Except for a short interval I had been absent from London for seven years [when I returned in 1939], but it might have been since yesterday, so little change could I detect in my friends, all of whom were easily accessible.
Evelyn Waugh had remarried and settled down to the domesticity he had always wanted. His wife seemed hardly more than a child with celestial trusting eyes; she preferred country to town life and she belonged to the Catholic communion. Hers was the tranquil charm of an early Millais portrait. This marriage restored Evelyn’s equanimity, which had been rudely shaken through a period of sour celibacy.
He had travelled to distant lands during the last restive decade and had produced sparkling books of impressions which were distilled with more subtle art through the medium of his novels. Remote People was the rough canvas for Black Mischief. A Handful of Dust was the consummate fruit of that period. He took his fame for granted without the vanity of most successful authors. Avoiding the publicity of literary congresses, he preferred the society of his Oxford cronies, whose foibles continued to amuse him. His personal privacy was sacrosanct and he made no effort to court popularity with strangers. He was his sprightly self again though stouter in build and his Catholicism, a rather special brand, had made him more uncompromising.
Morals mattered more to Evelyn than to certain other religious novelists of our age: he did not dissociate them from faith. Hence his vigor as a satirist. During his vagrant years the Church had been his only solid anchor. Perhaps because we had been best men at his first ill-fated wedding, Robert Byron and I had fallen from grace when he wished to cancel its memory. Now that the wound was healed he recovered his original bonhomie and we laughed as happily together as in our undergraduate days. John Sutro was immersed in film production. Many of us regretted the absorption of so life-enhancing a companion in a milieu too coarse to appreciate the extraordinary versatility of his talents. Was he not too sensitive to cope with the ruthless paladins of the film industry? However, the complicated negotiations and intrigues of that hectic underworld appealed to his temperament: they split his existence but not his personality. Whenever he could spare time for his friends it was a feast of delightful surprises. He sang, he extemporized, he invented Rabelaisian fantasies and created new heroes of fiction, he conducted imaginary orchestras, radio discussions and farcical dialogues by telephone. So spontaneous was his genius that he could seldom repeat himself. Much depended on his mood. He was the first to forget his extravagant inventions, and alas, the recording angel was too submerged in laughter to record them for posterity.
(ch. 2, pp. 18-9 of the 1986 Hamish Hamilton paperback.)
The super-civilized Huntington Library [in Los Angeles] was as much a memorial to Lord Duveen as to the railway magnate who had married his widowed aunt Arabella and bought Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. Here aristocratic portraits of the English eighteenth century were displayed in Duveen condition, a little brighter than when they had left the painter’s studio. They made me feel I had been gorging on strawberries and cream with too much sugar. Outside the library in the Californian sunshine, I caught sight of two familiar figures who in spite of their modern attire seemed to belong more to the eighteenth century than the pictures I had examined: Evelyn Waugh, rubicund as a master mariner in mufti, and Simon Elwes, the suave portrait painter I had seen last in New Delhi. Since then Simon had been paralysed by some Oriental bacillus, but owing to his courage and sterling constitution he had recovered sufficiently to walk with the aid of a stick and he had trained himself to paint with his left hand. No nonsense about open-necked shirts; they were dressed as for the Eton and Harrow match at Lord’s.
Evelyn and his shy little wife were staying at the extravagant Bel Air Hotel as the guests of MGM, who wanted to film Brideshead Revisited. Wisely he had reserved the right of veto, and he exercised it when the script failed to satisfy him. An artist first and foremost, he would not compound with mammon like Simon Lent in his story “Excursion in Reality”, who was summoned by a film tycoon to write the dialogue for a production of Hamlet in modern speech. Let the film experts have a go at it, he said, the place was teeming with them. In the meantime his witty eyes, slightly astonished under his raised eyebrows, registered every detail of the terrain and his ears, more fallible, recorded the peculiarities of local speech. He had been fascinated by a posh cemetery called Forest Lawn, he told me; his eyes shone as he described it. “You must see it,” he said, “it is a Tivoli garden for the dead.” But I preferred the beauty parade of Santa Monica. Having seen the tombs of the Ming Emperors and those of the Kings of Delhi as well as the grotesque mausoleums of Genoa, even Evelyn’s enthusiasm faded to lure me to Forest Lawn. It sounded a shade perverse and I was puzzled. But I could understand it when The Loved One appeared, for it had inspired him to write a masterpiece. There is so much of Evelyn’s brand of humour in this tale that it stands in relation to his œuvre as Un Cœur Simple to Flaubert’s. Evelyn was little versed in French literature, so it must have been a coincidence that a parrot held the same place in Mrs Joyboy’s affections as in good Félicité’s. Hollywood’s revenge was to turn the novel into an atrocious film.
After the food restrictions in England the cuisine of the Bel Air Hotel was lavish but Evelyn had plenty to find fault with. He was a gourmet of honest English delicacies which are seldom available in the restaurants of hotels. Here the cooking was meretriciously international. Evelyn turned it over on his fork with an expression I knew well, the colour rising together with his eyebrows. Peremptorily he summoned the head waiter.
“Send for some fresh asparagus. This stuff is tinned and absolutely tasteless.” The head waiter apologized that fresh asparagus was out of season. “Nonsense, I’ve seen bundles of it in the market.” Evelyn refused to be fobbed off with the second best of anything and the imp in him enjoyed these little tiffs. “In a place like this they should know better than to serve tinned fodder,” he grumbled.
The waiter looked as uncomfortable as I felt under Evelyn’s stare. His arrow having hit the mark, Evelyn recovered his joviality as he described his Hollywood adventures. Adaptability was not among his traits and I confess that his intransigence amused me. He was as censorious of certain American habits as Frances Trollope. He objected to the food, to the showers in bathrooms, to the chewing of gum, to the habit of smoking at meals (women were the worst offenders since they believed that cigarettes between courses prevented them from getting fat), to the volubility of taxi-drivers, and so forth. “How I wish the beasts would stop talking to one,” he moaned. “I tell them to shut up but they will go on and on. One is totally defenceless. It’s an outrage to be charged for such boredom.” When a hostess expostulated with him for handing round the cakes at a party held in his honour he replied: “It will save me from having to talk.”
Though I agreed with a few of his strictures — smoking through meals is an insult to good cooking and dulls the palate for any decent wine — I extolled the little neck clams, soft-shell crabs, Maine lobsters, T-bone steaks, avocado pears, lima beans, sweet corn, and other indigenous dishes. As for the taxi-drivers, I had been charmed by one in Chicago who remarked: “Gee, I wish I had heard that concert!” after Horowitz had been playing at the Symphony Hall. He had proceeded to explain with that naïve effusiveness which always went to my heart, that he was an alumnus of Chicago University who took turns with his brother to drive a taxi; that he was majoring in literature but that he actually preferred painting. “My ambition is to paint like Picasso,” he confided.
Evelyn listened with a frown of mock disapproval. “The trouble with you is that you’re really a Yank,” he observed.
Surely he would have also been touched by the aspirations, howsoever misguided, of this young taxi-driver, but he maintained that I should have discouraged his gratuitous avowal. There was always an element of chaff in his comments. He was obviously enjoying the strangeness of the Hollywood scene, though he disliked the cinema. “After driving tractors and growing turnips, it’s a nice holiday for Laura,” he remarked.
Romantically English and attached to hierarchical traditions, he feared that the Socialists would soon render England uninhabitable. He considered emigrating to Ireland if he could discover a Georgian house there suitable to a budding family, but I was none too sure that he would tolerate the Irish brogue any better than the Californian, though the rigidity of Irish Catholicism might appeal to the Victorian side of his nature. He had become defiantly Victorian in the Bel Air Hotel and I relished the incongruity. He pretended to dread the appearance of my Memoirs. “This is probably the last time I shall speak to you,” he said with a flicker of his juvenile truculence when I mentioned that I had written about our friendship at Oxford. Evidently he anticipated some shaft of malice, though he was the last person I should have wished to offend. When the book appeared he wrote me a characteristically generous letter and our friendship remained unshaken till his death in 1966. Under his crusty cuirass there was always the acute sensitiveness of a fastidious artist. Financially he could only gain by coming to terms with MGM, but he refused any compromise with mediocrity even if Brideshead Revisited were converted into a visual Rolls-Royce. I admired his integrity.
(ch. 13, pp. 223-6 of the 1986 Hamish Hamilton paperback.)
Osbert [Sitwell] was always a munificent host, lavish with wine, good cheer and conversation. His wine, both red and white, was the purest in Tuscany, and many a Frenchman who turned up his nose at Chianti acclaimed its excellence. The musty aroma from the vats in his cellars greeted one like a bibulous crony. After the austerities of post-war Britain, English guests felt they had entered the land of Cockaigne, especially Evelyn Waugh, who arrived in April, 1950, fully equipped for a course of Tuscan gastronomy. He arrived in his happiest vein.
Prince Isidore had delighted him — “a huge pleasure”, he had written, “and so much more welcome for being all against the spirit of the times”. But he had always been kind about my productions, even about those which had been slated by the popular reviewers, for though I considered myself modern I had never tried consciously to swim with the current. “I am coming to Italy in Easter week to do my Holy Year duties in Rome,” he continued. “After that I am alone, without plans and with a fair amount of funds. I thought of spending a week or two travelling about. I have not been to the country since it was a mass of soldiers and thieves and long to see it again. I never knew it well. Is there any chance of your joining me, perhaps in Venice? It would be such a treat... May you be guarded from all evil eyes.”
Not having seen him since our encounter in Hollywood, I revelled in his society. His moments of gaiety more than compensated for his gloom, his silence was more sympathetic than other people’s chatter, and his sharp eye infallibly detected the humorous aspects of every situation. Romantic without sentimentality, he cherished his firm convictions without compromise. Unfortunately Florence did not appeal to him: he said it was too dressed up for tourists. Perhaps it struck him as too pagan after the pieties of Rome, though architecturally it is more austere than other Italian cities. Ruskin could not convert him to Florentine Gothic. On the other hand, he admired the landscape near Montegufoni, the undulating hills with their groves of stone pines and cypresses which Benozzo Gozzoli had painted so minutely. And he enjoyed the food, especially the creamy sweets he called puddings.
Sinclair Lewis was then in Florence, having rented a tasteless modern villa in Pian dei Giullari. Lean and lanky, with a parboiled complexion and prominent blue eyes, strongly opinionated yet still eager to learn and sensitive, for all his toughness, to the triumphs of the Florentine spirit, he seemed aggressively self-satisfied. According to him only America produced a galaxy of talent in the art of fiction: he thought, or pretended to think, that the English novel had decayed with the nineteenth century. There was no limit to the variety of experience offered by the last bulwark of free enterprise. This made sense to me, but why exclude the literature of the Commonwealth?
[...]
When Evelyn Waugh was dining with me in a quiet restaurant, Lewis loped diagonally across the room to our table and hailed him as a dear old pal. Evelyn looked startled — how well I knew that elevation of the eyebrows, the round stare of his wide open eyes, the pursed lips, as if he had been chilled by a sudden draught! He was irritated, moreover, because Lewis addressed him as Evelyn: “Well, Evelyn, it’s mighty good to see you here. How are the Vile Bodies — not so vile as they used to be or viler? A good title anyway. We must get together, Evelyn, the sooner the better, you say when. I can give you dinner at my house. It’s nothing special to look at but the view’s tremendous. I took it for that view. I’m writing theology now, at least the subject’s theological. Let’s make a date right now.”
I was afraid Evelyn would say “I’m Mr Waugh to you”, but he explained that he was going to stay with Osbert Sitwell at Montegufoni.
“The Sitwells are an autonomous kingdom, strictly feudal. Florence is a republic. You ought to stay with me.”
Evelyn demurred and the conversation did not flow smoothly, but having dined well he was in a conciliatory mood. We accepted Lewis’s invitation for the following Friday. Afterwards Evelyn groaned: “Must we do it? Really I’d rather not. Let’s make an excuse, send him a telegram.” Personally I looked forward to a sparring match between two such incongruous champions and I persuaded him to keep the engagement.
After the velvet volupté of Osbert’s company Evelyn was more reluctant than ever to be dragged to dine with “Red” Lewis. We were met at the door by an English secretary-companion. He explained that “Red” was about to finish a new novel and that whenever he wrote he could scarcely bring himself to eat. It was impossible to tempt him to swallow enough vitamins. On the other hand he had been drinking more than was good for him. “In point of fact,” he said (ominous expression), “I’m trying to keep him off the booze, so I hope you don’t mind if there isn’t much liquor in the home, unless you fancy a drop of white vermouth. In point of fact I’ve had to water the wine.”
Evelyn glared at me indignantly. He was accustomed to his apéritif and now he definitely needed one. “Red” appeared rather hazy: he lacked the jauntiness of our previous encounter. He informed us that this was the first dinner he had given for several months, he had been working so hard at his novel, and before that he had nearly died of double pneumonia. Apart from an Italian girl called Titi who seemed to be running the house, the only other guest was a short-haired elderly dame in masculine attire. This was Una, Lady Troubridge, known as the Widow of Radclyffe Hall since she had lived for many years with the author of The Well of Loneliness. Though she discoursed about dogs and looked as if she had breezed in from some English vicarage, she did not help to put Evelyn at ease. It was no meal for an epicure. Evelyn toyed with the tepid spaghetti but he refused the veal. Our host scarcely touched the food but his stomach rumbled and he belched at regular intervals to make up for it. Evelyn flinched in his chair on the host’s right with an expression of growing alarm. “What is that frightful noise?” he kept asking me. “Red’s” speech was incoherent but at length he noticed that Evelyn was fasting and he urged him to taste the veal, the spécialité de la maison. Evelyn answered severely: “It’s Friday.” Diverted by this, “Red” prompted his companion, who had been an army captain serving in Trieste, to entertain us with the saga of his war exploits. “I don’t want to hear them,” said Evelyn. “Oh but you must. They’re absolutely hilarious. Tell Evelyn about the holy water font that was mistaken for a urinal.”
The captain, an ingenuous type, proceeded to spin his yarns, which convulsed “Red” with guffaws interspersed with hiccups. Evelyn pressed his fingers to his ears and sat back with an air of weary resignation. Towards the climax he turned to me and asked: “Has he finished?” When I nodded he removed his fingers and contemplated the table cloth. Lady Troubridge strove to remedy the gaffe but the dinner was a social and culinary failure. We adjourned for coffee, which Evelyn could not drink on account of his insomnia, to “Red’s” bedroom — the room with the view. Our host repeated “It’s intoxicating,” alas, in his case, too truly. Subsiding on to a deck-chair, he maundered on about how much he had enjoyed writing his last novel. “It may be bad but it has given me lots of fun.” Evelyn did not mention that he had finished his beautiful book on St Helen of Egypt or that he was rewriting Brideshead Revisited — he was dissatisfied with the original version and wanted to make the narrative more direct. He seldom discussed his own writing and he discouraged others from doing so in his presence. Singularly free from the egotism of most writers, successful or unsuccessful, his estimate of his own work is embedded in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: “He regarded his books as objects which he had made, things quite external to himself, to be used and judged by others. He thought them well made, better than many reputed works of genius, but he was not vain of his accomplishment, still less of his reputation.”
Provoked by his silence, “Red” delivered a panegyric upon the vigour, the splendour, the creative genius of America, which was moving in the circumstances despite its platitudes. Nobody in Europe had begun to appreciate the virtues of the little man from Main Street, his marvellous potentialities: he might seem dumb and crude but he was making a better world possible. That little man would conquer the moon and the stars. A pæan to democracy followed. “Red’s” bloodshot eyes bulged, his fingers trembled clutching the chair, as he wound up with a denunciation of contemporary English literature. I was reminded of Walt Whitman’s “Placard ‘Removed’ and ‘To Let’ on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus”. For literature had been reborn in the United States. “You Britishers will have to cross the Atlantic to learn how to write. We are rejuvenating the language. Have you added anything new to the English language, Evelyn? Your ‘bright young people’ are not likely to be remembered. I guess they’re already forgotten. But Main Street and Babbitt will be remembered, so will Arrowsmith and Elmer Gantry. And there’s more to come.”
Evelyn reddened more with embarrassment than resentment but he endured it all most patiently and politely. I suspect he was aware of the pathos underlying this half-defiant monologue. “I can’t think what got into him,” said Lady Troubridge when we escorted her home. “I’m afraid poor old Red is off colour. He doesn’t usually behave like that, I assure you.”
“I rather enjoyed the latter part of it,” said Evelyn. “I was only afraid he might burst a blood vessel.”
He might have held this distressing evening against me but the macabre element had saved it, from his point of view.
Instead of Venice I suggested that we go to Verona, within easy distance of Vicenza, Mantua, Parma and other fine cities unknown to Evelyn, and it proved a fortunate choice. Pisan Gothic, Romanesque, Renaissance, Baroque, almost every style was represented here and it was extraordinary how they blended in relatively limited space, as on the Piazza delle Erbe, surrounding the bright umbrellas of the market stalls. Its harmonies of faded fresco and marble, of softness and mellowness of colour, prepared one for the symphony of Venice. We found comfortable rooms, and the excellent restaurants catered to every palate: Evelyn went so far as to declare that he “preferred wop food to frog food, it lay lighter on the liver”. The Romanesque and quasi-Gothic churches, the eleventh-century San Fermo, the twelfth-century Cathedral and San Zeno, the thirteenth-century Sant’ Anastasia, pleased him better than the Florentine churches as he maintained their atmosphere was more deeply religious: of this he was a better judge than I, for he rose before I did to attend early Mass. He had already breakfasted on salami and wine when I joined him to see the sights. No companion could have been more appreciative, and I thought Verona satisfied him more than any other city we visited together. He was as enthusiastic as Ruskin about the Scaligeri tombs, and the medieval chivalry of Pisanello’s fresco of St George and the Princess of Trebizond enchanted him.
In essentials he had not changed though he allowed himself to appear middle-aged, with a paunch that imparted solidity and dignity to his gait. Clad as an Edwardian country gentleman, he carried a stick “to beat the Communists in case of assault”, he explained. In his new role of crusty colonel he insisted on speaking English to Italians, who could not understand him.
Our arrival coincided with a festival in honour of Our Lady: San Zeno was brilliantly decorated and Ave Maria was written on the houses in the vicinity; paper garlands, flowers and lanterns hung from the doors and windows and crinoline balconies. Next Sunday the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, the future Pope John, celebrated Mass in Sant’ Anastasia: the ceremony for the beatification of the boy saint Domenico Savio was very solemn and gorgeous. I was exhausted with standing two hours in the dense congregation: not Evelyn, who listened with rapt attention to the Cardinal Patriarch’s sermon, which lasted a good hour.
Our excursions were sprinkled with comical incidents. In the Palazzo del Tè at Mantua a custodian with the high-pitched voice of a eunuch fastened himself to Evelyn and trotted beside him with lecherous winks and nudges to draw his notice to the erotic details of Giulio Romano’s ceilings. Evelyn’s attempts to shake him off were unavailing and he accused me in jest of goading the creature on. Neither of us were sound sleepers, and the narrow street outside our hotel was noisy with revellers in the early hours of the morning. I peered out and shouted “Basta!” till I heard a resounding splash. Evelyn dispersed them with the contents of his water jug.
This carefree holiday had a disconcerting climax. Before leaving Verona we returned to Evelyn’s favourite restaurant. He was scrutinizing the trolley of hors-d’œuvre when a gangling youth sauntered in, accompanied by a typical American matron and a bearded escort. The youth wore a flowery chintz-like shirt open at the neck without a jacket or tie, and as he passed us he picked up a couple of grissini from another table and shovelled them into his large loose mouth.
“Look, look, the Ape Man!” Evelyn exclaimed. Unfortunately the trio sat down at the next table. Perhaps the matron had not heard Evelyn’s comment but she must have sensed an adverse wind, for she turned towards us and said: “I guess my son should be wearing a coat and tie but we’re from California, see, and our climate’s so wonderful the boys don’t need to wear them.”
“Madam,” said Evelyn sternly. “We haven’t been introduced and I don’t care where you come from. When he enters a decent restaurant your son should be properly dressed.”
The matron goggled as if she had been slapped. She dabbed at her spectacles with a sight-saver, and remarked: “Well, I guess that’s what the Marshall plan has done for us. We pay eighty-five cents tax in the dollar for you folks over here and that’s all the thanks we get. Nothing but high-hatting and rudeness. I guess you’re English. You Limies will never forgive us for helping you win the war. From now on I’m an isolationist. What’s being done with all the money we’re giving you I’d like to know? I don’t see much sign of progress.”
Evelyn turned to me in a rage: “This is intolerable. And it’s your fault. They spotted you as a fellow Yank. You deliberately enticed them here to annoy me.” He drew himself up to leave while I heard the boy protesting, “He was only kiddin’, Ma!”
I was not inclined to follow when Evelyn marched out of the restaurant. I apologized on his behalf, explaining that my friend was rather eccentric and that her son’s comment had been correct: he had not intended to be insulting. Slightly mollified, the lady proceeded to tell me her life history. She was a surgeon’s widow from Santa Barbara and this was her first visit to Europe in years. She had come over for her son’s education. Already she was beginning to regret it. Such rudeness everywhere! Americans were not appreciated. They might as well spend their hard-earned dollars at home. The bearded companion was a Russian guide who spoke English.
In spite of this unpleasant epilogue for which I was held responsible, Evelyn bore me no grudge. He must have forgotten about it, for he sent me a heart-warming letter from Paris and a card inscribed: “My love to Red Lewis, Mrs Walston and all stray Yanks. I was touched to learn that I gave the impression of industry during our lazy days in Verona.” When I reminded him of such incidents later he treated them as figments of my imagination.
Our next excursion was more amusing in retrospect than in reality, for his Pinfold period was about to incubate. In this age of comparatively harmless soporifics it was characteristic of Evelyn to resort to such Victorian drugs as bromide and chloral, which he combined with brandy and crème de menthe to camouflage the flavour. As he had also been taking pills for rheumatism, the mixture affected him with a sort of paranoia.
Early in March, 1952, he sent me a telegram proposing a trip to Capri or Palermo. I was feeling so run down after an attack of influenza that I fancied any change must be for the better, especially in Evelyn’s company, and his arrival in Naples provided a welcome recreation. Neither of us was a picture of health. We had both injured our knees during the war, Evelyn on jumping from a parachute, and rheumatism had invaded the vulnerable joint: he relied on a stick to support him. In order to see the churches near Via Tribunali it was necessary to walk, and he hobbled so painfully that I found myself hobbling in sympathy. Even so he was a pertinacious sight-seer and I knew what was likely to interest him: the Surrealistic sculpture in the Sansevero Chapel, where the figures of Modesty and the dead Christ are visible under transparent marble veils and a man struggles out of a net, symbolical of sin; the ghastly skeletons of nervous systems in the crypt below; and Caravaggio’s “Seven Acts of Mercy” in the Monte della Misericordia, a painting in which it is difficult to detach one act of mercy from another. “Feeding the hungry” and “Visiting the prisoner” are combined in the startled woman feeding her old father in prison from her breast. A priest with a torch looms above her, no doubt connected with the projecting feet, all we see of a corpse — “Burying the Dead”. Whose ear and whose leg emerge from yonder shadow? A plumed knight in the foreground doffs his cloak for a bare-backed beggar — “Clothing the naked”. The shell in a hat is a symbol of pilgrimage or “Sheltering the stranger”. Could it be Samson drinking from the jawbone of an ass or was it “Giving drink to the thirsty”? Caravaggio himself stands sombrely in the left-hand corner. “All very rum,” said Evelyn, puzzling over what Hinks called its “structural equivocations”, which he examined with approval.
He was not chary of wine in spite of his rheumatism, and he had an enviable appetite. Lunching at a restaurant which was patronized by “Lucky” Luciano, I drew Evelyn’s attention to the notorious gangster, who had been deported from the U.S.A. He resembled a bespectacled solicitor surrounded by shady clients, who crept in furtively to consult him during his meal. His expression was intelligent, even kindly, and he tipped the waiters lavishly with dollar bills. Evelyn had never heard of him but he was sure his son Bron [Auberon] had. To my astonishment he procured a picture postcard, walked over to Luciano, and asked him to sign it as a souvenir for his son. The gangster, equally astonished, obliged him with a flattered smile.
At this time Evelyn was my chief liaison with friends in England, and he regaled me with news of their recent activities, embellished with his inimitable fantasy. Thus one boon companion had brought an exotic animal called a coaita from Brazil, a cross between a monkey and a fox, which he had presented to Cyril Connolly. As if it realized that servants were hard to obtain, the animal promptly stepped into the breach: more agile than any kitchen maid, it scoured the dishes with its prehensile tongue. It drew the window blinds and wakened guests with early cups of tea. An invaluable acquisition of which the Connollys had every reason to be proud! If a guest looked lonely it was ready to hop into bed with him, and it had the great virtue of silence: it could not blab. Its only peccadillo was a tendency to tipple, and since Cyril had inherited many vintage wines from Dick Wyndham’s cellar, several bottles of these had been swilled by the boozy beast, which was apt to snatch your glass at dinner unless you were careful. Alas, I have forgotten half the talents of this pet which Evelyn described with gusto.
About general conditions in England he was pessimistic. The Conservatives were exceeding the Labour Party in imposing restrictions, cutting down travel allowances, making the rich suffer in a bid for popularity. Ultimately he predicted a Labour dictatorship. “We’ll all end in a concentration camp,” he said.
Owing to his rheumatic knee, Palermo seemed more suitable than Capri, but after ten dismally rainy days we decided to cut our losses and return to Naples. The weather was a dire disappointment to Evelyn, who had brought his bathing trunks, expecting to swim and bask in the sun. His knee hurt him so that he refused to walk, and I developed an obstinate cold. Everything conspired to vex him. His letters had been forwarded from the Consulate to the wrong hotel, and he roundly berated the clerks for their inefficiency. When the Consul paid us a polite call he was snubbed outrageously. Conversation flagged under Evelyn’s dudgeon, and the Consul remarking in a quaint non sequitur: “I’ve a map of Mount Ararat which might interest you,” Evelyn replied: “Why should it? Has the Ark been found?” Impatient of boredom, he raised an invisible barrier of barbed wire. Occasionally his rudeness was so extreme as to be fascinating, yet I regretted the impression he made on people who did not know him. One of the kindest and most generous of friends, he could exude such malevolence that it was startling. When I expostulated with him he retorted that I suffered fools too gladly.
I attributed his passing squalls to his state of health. With the Commandos during the war he had forced himself to be more robust than his physique. The epicurean had worn the mask of a stoic until he became one. But the strain of military life at high tension must have left a delayed reaction on his nerves. He told me he could not bear a garrulous person or a grinning face: he preferred people to look miserable. They had every reason to be in Palermo under the rain, among so many ruins left by the bombing of 1943. The lines of Prévert’s Barbara recurred to me:
Il pleut sans cesse sur Brest
Comme il pleuvait avant
Mais ce n’est plus pareil et tout est abîmé...
Brest had become Palermo as I tried to make out the once splendid quay called the Marina. The magnificent open staircase of the Palazzo Bonagia still stood, but it looked as if a breeze would send it toppling.
Our tour was not a total failure. Having greatly admired the waxworks by Gaetano Zumbo in the Florentine Bargello, representing scenes of the plague and putrefaction, with worms crawling out of ulcers and gluttonous rats, Evelyn was sorry to find no examples of his art in his native island, but Giacomo Serpotta’s plasterwork, as gay as the waxworks were gloomy, provided a pleasing substitute. And indeed his stucco groups representing the mysteries of the Rosary had the smoothness of wax.
About a mile from Palermo on the way to Monreale we stopped at the Cappuccini convent where the dead friars used to be dried, dressed and placed upright in niches underneath the church so that their friends could visit them whenever inclined. Many not in holy orders had joined them — desiccated mummies of women and children, twins and dwarfs, standing, lying, crouching, grinning and scowling, the yellow skin adhering to the bones, like victims of a famine or Goya caricatures, coated with dust, their garments rotting away. When they collapsed they were bundled into sacks from which the hands and skulls protruded as if to preach or implore. Here was Donne’s “bracelet of bright hair about the bone” and here — an American vice-consul in evening dress, his hair, moustache and beard very neat and trim, less dusty than the rest in his glass coffin. The bodies had formerly been deposited in vaults behind iron doors for half a year, at the end of which they joined the majority. Altogether the catacombs contained some eight thousand natural mummies, though interment here was discontinued in 1881.
The monk who showed us round rattled off a facetious commentary in slangy English like a Shakespearian clown. Evelyn ordered him sharply to shut up. He spent a full hour examining the grisly relics with an expression akin to rapture. According to my guide book, “the atmosphere of the catacombs is impregnated with a smell so offensive that it cannot be wholesome”, but Evelyn differed. He announced that his knee was cured and left his stick in the taxi. Whether it was due to the dryness of the air or to the emanations of the mummies, he felt so much better that he would recommend it in future to sufferers from rheumatism. Turning to take a last sniff, he muttered “Delicious!” as if it had been jasmine. He became more cheerful, in the right mood to relish the mouldering grotesques of the Villa Palagonia and the elegance of the other villas at Bagheria, which he pronounced “buggery”, formerly the resort of the Palermitan aristocracy,
The good Consul having prescribed Syracuse for “p and q”, meaning peace and quiet, we took an express train thither. The carriages were unusually crowded, and we discovered that there would be motor races in Syracuse next day and that every hotel would be packed. Until the races were over we were advised to stop in Catania. There we traded from hotel to hotel but not a single room was available. Our last hope was Taormina, another hour’s distance by train. Taormina was overrun with Scandinavians travelling in charabancs, and we were very tired and hungry after a second search when we were reluctantly conceded two cold and poky rooms in a pretentious caravanserai shortly before midnight.
Surrounded by tourists with cameras swinging from their necks, it was no pleasure to climb among the ruins of the much publicized Græco-Roman theatre or test its acoustics, and so many were taking snapshots of the view that we could not observe it with serenity: Etna shrouded in snow, beaches and headlands, how often seen in Victorian water-colours painted when Persephone had brought back the spring we sighed for. Where were the Grecian lovers and Uranians, those who came hither to cultivate “Les Amitiés Particulaires” — the German baron whose photographs of naked boys emulated Tuke R. A., and the rest of them? The most ostentatious had been expelled by the Fascists; the others had emigrated to some other island. They had left no tell-tale trace. In my youth Taormina had been a polite synonym for Sodom: now it was quite as respectable as Bournemouth. Drab tourists as disconsolate as ourselves drooped in front of a shop window displaying an aspidistra and a placard inscribed “Nice Cuppa Tea” in Gothic letters.
The weather was so warm in Naples that we were sorry to have left it. Evelyn was still dogged by petty vexations: his wife had not heard from him and he had no reply to an urgent wire he had sent; the proofs of Men at Arms might have gone astray since he was uncertain he had given the right address; he had not slept a wink in spite of his potion; and he complained of a stench of sulphur in the air. He longed to escape to the country.
We compromised by taking a boat to Sorrento. It was full of the same tourists we had seen in Taormina, and while he was exhilarated by the sea crossing he was enraged by a garrulous cabdriver whose manner seemed to him derisive, and by the swarm of touts and beggars. Among the latter was a ragged nun with a bristly face. With his usual generosity he gave her a thousand lire note. “Too much,” I muttered. “I never refuse a nun,” he said reproachfully. The creature grabbed his donation and ran off without waiting to thank him, betraying his sex with a pair of brawny calves. Evelyn was annoyed with himself for not detecting the transvestite.
Several friends who met him with me remarked that he was totally unlike the person they had expected from reading his books. They had expected — one wondered what? — presumably some modern version of Beau Brummell. Authors tend to disappoint their readers in the flesh. Perhaps because I had met him at Oxford when we were both young if not unfledged, his writings struck me as an essential part of him, even the black humour and vein of cruelty, sharpened by the failure of his early marriage. A Handful of Dust was written in his blood. He was primarily an artist in revolt against philistinism, and this was our lasting bond. Compassion is extraneous to the satirist, yet it is inherent in his later writings. If he lacked what is loosely called a “social conscience”, as he wrote in Pinfold, he was certainly philanthropic in a practical sense. His anti-Americanism was the only pose I considered unworthy of him, a futile gesture against what our friend Graham Greene described as “the sinless empty graceless chromium world”. It has always seemed to me superficial as well as unfair to charge America with a monopoly of these negative attributes, which apply to modernism in general and to Communist countries in particular. But Evelyn’s anti-Americanism was exaggerated for my benefit: as the boy in Verona remarked, he was “only kiddin’ ”.
Though everything had conspired against us in Sicily, we extracted much amusement from our mishaps in retrospect. Nothing could exceed the drollery of Evelyn’s impromptu acts. John Sutro had coined the adjective “Wavian”, as Shavian applied to Shaw, and for me these were acts of a Wavian comedy. He walked on to the stage and without bothering to take part in the plot created a character which was an epitome of his humour, making a trenchant comment on this or that episode, and he walked off when we were hoping to hear more. Sacha Guitry once said that a good joke required three people to make it successful: the perpetrator, the person who can see it, and the one who misses the point. The pleasure of the person who appreciates it is increased by the latter’s bewilderment, and I often found myself in this position in Evelyn’s company. While I simmered with laughter there were others who failed to see the point. And when that is instantaneous it is apt to dissolve in the process of elucidation. One had to know him well to savour the idiosyncrasies of his humour. Life seemed flatter and duller after he had left me.
(ch. 17, pp. 304-19 of the 1986 Hamish Hamilton paperback.)
Evelyn Waugh had not been present [at a recitation of Edith Sitwell’s Façade to the music of William Walton or the supper party given after it], though it was the sort of occasion he would have relished. Before I returned to Florence he dined with me, and he asked me avidly for details about the performance and who was there. Only his lack of musical ear would have been a handicap: this deprived him of much enjoyment as he grew older. When it suited him he pretended to be deaf. We were staying in the same hotel and he joined me in boisterous mood, having quaffed copious draughts of champagne with one of his old comrades-in-arms. Though the dining-room was quieter than most, he complained of the hubbub. A page was summoned to fetch the ear-trumpet from his room. The trumpet was brought ostentatiously on a salver, a formidable instrument which he must have disinterred from some country junk shop. Having dusted it tenderly with a silk handkerchief, he flourished it in the direction of each of his interlocutors with, “Sorry, can’t hear you. Speak up!” All of us had to shout at him, and as we were sitting in the middle of the restaurant our loud voices and laughter caused consternation among the other diners. John Sutro and I played up to his act, but under the arrows of disapproving glances we felt a trifle self-conscious. We were the last to leave, and the waiters fidgeted around our table a little too persistently as we sat over coffee and liqueurs. Evelyn liked to linger over a Churchillian cigar. “It’s no good your fussing,” he snapped at a waiter. “You’re not going to make me budge till I have finished. Bring me another crème de menthe!”
(ch. 20, pp. 372-3 of the 1986 Hamish Hamilton paperback.)