In “Nobody turns up,” published in The Spectator for 17 September 2011, Byron Rogers reviews How to Disappear by Duncan Fallowell. The book is partly about Fallowell’s quest to find Alastair Graham, the reclusive friend of Evelyn Waugh.

How to Disappear was also reviewed, along with the new Penguin edition of Waugh’s Labels, in “How to write about travel” by Toby Lichtig, published in the Times Literary Supplement on 7 December 2011.

maresalsalis:

Evelyn Waugh’s diaries, published after his death, record much of his post-Oxford existence. Much of that existence, at least for the years between 1924 and 1928, revolved loosely around a young man named Alistair Graham, forever immortalized in print through Waugh’s character from Brideshead Revisited, Sebastian Flyte. Evelyn courted women in this period, and married his first wife, Evelyn Gardner, in 1928, but it was Alistair who was, as Evelyn put it, “the friend of my heart”. The two men traveled together, went shopping together, drank and laughed at one another, just as Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte were to do twenty years later in Waugh’s book. Alistair, like Sebastian, was born of a rich family, and had been born into wealth— specifically, he was born in Bucknell Manor. Alistair’s usual home, Barford, became Evelyn’s refuge when he was writing Decline and Fall, his first popular work. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder finds a parallel solace at Brideshead Castle. 

However, as fans of Brideshead Revisited know, Charles and Sebastian grow distant. Evelyn’s real-life romance deteriorated over time as well. Alistair’s mother, Mrs. Graham (referred to in Evelyn’s diaries as “Mrs. G”) grated on Alistair. Evelyn never elaborated on what particularly Mrs. Graham said toward her son, but mentioned how much “noise” she made whenever she was around.  Alistair frequently left the country in order to escape her. “Today we had to go through the heartbreaking business of buying Alistair’s tickets to Kenya,” Waugh wrote on June 25, 1924. Alistair traveled to Constantinople and Italy as well, seeking refuge from his mother in foreign places and in drink, precisely as Sebastian does. “Mrs. G” frequently wrote to Evelyn, desperate letters in which she begged him to convince her son to return for the holidays. It is unclear from the diaries if, as in Brideshead Revisited, this connection with Alistair’s mother drove the two men apart, but it is certain that Alistair grew more distant and more consistently drunk, and that Evelyn began to complain that Alistair annoyed him with his behavior. One spring, Alistair disappeared from Barford for days before finally being found in a pub some miles away. Another time, he fled to Paris without telling anyone.

In Brideshead Revisited, Charles watches helplessly as his friend descends into bouts of drunkenness in which he shuns Charles, even as Charles tries to speak with him. Charles himself remains in the reader’s favor: as he grows older, his own drinking becomes more infrequent and he adopts a more mature attitude toward life, attending art school and becoming a studious young painter, giving up revels in favor of working toward his goal of painting for a living. After reading Evelyn’s diaries, it becomes clear that Charles is a model of what Evelyn might have been. In 1924, Evelyn began to attend Heatherly’s drawing school, with the goal of improving his sketching— a skill he had been honing in his amateur way since his days in Lancing public school. Unlike Charles, though, Evelyn’s trips to the school soon became infrequent— his diary is full of entries in which he rewards himself for drawing well by going to nightlong drinking parties with his old friends from Oxford. Eventually, Evelyn ceased going altogether, and instead lapsed into a habit of drunken late nights, parties, and hangovers. It is tempting to suggest that, in reflecting on this time, Waugh decided that Charles should be what he couldn’t be for Alistair: sober, and willing to help. 

Though Evelyn remained friends with Alistair into the 1930s, the peak of their friendship had passed by 1927. Evelyn got married to Evelyn Gardner (upon his proposal he asked her to marry him “and see how it goes”), then divorced; he found a new, more advantaged crowd with the success of his first novel. Later, he joined the Roman Catholic Church. Alistair moved to Cairo.

It is tragic, then, to read on through the later decades, to find no mention of Alistair at all. Waugh’s diaries grow remote and incomplete; the paragraphs-per-day of 1924 shorten themselves to bullet points by the forties. Evelyn’s second wife, Laura, is hardly ever mentioned even in his journals, and he never spoke again of anyone as he did Alistair. Throughout the rest of his life, the whimsy remains lost, the happiness, it would seem, gone. The diaries become nearly dull, a catalogue of minor dinners and friends whose names appear once or twice, never elaborated on. To be fair, it was a stressful, uncertain time for many people, and with such discontent in the air politically, it was probably hard for anyone to be sentimental, or romantic, or whimsical.

There was a brief period, though, in 1944, when Waugh’s diary entries lengthened for a time, when his entries became inflamed briefly with excitement: when he was on leave from the military, writing Brideshead Revisited. 

In the spring of 1924, the term before his final examination, he [Evelyn Waugh] seems to have become active homosexually. He told Christopher Sykes that while in Oxford he had experienced an ‘extreme homosexual phase’ (Sykes’s words) which, for the short time it lasted, was unrestrained, emotionally and physiscally’. There appears to be an allusion to this in a letter to Dudley Carew from Oxford this spring:

My life has been extremely precarious. … At present I am keeping my balance but I may crash at any moment. We will then combine and run a Sadist brothel at Wigan. … Of course no one in our class need ever starve because he can always go as a prep school master not a pleasant job but all roads lead to Sodom.

And in another letter to Carew:

I have been living very intensely the last three weeks. For the last fortnight I have been nearly insane. I am a little saner now. My diary for the period is destroyed. I may perhaps one day in a later time tell you some of the things that have happened. It will make strange reading in the biography.

And from a third letter to Carew this spring:

St John [his third name] has been eating wild honey in the wilderness. I do not yet know how things are going to end. They are nearing some sort of finality. One day I will tell you things to surprise you and sell an edition of the biography if faithfully recorded.

 Christopher Sykes, who either knew everything or was pretending to, writes of this in his official life of Waugh: ‘Names and details need not and should not be given.’ Possibly Waugh was now going to bed with Alastair Graham, but Harold Acton thinks this is unlikely - he believes that Graham’s attractiveness to Waugh was increased by the chastity of their relationship. Possibly it was Hugh Lygon, handsome and fair-haired, with whom Waugh was sharing digs. Those who knew Hugh claim to perceive traces of him in the character of Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited. At all events this homosexual episode or phase, whatever it was and whomever it involved, passed swiftly and was not to be repeated. Waugh’s letters to Carew suggest that it did not disturb his conscience.

All other sources say that Evelyn Waugh never actually happened to share digs with Hugh Lygon, though the two of them did have such a plan.

I thought I’d post a rather extensive quote about Richard Pares (more information than I could find anywhere), Alistair Graham, rumors of Evelyn Waugh’s homosexuality, ‘fairies’ at Oxford and even Mario Bowra, the prototype of Mr Samgrass.

‘Everyone in Oxford was homosexual at that time,’ said John Betjeman, who was there. Though homosexuality was illegal, many senior members of the university, most notably the flamboyant don Maurice Bowra, actively encouraged it, sometimes acting as go-between in setting up assignations for their pupils. Tom Driberg enjoyed soixante-neuf with a young don in the rooms where more cerebral tutorials were supposed to take place. The Hypocrites’ Club was the epicentre of what would now be called the university’s gay scene. According to Sykes, who knew Waugh extremely well, Evelyn was never shocked by homosexuality and remained very interested in the subject. He was, after all, ‘interested in all things which shed light on human character’. But later in life he would worry about his son discovering his past indiscretions. In the spring of 1924, Evelyn informed his old school friend, Dudley Carew, that his life had become ‘quite incredibly depraved morally’. Drunkenness at the Hypocrites was part of the story, but hardly sufficient to qualify as incredible depravity. Something else was being hinted at. Tom Driberg, dancing with a fellow member, saw a drunken Evelyn rolling on the sofa with another boy, ‘with (as one of them later said) their tongues licking each others’ tonsils’. Anthony Powell’s first encounter with Evelyn was a sighting of him at the Hypocrites sitting on the knee of another member, Christopher Hollis. A club guest, Isaiah Berlin, also saw him on a settee kissing a friend. Evelyn later teased Christopher Sykes for not having had a homosexual phase, saying that he had missed out on something special. But it was not just sexual experimentation. There were genuine love affairs. When the staunchly heterosexual Henry Yorke read Brideshead Revisited, he told Evelyn that it made him regret not falling in love at Oxford himself: ‘I see now what I have missed.’ What he missed was what Waugh experienced: real passion. Evelyn’s sexual abstinence at school seemed to make his Oxford love affairs even more intense. Though Evelyn relished the companionship of eccentric and slightly crazed friends like Terence Greenidge and Harold Acton, romantically he was drawn to fragile, beautiful boys. Before being seduced by the Hypocrites, he had become intimate with a shy and scholarly left-wing Wykehamist from Balliol called Richard Pares.

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 Captain Ryder and Captain Waugh

Brideshead appeared in May 1945 with a dedication to Laura and the Author’s Note: ‘I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they’ Waugh had already told Dorothy Lygon, ‘It’s all about a family whose father lives abroad, as it might be Boom [Lord Beauchamp] - but it’s not Boom - and a younger son: people will say he’s like Hughie, but you’ll see he’s not really Hughie - and there’s a house as it might be Mad [Madresfield], but it isn’t really Mad¹ (HW 53). Thus invited, Waugh’s friends immediately began identifying the novel’s characters and settings. Maurice Bowra recognized himself in Mr Samgrass; Sebastian’s teddy-bear Aloysius recalled John Bctjeman’s Archie. Alec Waugh heard Evelyn Gardner’s voice in Cclia Ryder’s; Dorothy Lygon wrote, ‘Sebastian gives mc many pangs’ for his resemblance to the dead Hugh, witli whom Waugh had planned to share rooms during his final term at Oxford. No response survives from Brian Howard, source of Blanche’s stammer and depravity; Harold Acton generously found Waugh’s chapters on Oxford in the twenties ‘the only success­ful evocation of the period that I know’.

It was easy for friends to identify Ryder with the Waugh who had stayed in their country houses, especially in the years after his first marriage when, like Ryder, he escaped to the tropics, collecting material for novels that (like Ryder’s Mexican pictures) focused ‘the frankly traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of barbarism (BR 201). Though Brideshead Casde is patterned mainly after Castle Howard - also damaged in wartime, not by soldiers but a fire started by an evacuee schoolgirl that in 1940 destroyed the dome and most of the rooms on the south front - its chapel is based on the chapel built at Madresfield by R C. Harwick in 1867, ‘the most complete realisation of Arts and Crafts theory in Britain¹.²⁹ More even than Bcauchamp’s son Hugh, Sebastian recalls Alastair Graham, also a drunkard, and the child of a strong-willed mother. Graham had in fact once written to Waugh, in a letter signed ‘With love from Alastair, and his poor dead heart’ (and which enclosed a nude photograph of himself):

I have found the ideal way to drink Burgundy. You must take a peach and peel it, and put it in a finger bowl, and pour the Burgundy over it. The flavour is exquisite - ill you come and drink with me somewhere on Saturday? If it is a nice day we might carry some bottles into a wood or some bucolic place, and drink like Horace.

(Hastings 108)

Even readers who did not know Waugh personally identified author and narra­tor; many supposed Waugh, like Ryder, a recent convert.

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Alistair Graham, Richard Pares and Hugh Lygon – the three alleged lovers Evelyn Waugh had at Oxford.