Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. Paula Byrne

      They talk for a little while.

      ‘RICHARD, CAN YOU DINE WITH ME TO-NIGHT. YOU MUST. I’M HAVING A FAREWELL BLIND.’ Richard looks sadly at his Collections Paper and shakes his head.

      ‘My dear, I simply can’t. I’ve got to get this finished by tonight. I’m probably going to be sent down as it is.’

      Adam returns to his taxi.

      In this poignant little scene, Hugh Lygon enters the fictional world of Evelyn Waugh. His mother is a dominating spirit, as, by way of that nineteenth-century engraving, is Madresfield. Hugh’s passions are captured: drinking, gaming, riding. As is his academic weakness: the childish handwriting, the inability to spell ‘martial’. But hanging over the pen portrait are the qualities that Evelyn so loved. On the one hand, the capacity for friendship – the photographs of fellow Old Etonians, the invitations revealing that everyone wants his company. And on the other, the sense of sadness and hopelessness. In the flesh, Lord Basingstoke is Hugh Lygon. In the imagination, he is Sebastian Flyte in embryo.

      As Waugh developed as a writer, he perfected a technique of combining the characteristics of his friends, enemies and acquaintances in order to create composite characters. His later portraits of Hugh are not of Hugh alone. In that sense, the glimpse of Lord Basingstoke in his Oxford rooms, so clearly evocative of Hugh and no one else, is the closest we ever come to the most elusive of Evelyn’s lovers.

      Another aspect of Waugh’s creative sophistication was his way of splitting his own identity into more than one character. The full extent of this practice has not always been noticed by his critics and biographers. They have seen that Adam Doure is a self-portrait, but a second double has escaped observation. Adam goes around Oxford trying to find an old friend to dine with. Everyone is engaged. But then as a last resort he calls on a certain Ernest Vaughan. This E. V. has ugly rooms in a second-rate college. They are situated (symbolically) between ‘the lavatories and the chapel’. Caricatures and messy drawings line his walls. Among them is an ‘able drawing of the benign Basingstoke’. Ernest is carefully described, sitting in his wicker chair as he mends darts ‘with unexpected dexterity’. He is ‘a short, sturdy man, with fierce little eyes and a well-formed forehead’. His well-made tweeds are stained with drink and paint. The two men proceed to get drunk over dinner. Ernest sketches Adam. Later, after more drinking in another Oxford pub, Ernest ‘beset by two panders, is loudly maintaining the abnormality of his tastes’. Then with ‘swollen neck and staring eye’, Ernest almost gets into a fight with Imogen Quest’s brother. He is violently sick at the last minute, foreshadowing Adam’s reprieve when he vomits up the poison.

      The story ends with a conversation between the Quests and some aristocratic Oxford friends who pass judgement on the hapless Vaughan: ‘Just the most awful person in the world … Isn’t he short and dirty with masses of hair.’

      Imogen, bored and repelled by Adam, is intrigued by a glimpse she has had of the awful Ernest: ‘I think he looked very charming. I want to meet him properly.’

      ‘Imogen, you can’t, really. He is too awful.’

      The story ends with Imogen determined to persuade Adam to orchestrate a meeting with his funny little friend. Ernest Vaughan is on his way to becoming an unlikely romantic hero.

Adam Doure is Evelyn Waugh, but so is Ernest Vaughan. On returning to Oxford, Adam meets his own other self, a doppelganger who is also drawn to Basingstoke/Hugh, and who becomes a device for Waugh to fantasise about succeeding in his doomed quest for the love of Imogen/Olivia. Many things are in the balance in this most accomplished of Waugh’s early stories: not only the choice between life and death, but also the question of sexual orientation and the writer’s need to hold together his personal experience and his gift for fantastical invention.^*

      September 1925 and the new term at Aston Clinton beckoned. It was time once again for Evelyn to say goodbye to Alastair. He felt more ready on this occasion. Alastair and his friend Christopher Hollis were beginning to bore him with their endlessly rehashed conversations about just two subjects, ‘Catholicism’ and ‘the Colonies’.

      Aston Clinton did not meet expectation. Its common room (always the key to a teacher’s happiness) was ‘frightful’. The boys were ‘mad’ and ‘diseased’ (i.e. spotty). It was no more than a crammer for the rich and thick. There was a pub close by, which was something. ‘Taught the poor mad boys and played football with them’ is a typical diary entry. Or ‘Taught lunatics. Played rugby football. Drank at Bell.’ Evelyn was trapped here for the next seventeen months. The one compensation was that he was closer to his friends.

      Most weekends were spent at Oxford or London. In October, Evelyn and Richard Plunket Greene returned to Oxford, where they dined with Hugh Lygon and John Sutro: ‘they gave us champagne and we gave them brandy’.

      He was disappointed when he hosted an early birthday dinner and not one of his Oxford friends turned up. The day before his birthday, he began a drawing intended as a present for Hugh on his twenty-first, which was to be a week later. Richard, meanwhile, had got a new job at Evelyn’s old school, Lancing. The prospect of Aston Clinton without a real friend in the common room was grim.

      He was not invited to Hugh’s twenty-first birthday party at Madresfield. But around the same time, Evelyn and Richard had a party of their own. Three carloads of Oxford friends came down to play a rugby match against the schoolboys. It was a great success. The grown-ups won, though not by such a large margin as Evelyn had feared that they would. He even scored a few tries himself, which would have been an unusual sight. In the course of the drunken evening that followed, Arthur Tandy, a Magdalen man of a thespian bent who hung around on the fringes of their Oxford set, ‘made love’ to Evelyn – that is to say, professed his love for him. He spoke in no uncertain terms: ‘Everything that I said about him cut him to the very soul; throughout the giddy whirligig of his life – and he had been up against things, in his time, face to face with the scalding realities of existence – the one constant thing that had remained inviolate in spite of all else had been his love of me.’ This all took time to say and, according to Evelyn, it bored him inexpressibly. Tandy eventually became British ambassador to the European Economic Community.

      Two days later, at the beginning of half term, Evelyn headed for Oxford. He had promised to act in Terence Greenidge’s latest film. They were filming in the Woodstock Road but Evelyn was cross about the other actors, who were people he couldn’t stand: ‘After an hour I could bear it no more and when we came to a scene in which a taxi was to be used I got in it and drove away, rather to everyone’s annoyance.’ That evening he went with friends to the George Bar. A scandal ensued from the night’s activities, though Evelyn managed to escape all the trouble.

      A party was in full swing. But not solely with the usual Oxford set. A gang of wealthy homosexual stockbrokers and businessmen had come to Oxford to see Hugh Lygon. There was a rumour that one of them owned 107 newspapers and wore platinum braces. When they arrived, they discovered that Hugh was not there. He was still at Madresfield, celebrating his coming of age. His failure to turn up for the party to which he had invited the stockbrokers was characteristic: Hugh was notorious for bad time-keeping, always arriving late, or sometimes not appearing at all, despite assurances given when arrangements were made. So great was his laxness in this regard that a considerable number of his friends and family had the same idea for a twenty-first birthday present: he was overwhelmed with numerous gifts of clocks and watches of all sizes and designs.

      Robert Byron, one of the most active homosexuals among the Hypocrites, opportunistically took Hugh’s place and enjoyed a wild night with the Londoners. Writing to Patrick Balfour with a graphic account of their activities, he cautioned him not to leave the letter lying about. There was, according to Anthony Powell, a fear that the police might become involved. Though homosexuality was tolerated when indulged in privately by undergraduates, group encounters between gentlemen and stockbrokers were a step too far in an era that had not forgotten the trials of Oscar Wilde.

      Evelyn was in at the start of the evening, but not its climax. The ‘syndicate