My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Read online

  In Memoirs of an Aesthete Harold Acton has given a charming account of the occasion. There were only six of us there in all, Lady Pansy Pakenham (later Lamb) and Robert Byron being the other two. It was all very sweet and touching. She-Evelyn appeared to giggle when He-Evelyn promised to endow her with all his worldly goods. They looked so young, so innocent, and so defenceless, to be launched upon such rough seas. One prayed for charitable tides.

  Five months later it seemed that our prayers had been amply granted. London mantelpieces were adorned with cards of invitation to his housewarming cocktail party at 17a Canonbury Square. This was in Islington, a section of London that had been occupied by city merchants in the middle of the nineteenth century. The houses were solid, well built, in the Georgian style. You would imagine yourself in Bloomsbury. For fifty years it had been occupied by humble families and Evelyn got a spacious first-floor flat, unfurnished, for a pound a week.

  The invitation cards were decorated with maps showing guests how to get there. Buckingham Palace was marked on its left hand side and the caption read ‘Routes from Buckingham Palace to 17a Canonbury Square’. Actually his home was far from inaccessible. It was a minute’s walk from the Angel tube station and a 19 bus could get you there from Piccadilly Circus in twenty minutes.

  The party was also in celebration of Decline and Fall. It had been published a few weeks earlier. It was not a best-seller, but it was a seller and it was being ‘talked about’. It was recognized that a new and exciting figure had appeared upon the stage. The road to success ran broad and clear.

  The large flat was crowded, with new friends and old. It was there that I saw for the first time Diana Mitford, whose friendship was later to mean so much to Evelyn. She was then, on the brink of her marriage to Bryan Guinness, in the full, rich spring of her flowering beauty. I have seldom been to such a genial party. Everyone was so happy for the Evelyns’ sake. They had gambled on one another—a hundred-to-one chance—and they had ‘brought it off’.

  On the first Monday in December, I sailed for the West Indies. On the Sunday evening I had a very small good-bye party at the Gargoyle to which the Evelyns came. They were in high spirits. The company that owned the luxury cruising liner the Meteor had offered them a free holiday in the Mediterranean, in return for publicity in a travel book. They were to sail directly after Christmas. It was to be their real honeymoon. In June they had only been able to afford a fortnight in a country inn. I looked back a year, to that grim December when Evelyn unemployed and seemingly unemployable, had been so cantankerous. What a miracle She-Evelyn had achieved! But for her he would never have written Decline and Fall: he would still be fiddling with fretsaws; and was there any reason to believe that he would have been any more resolute as a carpenter than he had been as an art student at Heatherley’s? How much could happen in a year!

  I was away for five and a half months. Once again I frequently changed my plans; inter-island travel was not easy then; mail accumulated in ports I failed to reach when I was expected, so that I did not learn of the drama of the Evelyns’ trip until afterwards. Nineteen-twenty-nine provided one of the most tempestuous Januaries within record. It snowed in Monte Carlo, and She-Evelyn caught pneumonia. She was dangerously ill, and her brother-in-law, Geoffrey Fry, who was then Stanley Baldwin’s secretary, was active on the diplomatic telephones. Evelyn had to spend several weeks in a hotel in Port Said, visiting his wife in hospital; a stay that gave him unique copy for one of his most amusing travel chapters. It was an anxious time, but by the time I learnt of it, she had recovered.

  We returned to England almost simultaneously. They dined with me their first week in London. It was delightful to see how affectionate they were together. Evelyn was getting well-paid commissions from the newspapers. He had acquired the right material for his travel book. He asked if he might dedicate it to me, sharing the dedication with Alistair Graham, the ‘Lennox’ of A Little Learning, inscribing it ‘to two other travellers’. I fancy that the idea of the dedication was She-Evelyn’s. On that same evening she said to Evelyn, ‘Have you told Alec about the dedication?’ She was consistently resolved to keep Evelyn and myself on good terms with one another. And I believe that it was because the dedication was her idea that when the book was eventually published, it was dedicated not to Alistair and myself, but to Bryan and Diana Guinness. He wanted to expunge every trace of She-Evelyn’s influence. In England the book was entitled Labels, but in the U.S.A., A Bachelor Abroad—an ironic title for a description of one’s honeymoon.

  Climatically the summer of 1929 offered a full rich recompense for the appalling winter. On the vineyards of the Médoc grapes ripened to a lovely vintage. Socially there was a general heightening of tempo. There was, as I have said, no equivalent in Europe for the boom on the New York stock market, but a great many Americans in Paris and London were living in terms of Wall Street. They helped to set the pace. Parties became more eccentric. By the Charing Cross Pier, a river boat, the Friendship, was hired for private parties. I remember a tropical party there—of which Vyvyan Holland was one of the hosts. It was a hot, still night; there was a curious kick out of misbehaving in a sarong in the dusk of the bows when along the embankment and over Westminster bridge dutiful citizens were hurrying to catch a last train home to Surbiton.

  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 tol
d 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.