He [Evelyn Waugh] saw Laura now and then on weekends [in 1942 when EW was still in the army], but from her scarcity of letters he began to suspect that she was not terribly interested in him. ‘I should like to feel [he wrote to her from London] that once or twice a week you felt enough interest in me to write & say so.’ He suggested ironically: ‘If by chance my children should die, do come to London. I miss you every hour.’
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Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
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During the fighting in Crete, a Commando officer named Pedder was shot in suspicious circumstances. ‘We shall never know who killed him’, records Waugh. ‘Many of his men had sworn to do so and he was shot in the back by a sniper.’ Christopher Sykes says Laycock feared the same fate for Waugh, and ‘set a guard on Evelyn’s sleeping quarters’. Another officer, Colonel Brian Franks, described to Sykes his conversation with Laycock, when Laycock proposed taking Waugh into action again: ‘You will regret it,’ said Franks. ‘Apart from anything else, Evelyn will probably get shot.’ Laycock answered: ‘That’s a chance we all have to take.’ ‘Oh,’ said Franks, ‘I don’t mean by the enemy.’
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Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
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Another officer, the Hon. ‘Jakie’ Astor, who was in camp in Dorset with Waugh, told Sykes that he hated to see Waugh drilling his men, or assuming any kind of command over them, however trivial: ‘He never hesitated to take advantage of the fact that while he was a highly educated man, most of them were barely literate. He bullied them in a way they were unused to. He bewildered them, purposely. I found it embarrassing.’
Sykes himself, always eager to defend Waugh whenever it was reasonable to do so, makes no attempt in his biography to justify Waugh’s tendency to be rude to his social inferiors, or to those he considered inferior:
To the naturally weak [writes Sykes] he was as merciless as he had been in his bullying school days. I witnessed the spectacle many times and it always utterly disguised me. It was useless to remonstrate as I sometimes did because he was always ready with a witty and plausibly logical defense.
Sykes suggests that this form of bullying ‘was a perversion… of his aggressive spirit which rejoiced in conflict.’
— from Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
Waugh noted in his diary the Horizon [the literary magazine launched by Cyril Connolly in 1940 to which Waugh contributed] was being run by ‘the rump of the left wing’. To Connolly in 1953, he wrote: ‘I always enjoyed the magazine & was grateful to you for printing my work in it, but there was an ugly accent — RAF pansy — which kept breaking in… That spoiled the enterprise for me.’
— Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
RAF pansy? Did Waugh mean Brian Howard?
He [Brian Howard] was supposed to report on possible Nazi sympathizers [at his job in MI5], but when he informed his superior officer that a certain prominent person had displayed strong Fascist sympathies before the war, he was told: ‘Don’t be ridiculous - he went to Eton with me!’
In the summer of 1942 Brian was sacked from MI5 and to everyone’s surprise he volunteered for, and was accepted by, the Royal Air Force. He was frequently in trouble for minor infringements, such as ‘the day I lost my uniform. Seems no one’d ever done this before. People are really too extraordinary. I just left the silly thing in a public lavvy.’
He remained an Aircraftsman almost until the end of the war, and was finally discharged honourably, despite many scrapes. The most celebrated of these took place at the Ritz, where he was heard discoursing noisily on the incompetence of those in charge of the war, from Churchill downwards. As he was wearing his uniform, a high-ranking RAF officer came over and angrily demanded Brian’s name, number and station. Brian replied: ‘Mrs Smith’.
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Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
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On each occasion [of minor military operations in Egypt] they [8 Commando unit were Evelyn Waugh was serving] set out and were promptly turned back. These events were summed up by 8 Commando in a parody of Randolph Churchill’s father famous dictum: ‘Never in the history of human endeavour have so few been buggered about by so many.’
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Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
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Sickly child
‘I have taken a great fancy to a young lady named Laura,’ he [Evelyn Waugh] wrote to Mary Lygon.
What is she like? Well, fair, very pretty, plays peggoty beautifully… She has rather a long thin nose and skin as thin as bromo and she is very thin and might be dying of consumption to look at her… and she is only 18 years old…
— Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
“Rex telephoned me this morning and told me everything! What were your girl friends like?”
“Don’t be prurient,” said Sebastian.
“Mine was like a skull.”
“Mine was like a consumptive.”
— Brideshead Revisited
Does anyone know what peggoty is? Google is no help.
However, he [Evelyn Waugh] derived some amusement [during a failed expedition for French West Africa in September 1940 when he was Battalion Intelligence Officer] from defending one of the men on a charge of buggery: ‘He got eight months. His companion in pleasure got eleven. I did quite well for him.’
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Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
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Gentleman’s personal gentleman
In 1951 Christopher Sykes happened to mention that his father had employed an Italian valet, whereupon Waugh was:
overcome by self-pity. ‘My father never had an Italian valet,’ he whimpered.
‘Well, my father never published any books, so we’re quits,’ I replied.
‘Anyone can publish books,’ he moaned, ‘but only the great ones of the earth can have Italian valets.’
— from Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
Penelope [Betjeman] knew how to cope with the childish games of her husband’s circle. Once when she and Betjeman were quarrelling, she threatened to throw his teddy bear Archie down a well.
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The Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
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Waugh says he ‘did not greatly like’ Murray [the model for Basil Seal], and Christopher Hollis supplies a possible explanation. Philbrick of Balliol, the young man mocked by Waugh for his confession of sadism, was a friend of Murray’s. and one night after Waugh had been inciting his cronies to further slander of Philbrick, Murray and Philbrick waylaid him in a dark corner of Balliol and beat him up, with the words ‘We’ve had as much of you as we can stand.’
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The Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
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The idea begins to suggests itself that Waugh does not really like human company. He himself considers this quite candidly, and accepts it: ‘I shall always be ill at ease with nine of every ten people I meet,’ he observes, comparing his own case with so-called ‘men of the world’, truly seasoned travellers. ‘I shall always find something startling and rather abhorrent in the thing most other people think worth doing.’
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The Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
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Brian Howard turned his back on England too. He drifted about Europe during the early 1930s, engaging in stormy and usually unsuccessful affairs with various young men. Eventually he settled for ‘Toni’, a young German he picked up in Munich.
‘The more I hear of England,’ Brian wrote to his mother, ‘the more I… loathe the idea of my clever young contemporaries… all these Waughs and young pseudo-serious writers. …’
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The Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
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Discuss sex seriously
In an article on marriage that he [Evelyn Waugh] wrote for the magazine John Bull during 1930, soon after his wife’s desertion <…> he concentrates almost exclusively on the sexual aspect of marriage, and complains that:
responsible people - doctors, psychologists, novelists - write in the papers and say, ‘You cannot lead a happy life unless your sex life is happy.’ That seems to me just about as sensible as saying. ‘You cannot lead a happy life unless your golf life is happy.’ It is not only nonsense, it is mischievous nonsense. It means that the moment a wife begins to detect imperfections in her husband she thinks her whole life is ruined.
<…>
… Martin Stannard suggests that Waugh may have visited a brothel during one of his visits to Marseilles, but this is speculation, and it seems likely that he had never been to bed with a member of his own sex until he married. In his article on marriage, he complains that ‘by the present system of education the one thing that is hidden is the actual facts of sex’, and asks that parents ans schools should ‘teach children the biology and hygiene of sex. … Teach them fully about birth control. …they will not then marry out of curiosity or inexperience.’ This seems to hint that curiosity and inexperience were among the motives behind his own marriage.
— The Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
Harold Acton regards Waugh’s attraction to her [Evelyn Gardner] as a natural sequel to his feelings for Alastair Graham. Indeed, Waugh might have never shown an interest in her had Alastair remained in England. As it was, he had been accepted (rather improbably) for the Diplomatic Service and was about to sail for Athens.
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The Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
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