and the entire film-making project was clearly deeply bound up with the Hypocrites’ willingness to push at the boundaries of taste, decency and the law.

Terence Greenidge later remembered Evelyn’s mother telling him that her son had changed profoundly by this time, that as a child he was loving, fun and trusting, but that something had happened to put him on his guard. Yet he was always, according to Greenidge, ‘joyously, healthily rude, as was the great Dr Johnson’. The combination of guarded watchfulness and unabashed smuttiness may suggest that Evelyn was simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the world in which he found himself.

The bohemian gatherings he attended with Alec were often ‘bottle parties’ in ‘unfashionable areas’. He hankered instead for the statelier world of engraved visiting cards and black velvets. The bohemian set didn’t really suit him. The parties were full of actors, painters, and men just down from the university who had no idea of what to do with their lives. Men, in other words, who were all too like himself.

In his diary he recalled one particularly memorable party at Mrs Cecil Chesterton’s flat in Fleet Street, at which ‘pansies, prostitutes and journalists and struggling actors’ all got ‘quite quite drunk and in patches lusty’. Among the guests he singled out a certain ‘Peter Pusey with whom Hugh Lygon sodomises’. Hugh’s taste for the crime that took its name from the City of the Plain was no secret. Alec, meanwhile, turned up late and a little drunk, then proceeded to carry off ‘the ugliest woman in the room’.

At another party Evelyn was so drunk that he ended up playing football with the butler’s top hat. Parties in private houses were followed by hard drinking at nightclubs, but there was a seedy and unglamorous feel to it all. All the promise of his Oxford days seemed to have evaporated. The Scarlet Woman had been a reprieve, but Evelyn had no prospects. It seemed that all his richer friends had places to go after graduating, whereas he sensed himself becoming a hanger-on on the fringes of the artistic world, or, even worse, a sponger (the kind of character he would represent so mercilessly in the character of John Beaver in A Handful of Dust).

He was yearning for his lost paradise. Spiritually he was still at Oxford. Its lure, the knowledge that the city of dreams was ‘still full of friends’, made him quit art school. Invited to an Oxford party by John Sutro, he accepted gratefully, eager to be reminded of what he was missing. His unexpected attendance was greeted warmly. All the old Hypocrites were there: Harold Acton, Hugh Lygon, Robert Byron, even his first lover Richard Pares. It was a luncheon party that seemed to stretch on for ever, as in the old days. They ate hot lobster, partridges and plum pudding, drank sherry, mulled claret and ‘a strange rum-like liqueur’. Hugh, as usual, was drinking too much. Evelyn left in time for a tea party and then a beer at the New Reform Club with Lord Elmley and Terence Greenidge. A message then came from Hugh, by this time installed in the bar of the Dramatic Society, proposing a trip to Banbury. But instead they reconvened in the old Hypocrites’ rooms, where they drank whisky and watched The Scarlet Woman. Evelyn’s recollection of the rest of the evening was hazy: all he could remember was that he got hold of a sword and escaped from Balliol via a window after the college had been locked for the night.

The next morning he started drinking again with Hugh, and then they had lunch together. An umbilical cord connected him still to his alma mater. He found himself dressing as an undergraduate again, sporting the latest fashion of turtleneck sweater and broad trousers. He was delighted with the roll-neck top – it was ‘convenient for lechery because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like studs and ties’. The garment also served to hide the boils on the necks of dermatologically challenged young gentlemen.

The Jazz Age had come to Oxford. Cars full of flappers came up from London every weekend. There was a new smart set. They danced to the Harlem Blues and the strains of Gershwin. Evelyn threw himself into the rowdy, partying atmosphere. He returned every weekend. But he knew that he was becoming self-destructive. He was often in the company of Hugh. Once he was drunk for three days – a condition that for Hugh was perfectly normal. After lunching together they would continue drinking until they were too drunk to stand.

The only way out from this alcoholic spiral was to get a proper job. And the only job that seemed suitable for an Oxford man who had failed to achieve Honours and who had no inclination for either physical labour or further study was schoolmastering. With great reluctance, he began to look for a position.

Before descending into the teaching profession, Evelyn fell in love again. This time, though, it was not with a fellow undergraduate but with an entire family. They were the Plunket Greenes. For Evelyn, they would prove to be the forerunners of the Lygons.

He of course knew David and Richard Plunket Greene from Oxford. They were members of the Hypocrites and very hard to miss: David was six foot seven inches tall and Richard a powerfully built young man. David, a ‘languid dandy devoted to all that was fashionable’, would die a heroin addict at a tragically early age. Coote (Lady Dorothy) Lygon remembered that he took drugs at a time when that was a very fast thing to do. When Hugh brought him home to Madresfield she used to swoon at the very sight of him. She developed a huge crush.

Evelyn became close friends with Richard, eventually serving as best man at his wedding. The boys’ father, Harry, was a singer and their mother a gifted amateur violinist. Harry Plunket Greene was friendly with England’s leading composer, Edward Elgar. He sang the baritone part in the first performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius and was the first to sing settings of A. E. Housman’s poems, A Shropshire Lad. He frequently appeared in events at Elgar’s Malvern Concert Club. This brought him into contact with the Lygons, who were Malvern’s most famous family and leading patrons of the festival. Elgar was supposed to have composed the most enigmatic of his famous Enigma Variations as a musical portrait of Hugh’s aunt, Mary. When Plunket Greene married Gwen Ponsonby, he came into a family relationship with the Lygons, who were cousins to the Ponsonbys.

David was soon to marry and in short order divorce Babe McGustie, the gold-digging stepdaughter of a prominent bookie. Richard fascinated Evelyn with his eccentricities and his tinge of melancholy. He was piratical in appearance, sporting earrings and a cravat, while smoking strong, dark tobacco. Evelyn described him as ‘good with boats’ and passionate in the way he threw himself into everything: ‘he brought to the purchase of a pipe or a necktie the concentration of a collector’. One moment he would be a connoisseur of wine, the next a racing motorist, then a jazz lover, and before long an aspiring writer of detective fiction. But he was never a bore with his passions. He brought to each new hobby ‘the infectious absorption of an adolescent’. Not a bore and always amusing: for Evelyn, this was the highest praise.

Evelyn’s admiration of the handsome Plunket Greene brothers in his Oxford years transferred itself into infatuation with their sister, Olivia. He lacked the experience and ‘force of purpose’ to conduct a proper courtship, so the relationship became instead an ‘intimate friendship’ of a kind that established a pattern for a succession of future liaisons with upper-class, sexually unavailable women. The pattern was always the same: ‘doting but unaspiring on my part, astringent on hers’. One cannot help but think of the adventures in unrequited love of Bertie Wooster’s friend Bingo Little.

Harold Acton said that Olivia had ‘minute pursed lips and great goo-goo eyes’. Evelyn considered this description unfair. She was not a conventional beauty (which her mother was), but she was fashionable and graceful, dressing in black and heavily made up with cosmetics that enhanced her enormous eyes in a pixie-like face. Evelyn loved her personality. He thought that she combined ‘the elegance of David with the concentration of Richard’. What drew him to her was the very quality that had drawn him to her brothers: her capacity for passionate but short-lived enthusiasms. She lived every moment to the full.

Some saw a mad streak in her, though for Evelyn this was always tempered by her essential delicacy and fundamental shyness. She did not seek others out: people were drawn to her. Evelyn accepted that she could be a nag and a bully, that she suffered from ‘morbid self-consciousness’ and was ‘incapable of the ordinary arts of pleasing’. Perhaps he loved her because these deficiencies were also his own. ‘A little crazy; truth loving and in the end holy’, she was his first true heterosexual love. But she made him miserable.

Fiercely loyal to those he loved, Evelyn withheld from his autobiography the information that Olivia went on to have a very unhappy life. She became an alcoholic and died a recluse, unmarried. It was no coincidence or mere ill fortune that so many of Evelyn’s friends fell victim to alcoholism: the art of heavy drinking was virtually a prerequisite for his friendship. In sharp contrast to his first male love, Richard Pares, Olivia could hold as much liquor as Evelyn. Like him, she lost her inhibitions when under the influence. Her aura of melancholy made her more like Hugh and Alastair: it added lustre to her beauty, but its corollary was alcoholic dependency and despair.