My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (23 page)

It was a very happy few days that we spent together. We travelled south by daylight; between Dijon and Beaune we rose and bowed reverently to the sacred vineyards, Chambertin, Clos de Vougeot, Corton. We changed trains at Tarascon, and with an hour to wait, drank Tavel, I for the first time, with our sandwiches. In Nîmes we watched in the arena, the film of Conan Doyle's
The Lost World
. Evelyn found it ‘appropriately inappropriate'. The photograph of Evelyn and his father sitting at a café table, which illustrated his article ‘My Father and I' that appeared in the
Sunday Telegraph
in November 1962, was taken then. As my ship sailed at 11.30 in the morning, Evelyn and I spent my last night in Marseilles. Our evening in the
Vieux Port
provided him with material for
Decline and Fall
. Later he went on with his parents to Les Baux, with which he was delighted. Both my parents agreed that their five
days there were among the very happiest that they had spent with him.

It was to a very different atmosphere that I returned early in November. I was myself involved in a love affair with an American married woman, which I have described in my
Early Years
. I knew inside myself that it could have no future; but I had to act as though it had. I had to make quickly enough money to be able to finance the start of a joint life if she elected to elope with me. I did not want to spend money on a flat in London, so I decided to go down into the country, to a small inn, during the week and work upon a novel, spending the week-ends at Underhill. I was no doubt in an edgy mood.

My father had lost during the autumn a dearly loved sister: he was becoming increasingly worried about the future of Chapman & Hall. Evelyn, also, was living at Underhill with his fortunes at their lowest. During the autumn, he had been knocking on innumerable doors. At one point, he had been interviewed by the headmaster of an excellent preparatory school. He had liked the headmaster; the headmaster had said, ‘You seem to be exactly the man I'm looking for.' Evelyn had returned home jubilant. ‘Mr Toad on top,' he told his mother. But the headmaster knew Cruttwell, and that was that.

He had letters of introduction to a few London editors. They all said the same thing. ‘The market's crowded; not a glimmer of an opening, old boy; fix up something with the provincial press, then worm your way in from there.' I have not known a single prospective journalist who has not been given that advice. I have not known one who has taken it. Either they have ‘crashed Fleet Street' on their own, as buccaneers; or they have failed and sought some other source of livelihood.

Evelyn was receiving from his father a dole of four pounds a week—which he preferred to call an annual
allowance of two hundred pounds—and he was a part-time instructor at a third-rate day school in Golders Green. I learnt of this from his mother; he was himself too ashamed to mention it. It is not surprising that he was fractious. I would not care to re-live the November and early December of 1927. Eventually it was agreed that Evelyn should be apprenticed to a carpenter. A premium was paid, and he was to enter into residence with a master of the craft in January. But before that could happen he announced his engagement to Evelyn Gardner.

I was very curious to know what he would say in ‘A Little Hope' (which was to have followed
A Little Learning
), of his first marriage. It may well have been that doubt of how to deal with it, contributed to ‘the writing block' that held him inoperative during his last year. He must inevitably have held harsh feelings for Evelyn Gardner, but he must have known that nearly everyone found her a delightful person; certainly I did. She was pretty and neat and gracious; she had winning ways; she had
race
but unobtrusively. She was friendly, welcoming, and cosy. She spent Christmas at Underhill. It was a modest house, compared with the many grand ones with which she was familiar. But she was appreciative of everything that was done for her. She made herself very pleasant to my parents. Recognizing that Evelyn and I were ‘at outs' she put herself at once ‘to set that straight'. And she succeeded.

She and Evelyn were a delightful team; they were so at ease, so affectionate together, their having the same Christian name was an amusing bond. They were called ‘He-Evelyn' and ‘She-Evelyn'. But of course from every worldly point of view, it was a ridiculous engagement.

Lord Burghclere, a man of great distinction, was from one point of view a self-made man. His widow, who had adored him and was bitterly disappointed at not having
had a son who could carry on the title, was one of the Carnarvon Herberts, so that when at a later date Evelyn became engaged to Laura Herbert, the same great-aunt Lady Victoria Herbert who had protested against his marriage to her neice was able to exclaim, ‘What, this young man again, I thought we'd seen the last of him.'

She was far from being the only relative who objected. Lady Burghclere was not rich. She had two other daughters; no doubt the family could have rallied to a deserving cause, a hundred from this uncle, three hundred from that aunt. But my brother did not seem a deserving cause. The Baroness made enquiries at Oxford. And Cruttwell for the last time had the satisfaction of performing ‘his unwelcome duty'. My father and Lady Burghclere met; there was, as politicians say ‘a frank exchange of views'. Evelyn remarked on how useful it was at such a time to have a father with an unblemished reputation. But there was no public announcement of the betrothal in
The Times
. One thing was certain, if He-Evelyn was to marry She-Evelyn, the union could not be supported by cabinets and chairs from Sussex. Evelyn could evade his literary destiny no longer. As P. G. Wodehouse would have said, ‘he bit the bullet' and went to a small country-inn to write
Decline and Fall
.

At the end of January I went to California. I was not back until early May. This time I found Evelyn in high good humour.
Decline and Fall
was finished and his book on Rossetti had either just been or was shortly to be published. A critical study of Rossetti cannot expect a large sale, but it was well reviewed; the
Times Literary Supplement
noticing it at length, referred to its author as Miss Waugh, which gave Evelyn the opportunity of making an amusing ripost, and he was delighted to receive a letter of congratulation from Rebecca West in
which she praised in particular his flashes of wit, recognizing in advance of anyone the eventual direction of his writing. The two Evelyns were as charming a team as ever and though there was still no definite engagement, there was a general understanding that if
Decline and Fall
was a success, family opposition would be relaxed.

I read
Decline and Fall
while it was under consideration at Duckworth's. I had no doubt of its quality. I found it hilariously funny, and was astonished at the ridiculous corrections that Duckworth's wanted him to make in it. They were shocked for instance at a ‘debagged' undergraduate running round the quad without his trousers. Tom Balston was, as I have said, away on a holiday; and Gerald Duckworth who was a considerable friend of Lady Burghclere was nervous about her reaction to the book. Evelyn could not accept their emendations. He knew that the book was good, though he wondered whether he should not publish it under a different name, on the principle that a poet publishes his detective stories under a pseudonym. Could a serious literary critic sponsor Captain Grimes?

I do not keep a diary and cannot recall the exact sequence of events. My parents went for a holiday in early June, and it is my belief that my father left his fellow directors to decide whether or not Chapman & Hall should publish
Decline and Fall
. He admired the book immensely but he was hypersensitive on the use of the firm's money to finance his family. Ironically enough the decisive vote in Evelyn's favour was cast by a scientist who three years earlier had been voted onto the board after a stormy shareholder's meeting, to ensure that the firm's money was not wasted on
avant-garde
belles-lettres when such sound profits could be made on ‘mathematics for engineers'. When the final acceptance letter was sent I do not know, but it was certainly while my parents were
still away on a holiday that Harold Acton and Evelyn came round to my flat to announce that the Evelyns were being married clandestinely in two days' time, to invite me to the ceremony at St Paul's Church, Baker Street, and to luncheon afterwards at Boulestin's.

In
Memoirs of an Aesthete
Harold Acton has given a charming account of the occasion. There were only six of us there in all, Lady Pansy Pakenham (later Lamb) and Robert Byron being the other two. It was all very sweet and touching. She-Evelyn appeared to giggle when He-Evelyn promised to endow her with all his worldly goods. They looked so young, so innocent, and so defenceless, to be launched upon such rough seas. One prayed for charitable tides.

Five months later it seemed that our prayers had been amply granted. London mantelpieces were adorned with cards of invitation to his housewarming cocktail party at 17a Canonbury Square. This was in Islington, a section of London that had been occupied by city merchants in the middle of the nineteenth century. The houses were solid, well built, in the Georgian style. You would imagine yourself in Bloomsbury. For fifty years it had been occupied by humble families and Evelyn got a spacious first-floor flat, unfurnished, for a pound a week.

The invitation cards were decorated with maps showing guests how to get there. Buckingham Palace was marked on its left hand side and the caption read ‘Routes from Buckingham Palace to 17a Canonbury Square'. Actually his home was far from inaccessible. It was a minute's walk from the Angel tube station and a 19 bus could get you there from Piccadilly Circus in twenty minutes.

The party was also in celebration of
Decline and Fall
. It
had been published a few weeks earlier. It was not a best-seller, but it was a seller and it was being ‘talked about'. It was recognized that a new and exciting figure had appeared upon the stage. The road to success ran broad and clear.

The large flat was crowded, with new friends and old. It was there that I saw for the first time Diana Mitford, whose friendship was later to mean so much to Evelyn. She was then, on the brink of her marriage to Bryan Guinness, in the full, rich spring of her flowering beauty. I have seldom been to such a genial party. Everyone was so happy for the Evelyns' sake. They had gambled on one another—a hundred-to-one chance—and they had ‘brought it off'.

On the first Monday in December, I sailed for the West Indies. On the Sunday evening I had a very small good-bye party at the Gargoyle to which the Evelyns came. They were in high spirits. The company that owned the luxury cruising liner the
Meteor
had offered them a free holiday in the Mediterranean, in return for publicity in a travel book. They were to sail directly after Christmas. It was to be their real honeymoon. In June they had only been able to afford a fortnight in a country inn. I looked back a year, to that grim December when Evelyn unemployed and seemingly unemployable, had been so cantankerous. What a miracle She-Evelyn had achieved! But for her he would never have written
Decline and Fall
: he would still be fiddling with fretsaws; and was there any reason to believe that he would have been any more resolute as a carpenter than he had been as an art student at Heatherley's? How much could happen in a year!

I was away for five and a half months. Once again I frequently changed my plans; inter-island travel was not easy then; mail accumulated in ports I failed to reach when I was expected, so that I did not learn of the drama of the Evelyns' trip until afterwards. Nineteen-twenty-nine provided one of the most tempestuous Januaries within
record. It snowed in Monte Carlo, and She-Evelyn caught pneumonia. She was dangerously ill, and her brother-in-law, Geoffrey Fry, who was then Stanley Baldwin's secretary, was active on the diplomatic telephones. Evelyn had to spend several weeks in a hotel in Port Said, visiting his wife in hospital; a stay that gave him unique copy for one of his most amusing travel chapters. It was an anxious time, but by the time I learnt of it, she had recovered.

We returned to England almost simultaneously. They dined with me their first week in London. It was delightful to see how affectionate they were together. Evelyn was getting well-paid commissions from the newspapers. He had acquired the right material for his travel book. He asked if he might dedicate it to me, sharing the dedication with Alistair Graham, the ‘Lennox' of
A Little Learning
, inscribing it ‘to two other travellers'. I fancy that the idea of the dedication was She-Evelyn's. On that same evening she said to Evelyn, ‘Have you told Alec about the dedication?' She was consistently resolved to keep Evelyn and myself on good terms with one another. And I believe that it was because the dedication was her idea that when the book was eventually published, it was dedicated not to Alistair and myself, but to Bryan and Diana Guinness. He wanted to expunge every trace of She-Evelyn's influence. In England the book was entitled
Labels
, but in the U.S.A.,
A Bachelor Abroad
—an ironic title for a description of one's honeymoon.

Climatically the summer of 1929 offered a full rich recompense for the appalling winter. On the vineyards of the Médoc grapes ripened to a lovely vintage. Socially there was a general heightening of tempo. There was, as I have said, no equivalent in Europe for the boom on the New York stock market, but a great many Americans in
Paris and London were living in terms of Wall Street. They helped to set the pace. Parties became more eccentric. By the Charing Cross Pier, a river boat, the
Friendship
, was hired for private parties. I remember a tropical party there—of which Vyvyan Holland was one of the hosts. It was a hot, still night; there was a curious kick out of misbehaving in a sarong in the dusk of the bows when along the embankment and over Westminster bridge dutiful citizens were hurrying to catch a last train home to Surbiton.