Source Notes

Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead

Throughout the writing of the book I benefited greatly from the work of Evelyn Waugh’s previous biographers: Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh (1975); Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years, 1903-1939 (1987) and Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years, 1939-1966 (1992); Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (1994); Douglas Lane Patey, The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography (1998); Alexander Waugh, Fathers and Sons (2004). My aim has been to complement the superb job they have done in treating Waugh’s life in the round with a more focused and selective account that concentrates on his friendship with the Lygons, without losing sight of the bigger picture.

There follow some notes on principal sources for key quotations and points in the book.

Prologue

Waugh’s progress in writing Brideshead can be traced in his diaries: The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Michael Davie (1976). The evolution of the manuscript is analysed in Robert Murray Davis, Evelyn Waugh, Writer (1981).

1. A Tale of Two Childhoods

My account of Evelyn’s childhood is based on the diaries, early letters in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory (1980), the unpublished diaries of Arthur Waugh (private archive) and above all the autobiography A Little Learning (1964).

Information about the Lygons’ childhood is based primarily on their own recollections, recorded in unpublished interviews and various press clippings (mostly undated) in two private uncatalogued archives. Of especial value are Julie Kavanagh, ‘Lady Mary Lygon Revisits Brideshead’, Harpers and Queen, October 1981, and Nicholas Shakespeare, ‘Lady Sibell’s Secret’ (1995, publication unidentified). Some of this ground is also covered in Jane Mulvagh, Madresfield: One House, One Family, One Thousand Years (2008), which contains much valuable information about the history of the house and the family, but which I have not used, partly because it appeared after most of my research was complete and partly because certain key inaccuracies (e.g. misdating of Evelyn’s first visit to Madresfield and the false claim that he never met Earl Beauchamp) made me wary of it.

An excellent website, http://www.westdowns.com/, is devoted to the history of Hugh’s prep school, West Downs.

The significance of Alec Waugh’s Loom of Youth is discussed in Peter Parker’s fascinating The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos (1987).

2. Lancing versus Eton

The archives of both public schools provided much valuable material. Michael Meredith’s Five Hundred Years of Eton Theatre (2001) drew my attention to Hugh’s acting. For Waugh, the early journals and A Little Learning are again the primary sources. For the Eton crowd, Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948), Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure, edited by Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster (1968), Humphrey Carpenter, The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and his Friends (1989), Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1961), Martin Green, Children of the Sun: A Narrative of Decadence in England after 1918 (1980), James Knox, A Biography of Robert Byron (2003) and Anthony Powell, Memoirs (vols 1-3, 1976-80).

3. Oxford

Nearly all the sources cited for chapter 2 also cover the Oxford years. The other key witness in this period is Terence Greenidge, whose Degenerate Oxford? (1930) and letters to Charles Linck (privately published as Evelyn Waugh in Letters by Terence Greenidge, 1994) are exceptionally important, but little known. It is, for instance, in Greenidge that we find the story of the Magdalen ‘wine’ evening and the information that Hugh Lygon as well as John Betjeman carried a teddy bear. Christopher Hollis’ Oxford in the Twenties (1976) is the book in which Richard Pares and Alastair Graham were first named as Waugh’s Oxford lovers. My suggestion that he also had an affair with Hugh Lygon derives from an unpublished interview given by Tamara Talbot Rice, an unpublished letter by A. L. Rowse and a remark in an unpublished interview given by Lady Sibell Lygon, all in a private archive.

4. The Scarlet Woman

There is selective coverage of this period in Waugh’s diaries, but the key source is Evelyn Waugh in Letters by Terence Greenidge, together with Charles Linck’s unpublished PhD dissertation, ‘The Development of Evelyn Waugh’s Career: 1903-1939’ (University of Kansas, 1962). It was Linck who unearthed The Scarlet Woman, which is now available on DVD.

5. In the Balance

Again, there are some letters and diary entries for this period. Crucial evidence concerning the relationship with Alastair Graham is to be found in Waugh’s incoming letters, now in the British Library.

The early short stories are in The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Ann Pasternak Slater (1998). The schoolteaching experience is, of course, refracted in Decline and Fall (1928).

6. The Lygon Heritage

Robert Byron, Letters Home, edited by Lucy Butler (1991), is crucial. Information about William Ranken is derived from a private source. The best account of the life of Earl Beauchamp is that of the superbly incisive Richard Davenport-Hines: ‘Lygon, William, seventh Earl Beauchamp (1872–1938)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). This has a valuable list of sources. On Beauchamp’s political career, see also David Dutton, ‘William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp’, Journal of Liberal History, Summer 1999.

7. Untoward Incidents

Diaries, letters, incoming letters, Arthur Waugh’s unpublished diary.

8. Bright Young Things

Vile Bodies (1930) is the centrepiece here, but see also Patrick Balfour’s Society Racket (1933). D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People (2007), is good on the context, as is Carpenter’s The Brideshead Generation. Diana Mitford/Guinness/Mosley remembers Evelyn in her Loved Ones: Pen Portraits (1985) and The Pursuit of Laughter: Essays, Articles, Reviews and a Diary (2008).

9. The Busting of Boom

I have tried to provide the most detailed and accurate account yet of the much-written-about Beauchamp affair. Reconstruction of the chronology of events has been greatly assisted by searches on Beauchamp’s name in The Times Digital Archive. Many references from the gossip of the time are gathered in Richard Davenport-Hines’ Oxford DNB life of Beauchamp. The family letters are in the private archive at Madresfield. The Lygon sisters’ memories of the affair are recorded in the interviews cited under chapter 1, above. The explosive divorce petition was obtained, to my surprise, merely by clicking on a request for it via the online catalogue of the National Archives at Kew. The Westminster side of the story comes from Leslie Field’s excellent biography Bendor: The Golden Duke of Westminster (1983), supplemented by some pages kindly provided by Robin Rhoderick-Jones from his unpublished history of the Dukes of Westminster. Lady Dorothy’s letter to Patrick Balfour is in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Alec Waugh’s reminiscences of two key encounters: see his A Year to Remember: A Reminiscence of 1931 (1975).

Lady Christabel Aberconway’s memory of Ernest Thesiger in pearls and of the tennis coach who couldn’t hold a racket is in her autobiography, A Wiser Woman? (1966) – though her granddaughter, Lady Christabel Watson, informs me that she never played tennis in her life and would not have known what was or wasn’t a proper grip.

10. Madresfield Visited

For Captain Hance’s Riding Academy, see his book School for Horse and Rider (1932). There is also material in the local history section of the Malvern Public Library. See also Cora Weaver’s informative pamphet, A Short Guide to Charles Darwin and Evelyn Waugh in Malvern (1991).

I am indebted to Alexander Waugh for important information about Baby Jungman in this period.

My account of the house, chapel and grounds at Madresfield is based on personal visits, the article ‘Madresfield Court, Worcestershire’, Country Life, 30 March 1907, Dorothy Williams’ The Lygons of Madresfield Court (2001) and John De La Tour’s undated guidebook, Madresfield Court.

11. The Beauchamp Belles & 12. Christmas at Mad

From this point on, correspondence between Evelyn and the Lygon sisters becomes my primary source, though for many periods there are also invaluable diary entries. Some of Waugh’s letters to the sisters are included in Mark Amory’s selected edition of the Letters of Evelyn Waugh, but others remain in manuscript. A collection of eighty of those to Maimie is in the library of Georgetown University in Washington DC, while those to Coote, together with a second batch to Maimie, are in private hands. The letters from Maimie to Evelyn are in his incoming correspondence, which is in the British Library.

The sisters’ own reminiscences of Evelyn have also provided a wealth of material: see the interviews cited for chapter 1, above, and especially Coote’s lovely essay ‘Madresfield and Brideshead’, in Evelyn Waugh and his World, edited by David Pryce-Jones (1973).

13. An Encounter in Rome

It is clear from Evelyn’s letters to Maimie that he met Earl Beauchamp in Rome. Sibell Lygon, in her 1995 interview with Nicholas Shakespeare, confirmed this. I was struggling to date the encounter when Alexander Waugh kindly drew my attention to the unpublished passage in Evelyn’s ‘Open Letter to the Archbishop of Westminster’ in which he spoke of being privately confirmed in Rome in the summer of 1932. This solved the mystery: Evelyn went to Rome as well as Venice that summer.

For Lord Berners’ house by the forum, I have relied on a visit, together with Mark Amory, Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric (1998) and Lord Berners: Composer, Writer, Painter, edited by Peter Dickinson (2008).

For Venice, Diana Cooper’s Autobiography (1965; originally in 3 vols, 1958-60) and Evelyn’s own ‘Venetian Adventures’, reprinted in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Donat Gallagher (1983).

Earl Beauchamp’s movements (and companions) in his exile have been reconstructed from his letters to Lady Dorothy in the archive at Madresfield, together with the immensely informative passenger lists of the great ocean liners, available online via www.ancestry.co.uk.

14. Up the Amazon

Based on Evelyn’s detailed diaries of this period and the equally detailed letters he sent to Maimie and Coote from South America.

15. A Gothic Man

This period is rich in correspondence to and from the sisters, and in letters from Beauchamp to Dorothy, now at Madresfield. The architectural resemblance between Madresfield and the fictional Hetton Abbey of A Handful of Dust has been noted by several Waugh scholars, but the suggestion of a profound connection between Boom’s wanderings and the novel’s theme of exile and the ‘Gothic man in the hands of savages’ is, as far as I am aware, new.

16. Fiasco in the Arctic

Based on two accounts by Alexander Glen – Young Men in the Arctic (1935) and a long unpublished interview given late in life – together with Evelyn’s own account, which is reprinted in Gallagher’s The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh.

17. Ladies and Lapdogs

Evelyn’s and his father’s diaries; letters to and from the Lygon sisters and to and from Diana Cooper in Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper, edited by Artemis Cooper (1991). Mona’s arrival at Mad: an unpublished interview with her, now in a private archive.

‘On Guard’ is in The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh. The fact that Maimie’s dog Grainger was named after the custodian of Walmer Castle in her youth was discovered serendipitously when I was scrutinizing the 1911 Census returns for the Beauchamps’ three homes – a source which provided much valuable information about their servants, including some of the footmen cited in the divorce petition.

18. A Year of Departures

Again, mainly based on Waugh/Lygon correspondence, letters from Beauchamp to Lady Dorothy, interviews given by the sisters, and Waugh’s diaries. For the homosexual underworld of Venice: Frederick Rolfe, ‘Baron Corvo’, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1934). Boom’s palazzo on the Grand Canal: a visit (it is now divided into apartments and I am grateful to one of the current residents for giving me a peek inside).

The deaths of Lady Beauchamp and Hugh Lygon: newspaper reports, obituaries, reminiscences of the Lygon girls. The testimony of the actor and theatre manager William Armstrong in both his Times obituary of Hugh and memories recorded in his biography, Sydney Blow, Through Stage Doors (1958), was especially illuminating. The detail about the Tiger Moth aircraft is from Andrew Barrow, Gossip: A History of High Society from 1920 to 1970 (1978).

19. Three Weddings and a Funeral

Waugh/Lygon and Beauchamp/Dorothy correspondence; newspaper reports, passenger lists and obituaries. Reminiscences of the Lygon sisters. Beauchamp’s will was obtained via the Court Service, York Probate Sub-Registry.

20. Waugh’s War

Correspondence and diary entries are rich in this period. The 1975 Punch interview with Waugh’s batman Ralph Tanner is especially illuminating. The definitive account of the disastrous Cretan campaign, and the part played by Laycock’s Commandos in it, is Antony Beevor, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (1991). Waugh’s LAYFORCE Memorandum is included in Davie’s edition of his diaries. Ann Fleming’s telegram about Ivor as Laycock and Evelyn’s angry response are in The Letters of Ann Fleming, edited by Mark Amory (1985).

Preparation of Madresfield for possible evacuation of royal princesses: unpublished interview with Mona (private archive).

21. The Door to Brideshead

Duggan’s deathbed conversion: reported in detail both in Waugh’s diary and in several letters. In Yugoslavia: Correspondence with Dorothy; diaries; her reminiscences. For progress on the manuscript of Brideshead: Davis, Evelyn Waugh, Writer. Friends’ reactions: The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, edited by Charlotte Mosley (1996). Differences between the proof copy sent to friends and the published text: ‘Bloggs’ Baldwin’s copy of the proof, now in the British Library.

22. Brideshead Unlocked

Chips Channon: ‘Chips’: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, edited by Robert Rhodes James (1967).

The Hollywood memo: see ‘Waugh versus Hollywood’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/may/22/classics.film.

St Sebastian and the gay imagination: see, for example, Richard A. Kaye, ‘“A Splendid Readiness for Death”: T. S. Eliot, the Homosexual Cult of St Sebastian, and World War 1’, Modernism/Modernity, 6.2 (1999), pp. 107-34.

‘Oxford romances’, homosexuality and what I call ‘the Brideshead complex’: the crucial, little-known texts here are Greenidge’s Degenerate Oxford? (1930) and Waugh’s (unreprinted) review of it in The Fortnightly Review, new series, CXXVII, March 1930, pp. 423-24. Also Waugh’s review of Compton Mackenzie’s Thin Ice, reprinted in Gallagher, The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh.

Edmund Wilson’s attack on Brideshead in The New Yorker of 5 January 1946 is reprinted in Martin Stannard’s invaluable Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage (1984).

Coda

I would have wished for space to include more of the late letters that passed between Maimie and Evelyn – hers, now in the British Library, are exceptionally poignant, while his are always generous and witty. Her decline can be charted via a series of auctioneer’s announcements of sales of her jewelry in The Times Digital Archive through Evelyn’s letters, to the interview she gave to Harpers and Queen in October 1981 at the time of the Granada television Brideshead.

Times obituaries of all the major characters have been traced. Coote’s late-in-life marriage to ‘Mad Boy’ Heber Percy is discussed in both the works on Lord Berners, cited in notes to chapter 13, above. I have also relied on personal reminiscences from people who knew her and on Mark Amory’s obituary in The Independent, 20 October 2001.

The party at Chatsworth is described in a letter of 11 August 1990 from Deborah Duchess of Devonshire to her sister Jessica Mitford.