Brideshead Revisited

On D-Day, Tuesday 6 June [1944], he brought the book to its climax: ‘This morning at breakfast the waiter told me the Second Front had opened. I sat down early to work and wrote a fine passage of Lord Marchmain’s death agonies. Carolyn [Cobb] came to tell me the popular front was open. I sent for the priest to give Lord Marchmain the last sacraments. I worked through till 4 o’clock and finished the last chapter.’ That same week, appropriately enough, the Americans liberated Rome.

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—	Mad World by Paula Byrne

From Paula Byrne’s ‘Mad World’

[Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford friend, Hubert Duggan] was dying of tuberculosis. Evelyn wrote to Laura: The news of Hubert is very bad indeed. He is allowed to see no one … He never sleeps and drugs put him into a delirium but not to sleep. He is in the blackest melancholy and haunted by delusions. There is nothing that can be done for him medically. Supernatural aid needed.’ Duggan had renounced his Catholicism for the sake of his longstanding mistress, Phyllis de Janze. Now on his deathbed he had begun to talk of religion and returning to the Church, but felt that this would somehow be a betrayal of the memory of Phyllis, who had recently died.
Evelyn acted directly and decisively. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to save the soul of one of his friends. He went to see a Father Dempsey (whom he described as a big, fat peasant). The priest gave him a medal to hide in Hubert’s room and promised to call, saying, ‘I have known most wonderful cases of Grace brought about in just that way.’ But when Evelyn was told that Hubert would not survive the day he could not locate Dempsey. He found another priest, Father Devas. His interference annoyed Hubert’s sister, who was watching over him, and his nurse, but he was committed to saving his friend from Hell. Father Devas gave Hubert absolution and his cThank you, father’ was taken as assent. Evelyn then returned to White’s Club and sat drinking with Randolph Churchill. When he returned to Hubert, the priest was still there, wanting to anoint him, much as his sister resisted. All of this is Evelyn’s own account:

Father Devas very quiet and simple and humble, trying to make sense of all the confusion, knowing just what he wanted … patiently explaining, ‘Look, all I shall do is just to put oil on his forehead and say a prayer. Look the oil is in this little box. It is nothing to be frightened of.’ And so by knowing what he wanted and sticking to that … he got what he wanted and Hubert crossed himself and later called me up and said, ‘When I became a Catholic it was not from fear’, so he knows what happened and accepted it. So we spent the day watching for a spark of gratitude for the love of God and saw the spark.

This was a crucial moment for Evelyn. He had witnessed the operation of Divine Grace. He used the whole of this incident at the climax of Brideshead. Critics complained that the conversion of Lord Marchmain was wholly unrealistic, but as far as Evelyn was concerned it was a piece of reportage. To his theological mentor, Ronnie Knox, he wrote after the publication of Brideshead: ‘It was, of course, all about the deathbed. I was present at almost exactly that scene, with less extravagant decor, when a friend of mine whom we thought in his final coma and stubbornly impenitent … did exactly that, making the sign of the Cross.’
Twelve days later Evelyn returned to Pixton with the intention of starting his novel. Hubert’s death had made a profound impression on him.

…once I passed them and I caught the eye of the Fogliere gondolier, whom, of course, I knew, and, my dear, he gave me such a wink.

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—	To this Paula Byrne notes that ‘Waugh obviously knew all about the Venetian homosexual underworld’. But then again, she does maintain that Lord Marchmain was mainly Boom.

…the heat didn’t agree with him [Evelyn Waugh]. A ‘confirmed heliophobe’, he left it to the others to sunbathe ehile he escaped ‘in the cool depths of churches and palaces’. In ‘Brideshead’ Lord Marchmain advises sticking to the cool of the churches rather than the beaches where endless games of backgammon were played.

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Mad World by Paula Byrne

“And how do you plan your time here? Bathing or sight-seeing?”
“Some sight-seeing, anyway,” I said.
“Cara will like that — she, as Sebastian will have told you, is your hostess here. You can’t do both, you know. Once you go to the Lido there is no escaping — you play иackgammon, you get caught at the bar, you get stupefied by the sun. Stick to the churches.”

Lady Sibell recalled that although her father liked Evelyn very much [when they met in Italy in 1932], he could be irritated by his lack of grace: ‘Father told me once: “I wish Mr Waugh would not genuflect because he does it so clumsily”.’

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—	Mad World by Paula Byrne

Physical tricks of the family

From Paula Byrne’s ‘Mad World’

Alec Waugh’s book about 1931, A Year to Remember, gives a detailed account of the scandal and its impact on his brother. He explicitly states that the events of that summer inspired Brideshead Revisited. Refusing to name the peer, even in 1975, the year of the memoir’s publication, Alec decided to call him Lord Marchmain:

In real life Lady Marchmain was the sister of a prominent Duke, and the case was being brought because of a quarrel between her husband and her brother, at her brother’s instigation. A groom for whom Marchmain had formed an attachment many years before was to be cited. The case was never brought because the King intervened. He could not allow a man who had been his own representative to be exposed to scandal. But the case was only dropped on the condition that Marchmain left the country.

Of Hugh, also not named, he writes: ‘His younger son was very good looking, very charming. He was also a very heavy drinker.’ Alec remembered that the wealthy and distinguished bisexual expatriate writer Somerset Maugham, who knew the family well, made the connection between Hugh Lygon and Sebastian Flyte in New York in 1945: ‘We all know, of course, who Sebastian was. A charming boy. He drank himself to death.’ Hugh had stayed with Maugham in the south of France.
Before recounting the story of the Beauchamp affair, Alec Waugh told of another encounter that took place in the summer of 1931. It involved W. Somerset Maugham and a young playwright called Keith Winter, who was a friend of Evelyn’s and Balfour’s. Winter was taken to the Villa Mauresque, where Maugham resided. Various other guests came and went, but Winter spent the night with Willie Maugham, teaching him a new sexual trick with his fingertips. Maugham was reminded of the boys he had enjoyed in Bangkok. Winter hoped to be taken up as Maugham’s new paramour, but Maugham dropped him unceremoniously. And the moral of the story? Winter (also unnamed in Alec’s memoir) went on to become a well-known writer, married with three children, a presenter for the BBC, a member of the Savile Club, a lecturer in American universities. Alec Waugh’s message is clear: promiscuous homosexuality is not in itself an impediment to success in life. As with Alec’s own disgrace at Sherborne, it was the discovery and not the act that did the damage. Boom’s big mistake was to get busted.

There are lots of us

Gosspis and sneers circulated in high society [about lord Beauchamp]: ‘Well, you must expect anything from a man that has his private chapel decorated like a barber’s pole and an ice-cream barrow’.

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—	Mad World by Paula Byrne

From Paula Byrne’s ‘Mad World’

The grounds [to accuse lord Beauchamp] were: ‘THAT the Respondent is a man of perverted sexual practices, has committed acts of gross indecency with the male servants and other male persons and has been guilty of sodomy.’
The following paragraphs then lay out the litany of evidence that had been gathered by Westminster, Buckmaster and their detectives: