How to Disappear (20 page)

Also with them in Athens was a man with a red beard who kept trying to seduce Alastair. In the published Waugh
Diaries
his name is given as R – . Thinking that this man might provide a further lead, I called the Humanities Research Centre at Austin in Texas where the
Diaries
are lodged. They really are terrifically on the ball in Texas – the relevant entry was read back to me over the phone. The man's name turned out to be Arthur Reade and Waugh ‘used to meet him in my Great Ormond Street, 1917 Club days'. It didn't mean anything at the time but I've now googled ‘Arthur Reade'. Very little. He's called Britain's first Trotskyist, and the 1917 Club was a Communist hangout in Gerrard Street, Soho, not Great Ormond Street. Has anyone else picked up on this flirtation of Waugh's with Communism? Or am I the last to know?

I explored the Foreign Office papers at the Public Record Office because on February 20th 1928, Alastair became personal assistant to the British ambassador in Athens, Sir Percy Loraine. Presumably in consequence, he was not present at Waugh's marriage to Evelyn Gardner in June of that year at St Paul's, Portman Square. Or had Waugh actually not invited him? The occasion was hardly ‘a wedding'; no parents were there; Harold Acton was best man and generously paid for the lunch at Boulestin afterwards.

Waugh was impoverished but managed to cruise to the Levant in February 1929 on a travel book commission. His wife developed double pneumonia and went into hospital at Port Said where she almost died. Alastair, answering he said Waugh's ‘pathetic cry for help', arrived from Athens and gave Waugh £50. He often gave Waugh money and four years earlier, in 1925, had guaranteed Waugh's overdraft – to Mrs Graham's great displeasure. For two days Alastair and Evelyn did the low life of Port Said together and it was reported that the new Mrs Waugh resented being abandoned in favour of the former lover. One of the hallucinated voices in
Pinfold
raises the issue nearly thirty years later: ‘I want the truth, Pinfold.
What were you doing
in Egypt in 1929 ?' Whatever it was, it can't have been insuperable because Mr and Mrs Waugh followed Graham back to Greece for an interlude, and in May 1929 Waugh was writing to Henry Yorke from Istanbul that he and his wife had ‘fun at Athens with Mark & Alastair.'

When Sir Percy Loraine became British High Commissioner in Cairo, Alastair went along too, being appointed honorary attache at the Residency on September 2nd 1929. Technically a kingdom, Egypt had in effect been a British protectorate since 1883 (thus making Cecil Rhodes's great dream come true: it was possible to travel the length of Africa, from Cape Town to Alexandria, without leaving British territory). Mark Ogilvie-Grant was appointed to a similar post on December 2nd. A third character, Vivian Cornelius, was appointed honorary attache on January 10th 1930. Ogilvie-Grant had his ‘appointment terminated' in November 1932. Cornelius ‘resigned' May 1933. Alastair had his ‘appointment terminated' in December 1933. Again, all this information is from the Foreign Office papers. The phrase ‘appointment terminated' is not necessarily ignominious. It was often applied to contract officers, as opposed to career diplomats, when their employment ended. It's too late presumably to speak to Mr Cornelius about those days.

It was the following year, on May 13th 1934, that Alastair's mother died. His father he had loved, and lost while still a teenager. His mother, who was richer than the father, he'd more or less detested but she'd been the only pressure on his life for action. With her gone he appears to have lost a drive and a shield. The drive he could do without; he had his inheritance. The shield he would replace by other means. And of course he no longer had to go abroad to escape her. One thing is clear: by this time Evelyn Waugh was no longer in Alastair's life. The last notice I could trace of them together is at Pakenham Hall in Ireland, 1930 – Alastair talked of Abyssinia, sowing the seeds of
Remote People
and
Black Mischief-
although Waugh did write to Daphne Fielding in 1962 (year of the first Beatles' single!) that he hadn't seen Alastair for twenty-five years which, if precise, would make their last meeting in 1937. But I don't think Waugh was being precise; he was being vague.

Waugh's horror of the banal, his need to make all events participate in his personal mythology, can lead to misrepresentations. Yet one of the most fascinating aspects of his genius is the transformation of facts into fictions. This tempering of his imagination by fact gives his work a rare quality of combining extravagance with leanness, always an irresistible combination. Perhaps I was wrong in my remark to Alastair Graham about Waugh's work being undermined by his narrowing sympathies. Perhaps Waugh has the art to survive his own vileness and snobbery – because he was of course an artist. We should not make the mistake, which Waugh makes, of trying to judge him as a gentleman. And for Waugh, man and artist, Alastair Graham had by 1930 served his purpose.

There is a notion that having made grand connections at Oxford, Waugh's life thereafter was replete with titles and great houses. This wasn't so. In order to be at ease among the
gratin
he needed money and recognition as an artist and these did not come immediately. And it was only in the artier, more dysfunctional area of the upper class that he made his friends and was comfortable. The mainstream grandees of the peerage or the international set were not his territory. Diana Mitford, for example, said later that she was bewildered when Waugh suddenly broke off their close friendship in 1930 – she never realised that because she had become, as Diana Guinness, very rich and one of the most glamorous women in Europe, Waugh simply couldn't cope.

Waugh's essential move was to escape from his parents' house in Golders Green. Which took a long time. He often returned to live with them from necessity – in 1935 he's living there again. Meanwhile he adopted a series of alternative families. Waugh could not approach the aristocracy directly, especially when after Oxford he found himself teaching in second-rate schools for a pittance. He needed a less intimidating bridge, some middleground in which to groom his personality and manners, in which to learn without being overpowered.

It was the Graham household at Barford which supplied the perfect reductionist model of country-house style. The house itself wasn't huge but it had all the right things. Alastair himself wasn't one of the landed Etonians and, like Waugh, he'd gone to a Victorian school; yet he was a good-looking and dissolute member of the gentry class, which gave him the allure of decadence. Most important of all, there was no father in the household to make Waugh uneasy and put him on his mettle. So at Barford he could enjoy his upper-class fantasy without being threatened. During the period of humiliation as a schoolmaster, it was also his escape, enabling him to preserve caste in his own eyes. And the whole affair with Alastair confirmed which direction Waugh would take when he emerged from his shell and became his own man: it would be provincial county, not Harold Acton cosmopolitan. Graham was never much interested in London, but nor was he interested in traditional country pursuits. For him the countryside was a refuge, as Waugh hoped it would be for him too. In this Graham was the more successful. Waugh never found a refuge anywhere.

By the 1930s Waugh was ready to graduate to the much larger Madresfield Court where again there was no
paterfamilias
to intimidate the atmosphere. Lord Beau-champ, father of the seven Lygon children, was forced into exile in Italy in 1931 by his brother-in-law the Duke of Westminster, the philistine ‘Bendor'. The Duke's personality was an odd mixture of prudery and passion (his mistress for many years was Coco Chanel and Simon Blow tells me that he gave Coco what a private note calls ‘a sexual illness': the Duke was too embarrassed to deal with it and asked Detmar Blow to go and pacify her). This mixture came fully into play when he discovered that his brother-in-law Beauchamp enjoyed sleeping with his own sex, especially with footmen. This was not an uncommon practice but Bendor was a bully too. Prised away by the Duke threatening to expose her husband, Lady Beauchamp fled to the protection of her brother, leaving Madresfield in the hands of her offspring. It was this state of affairs which enabled Waugh to move in on them. While staying in Mal-vern he made contact and complained that he had nowhere to go for Christmas, which got him invited to Madresfield Court, a house he'd never before seen. Waugh preferred classical architecture but Madresfield's array of turrets and battlements would do. He later said that the place looked like an orphanage – which in a way it was.

Hugh Lygon, Lord Beauchamp's younger son, is sometimes touted as the model for Sebastian Flyte but there are only technical similarities. Waugh wasn't particularly close to him at Oxford and was not among those invited to Hugh's 21 st birthday party. Hugh lacked Graham's louche magnetism; he seems to have been a bore and a drip who'd never inspire anyone to anything, let alone fire an artist's imagination. Waugh was never in love with him and neither was anyone else. Not that Hugh cared either way. When he fell over drunk in 1936, and hit his head and died, Waugh was in Abyssinia and heard about it from his parents in North London when he got back – they'd read it in the newspapers. Any subsequent claim of intimate friendship between the two men appears to be a projection backwards. Like Proust, Waugh created in his writings a milieu which was then superimposed on the real world of the past. What had in actuality been a number of scattered events, in which Waugh – and Proust – had often been marginal observers, became transformed in retrospect into a biographical drama of intense and conscious relationships. The various real-life characters were delighted to be co-opted into this mythologised pantheon – even dukes have to endure countless nothing days – and the authors gratifyingly transformed themselves into centres of the social universe.

In practice Waugh was far more interested in the lively Lygon sisters whom he now met for the first time and often visited until his second marriage a few years later – and he was never in love with any of them either. The set-up supplied Evelyn not only with friends but also with useful background. From 1931 on, his letters – and presumably his conversation – were full of casual remarks about estate maps, gun rooms and green baize doors, designed to convince the recipient of how thoroughly to the manor born he was (although he never deceived himself; one of the attractive aspects of Waugh is his ability to recognise his own pretentiousness at critical moments). Gentrification was not completed until 1937 when he married Laura Herbert in front of a very respectable guest list, bought Piers Court, and was granted a coat of arms. From 1937 can also be dated a rapid hardening of the exterior personality and a deepening of his unhappiness.

Waugh was a very physical man. His writing conveys an act of incision and sculptural pleasure. Probably he copulated with the same self-abusive gusto as he ate and drank. Before he'd finished with it he'd fathered six children. But clearly he was bisexual by temperament and loved to ‘camp' – how those vivid check suits exploded off him! In the film The
Scarlet Woman,
made immediately after Oxford with several cronies from the Hypocrites Club, Waugh chose for himself the part of Sligger Urquhart, the homosexual Dean of Balliol, and then indulged in outrageously effeminate posturings on the screen, mincing about, sitting on boys' knees, hugging them, stroking their hair. To see this film to-day is to see a creature of almost Nijinskian levity, thoroughly uninhibited in his portrayal of pagan pleasures.

Eight years after his second marriage, Waugh's love for Alastair Graham would burst out afresh in the form of an intense nostalgia and he would make Alastair the hero/anti-hero not of his best novel but of the one closest to his private dreams.
Brideshead Revisited
lost intensity in its second half and I was going to suggest that it was because Sebastian leaves the scene to be replaced by his rather bloodless sister Julia. That may be true, but loss of focus and vitality in the second half is a feature of every one of Waugh's novels except
Pinfold
(which is very short) and Put Out More
Flags
(for me his best book, with his earlier ‘comic' and later ‘serious' manner in ideal balance; also amazingly detached in the circumstances).

Not only does homosexual emotion resurface in
Brides-head,
the ‘camp' does too. The monologues of Anthony Blanche are one of the book's star features. Wholly convincing as the outrageous prattle of a cultivated queen, they are extended way beyond their narrative functions because, quite simply, Waugh is having such a gorgeous time with them. But Waugh does something more profound with Blanche which it is possible to miss since it is disguised by comedy. He makes him the artistic conscience of the novel. At the end when the narrator, now a painter, is enjoying a successful show of his new work, Blanche unexpectedly turns up from abroad and exposes the pictures for what they are, ‘t-t-terrible t-t-tripe', the watery products of that English fear of causing offence. This is, as it were, Harold Acton flying in from the world of Picasso, Stravinsky and Diaghilev. So when it came to the crunch Waugh did not, in this novel at least, betray the values and demands of art in the interests of social acceptability – unlike, paradoxically, Harold Acton himself.

That was in art. In Waugh's life it was different. Ambivalence terrified him as though it were quicksand. The ruthless suppression of complex aspects of his character must have contributed to his general distemper and thereby to his addiction to drink and pills and to his bromide-induced nervous breakdown. In post-1937 conversation and letters he now refers to homosexuals as ‘buggers', the straight-hearty name for them in those days, ostentatiously crushing out all tenderness from the subject. But he can't deceive himself entirely. In
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
one of the first things the voices do is accuse Pinfold of being ‘queer'. He goes into greater definition – not ‘nancy' or ‘pouf but ‘butch'. In his physical relationship with Graham, Waugh had seemingly been the more active partner.