My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Page 16

  Evelyn had a sunny nature; he was emotional and apt to dissolve in tears. Our mother had in the dining-room a large high-backed chair which my father had given her, on condition that she did the carving. If my father or myself threatened him with discipline, he would throw himself into the back of this chair, shouting ‘Sanctuary, sanctuary.’ He could not be touched when he was there. He invented his own language of love between his mother and himself. The word ‘goggles’ stood for love. He would finish his letters, ‘Evoggles goggles moggies’. His love was so special that it needed a special vocabulary, like Swann’s Cattleyas.

  In later life Evelyn may have given the impression of being heartless; he was often snubbing, he could be cruel. But basically he was gentle, warm and tender. He was very like his father, and his father’s own emotionalism put him on his guard. He must have often thought, ‘I could become like this. I mustn’t let myself become like this.’ Brideshead Revisited is the only one of his novels in which his poetic side was given a loose rein. He wrote it between February and June 1944. His father had died in the preceding summer. Is it too fanciful to suggest that that death gave him a feeling of release? The warning example was now removed.

  In many of Evelyn’s novels there is the portrait of the gentle loving man being exploited by self-seeking worldlings—Paul in Decline and Fall, Adam in Vile Bodies, Tony in A Handful of Dust. That was one side of Evelyn, the larger side, but he was also Basil Seal. Some people only saw that side of him. When he first read The Diary of a Nobody, he exclaimed delightedly, ‘But Lupin’s me.’

  Only in Charles Ryder are the two sides of him fused. Ryder talks to his wife very much as Evelyn did talk to someone by whom he was irritated: but though Brideshead may be autobiography spiritually and emotionally, it is not factually. Charles Ryder was an agnostic. But Evelyn was devout from the beginning. As a child he went to matins, in a small village-type church-room, where the service was conducted by a man not in holy orders, but from the age of, I should say seven, he attended with the rest of us, choral celebration at St Jude’s, in the Garden Suburb, which was near Anglo-Catholic; its priest being Basil Bouchier, a cousin of the actor, who was satirized as the Rev. Boom Bagshaw in A. S. M. Hutchinson’s 1921 best-seller If Winter Comes. Evelyn was confirmed there in 1916. He had a shrine in his bedroom, at which he lit incense. In A Little Learning he tells that in his later years at Lancing he had a period of agnosticism, but I do not believe that it lasted long. In The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, he speaks of his conversion as the inevitable crossing of a line, a step that could have been foreseen from the beginning.

  When he was quite young—I do not know the exact date—his mother said to him before the beginning of Lent, ‘We are now starting Lent. We should always give up something during Lent. We should also be on our guard against our besetting sin. You know, don’t you, what is your besetting sin?’

  He shook his head; no, he had no knowledge of it. His mother explained: it was his quick and unkind tongue. He accepted her criticism: pondered it for a moment, and then said, ‘You know, Mother, what is your besetting sin?’

  This was a shock to her. Conscious though she was of her shortcomings in the world at large, she thought that in the nursery, and in the eyes of her second son, she was the image of perfection. But she supposed that she must face the mirror. ‘No, Evelyn,’ she said, ‘what is it?’ The answer came back straight: ‘A lack of faith in Catholic doctrine.’

  ‘And of course,’ she would say afterwards, in recounting the incident, ‘he was completely right. I do lack faith.’

  As a child, I repeat, Evelyn had a sunny nature. He was always happily, busily occupied. He indulged in ‘different arrangements’ which meant moving round all the nursery furniture to see if it looked better with the wicker chair beside the door and the Peter Pan picture over the fire-place. He was the centre of his own group of children, the spokesman, the organizer. The Pistol Troop was followed by the W.U.D.S. (Wyldesmead Underhill Dramatic Society). I came across some of their programmes the other day. They were very professional: illustrated with photographs of the chief performers. He was very like his father in all of that.

  Evelyn has described his preparatory school—Heath-mount, a day school in Hampstead—where Cecil Beaton was a junior contemporary of his. He was sent there instead of to Fernden because his mother thought he had too gentle a nature for the Spartan discipline that I described in my autobiography. Fernden was extremely tough; so tough that everything that has happened to me since has in comparison seemed tame. It may seem surprising in view of the reputation for toughness which Evelyn acquired in after years, that anything could have seemed too tough for him at the age of nine; but it must never be forgotten that he had a very tender heart. The toughness was superimposed, in self-defence. Beneath it he was highly vulnerable.

  A Little Learning contains an amusing description of Heathmount, but it does not mention a schoolmaster, Aubrey Ensor, who can be seen in retrospect as a formative influence in his development. Ensor, who became a good friend of mine and very much a family friend of my parents, was that not uncommon type, a young preparatory schoolmaster with literary ambitions, who regarded his hours in the classroom as a prelude to a substantial career as a dramatist. He did not realize his ambitions but he had a real gift for writing stage dialogue; with a little luck he might have ‘brought it off’; and even so, he has had a not unsuccessful life, spent in congenial occupations. He was at one time connected with the Everyman Theatre and at another supervised the Iveagh Bequest in Ken Wood. For nearly every artist there is someone outside the family, a schoolmaster, a parson, who at a very early age lengthens his horizon, opening windows on new landscapes. Aubrey Ensor did that for Evelyn. He introduced him to Saki. In the letter that he wrote to me after Evelyn’s death, he told me how surprised and amused he had been when Evelyn, as an eleven-year-old schoolboy, had remarked, ‘Terrible man my father. He likes Kipling.’

  Had Evelyn cared for cricket, he and I would have had many companionable times together at Lord’s and at the Oval. But as it was there was nothing except the cinema that we could share until he was old enough to go to adult parties. That did not happen till he went up to Oxford, in January 1922, when he was eighteen. In that month my first marriage broke up; I did not take a flat of my own until January 1924. For most of Evelyn’s time at Oxford, we were, during his vacs, living under the same roof. I did not start travelling until June 1926. So that for four and a half years we were constantly in each other’s company.

  During Evelyn’s first two years at Oxford, we had a number of good times together. I introduced him to my friends, I took him to parties and invited him to my own. I felt very proud of him. He was excellent company; witty, lively, hopeful. He was good-looking in a faunish way. Everybody liked him. It is pleasant to be the initiator, to show to the inexperienced, places with which one is familiar, and it was pleasant to have someone with whom I could talk over the parties afterwards. My father’s sisters always gave him a Stilton cheese for Christmas and I can remember many occasions when Evelyn and I, returning late, would raid the larder and pick away at the dwindling cheese, discussing various aspects of the party.

  A few weeks before his death, Evelyn told an interviewer that after an idle year, he was again at work upon his autobiography, the second volume of which was to be called ‘A Little Hope’. He only left seven or eight pages. I was very touched that one of them should have paid a tribute to those times. He wrote of me 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 return he immensely enlarged my life by introducing me to men like Harold Acton, Hugh Molson, Christopher Hollis, Robert Byron, Peter Quennell, Brian Howard and Terence Greenidge.

  Evelyn wrote at length about his three years at Oxford, both
in Brideshead Revisited and in A Little Learning. Like Charles Ryder, he was studiously industrious for his first two terms; he then had a year of abounding happiness, but suddenly the magic faded. Ryder decided that he had got the best out of Oxford and that he would be better employed studying art in Paris. Evelyn also thought he had got the best out of Oxford and asked his father if he could come down. But unlike Ryder, Evelyn had nothing to come down to. His father, as most fathers would, told him that it would be foolish for him to leave before he had taken a degree. It was only a matter of another year, then they could review the situation. Evelyn stayed on and took a third. Because he had gone up a term late, he would have had to stay on another term before he could take his degree: as he had had his scholarship taken away, because of his third, there seemed no point in delaying his start on life for six months in order to be able to put B.A. after his name.

  Charles Ryder’s ecstatic days at Oxford coincided with the peak of his friendship with Sebastian; it ended with Sebastian’s decline into alcoholism, and the authorities’ refusal to let him share rooms with Ryder. But there was no Sebastian in Evelyn’s life. No one will believe that novelists create their characters by taking one trait from this person, and this from that, giving one character a situation that has perplexed another; and because the head of a titled family was forced at that time because of a scandal to live abroad, and because a younger son of that family drank himself to an early death, the world said, ‘Of course the Flytes are the…’ and no doubt Evelyn had that family in mind when he created Sebastian, Julia and Lord Marchmain. But they are not portraits; any more than Margot Metroland is the Mayfair hostess who in 1927 had a love affair with a prominent coloured singer and whom Evelyn must have had in mind.

  Charles Ryder said, ‘I sometimes wonder whether had it not been for Sebastian, I might have trodden the same path as Collins round the cultural water wheel. My father in his youth sat for All Souls and, in a year of hot competition, failed. Other successes and honours came his way later, but that early failure impressed itself on him, and through him on to me, so I came up with an ill-considered sense that there lay the proper and natural goal of a life of reason. I, too, should doubtless have failed, but, having failed, I might perhaps have slipped into a less august academic life elsewhere. It is conceivable, but not, I believe, likely for the hot spring of anarchy rose from deep furnaces where was no solid earth, and burst into the sunlight—a rainbow in its cooling vapours—with a power that rocks could not repress.’

  Presumably Evelyn was drawing a parallel between Mr Ryder’s failure at All Souls and his own father’s third in Greats.

  But though there was no Sebastian in Evelyn’s life, there was, I think, an equivalent for Sebastian in the number of brilliant and elegant young men from a larger way of life who showed him in how narrow a world he had moved at Heathmount, Lancing and at Underhill. For a year he was enchanted at moving in this brighter wider world, then he realized that he did not belong to it, that he was only a sojourner, that if he wanted to stay in this world after he went down, he would have to win his place there. At least that is my diagnosis of the situation.

  There was also the deep antagonism between himself and the Dean of his college—Cruttwell. Evelyn wrote at length about Cruttwell in A Little Learning and his attack provoked in the public press a burst of epistolary shrapnel from pupils who had different experiences of the Dean. No man could reach and hold such a position as Cruttwell did without having considerable merits. The dislike between Evelyn and himself was mutual, instinctive and as irrational as love. They hated one another. How Cruttwell must have enjoyed writing the letter announcing Evelyn’s third and the loss of his scholarship.

  Evelyn, subsequently, was implacable in his pursuit of Cruttwell. If in a novel there is a dreary character who can always be asked to dinner at the last moment, it is a Captain Cruttwell. The bogus ex-Indian army officer who sells tropical equipment in a department store was Brigadier Cruttwell. Mr Loveday’s Little Outing, the story of the lunatic who is allowed out of his asylum for a single afternoon and promptly strangles a schoolgirl on a bicycle, was originally entitled ‘Mr Cruttwell’s Little Outing’. Evelyn was anxious that Chapman & Hall should write to the Dean, saying that they were proposing to use this title for a collection of short stories. The Mr Cruttwell in the story was a homicidal lunatic; if the Dean of Hertford thought he would be mistaken for this character, they were prepared to alter the title. But the letter was never written. It was felt that the joke had gone far enough, and by then the victim had suffered an adequate humiliation.

  At that time certain universities were allowed the right to an independent representative in Parliament, and Cruttwell had in 1935 been chosen as the official Conservative candidate for Oxford University. Up till that day the actual voting was regarded as a mere formality and Cruttwell had arranged for a party in his rooms on election night to celebrate his appointment. This year, however, A. P. Herbert decided at the last moment and in a spirit of jest to have himself proposed as a rival candidate; he swept the polls and Cruttwell’s party was never held.

  The good news reached my brother when he was a war correspondent in Abyssinia. The jubilant letter that he wrote my wife is one of her most prized possessions. ‘Cruttwell’s ignominy’ had made his week he said. He had needed cheering up as he had just returned from an unsuccessful attempt to reach the front. He had been arrested by a one-eyed sheik and kept under guard for a whole day and night. On his return to Addis in dejection, he had found ‘Cruttwell’s failure supremely comforting. It must be the first time in history that the official Conservative has bitched things so thoroughly.’

  Evelyn gave the coming-out dance for his daughter Teresa in a marquee in a London square. It had been a singularly cold and rain-swept summer. But this particular night was warm and starlit. I congratulated Evelyn on his good luck. ‘Not luck at all,’ he said. ‘The Sisters of——have been saying masses for it for a week.’ ‘Do you really believe that?’ I asked. ‘Do you question the efficacy of prayer?’ he answered. I thought of Cruttwell and all the pins that had been stuck into his wax image.

  From the summer of 1924 to the summer of 1928, when Decline and Fall was in the Press, Evelyn was, though casually employed for the most part of the time, definitely not engaged on a career. He entitled the chapter describing this period as ‘In which our hero finds himself in very low water’. The book ends in July 1925; and the low-water period had another three years to run. Four years may not seem a long time in the retrospect of fifty years and as a prelude to an unbroken series of successes, but at the time those four years were interminable in their passing, a constant source of anxiety; after all there was no means of knowing that they were a prelude.

  In the autumn of 1925, I arrived one morning at Chapman & Hall’s to find my father in a state of considerable perturbation. Evelyn had come up to London for the night, had taken a number of his friends to the Gargoyle Club, settling the bill with a cheque; the cheque had bounced.

  The secretary had rung up my father: what did he propose to do about it? My father answered that it was none of his business; his son must settle his own problems. The secretary had her reply ready. The matter would have to come up before the committee. The committee included some very prominent literary figures, Arnold Bennett among them. Did Mr Arthur Waugh want the matter of his son’s cheque to be brought before Mr Arnold Bennett? Clearly Mr Arthur Waugh did not.

  My father was at his most histrionic. I listened with sympathy. ‘You know father,’ I said at length, ‘if Evelyn turns out to be a genius, you and I might be made to look very foolish by making a fuss over ten pounds, seventeen and ninepence.’ My father raised his hand to heaven. ‘Would I, would we, that’s not much consolation now.’ It was not an easy period for my father, and as Evelyn admitted in A Little Learning, ‘the intermittent but frequent presence of a dissipated and not always respectful son disturbed the tranquillity of the home to which he always looked for refuge.’<
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  At the time, those years seemed marked with a steady retrogression. Evelyn has told how after a few weeks at Heatherley’s Art School, he went to Oxford for a hectic week of parties. On his return he felt in no mood to continue as an art student and became a schoolmaster first at the preparatory school in North Wales which he described in A Little Learning, then at the school near Aston Clinton for backward young men, which was the model for Dr Fagan’s academy in Decline and Fall. The two schools were merged into one for the purposes of fiction, Grimes being transferred from North Wales to Buckinghamshire.

  At Lancing, Evelyn had kept a diary which he had abandoned at Oxford. He now resumed it. ‘It reveals,’ he wrote, ‘a warmer and altogether more likeable character than its predecessor; even though it is a record of continuous failure.’ If that is what it reveals, then I would suggest that here the embryo novelist was at work; subconsciously recognizing that the hero, the ‘I’ of a narrative must be ‘sympatico’, and it should be noted that one of the most marked characteristics of Evelyn’s novels is the likeability of all his characters. Even the grisly Mrs Beaver has her own repulsive fascination. One would be glad to meet her; if not to linger in her company; while with every one of his other characters, one would be happy to spend quite a little time. Of how few novelists can that be said.

  It is for that reason, I am very sure, that the E. W. of the 1924–8 diaries is ‘a warmer and altogether more likeable’ character than the E. W. of 1920–22. For in point of fact the Evelyn of those four years was very far from being that.

  It would have been surprising, if he had not been. At Oxford he had been one of the most prominent of a brilliant group. The highest achievement had been predicted for him, yet he alone of all that group seemed now to be headed nowhere. He must have been conscious of his own latent powers. He must have known that potentially he was more gifted than those who had passed him in the race. Yet at the same time he must have had torturing moments of self-doubt, when he asked himself whether he was so brilliant after all. He explained publicly his failure in schools with the excuse that he had not really tried, but actually he had worked much harder than he had let his friends suspect. It was not surprising that he should have in self-defence disparaged the successes of his contemporaries. What did what they were doing amount to after all? Were they not trivial time-servers, accepting the standards of the market-place? He looked for their weak points and then attacked them. His quick tongue was like a snake’s.