ALL EVELYNED OUT
Or
THE EVELYN WAUGH CONFERENCE OF 2011
Or
SCOTT-KING'S MODERN EUROPE REVISITED
ARRIVAL
We get to Downside School, Somerset, at 9pm, hoping that we’re not too late for dinner. The private Catholic school is massive, dark and quiet. Is anybody there? A couple of security guards are. They know nothing about any Waugh conference but are aware that something was going on in the middle of the school earlier in the evening and are willing to escort me there.
So off I go between the two uniformed guards, and after five minutes march, I’m face to face with a couple of unsmiling organisers of the Waugh conference. Apparently, they have reported to the police someone making a drunken nuisance of themselves in the school grounds, and I think they suspect that the villain has been apprehended and brought before them. Not so: I come in peace, and, what’s more, having paid for full board and lodgings. Accordingly, I ask if there’s any food available. “Nope,” comes the stony-faced reply. “Are any of the other confrères still around?” I ask, smiling. “Most of them have retired to their rooms.” I’m told, dryly. I suppose that means that a few folk are still up and socialising. But by the time I’ve turned around his answer the pair have disappeared up a corridor, no doubt headed for some exclusive meeting in a bar. Christ, maybe Kate and I should have got up at 4am this morning in order to check-in on time and endure a tour of Downside Abbey.
The local pub has also stopped serving food, which is bad news in particular for Kate, who needs to eat little and often and who’s been going on about her hunger since we touched down at Bristol Airport. I’m not bothered by the situation, indeed I’m quite excited by a coincidence. In the summer of 1946, when Evelyn Waugh attended – purely for the jollies - a conference in Spain, devoted to a lawyer he’d never even heard of, he wrote in his diary that he and his travelling companion, Douglas Woodruff, had ‘no luncheon’ on the first day. When he later came to fictionalise the event in Scott King’s Modern Europe, where a dim classics scholar, accompanied by an academic called Whitemaid, goes to a conference in Neutralia devoted to the work of an obscure Seventeenth Century poet, Waugh transformed his experience into art in the following way:
A steward announced: ‘We shall arrive at Bellacita at sixteen hours Neutralian time.’
‘An appalling thought occurs to me, said Whitemaid. ‘Can this mean we get no luncheon?’
They got no luncheon. A couple of pages later, Whitemaid informs Scott King:
‘Exactly ten hours and a half since I had anything to eat.’
Back at the school, we punch the entry code and gain entry to Isabella. This is a six-floor accommodation block, normally a girls’ dorm but used for conferences out of term. The hard, narrow, single beds soon distract Kate from her hunger. A light goes on in the corridor outside our room every time a door opens. Pipes make deeply ominous noises whenever the plumbing is called into action.
‘Exactly twelve hours since I had anything to eat,’ I announce, in an effort to lighten my partner’s mood.
DAY ONE
1
A British-born, American-based confrère happens to be going to the refectory at the same time as Kate and me. Our dapper guide raves about the ‘marvellous’ food at Downside. Later we decide that we must have missed the irony when Tony said this. But at the time it puts a spring in our step.
Over a congealed egg breakfast, we learn that our guide is responsible for the Evelyn Waugh society website. Now Waugh has a poor online presence, as our new friend readily acknowledges, and so we discuss what can be done to amend this state of affairs. Citing the Enid Blyton Society website - to which I’ve contributed truckloads of posts - I tell him my ideas for an improved Waugh site. First, a ‘Library of Books’ for the bibliophile, with scans of every edition of each Waugh title. Second, the existing Evelyn Waugh newsletter, which appears elsewhere on the web at the moment, and which brings together all the academic developments, however pedantic. Third, and most important of all, a FORUM so that enthusiasts can have their say on any aspect of Evelyn Waugh’s life and works.
Sure, there is a forum already on the net. But that is a sedate affair to which only learned dons seem minded to contribute. The forums I have in mind will attract BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS. I don’t know how to achieve that exactly. But maybe while I’m blogging and tweeting about Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love the way forward will reveal itself.
It just so happens that I’ve recently been to Llanddulas in North Wales, where Evelyn Waugh taught as a schoolmaster for two terms back in 1925. I took photos of Arnold House, the ex-school, and of the Fairview Inn (which is referred to as ‘Mrs Roberts pub’ in both Waugh’s diaries and in Decline and Fall), and of the spot on the beach where sad young Evelyn embarked on what was intended to be a suicide swim. The resulting essay, illustrated with my photos, is made for the internet.
‘I’d like to see that essay.’
‘You will see that essay.’
‘I’ll find a place for it on the website.’
‘Now you’re talking.’
Kate then takes over the conversation, explaining what motivated her to make a rudimentary ‘GENTS’ sign for one of the fifth floor bathrooms and a ‘LADIES’ for the other. If she must see the naked body of a fellow confrère stepping out of the shower, then let it be an echo of her own form.
The conference proper starts in a room where we’re going to be presented with four papers in the two hours from 10am. To kick us off we hear from a gentle man who was at Heath Mount preparatory school in Hampstead, as was Evelyn, though not at the same time. Kate knits. I make no notes. Nor does the American who I’m sitting beside. In his case, possibly because the lecture has been given in an upper-class English drawl. One up to the old country, I’m thinking.
The second lecture focuses on Sherborne, the public school that Evelyn didn’t attend because his brother wrote The Loom of Youth about it, where what was looming was adolescent homosexual experience. This lecture, which makes some fascinating points about Waugh’s traumatic war experience in Crete and his subsequent visit to Sherborne as an umpire for a day of war games, is also delivered in a voice whose clarity seems to be impeded by the simultaneous sucking of a plum. As 11 o’clock strikes it’s just possible that half the 40-strong audience have not yet been able to understand a single word of the papers. The Spanish delegate has been reduced to sketching portraits of the speakers. Two up to the old country.
An American lawyer is next. Seated, he eschews eye contact with the audience. Choosing to mutter away to himself, he pretty well eschews voice contact also. Things are going badly from a UK point of view this time around, until Alexander Waugh, who is chairing the conference, points out that the slide on display - which is supposed to be of a house that Evelyn Waugh considered buying but did not buy - is not in fact the house in question. Not that it matters, as the house is hidden behind a wealth of extraneous vegetation. Apparently it was the best picture that the speaker could download from the worldwide web to his laptop. And I have to say, I warm to this Yank’s nerve.
There is no fourth speaker, it turns out, so we break early for coffee. There I learn that the absent speaker, whose talk was to be about sartorial elegance in Decline and Fall, was present at the opening dinner last night. However, apparently she expressed a lack of confidence in her paper. Moreover, the fracas that had disturbed the conference shortly before my own arrival, broke out again later in the night and this may have caused her to bolt come morning.
I’m left imagining the opening scene in Decline and Fall. The dons at Scone College are cowering in their rooms because the Bollinger Club is on the rampage. How does Evelyn put it again? In anticipation of engaging with the fourth paper I have a paperback copy of the novel to hand. Soon I’m reading:
A shriller note could now be heard; any who have heard that sound will shrink at the recollection of it; it is the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass.
No wonder our missing delegate was scared. I don’t suppose she made the mistake of going out to investigate the strange noises late at night. But I doubt if she slept much. And, in the morning, stepping into the washroom on whatever floor of the Isabella block she was on, she might have come across a male delegate emerging from the shower, who she, in her delirium, may have taken to be Lumsden of Strathdrummond, swaying across her path like a druidical rocking-stone.
2
Lunch is a networking opportunity. For me, that means sitting alongside Kate and listening to her engage with humanity. She gets talking to a Canadian who teaches an English Literature course to 18-year-olds. He wants to include Waugh on the syllabus but thinks that his students wouldn’t get the humour of Decline and Fall, so he may go for A Handful of Dust instead. But in any case he’ll need a good book of lit crit and biography that his students can consult. Kate suggests that Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love would be the ideal companion for any reader of Waugh from 4 to 90. She has him smiling and when he mentions that he could order as many as twenty copies of my book he has us smiling as well. Warren was originally down to present a paper but decided that it wasn’t quite ready. Well, the bar has been set pretty high this morning, says Kate, so perhaps he was wise to ‘back off, buddy’. She leaves him chuckling into his pudding.
As Kate and I emerge from a lunch full of saturated fat, we bump into Alexander Waugh. He apologises for the fact that he won’t be at our talk tomorrow evening. Alas, he is not the first high profile attendee to tell us he can’t make our slot. As I’m thinking this aloud, and mentioning that we’re disappointed that Derek Granger, the producer of the 1981 Granada TV serial of Brideshead has had to pull out of speaking after dinner tonight, Alexander begs us to consider taking over this empty slot. Tonight? I’m up for it, but is Kate? She could be. So that’s that, and I can’t wait.
I’ll have to wait, though. So I walk back into the lecture hall eager to crack on with four more papers crammed full of Wavian insight. First up is another academic from across the Atlantic whose talk is called ‘The Mortuary Aesthetic of Secular Culture in The Loved One’. The paper, which is read aloud, is full of multi-syllabated jargon, which at first goes over my head then begins to seduce me. For a while I feel like Aimée Thanatogenos when she says to Dennis Barlow who’s just quoted a poem for her in the grounds of Whispering Glades: ‘It’s just what I’ve thought so often and haven’t been able to express. It’s wonderful to be able to write like that.’
Next up is an academic from Turkey. She has lost her paper in transit but is willing and able to talk at random about H.G Wells and Evelyn Waugh. Does she make an effective connection between these two Twentieth Century writers? She does not. But then that kind of exercise is not easy. Try Evelyn Waugh and D.H. Lawrence. Or Waugh and Joyce. Compare and contrast Evelyn Waugh and John Steinbeck, for goodness sake. On the one hand it is, in fact, very easy. On the other, it’s more or less pointless.
Suddenly an immaculately dressed Japanese man is standing before us. His paper is about Decline and Fall, but, as with our first speaker of the afternoon, much effort has been put into the visual impact he makes. Indeed I know from his lunchtime conversation with our Sherborne expert that the present speaker buys his shoes from Trickers on Jermyn Street, Mayfair, and his shirts from Brooks of New York. The tie though, with its pale blue and white stripes, is instantly recognisable as belonging to the Bollinger Club. Once again I extract my Penguin copy of Decline and Fall. This time I’m looking for a particular line spoken by Lumsden of Strathdrummond. Ah. Here it is:
‘Here’s an awful man wearing the Boller tie.’
But there’s nothing awful about our neatly turned out speaker. In this context, I prefer to read the line in a more neutral way, so how about:
‘Here’s a Japanese man wearing the Boller tie.’
Again there is no fourth paper. The scheduled fourth speaker of the afternoon was the partner of the speaker who didn’t turn up this morning. Perhaps, after a difficult night, the pair decided to cut their losses and run. For all I know, last night’s disturber-of-the-peace broke up the missing speakers’ grand piano, and stamped their cigars into their carpet, and smashed their china, and tore up their silk sheets, and threw their travelling Matisse into their water-jug. The rampager of Downside may well have found the missing speakers’ papers and had fun with them, in the same way that, in the ever-rich pages of Decline and Fall, the Bollinger Club had great fun with the manuscript that Mr Sanders had been working on for the Newdigate Prize Poem.
Stuffed with the fruit of six - no, eight - academic papers, we board a bus that’s to take us to Mells, a quaint old village that has Evelyn Waugh connections. Alas, Kate is an absentee. After the excitement of the lecture room, she has had to go and lie down on her hard, narrow single bed. So I sit beside someone else, James Morris, a poet who regularly contributes sharp, allusive poems to the Evelyn Waugh newsletter. He’s also had poems published in the Spectator recently, so we happily swop notes about the state of publishing today.
At Mells we go into the fine old church. But why? It’s an Anglican church so Evelyn wouldn’t have come here. Apparently, this is where we’re meeting the Earl of Oxford, but I don’t see the need to hang around for him to turn up.
Outside in the churchyard is the grave of Ronald Knox. Waugh wrote his biography, and Chapman and Hall published it in a volume that looks so forbiddingly boring that I’ve hardly been able to open it never mind read its chapters. On the grave it says ‘Priest, Scholar, Preacher and Writer.’ This echoes the strap-line of Waugh’s other strait-laced quasi-religious book, Edmund Campion: Scholar, Priest, Hero and Martyr. That was written in 1935, five years after Waugh converted to Catholicism. The Knox book was written in 1959, and on the title page Waugh notes that Knox was ‘pronotary apostolic to his holiness Pope Pius the Twelfth’. Is this some private joke? If so, I wish someone would let me in on it.
Right next to the church is Mells Manor. Evelyn was invited here by Katharine Asquith in the early 1930s and after a fine weekend he sent her copies of his books and soon became great chums with the high-born, serious-minded Catholic. 
Our guide today is Katharine’s grandson, and as I return to the group it’s to overhear a useful piece of info. 
The present earl was Evelyn’s godson, and he used to be given generous gifts from his godfather. I ask the earl how old he was when Waugh died. About 14, is the answer. And though his family lived abroad at the time, he still felt close to Evelyn at the time of his death.
As for Ronald Knox, he was invited to live at Mells Manor from 1947, and he stayed there, translating the Bible amongst other learned-cum- absurd projects, until his death ten years later. Evelyn would have been living at Piers Court in Gloucestershire for some of this time, then at Combe Florey in Somerset. Neither of these fine homes was particularly close to here, but both were within a couple of hours travel. However, Evelyn did regularly come here during his second life, by which I mean the devout family life he enjoyed with his second wife, Laura.
Indeed that’s why the conference is being held at Downside. What I mean is, when living at Piers Court, Evelyn would stay at Downside for Holy Week. In other words, out of term, at Easter, Waugh may have done what we’ve been doing: sleeping in a hard, narrow single bed and turning up for meals at the refectory three times a day. The only real difference is likely to have been that he worshipped with the monks at Downside Abbey while we worship in a secular lecture room in the middle of Downside School.
I think Evelyn regularly travelled the six miles to Downside Abbey for mass while he was in residence at Mells. Though I may be wrong. There is a private chapel in a corner of the Manor garden, in which a service of some kind is going on as we shuffle up to the door. 
Standing alongside a Japanese man (not this afternoon’s speaker), I find myself trying to explain why Evelyn might have once been found praying to God in this tiny converted shed, but on no account in the impressive church next door. Phrases like ‘Roman Catholicism’, ‘High Anglicanism’ and ‘Pronotary Apostolic to his Holiness Pope Pius the Twelfth’ roll off my tongue. But I’m not sure he quite gets what I’m driving at.
We walk en masse, as it were, to a lane where there is a thatched house. 
This is where Evelyn began Scoop in 1936, we’re told. The earl further tells us that when Evelyn was offered the house, he turned up at the front door, ran up to the bedroom, jumped on the bed a few times, and declared it was fine, he would take it. He’d probably come straight here from sleeping on a bed at Downside School.
That reminds me. In 1925 or so, when Evelyn was still great friends with his ex-Oxford lover, Alastair Graham, the latter spent a week with the son of a canon at Wells Cathedral. (Wells is near Mells.) Alastair wrote to tell Evelyn that the authorities at Downside School kept an arc of female birds and beasts for their sexual delectation.
But let’s try and be site-specific. We’re still standing outside the thatched house in the lane. 
Let me unobtrusively extract the Diaries from my day bag. OK, Evelyn came back from Abyssinia in September 1936. He went straight to Mells because it was handy for seeing Laura Herbert, his wife to be, who lived at Pixton Park, Dulverton, about forty miles away. A diary entry written in Mells on September 14, states that he was ‘living at Mrs Long’s’. The house I’m looking at may well be Mrs Long’s place, as was.
For a week or two, Evelyn was dining regularly at Mells Manor, house-hunting with Laura, and putting the finishing touches to Waugh in Abyssinia. By October 15, still living at this house, Waugh notes in his diary that he’d started a new novel (Scoop) and by October 29 he’d finished the second chapter and had sent it off to be typed.
On the coach on the way home to Downside, I’m sitting next to James Morris again. Can he give me a poem inspired by Scoop? He tells me he can do better than that, he can give me a poem based on the first chapter, which was written in the very house we’ve just been admiring.
‘Great.’
The poet closes his eyes and recites:
Crossword
Mrs Stitch
Signing cheques,
Translating Latin text,
'Terracotta' she suggests,
Talking to the man up the ladder,
Viola Chasm on the phone?
It was a puzzle.
Neat. It’s just a pity, from this afternoon’s perspective, that Evelyn chose to start the book with a pen portrait of Diana Cooper, scatter-brained actress, rather than Katharine Asquith, Mells-based Catholic.
Jim tells me that he too is a Catholic. I ask him to enlighten me on that score. He recites a poem for me, one that takes as its starting point the Waugh short story, ‘Out of Depth’.
Out of Depth
England abased
Before some African tribe,
The people debased,
Scavenging in the countryside,
Only the Catholic faith--
Giving some semblance of civilized life,
Same as it ever was.
Ha! This day just keeps getting better. Now for a quick dinner and then into the bar for our talk. I hope Kate’s been learning her lines.
3
The bar is full of people sitting on chairs. I’m standing at the bar feeling slightly self-conscious, waiting for Kate. Alexander Waugh suggests I introduce myself by saying something about the book in my hand. Of, course! It’s a proof copy of Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love, which will be published by Beautiful Books in hardback, and as an ebook, at the end of September. Then I read the endorsements that are printed on the back. First Alexander Waugh's:
"I think it is absolutely brilliant, breezy, very funny, original, erudite, beautifully written, fascinating in every detail, moving, generous and charming. It is written with magnificent zest."
And straight after that, one from John Howard Wilson, American Secretary of the Evelyn Waugh Society:
"McLaren shows how funny Waugh's writing is by adopting and using many of his phrases, often in surprising ways. He is funny, and that's a large part of the book's pleasure: not just rehashing all those old novels (which we do in academia), but discovering new things about them and trying to explain them to others."
John and Alexander are sitting at the back of the room, perhaps now regretting the fulsome generosity of their words. But this is no time for reserve, either British or American, and I know that reading the words of affirmation has been the right thing to do.
Kate arrives. She positions two barstools, one for herself and one for me, and we’re off and talking. The first half of our presentation is about Alastair Graham. I introduce him in a few paragraphs, while Kate and I display board-backed A3 prints of photos taken at Barford House, where Alastair and Evelyn spent much quality time, in 1923 in particular. 
Some of the photos are blown up from tiny originals that Alexander Waugh has shared with me. Others were taken in 2006. The photos of the temple at the bottom of the garden, past and present, are stunning. We know they are. The photos that Alastair took of Evelyn Waugh and Evelyn Gardner together, just before their wedding in 1928, will double the number of photographs of the Evelyns that are in print. They too are stunning. While showing the pictures I’m conscious of someone getting up from the audience and helping himself to a drink from the bar behind me.
Soon Kate and I are reading from my book. The scene takes place at the Easton Court Guest House in Chagford, a place that Evelyn used to frequent in order to write his books in the 30s and 40s, when it was a hotel. In this scene, Kate tells me what she’s discovered about Alastair Graham’s post-Waugh life. How he ended up living in Newquay, and became a buddy of Dylan Thomas. Again, someone goes to the bar. It’s Ginger, a Waugh enthusiast from Burnley, who was drinking heavily over dinner. And when he resumes his seat he interrupts our talk by complimenting us on how our talk has fundamentally changed his view of Brideshead. I thank him for his intervention and try to move things forward. But that does not prove an easy thing to do. Ginger is fixated on Barford and we have to listen to him formulating his new perspective. Eventually we get through the talk. Kate, who has read her half of our dialogue to perfection, is asked several questions, as if the discoveries she presented in the scene really were her discoveries, and not mine. But she fields those questions well enough. When asked why Alastair Graham moved to Newquay, she suggests it was for the mackerel. After all, hasn’t she just told us all that Alastair wrote a pamphlet called ‘Twenty ways to cook Newquay mackerel’?
The second half of our talk is about John Heygate, the man who helped destroy he-Evelyn’s first marriage by having an affair with she-Evelyn. Again we have photos. Again we read a scene from the book that takes place while we’re lying in bed at the Easton Court Guest House. And this time we’re positively heckled. Ginger thinks that Kate is openly taking Evelyn Gardner’s side against Evelyn Waugh. He tells her: ‘Evelyn was a wonderful man but she used him right from the start.’
How many sides are there to a love triangle? Quite a few, and one needs to keep an open mind to get the full picture. While, it seems to me, our heckler’s mind is closing fast thanks to the alcohol that’s besieging it.
‘She were a right bitch,’ says our heckler to Kate.
‘I didn’t write this,’ she tells him. I was reading from a book that Duncan has written.’
Over to me, I don’t think. After the talk, a few of the audience join Kate and I for a drink at the bar. Ginger buys a couple of bottles of wine and suggests that Kate and I retire to a bench and drink them with him. This echoes a line of Alastair’s that we delivered in our talk, where Alastair suggests that he and Evelyn retire to some bucolic spot and drink like Horace. I don’t feel like drinking like Horace right now, not with Ginger having such a head start, and Kate suggests that he puts one of the bottles back behind the bar where it will keep until tomorrow. The last thing I see before leaving the bar is Ginger downing in one a half-pint glass full of white wine. It is a sobering sight. Evelyn Waugh used to be able to ‘hit the bottle’ in this scary way when he was young. But Ginger is pushing 50.
Later, Kate and I discover Ginger in the entrance porch of Isabella. He is lying on his back, unconscious, clearly having forgotten the four-digit code to get into the building. Well, he can’t stay there all night, so I try and wake him. This proves difficult, since all he craves is oblivion, but eventually he does understand who it is that is trying to make contact with him, and he knows what we’re advising him to do. Alas he can’t stand up on his own. And I can’t haul such a dead weight to its feet. So I get on my hands and knees and urge Ginger to roll over and to adopt the same position. Ginger says he’d rather not bother. But I persist, and, when I mention tomorrow’s coach trip to Combe Florey, Evelyn Waugh’s former home, he co-operates. From an all-fours position he is able to stand.
Inside Isabella we ask Ginger what his room number is. Sebastian hasn’t a clue. Yes, my feelings of affection and pity for Ginger at this moment, echo my feelings for the charismatic character in Brideshead, who Charles comes across in a destructively drunken state both at Brideshead itself and at Sebastian’s Oxford College. As we said in our talk tonight, Sebastian is twice named as Alastair in the manuscript, through slips of the pen. So there is another love triangle of a kind: Alastair-Sebastian-Ginger.
Meanwhile Kate has removed cushions from seats in the ground floor lounge and put together a mattress, having decided that Ginger is too tall to lie comfortably on one of the sofas. Ginger eagerly collapses on Kate’s homemade bed, and may already be asleep again as Kate puts a rug over him and asks if he wants a glass of water placed by his bedside. No answer. Kate checks that he is lying on his side. Goodnight sweet prince. But can we really leave him in such a state? We consult with a passing colleague and the consensus is that Ginger has been in this position before, and that his body will somehow cope with the surfeit of alcohol that’s been imposed on it this evening. Indeed it was our heckler, we now understand, that was responsible for the fracas the previous night. Oh dear.
Soon Kate and I are in bed also. That is we’re lying on the hard, narrow single beds at opposite ends of our fifth floor room. ‘Exactly thirty-six hours since we left the world of balanced diets,’ I announce, in an effort to lighten my partner’s mood.
DAY TWO
On the way to breakfast, Kate and I fall in with Alexander Waugh as he too emerges from the Isabella block. He tells me that he read the proof copy I gave him last night and that it only confirms his previous high opinion of the work. Thank goodness for that.
I tell him some not so good news. In checking my email this morning, I’ve learned that Beautiful Books intend to delay publication by a month because of a delay in getting permissions. Alexander says that he fears for my book. By this he simply means (I think) that the delay may result in it sinking without trace in a sea of pre-Christmas publications. Jesus, why does the publishing process have to be fraught with so many ups and downs? Not that I’d have it any other way. The ups are cosmic.
After breakfast, on the way out of the refectory, we pass the mother and sister of one of the American professors. The last time they were in England was for the Evelyn Waugh conference in 2003. The older woman is concerned about the welfare of one of our number. “And how is Ginger?” she asks. Well, he must have transferred to his bedroom in the night, because his makeshift bed was neatly put away when Kate and I popped into the lounge this morning, so I’m able to give Ginger a glowing report.
I can’t help observing that the kind and friendly women are waiting outside the lecture room a full hour before the first paper is due to be delivered. Yesterday’s papers were good; but they weren’t that good, surely. An hour later the classroom is packed. Kate gets out her knitting and so does another woman, emboldened by Kate’s example of yesterday. Ginger’s not in attendance, but then how could he be?
The first paper is about Evelyn Waugh’s silence on Spain. The American academic from the U.S. Military Academy points out that so many writers had something to say about the war in Spain in 1939. But Waugh was silent on the subject. Or was he? The odd remark in Put Out More Flags, in Brideshead and in Scott King’s Modern Europe convinces our speaker that Waugh did, eventually, have his precise say on Franco and the fascists. One down, three to go.
A Spanish lecturer, who Kate thinks gorgeous, is next. His topic is Put Out More Flags, how that novel, published in 1942, prefigures what Waugh had to say in the later books about war, namely in Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy. In due course, the speaker, alerted by Alexander in the chair, becomes conscious that he’s running out of time. He speaks faster and faster in order to try and cover all the ground he’s laid out on each slide. If Evelyn Waugh had taken the same approach to his war trilogy (published in 1952, 1955 and 1961) the end product would have been risible.
Oh, we are on a war footing this morning. Because the third paper is called ‘How Lord Lovat kicked “Laycock’s sidekick” out of the Special Service Brigade.’ Laycock’s sidekick being our Evelyn. In 2003, Donat Gallagher, based in Australia and a most respected Waugh authority, delivered a paper that dealt with how Antony Beevor kicked Laycock’s sidekick’s backside over the debacle at Crete. Now, in 2011, the professor has moved on a year, from 1941 to 1942, but it’s still the fallout from Crete that’s calling the shots.
Actually, I’m beginning to realize how important the Crete episode was in Waugh’s life. Was Evelyn unfairly treated by the brigadier’s deputy, as today’s speaker suggests? Did he suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, as yesterday’s speaker thinks. Can a parallel be made between the depths of Waugh’s suffering on Crete in 1941 and while lost up the Amazon in 1933? I realize that, for me, the formal part of the conference is in danger of taking off.
Step forward Alain Blayac, a French academic. He begins with a spirited Vile Bodies pastiche. Then he is delighted to announce that three composite volumes of Waugh have been commissioned by a publisher in Paris. He will be hard at work for many months writing introductions and translating those texts that haven’t already been translated into French. Alexander Waugh asks if Helena will be included in the commission. Alas, laments Alain, it won’t be. But what can he do? We feel Alain’s pain as he shrugs his frustration. Something has to go in order to fit the Waugh canon into three paperback volumes. Oh, la la!
After lunch Kate and I go in search of Ginger. We find him at a school computer. He looks rough, but at least he’s showered and changed his clothes. He looks fragile, but then he is still alive, and in my book that’s a result. We advise him to go and eat while lunch is still being served. And we tell him that the coach will be leaving sharp at two o’clock.
Ginger doesn’t make the coach trip. But Paula Byrne does. The author of Mad World,: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead didn’t expect to be delivering a talk through a microphone, draped over the front seat of a moving coach, tour guide style, but that’s what she’s been asked to do. We’re going to Combe Florey, the house that Evelyn lived in for the last ten years or so of his life. But it’s an hour and a half away and we need to be entertained in the meantime.
Paula delivers. She’s full of energy, and though her present commission is a book on Jane Austen, the work she’s done on Waugh and the house of Madresfield is still fresh in her mind. After telling us a bit about Evelyn and the Lygon sons and daughters of the early 30s, she lets us into a secret of her own. That is, when researching the book, she discovered the affadivit, filed in 1932 that set out Lord Beauchamp’s sexual dealings with male members of staff. Mutual masturbation, sodomy, the works, is how I translate Paula’s insinuations.
Now Paula knew that if she put the details of the affadavit in her book, she would upset the Lygon family. So she asked Alexander Waugh, her other great source of help with the book, what she should do. Alexander pointed out that she was a biographer and she had a scoop on her hands: it was obvious what she must do. Ha! - if one is going to write to one’s full potential and for a general audience, the feelings of individuals must go to the wall. Do they? That’s something I’ve been wrestling with overnight.
Eventually we get to Combe Florey. Alexander has made his own way there by car, and as we troop out of the bus he marks our card. The woman who now owns the house knows that we are coming and has given permission for the group to approach the front of the house. Alexander thinks it best (why?) if we split up into three groups. One group will go to the house first. A second will go to the graves of Evelyn and Laura Waugh. And the third will begin by exploring the gatehouse, which is an interesting old building that the Waugh family still owns.
Well, I don’t want to go to the graves first. That smacks of the bit in Scott King’s Modern Europe where the visiting academics, taken to Simona for the unveiling of a statue of the poet Bellorius, are bussed for an hour into the countryside in order to lay wreaths at the National Memorial. Unbeknown to them, the delegates are photographed paying homage at the point where some fifty leaders of the now dominant party in Neutralia were massacred. Excellent propaganda for Doctor Arturo Fe! Oh yes, he was a crafty host. And I don’t doubt Alexander Waugh’s eye for the main chance either. He wants a picture of five American professors of English Literature – who for all I know shed tears at the drop of a hat – plus David Lodge, placing a wreath on Evelyn’s grave. And he wants it badly.
No, I intend to be part of the first group that approaches the house, and I nudge Kate accordingly. As ten of us walk up the long drive, I fill Kate in. 
Combe Florey is the house that Evelyn Waugh grew old before his time in. Towards the end, Waugh’s diary suggests that he passed his mornings drinking gin, doing The Times crossword and complaining about changes in the liturgy being imposed by Rome.
“Really?”
“Well, he did write Unconditional Surrender here… And a volume of autobiography… Oh and the Ronald Knox book … And a much-derided travel book about Africa. But he was slowing down in the 1960s. Nothing except a few sad letters towards the end.”
“What about the diary?”
“He didn’t make any entries in the last year. The final entry was made following Easter 1965, lamenting the changes that were being made to the liturgy and praying to God that he would never apostatise.”
“Apostatize?”
“I think it means to stop being a Catholic.”
“Heaven forbid! When did he last go to Downside?”
“There is a diary entry for Easter 1956, when he was still living at Piers Court in Gloucestershire. He complains then about the new liturgy that had just been brought in. Indeed he goes through from Thursday, before Easter, to Easter Saturday, detailing the ceremonial procedure that year as compared to previous years.”
“God, how boring. Can you remember the details?”
“No. But I could read them.”
“Go on then. Just for a laugh.”
I wrestle the diaries from my bag. “’On Thursday, instead of the morning Mass, mandatum, tenebrae and night vigil at the altar of repose, there was an afternoon Mass with the mandatum interpolated after the gospel and the altar of repose emptied at midnight.’”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“If only James Morris was in our group to tell us what a mandatum is or was.”
“Still, Ginger’s already shown us all we need to know about the altar of repose.”
“True.”
I turn back to the book: “’On Friday, instead of the Mass of the Pre-sanctified, stations of the cross, and tenebrae, an afternoon adoration of the cross and general communion.’”
Kate laughs. “I hope they never mess about with the Waugh liturgy in the same way. Just think if the next conference was confined to afternoon walks in the park!”
I read again: “’On Saturday, nothing all day until the Easter vigil at 10.30 in the same form we had suffered the last two years.’”
Kate: “We leave on Friday lunchtime, so on Saturday there will be nothing for us either.”
And so we trudge on to the house, sharing Evelyn’s pain. 
In front of Combe Florey, someone points out the famous ‘No Admittance on Business’ sign, now overgrown. Then we become aware of a woman’s face at an upstairs window. She knocks loudly on the pane. ‘GO AWAY!’ she shouts, gesticulating wildly. “This is private property.”
One of our number mutters that we’re not here on business. Another shouts back politely that we believe we have permission to be here.
“You do not! It is unspeakably rude for a busload of tourists to wander about at will and peer into someone’s home. GO AWAY!”
I’m not sure that this is the right time to ask to see the downstairs toilet in which, I believe, Evelyn died from a heart attack when he was 62. I tell Kate that he’d just attended mass with his family on Easter Day in 1966.
“Not at Downside?”
“No. But in a village church close to Combe Florey where a mass was said in Latin. Apparently, Evelyn had come back from it in a very good mood.”
We’ve continued to walk across the front of the house, as directed earlier by Alexander. Thus we’ve walked in front of what was once Evelyn’s library, now transferred wholesale to the Harry Ransom Centre in Texas, and are now approaching a kissing gate that is shown in the photo that’s on the back of Martin Stannard’s biography of Waugh. In that picture, Evelyn is looking into the eyes of Laura. Today, the kissing gate is massively overgrown and I have to hold up a thorny branch so that another of our number can pass by without getting his hair snagged. Rather an aggressive environment this.
As we troop down towards the grave we pass another group coming up towards the house. I tell the James Morris the reception he can expect topside, and I have to fight the temptation to join that second group. God knows what kind of abuse the third group will get. That’s the group I’ll join later if I get the chance.
But first the graves. Evelyn and Laura have been buried side by side, the places marked by massive horizontal slabs of stone. The graves are in a plot adjoining the churchyard and slightly above it. Indeed when you walk around it looks as if the graves may, in time, slide into the graveyard. I don’t see how this would be such bad thing. Ronald Knox is buried in the grounds of an Anglican church, so I don’t suppose the Pope would mind too much if Evelyn ended up in one.
Though Laura died in 1973, seven years after her husband, she was six years younger than him at death. She died in her late fifties. One of their seven children, Margaret, is also buried here. She was run over by a car in 1986 while still in her prime. When I point this out to Kate she remarks that, date-wise, all three should have been in their prime when they died: 62, 57 and 42. I make a calculation and realise that their average age at death was exactly my own.
Moving on swiftly then. When Margaret was born in 1942, Evelyn wrote in his diary. ‘A good year. I have begotten a fine daughter, published a successful book, drunk 300 bottles of wine and smoked 300 or more Havana cigars.’ It seems appropriate that her grave is marked by a vertical stone, as if she’s still slightly more in the world than her parents. Not that much more in the world though, so it’s good to know that a grandchild of Evelyn and Laura, Alexander, is walking close by right now.
I wonder if Alexander has managed to quieten things down up at the house, perhaps with the benign presence of his grandmother to guide him. How does that final line in Scoop go again? ‘Maternal rodents pilot their furry brood through the stubble.’ No, the final line is: ‘Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry brood’. I guess you can’t have one without the other. What do paternal rodents do? Oh, I think I know the answer to that even without consulting The Wind in the Willows, one of Evelyn’s favourite books. Paternal rodents drink fine wine, smoke Havana cigars and put out more flags.
A little nonplussed with how things have gone at the house, Alexander shepherds us all back on board and the coach gets going again. We’re moving on to his own place. Apparently, a part of his mind had been thinking that Combe Florey might not be a complete success, so he’s seamlessly rolling out plan B.
A half-hour drive through narrow Somerset lanes (a novelty for the Americans on board) and we’re there. His farmhouse is impressive, much better maintained than poor old Combe Florey. Soon we’re all sitting in the lounge and Alexander is standing in front of us, holding forth about his grandfather who is represented by the cast of a sculpted bust behind him. 
Actually, Alexander is also standing in front of a sinister oil painting. Two leopards are snarling over the limp body of their prey. The cool cats put me in mind of John and Evelyn Heygate, with deer-Evelyn their poor victim. Just as I’m thinking this, Alexander puts a top hat on the white cast, thus drawing attention to the antlers on the head of the deer. 
Oh yes, the dead stag symbolises he-Evelyn all right. Apparently, elsewhere in the house there is an elephant’s foot that was a gift from Harold Acton, and paintings that Evelyn collected when he was in Abyssinia in the 30s. In short, Evelyn’s intense tropical experiences in the Amazon rainforest and in darkest Africa, are preserved in this gentle Somerset setting.
Alexander describes what of interest is in the kitchen, over and above the orange squash and biscuits that’s been laid out for us. He lists four things, but the one that sounds most interesting is the big wooden chair that Evelyn bought for John Betjeman, having been inspired by one of his poems. Apparently, Betjeman’s wife, Penelope, didn’t want to give the chair house-room, so Evelyn kept it for himself, installing a metal plaque in the seat which states that this was the chair that had inspired the poem in the first place. Some interesting reversals there.
On the other side of the lounge is the library, and from time to time Alexander disappears into it. 
One of his special possessions is a set of the four early novels which Evelyn had reprinted - at enormous personal expense - on large paper in a special edition of 12. These particular books had been a gift to Evelyn’s brother, Alec. And Alexander has bought them, no doubt at enormous personal expense again, from Alec’s son. There is no money in books. Not if you’re a bibliophile. Just heartache and ecstasy.
Our host goes away then comes back with a great sheet of paper that he unfolds to its full extent. Its genealogical work that Evelyn was immersed in in 1947-48, and is an example of his precise handwriting and meticulous organisation. Apparently, Evelyn took pleasure in demonstrating that his wife was descended from six dukes. Alexander tries to explain this away, but I can sense the hackles of the leopards rising. No one likes a snob.
Alexander is talking quickly, so as to give us our money’s worth before the coach has to make its return journey. We ought to be leaving at half past five in order to be back at the trough for 7. He concludes his talk with an invitation for us all to explore the library and the other downstairs rooms. He takes me aside and asks if I’d like to see his archive. Moi? I jump at the chance. Alexander indicates a door at the back of the music room. Opening it, I enter a smallish room whose walls are lined with books and files. Indeed there is a heavy-duty metal shelving unit across the middle of the room as well. But I’ve only got five minutes in this cave of treasures. What can I achieve in so little time? For a minute I just stand there, conscious that I’ve succeeded in penetrating right to the heart of something. The ongoing life and work of Evelyn Waugh… 
My eye rests on a row of folders that stretches all the way across a shelf, each one dated. On opening a folder at random, I see it contains carbon copies of letters. Someone would seem to have typed out all Evelyn’s incoming and outgoing correspondence at some stage. I open the 1923 file and amongst lots of letters to Dudley Carew there is a pink one from Alastair Graham. It’s a letter that was reproduced in Selina Hastings book. It has the lovely ‘let’s go to a bucolic place and drink like Horace’ invitation. It signs off ‘with love from Alastair and his dead heart’. I think that Alastair’s dead heart is at the epicentre of Evelyn’s ongoing life. Why? Partly because of the three photos that Alastair took of the Evelyns in 1928, which Alexander was prompted to look out after reading the manuscript of my book, and which will be reproduced in all their glory in the up and coming Beautiful hardback.
Alexander comes in. He asks me what on earth I’m doing - the coach will be leaving without me! Panic stations. I flit about Little Texas like a pigeon caught in a conservatory. Finally, Alexander cups me in his hands and carries me out of the archive. He lets me go too soon though, and I flutter into the library where I immediately peck at the signed, large paper edition of Decline and Fall. If he’s ever stuck for a birthday present to send me, this will do nicely. Finally, I’m shooed out of the front door. But as I approach the coach I do a very clever thing. I ask the coach driver if there’s a toilet on board. On getting the answer I want to hear, I rush back into the house, asking Alexander where the loo is. He tells me, and I get so confused that I actually end up there rather than in the library or the archive. On my way out, I enjoy a bonus. For I have to pass each of his three children, who have obviously been given the all-clear just a few seconds too early, and so each of them is obliged to smile at me as I blunder my way out for a second time. I think about asking the son how he feels about the prospect of becoming the fifth male generation of Waugh writer, but decide that would be pushing my luck.
The coach gets going with all aboard. As we’re late, Kate suggests to one of the organisers of the conference that he phones the college and tells them to put the meal back by half an hour. A deep voice from the rear of the coach suggests that there is no need for this. Kate, still standing, points out that the serving staff will have to hang about for a full half an hour, and that our food will have been hanging about, cooked, for half an hour as well. Pressed, the professor has to admit that he has not got the phone number of the college with him.
As Kate resumes her seat beside me, she goes through the list of deficiencies to date that confirm the odd notion she has that this is a conference that has been organised exclusively by men for men. I’m put in mind of the role that Irma Sveningen plays in Scott King’s Modern Europe. In particular this exchange:
“We box the rude mens?” suggested Miss Sveningen, moving cat-like towards the soldiers.
“No. Forgive them I beg you. They think it their duty.”
“Such little men should be polite,” said the giantess.
Back at Downside, we find that Ginger is eating supper alone. We sit down on the bench opposite him and tell him about the coach trip. Ginger’s sticking to water tonight, which we think is a wise choice. We’re joined by a couple who heard about the Evelyn Waugh conference via the Antony Powell society. She is Kate’s fellow knitter from the lecture room, and I mention that Auberon Waugh once described Powell’s writing as being like knitting. This disparaging pronouncement gets me into trouble. And the more I try and untangle my ball of woolly thinking, the bigger the shroud I knit for myself.
We discuss whether or not the Waugh conference has been properly promoted in Britain. There are about ten academics from America. Universities in Turkey, Japan, Australia, Russia, Spain and France are all represented, But two of the three UK academics to turn up bolted on day one. On the other hand, there are several UK enthusiasts and writers, so perhaps the balance of the conference is all right. Where would the conference be without the British eccentrics? David Lodge, honorary president of the Evelyn Waugh Society, has been with us today, dressed in Columbo’s raincoat, and silence is called so that he can say a few words, cogently outlining his own writing’s debt to that of Evelyn Waugh. I can only echo his sentiments.
An official meeting of the Evelyn Waugh Society then takes place in the dining room. This seems to include everyone other than Kate, Ginger and me, so we retire to the bar. Ginger really does stick to drinking water, while Kate and I get stuck into the second bottle of wine that he bought when at the height of his manic thirst the previous evening. Sitting there, in the corner of the room where we delivered a talk and Ginger heckled us, we put our relationship onto a proper, warm footing. Ginger tells us about his life in Burnley. We tell him about ours in Blairgowrie.
When the rest join us, it’s suggested by Ginger that James Morris reads some of his poems to the conference tomorrow. The schedule is packed full of highlights already, but there may be a slot between breakfast and the opening lecture at ten o’clock. Some confrères think that the addition to the schedule is a good idea. Others dismiss out of hand - on principle -anything the disgraced Ginger has to suggest. So we’ll just have to wait and see how the cookie crumbles.
DAY THREE
Over breakfast, Kate and Agnes, the professor’s mother, put the news out that James Morris will be reading his poems in the lecture room at 9.30am.
‘That ain’t scheduled. And it ain’t happening,’ says one confrère.
‘Oh, yes, it’s happening,’ says Kate. ‘You just have to decide whether you’ll be there or not.’
In the event, about a third of the conference turns up for the poetry reading. Jim has printed out a sheaf of poems and he begins to read them without preamble. The Brideshead poems are a strong set. But then he really gets going on A Handful of Dust, and I’m mesmerised. I manage to note the lyrics of a poem that struck me when I first read it in the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter:
THE LAST OF TONY
Trapped in the Amazonian rainforest,
Reading Little Dorrit,
To Mr Todd.
Trapped in the Amazonian rainforest,
With Arthur Clennam,
In the Circumlocution Office.
Trapped in the Circumlocution Office,
In Little Dorrit,
In the Amazonian rainforest.
Trapped with Mr Todd,
In the Amazonian rainforest,
In the Circumlocution Office.
Trapped with Arthur Clennam,
In the Circumlocution Office,
In the Amazonian rainforest.
Trapped
In the Circumlocution Office,
In the Amazonian rainforest.
Trapped
In the Circumlocution rainforest.
Trapped
In the Amazonian Circumlocution Office.
Trapped, trapped.
It’s me that’s trapped, trapped in this particular poem. So much so that instead of listening to any new poems, I work towards a version of my own. I’m conscious that Kate is glancing at my iPad as I write, and that this is influencing my muse:
THE LAST OF ME
Trapped at the Downside conference,
Reading Evelyn!
To Ginger.
Trapped at the Downside conference,
With Kate Clayton,
In the Isabella block.
Trapped in the Isabella block,
With Evelyn!,
At the Downside conference.
Trapped with Ginger,
At the Downside conference,
In the Isabella block.
Trapped with Kate Clayton,
In the Isabella block,
At the Downside conference.
Trapped
In the Ginger block,
At the Downside conference.
Trapped
At the Ginger conference.
Trapped
In the Downside Ginger.
Trapped, trapped.
I raise my head from my notebook and look to my right. There sits Ginger, a picture of innocence, listening intently to the poems. How come that in some subtle way he’s been able to take over this conference and make it his own?
By the time I’m listening to James Morris again, he’s announcing his last poem. Its theme is Catholicism; its subject is death. When he gets to the end of it he falters, overcome with emotion. I’m moved too and I sense that Kate is as well. It’s been a challenging three days for us all. Perhaps it’s a sense of accomplishment that moves Jim. Perhaps it’s the opposite. Head bowed, the poet gets up from his seat and walks out of the room without acknowledging our applause.
The first official paper of the morning is read by Robert Murray Davis, Professor Emeritus at Oklahoma University. I’m captivated. But Kate isn’t. Pausing from her knitting she whispers in my ear: “Fifty years of editing Brideshead and he still doesn’t get it.”
Five minutes later she leans towards me again and says: “I’ve not even read Brideshead and I get it.”
Next up is John Howard Wilson, Professor of English at Lock Haven University and Secretary of the Evelyn Waugh society. He concentrates on a single paragraph in A Little Learning, one that Evelyn Waugh wrote and rewrote about seven times. In most versions Evelyn states that his father came down from Oxford with a double third in Mods and Greats. It’s a great phrase, but eventually Evelyn uses it elsewhere in the manuscript. Apparently it took him 28 months to write the slim first volume of his autobiography. No wonder, if Laura Waugh was anything like that woman who’s living in Combe Florey now.
Ann Pasternak Slater gives the last paper. She talks about Work Suspended and it’s soon clear that, while the Scott King prize for the dimmest contribution could have been shared between a couple of speakers on day one, only she is worthy of the Brideshead medal for brilliance. She establishes that Evelyn Waugh is talking about his real father, a man of letters in the old fashioned sense, through the character of John Plant, senior, a painter in the Victorian style. But Waugh does so via his own genuine regard for realistic, narrative paintings. Evelyn Waugh, John Plant senior, Charles Spencelagh: another love triangle.
During questions to Ann, Kate is not impressed by one questioner. She indicates to me that if he persists with his line of quibbling then he is liable to get a jab in the ribs from one of her knitting needles - the sharp one. Yes, she’s the sharp one all right. She and Ann are the sharp ones.
If I was as sharp as those two, I should be able to come up with an overview at this stage. OK, here goes. Most of the academic research in Waugh is being done in America. A book of essays, A Handful of Mischief, retailing at an off-putting £45, came out just this year, and someone sent me a PDF copy of it. The book contains the best papers from the 2003 conference, has 13 contributors, eight of whom were from American or Canadian Universities, while only one was effectively British. A book of strong essays arising from the present conference would have a similar geographical bias.
This is because most of Evelyn Waugh’s manuscripts and his library are at the Harry Ransom Centre in Austin, Texas. The presence of this archival material in America since shortly after Evelyn’s death, has created a schism in Waugh studies, because the sites of Evelyn Waugh’s life are in the UK, most of his readers are here, and the spirit in which he lived his life burns on in these islands. Paula Byrne’s book on Madresfield; James Morris’s poems; Alexander Waugh’s current editing of Evelyn’s diaries and letters; and my Evelyn! all attest to this in different ways. To be fair, I think the American professors understand this. But if they fully understood it, then more of them would have turned up for Jim’s poems.
Lunchtime. No not quite yet. As an extra, Alexander Waugh has brought along a recording that Evelyn made for the BBC. His own readings from Vile Bodies and Helena. Last night, a cassette tape was made from the vinyl record and so all that needs to be done is for a distinguished American professor to press play.
To begin with, Adam is talking to Nina on the phone. Difficult to pull off with a single voice, even if it is the author’s. But then the recording comes into its own as Adam goes to visit his prospective father-in-law, Colonel Blount, with the intention of borrowing money from him. Adam’s reception is farcical, like ours was yesterday at Combe Florey. Eventually, he emerges triumphant with a cheque for £1000. To celebrate Nina and Adam sleep together. And I note that the elderly Waugh does not excise the lines that he added to his original manuscript in restrained fury following the elopement of she-Evelyn with John Heygate. No, wise old Evelyn retains Nina’s lines about not having enjoyed her first time of sleeping with Adam, in fact never having hated anything so much in her life.
Alexander wonders if we have time to play Helena before lunch. No, there is no room for Helena, not as far as Alain Blayac or I am concerned. And, as one, the Evelyn Waugh conference votes with its collective stomach.
At our final lunch, Kate and I talk to John McGinty and his partner. Kate gets him to promise to fill the Notre Dame Library in Baltimore with copies of Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love just in case the next Waugh Conference is held there in preference to Los Angeles. Actually, whether its Baltimore or LA that hosts the next Evelyniad, the organisers should already be thinking how they can persuade a few creative Brits to fly across the pond and to put on a show. Dare I say that international academia needs a bit of gingering up. Of course it does! Getting tired now, I realise. It’s time to leave.
But before going, I catch Alexander and hand him a couple of the board-backed prints that we used in our talk. One shows the temple at the bottom of the garden at Barford. I hope he’ll find a place for it, maybe even in his Evelyn Waugh archive. He asks who the ginger-haired man is standing by the temple looking self-conscious. Oh, that’s John, my friend from university. John’s embarrassed because he’s standing beside Alan Roberts, who owns Barford House these days. I cut Alan out of the photo so that I wouldn’t have the complication of asking his permission to use it. John was well aware that I was taking a photo and that it could end up being reproduced all over the place… I’m wittering now.
We’re going, we’re going. We say goodbye to Ginger and Jim, to Agnes and Janet, to both Patricks, to Chip, to Jeff, to Tony, to John, to Donat and Mary. By now, Carlos and Marcel and others have already gone. While Amy and Martin never really got here. Goodbye and good luck to each and every confrère.
Kate drives towards Dorset. We’re headed for the Barley Mow where Evelyn wrote much of Decline and Fall while living within two miles of she-Evelyn’s lodgings. It’s where all Waugh conferences should start and finish.
As we glide along, Kate asks me how Scott King’s Modern Europe concludes. So I tell her. Scott King is left stranded once the Bellorius conference ends. He stays in a hotel for a few days, getting short of money. What money he still has, he hands over to a black marketeer. Then, disguised as an Ursuline nun, he gets driven to the coast with a bunch of other displaced people in an uncomfortable old saloon car…’
‘I imagine that’s how the Turkish academic will be getting back to Ankara.’
‘…At Santa Maria, Scott King spends six days in a crowded warehouse. Then he travels in the hold of a boat to no. 64 Jewish Illicit Immigrants’ Camp, Palestine. There he meets one of his former pupils who is at last able to halt Scott King’s spiral towards disaster. The schoolmaster ends up back at Granchester teaching classics to a record low number of boys.’
‘I imagine that’s how Michael will be getting back to Sherborne. But tell me, what do you think is the moral of Scott King’s experience?’
‘The world is getting less civilised by the day.’
‘And the moral of our experience?’
‘Some of us still care – deeply - about civilisation. And about the individuals who contribute to it.’
We stop off for a cream tea in Chagford, Devon, a stone’s throw from where Evelyn wrote the second half of A Handful of Dust and all of Brideshead Revisited. Delicious homemade strawberry jam rolls around our mouths. The conversation, such as it is, goes like this:
Kate: ‘I didn’t pay for a single drink all conference long.’
Me: ‘Nor did I.’
Kate: ‘Ginger did.’
Me: ‘Exactly.’
I suspect there’s a dialogue that takes place in the gents’ toilet of the Ritz in Basil Seal Rides Again that goes something like that. But maybe not. And right at this moment I’m not in the mood for checking it out.
‘I’m all Evelyned out,’ I say.
‘You’re all Eevelyned out, pigeon,’ says Kate, reminding me of the correct pronunciation, which we’ve only just picked up from Alexander Waugh in these last few days.
‘Yeah, right.’
2024 Postscript:
Why am I only now uploading this essay, which I put a lot of effort into at the time of writing? I suppose because, very sadly, Alexander Waugh has recently died. Back in 2011 he loved the first half of the piece but reading about how we were received at Combe Florey in its second half got him down, so I chose not to upload any of it when I created this website in 2012.
Now Alexander is no longer in a position to curse the then owner of Combe Florey for being so unfriendly towards his guests, esteemed members of the Evelyn Waugh Society, so the foregoing essay can see the light of day.
Besides, I've come to realise that the 2011 Conference was an important staging point in my interest in Evelyn Waugh. The initial investigation - resulting in the first draft of Evelyn! - had happened as early as 2006 cum 2007. It was then that Kate and I first visited Combe Florey. By a remarkable chance (I had no inside track at the time), on the only evening we were in the vicinity, Alexander - accompanied by his tennis coach, with whom he'd been training - came into the local pub still wearing white shorts. We spent the evening together as a foursome, primarily because Alexander warmed towards Kate. I was so excited by the chance meeting and a few of the remarks that Alexander made about his grandfather that I had a vivid dream that night involving Evelyn's grandson. In the dream I discovered… What did I discover?… No, it's gone. It's one of the insurmountable facts of life that all the insight we learn from dreams entirely dissipates on waking.
So my interest in Evelyn Waugh, which began in 1974 when I was 17, loving Decline and Fall, reached further peaks in 2006-7, in the researching and writing of a manuscript, and 2011, when my book was due to be published by Beautiful Books.
The Conference was in August 2011 and the publication date of the book was due to be September 25 of that year. Fancy me not knowing at that late stage that the publisher was in the process of going bust, and that the book would never appear under its imprint. That's why there was never any reply to my questions about the final cover art! Kept out of the loop or what? I suspect Alexander knew how things stood, which is why he'd said he feared for my book when we'd met in the playground at Downside School after breakfast that day in August.
After a bit of regrouping on my part, I came to an agreement with a smaller publisher, so that by 2015 the book was rescheduled to appear. This time Alexander asked me not to quote from the enthusiastic email he'd written on first reading the manuscript so many years before, and instead kindly provided a considered quote which appeared on the back of the book as follows:
Alexander stuck to his promise that I could use certain photos from his Evelyn Waugh archive that had never been published before. Including three shown in this next image:
I want to publicly express my gratitude to Alexander Waugh for helping my book see the light of day. I don't think I've mentioned previously that he tried - unsuccessfully - to get both his own agent and the agent of the Evelyn Waugh estate to take on Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love. And on many occasions he had something original and fascinating to say, over the years, about the content and style of this website.
I always thought I would be in conversation with him again, either about the volumes of Evelyn's 'Personal Writings', which he edited and which are due to be published by Oxford University Press as part of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Or about the identity of Shakespeare being the Earl of Oxford rather than William of Stratford, a theory I was coming round to agreeing with, somewhat to my astonishment.
Not the Earl of Oxford that appears in the above story, I hasten to add. The Earl of Oxford that was alive four hundred years ago.
Ah, time, that cruel separator of parents from children, readers from writers, and the individual from everyone else.
