THE LAST LOVED ONE
Evelyn Waugh spent his last few years carefully tidying up the loose ends of his writing career. After the tangents Ronald Knox and A Tourist in Africa, written out of duty and for money, respectively, Waugh doubled down and did his best to ensure he would leave a strong literary legacy.
His last four projects were as follows. One, the writing of Unconditional Surrender, the last book in a trilogy about the Second World War. Two, the short story 'Basil Seal Rides Again', which dealt with many characters introduced in the early novels. Importantly, it was published in a deluxe edition. At last a book that he could sign with relish and which would please any connoisseur of fine publishing. Three, an autobiography, which told the story of Evelyn Waugh from his ancestry, though childhood, Oxford and into his schoolteaching in Wales days. Which was as far as any autobiography needed to go, the novels and travel books taking over after that. And, four, the editing of the trilogy of war novels into a single volume Sword of Honour. If he had written one of the most consequential book of the 20th Century, best to show it in its most coherent state.
I've written the above as a justification for what I'm about to do: spend a lot of time and effort discussing where 'Basil Seal Rides Again' came from in terms of Evelyn Waugh's biography, and what dictated its final form as a deluxe book.
ONE
Evelyn's favourite child, Margaret, or Meg, shocked Evelyn in mid-1962 when she told him that she had fallen in love with and wanted to marry Giles Fitzherbert. Waugh had not long returned from Guiana where he had gone on a visit with Meg, revisiting some South American cities on the fringe of his Amazonian jungle travels of 1932/33, out of which had come Ninety-Two Days and A Handful of Dust. 
Back at Combe Florey in early 1962, Waugh had fussed about with the articles he had been commissioned to write about Guiana. The Mail had said they'd wanted these, but a change in editor at the paper was causing difficulties. Letters of enquiry passed in a desultory way to and from Evelyn and his agent, Peters. When Evelyn was told about Meg's engagement, he was jolted into literary action.
Let me say something about the first part of the story. At a literal function in Piccadilly, Basil Seal (first introduced in Black Mischief) is talking with Peter Pastmaster (Margot's son from Decline and Fall). Their talk disturbs the audience for the tribute to Ambrose Silk (joke literary editor from Put Out More Flags) and so they take their conversation to the gents toilet. There, Basil expresses his dislike of appearing florid, while Peter tells Basil of the circumstances in which a young man named Albright has stolen all his dress shirts. At the end of the evening, Basil walks to the Mayfair (Hill Street) home he shares with Angela Lyne (Black Mischief, Put Out More Flags), who had long been his mistress, and his daughter Barbara, or Babs. He finds Babs drinking a bottle of his finest champagne with the young man named Albright.
At the beginning of part two, we are told that Basil is 58 years and ten months old. Applying this to Evelyn Waugh, that places us in August, 1962. On August 7, 1962, his daughter Meg had written to properly thank him for not minding about her engagement. 'You are the best father in the history of the world - really, no flattery or sucking up, I think that. And there need be no divorce between us - I will come home just as often for weekends - Giles won't mind.' The wedding was set for October, 1962, and that went ahead as planned. With Evelyn looking terrible, especially when posing with the bride that he was giving away.
Waugh's negative response to losing Meg was entirely literary. He wrote to Diana Cooper on August 16 telling his old friend about Meg's engagement. 'She has fallen head over heels for an Irishman, 27 years old, short, rather an oriental face, a stockbroker's clerk of ten days experience, but a gentleman and a Catholic. I have not the heart to keep them apart. They will soon be spliced… Meg is bird happy about the affair. Let her enjoy it quick before the Light of Common Day.'
Diana responded sympathetically, prompting Evelyn to reveal the depths of his hurt. This letter is dated August 28, 1962: 'Darling Stitch Pug Baby, Your letter is full of understanding. It is, to me, a bitter pill and ungilded. I would forbid the marriage if I had any other cause than jealousy and snobbery. As it is, I pretend to be compliasant. Little Meg is ripe for the kind of love I can't give her. So I am surrendering with the honours of war - without war indeed.'
Then Evelyn goes on to tell Diana in the same letter: 'Do you remember books I wrote about a character called Basil Seal - a mixture of Basil Murray and Peter Rodd. I suddenly yesterday began a story about Basil Seal at 60. Jolly good so far…'
So let's tuck that date away: August 27, 1962. The date that Evelyn Waugh started to write 'Basil Seal Rides Again'.
Waugh goes on: 'You see I feel with Meg I have exhausted my capacity for finding objects of love. How does one exist without them? I haven't got the Gaiety euphoria that makes old men chase tarts. My ghastly brother calls them 'pipe lines' through which he is refuelled with youth. Not for me.'
Instead, Waugh wrote stories about his loved ones. So let's get back to 'Basil Seal Rides Again' which Evelyn reckons had started well. In section 2, Basil and Angela book in to a sanatorium, so that Basil can attempt to lose weight and lose his florid complexion. He is phoned by Barbara Sothill (Basil's sister, also present in the earlier novels) who tells him that his daughter is in love. He hears also from Babs herself, who wants to come back to London. But this part two is mainly about Basil's starvation diet and a scene whereby he breaks the rules and has a drink of whisky. This brings on an 'out of body' experience, during which he sings: 'He rolls through the air with the greatest of ease. The darling young man on the flying trapeze.'
Now I had assumed this was Evelyn taking the opportunity of putting into his story some recent experience. But there is no mention of any such event in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. It is not until October 1963 (a year later) that Waugh found himself in Forest Mere, from where he wrote to Meg: 'I am not noticeably thinner for my sufferings at Forest Mere but am very much healthier and much rejuvenated.'
He says more in a letter to Nancy Mitford of October 4, 1963. 'Your letter reached me at Forest Mere Hydro - Boot's beauty parlour - where I am spending a fortnight. Health, not vanity. I had grown too ponderous to move. Also I found in the last year that I could no longer get tight (a condition I enjoy) however much I drank. After 4 days total fast I have lost 10 lbs and been promoted to carrot juice (disgusting). I hope when I leave to get tipsy on a glass of wine. I have not yet experienced the euphoria which all the habitués claim to enjoy on the fourth day.'
All that suggests to me that this was Evelyn on a cure for the first time. But it's strange that so much of what transpires in part two of 'Basil Seal Rides Again' seems to anticipate Evelyn's own personal experience. Perhaps listening to the experience of Cyril Connolly (Boots) at the hydro had given Waugh enough to write about. (Or indeed the experience of Ann Fleming who had been there with her husband Ian Fleming.) If so that's unusual for Evelyn Waugh. Though he did write in the first person about a father's death in Work Suspended, a couple of years before his own father died.
Let me quote from letter written to Ann Fleming a few days after the one to Nancy. 'I have lost 13 lbs and all my good spirits. I think this place is only for people like yourselves who lead full social lives. It is the enforced tranquility that does you good. As I live like a hermit at home there is no change except for the awful ugliness. Today I am being promoted to stewed prunes. I hope you give Cyril a fine birthday present. A jampotful of caviare would suit him nicely.'
Back to the story. In part three, Basil returns to his home in Hill Street where he comes upon Babs. She explains that she is very much in love with Charles Albright. Babs has to go out, but Basil stays so that he can meet Charles in person. There first conversation is a battle of wits that the young man appears to win hands down. The bearded beatnik makes it clear that he will be sponging off his parents-in-law and that, because Babs is properly in love with him, there is nothing Basil can do about it. The young blade even manages to cadge a fiver off poor old Basil, the pushover. But as Charles leaves the flat, Basil thinks to himself: 'I hope he spends it all on luncheon. That bank-note is all he will ever get. He deserved better.'
Straight on to part four. Basil visits Sonia Trumpington (a character from Put Out More Flags) She keeps photo albums, and in one of those Basil sees a photo of himself chucking a young woman into a lake. It was in 1937, and, as it happens, the girl in question was Charles Albright's mother. Basil knows he is on to something. They look up a copy of The Peerage and learn that the girl that Basil threw into the lake in 1937 married Clarence Albright in 1940, who was killed in action in 1943. They had one male child. With a plan fully formed in his mind, Basil invites Babs to accompany him to the Serpentine (a lake in Hyde Park). Basil says lots of nice things about Charles, and then drops the bombshell. Not only had he thrown Charles's mother in the lake in 1937, he'd had a fling with her in 1940. Luckily for Basil, this Clarence had married her. Only now did Basil realise that his own liaison with the girl had produced a child. Basil concludes his talk by suggesting Mags couldn't marry Charles Albright because he was her brother. Babs says nothing, but immediately flees the scene. Back at home, Basil speaks to Angela and alludes to a break-up between their daughter and her boyfriend. "I don't imagine Babs will want much dinner tonight. She's best left alone at the moment. I feel I could manage a square meal. We might have it downstairs."
But we must remember that this was all just wishful thinking. Below is another photo taken from someone's album. Evelyn talking to his daughter and her new husband on the day of Meg's wedding, October 1962. The fourth person in the picture is Maisie Lygon, one of the girls from Madresfield that Evelyn had frolicked with when in his prime. Now all grown up to be a sadly married alcoholic. 
Is Evelyn saying to his daughter's husband. "That daughter is all you will ever get. You deserved better."
He may have been, as a joke. But I think Evelyn was more concerned with what he himself got out of the transaction that had just taken place, which is to say the giving away of his last loved one. And the answer is that he got a sumptuous book that I will now try and do justice to from another angle.
TWO
Evelyn's agent managed to get a lot of money for 'Basil Seal Rides Again'. The Telegraph and the Times were in a bidding war to serialise it, which the Telegraph won and so published the first half of the story on February 10:
And it was published in the March edition of Esquire in the United States.
But Evelyn was keen on seeing his story in something more permanent than newsprint, something more prestigious than a magazine for men. He asked John MacDougall if Chapman and Hall would make a deluxe edition in partnership with Little Brown in America. I have access to all Evelyn Waugh's letters from 1963, so I should be able to flesh out the story.
In April, he congratulated Gillon Aitken on the design that Kathleen Hale had come up with for a frontispiece. This is how it looked by the time the book was printed:
Kathleen Hale, 1963.
But at this early stage, Evelyn suggested a few improvements which show how seriously he took the visual side of his work.
He thought that young Basil (in the top half of the design) looked too plebeian and modern. He wanted the daughter (in the bottom half) to be more seductive. He also wanted the gondola to be black 'but could not the night sky be dark blue and the Salute and canal blue-grey.' He went on to suggest that the blue of the night-sky be used on the title page instead of red. 'If you could afford a further colour, old Basil's face, horses nostrils and striped posts could carry red.'
All this was made so. Good point about the face of elderly Basil needing to be florid. Later in the year, Evelyn would be having his photo taken by Mark Gerson but only after going to a sanatorium just before. Objective: full facial detox.
In June, Waugh wrote again to Aitken, this time about proofreading. He had made a few changes to the text but admitted to being a wretched proofreader and asks that two sharp-eyed and literate proofreaders go through it with the utmost care. 'We can't have any misprints in an edition of this kind.' Perhaps he was remembering his first published story, PRB, published by Alasdair Graham, that had been riddled with errors that neither Alasdair nor Evelyn had noticed.
Waugh also suggested that he travel to the offices of Chapman and Hall to sign the bound copies. This would be an arduous task as there were to be 750 copies printed for the UK market and 1000 copies for the United States. But as he was getting 50 copies for himself, he didn't mind too much.
On August 27, Waugh wrote from Combe Florey this intriguing message to Gillon Aitken: 'Please come on Sunday afternoon and study your task. You might be able to get the sheets into the case without grave damage. You will find the case immovable. Perhaps a dozen paper parcels might be made and disposed in your motor car.'
This was just one month before Evelyn spent his fortnight at Forest Mere, so perhaps he had become immobile and had abandoned hisnplan of travelling up to London for that day.
A letter to his oldest child, Teresa, dated the next day, contains the line: 'I have just had to sign and number a great pile of sheets for the edition de luxe of a story, which I will send you when it is bound. It was a tedious task.'
I'm not sure how much pleasure Teresa would have got from reading a story based on Waugh's far deeper love for another daughter, but I certainly got plenty pleasure when one of the sheets that were tediously signed eventually (nearly sixty years later) made its way into my possession.
On the last day of August, 1963, Waugh wrote to Jack MacDougall that 'Young Aitken showed dexterity and the spirit of enterprise in packing and despatching the preliminary sheets of B.S. Rides Again.' He followed up this compliment with a criticism: 'Spotty showed less than normal skill in neglecting to provide a half title. Aitken says he can remedy this.'
My own copy, number 296, has no half title. So perhaps Aitken didn't manage to remedy the problem. I believe I only paid about £100 for my copy of this luxury item. Possibly the price was this low because it had been on the shelves of a public library for eight years, during which time a label stuck onto the end pages reveals exactly how many times the book was borrowed.
I must congratulate some employee of the County Council of the West Riding of Yorkshire, because that individual found time to type the following label that was stuck onto the inside of the heavy front cover.
The book weighs a ton because the boards are so heavy. Boards covered in buckram. Originally, the book came with a transparent glassine dustcover, but there is no way such a sheet of plastic would be furthering the look of a book decades after its publication. On Abebooks, there are five of Waugh's 50 out-of-series presentation copies for sale, for between £900 and £3000. There are also copies not dissimilar to the one I'm presently illustrating, on sale for £200, £200 and £138. Perhaps they present the best opportunity to own a book of Evelyn Waugh's that has been signed by him.
Shall we turn a few pages of this wonderful publication, so befitting the final phase of the author's career? 
Note the delicate use of blue on the title page, as requested by Evelyn back in April of 1963.
The above is more or less the intro that the story gets in both the Telegraph and Esquire.
I like the way Waugh's story begins with the word 'Yes." Just as I like that Joyce's Ulysses ends with a whole bunch of the 'Yes' word.
Perhaps I should add that before I invested in a signed copy of 'Basil Seal Rides Again', I had made my own personalised copy by removing - from a Penguin collection of Waugh's short stories - the spine and all the pages that weren't 'Basil Seal Rides Again'; and then re-using the front and back covers, slightly amended, finally making use of a stapler to create a Penguin that consisted solely of the pages of 'Basil Seal Rides Again'. Actually, before stapling I added three letters between Diana Cooper and Evelyn as a prologue, and three letters between Evelyn and Nancy Mitford as an epilogue. I suppose this image sums it up.
Mark Gerson, Evelyn Waugh, 1963. Photo available from Bridgeman Images.
But this is what my copy looked like. Front cover:
Back cover:
The first of the letters in the epilogue was Nancy Mitford's detailed response to the deluxe edition. 'Thank you very much for the lovely book. I read it again, and again of course I couldn't stop until the end. But it gives rise to certain reflections. I'm afraid that, in literature at any rate, middle aged people become dull. I loved the two young ones, the little I saw of them. Now Evelyn, seriously, do you think being brother and sister would really have stopped them marrying? I call this rather naif. I don't believe young people today would give a fig and NOR WOULD BASIL SEAL - but the trouble is Prod [Peter Rodd, Nancy's husband] has turned into you and this falsifies everything. I do agree that naughty people are often reformed when they become rich but I don't believe however rich Seal was that he would become that sort of good citizen, or broken his daughter's heart over such a silly quibble. Or was he meant to be jealous? If so we are in deep water, indeed. Perhaps it's all too short - I don't know, but I'm not convinced. Were you, really?'
Evelyn didn't like this at all. 'Your odious letter was on my breakfast table on the morning of my 60th birthday.' That was the day Mark Gerson came round to take photos of the post-Forest Mere birthday boy. 'All you say, I refute. Old people are more interesting than young.' Evelyn goes on to say that after the age of 50, people revert to the habits and mannerisms of their parents. 'Seal had highly conventional parents. His change and recovery of his youth are the theme of the story'. Waugh states that the taboo against incest is deeply rooted. And that the Mitfords were peculiarly tolerant of it. Waugh ends: 'Of course Basil was fiercely jealous. That should be apparent. The only fault I admit to was the misspelling of Clicquot.'
How did Diana Cooper and Ann Fleming, who the story was dedicated to, respond? Strangely there is no record of either mentioning the story in any letter collected in The Letters of Ann Fleming or in Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper.
OUTRO
The last essay, 'Sword of Hospitality', dealt with a few days in June, 1963. The present chapter has taken us from early 1962 to October 1963. Now it's time to slow down again and deal with one special day in October of 1963. Our hero's birthday. Evelyn Waugh Rides Again!
June 6, 2025
