No match for Mr Pinfold
Michael Davie
THE BRIDESHEAD GENERATION: EVELYN WAUGH AND HIS FRIENDS by Humphrey Carpenter Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £17.95, pp.523 nHumphrey Carpenter and his pub- lishers deserve to be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act. The 'Brideshead Generation' can refer only to Evelyn Waugh's Oxford contemporaries, of whom two or three may have been models for characters in his novel, Brideshead Revi- sited. However, Mr Carpenter has made little attempt to add to published know- ledge about, for instance, Hugh Lygon and Alastair Graham, who are thought to have contributed to 'Sebastian Flyte', beyond having 'an unforgettable lunch' (as he tells us in Appendix D) in Florence with their 'A ha! Tapwaterr surviving friend, Sir Harold Acton. The reason the lunch was memorable must have been the food and company, for Sir Harold's only fresh contribution to the text is an epithet of uncharacteristic vulgarity describing Graham's alleged sexual charac- ter. Nor is the book about 'Evelyn Waugh and his friends'. Luned Jacobs, Dudley Carew, Francis Crease, Terence Greenidge, the Plunket Greene family, Alfred Duggan, 'Baby' Jungman, Ann Fleming, Katharine Asquith, Ronald Knox, John Sutro, and Lady Diana Cooper make walk-on appearances only. When Philip Dunne died in 1965, Waugh de- scribed him in his diary as 'a deeply valued friend whom I shall miss bitterly'; he is not mentioned.
Blithely ignoring his own title, Mr Carpenter explains that his book is 'a study of several writers and their circle, whose work has certain ideas and beliefs in common'. He hopes it will be read 'as a small piece of cultural history'. The writers most extensively treated, in their lives and in their works, are 'the central figure' of Waugh himself, Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, Cyril Connolly and John Betje- man.
But what exactly was it that these five had in common? Alas for Mr Carpenter's premise: not much. After a prolonged account of Oxford in the twenties, where once again Acton declaims his poems through his megaphone, once again Betje- man amuses everyone with his teddy bear, and once again `Sligger', Bowra, 'Colonel' Kolkhorst, and Fothergill the inn-keeper perform their routines, Mr Carpenter attempts to rationalise and pull together the dissimilar experiences of the circle by asserting, in very un-Waughlike prose, that they 'used the place as a testing ground for a new lifestyle'. He also claims that 'Waugh and his friends' were attempting 'to create a café society for the arts'. This notion seems far-fetched. Confronted by such a society, Waugh's instinct would have been to undermine it. Nor is it easy to imagine Mr Greene ever seeking mem- bership of café society as an escape-route from his spiritual malaise. But perhaps the quintet shared other ideas? Three of them despised suburbia: Waugh, Betjeman, Connolly. The same three thought of country houses as bastions against the surrounding chaos. Two be- came converted to Roman Catholicism: Waugh and Greene. The vaguely-stated premise of Mr Carpenter's book dissolves entirely as he follows the five into middle age. Waugh was openly mocking every- thing that Connolly stood for by 1942; and he can scarcely be said in anything except the most general sense to have had 'certain ideas and beliefs in common' with Bet) e- man after 1947, when Waugh welcomed with 'a particular joy' Penelope Betjeman's decision to go over to Rome, an event later followed by the Betjemans' separation. The book relies on published sources, generously acknowledged. Its second half is dominated by Waugh because, 'as the years passed, Waugh displayed the charac- teristics and conflicts of the group more intensely and dramatically, and more en- tertainingly, than any other member'. Mr Carpenter does not claim to have disco- vered anything new about Waugh's life. Instead, he puts forward novel interpreta- tions of Waugh's temperament and writ- ings.
From Appendix D, we learn that Anthony Storr has provided 'psychiatric information'. Hence, presumably, the Carpenter thesis that in later life, setting himself up in a country house as a Victo- rian paterfamilias and terrorising his chil- dren, Waugh was 'copying' his father. If SO, it was a poor imitation, given Arthur Waugh's expansive good nature, cherished Villa in North London, and unselfconscious taste for Keystone Australian Burgundy. Mr Carpenter goes so far as to surmise that Waugh was 'copying' his father when he married his second wife, since, in Mr Carpenter's view, she closely resembled his mother.
Furthermore, Waugh retained his child- hood jealousy of his novelist elder brother, Alec, until 1952, Mr Carpenter argues. In Men At Arms, published in that year, the fictitious Apthorpe, who allegedly stands for Alec, is abruptly killed off; 'the rival has at last been eliminated'.
Mr Carpenter also puts forward the theory that Waugh's troubles were caused by suppression of his homosexuality. Why else, he asks, would he refer to Brian Howard's homosexuality as 'incorrigible'? At the same time, he notes Waugh's attraction to very young girls, and his self-acknowledged incestuous feelings to- wards his daughter. How these 'character- istics and conflicts' bear on the other members of his 'group' is not explained.
Finally, there is the matter of Waugh's religion. Mr Carpenter seems reluctant to grant Waugh a serious belief in Roman Catholicism. He surmises that he joined the Catholic church after his divorce from his first wife in order to protect himself from the danger of marrying again. Nor does Mr Carpenter concede that the sub- ject of Brideshead Revisited is, as Waugh thought, 'the operation of divine grace'; on the contrary it 'shows the same malicious fate at work that can be found in all Waugh's novels'.
In life, Waugh effortlessly routed critics or interviewers who sought to knock him off balance by reference to his religion, way of life, or social attitudes. Mr Carpen- ter wrote a fine biography of Waugh's near-contemporary, W. H. Auden, but he has gone into the ring with Waugh inade- quately prepared. His jabs and swings only graze their target. So, with the second volume of Stannard to come, and the next biographer, Selina Hastings, still to climb into the ring, Waugh has not yet met his match. Yet the old pro with the lightning
footwork had a glass jaw, as revealed by his near-heroic work of self-revelation, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Indeed, The Pinfold Generation, dealing with drunken- ness, madness, and despair among Waugh's contemporaries, would be a far more interesting subject than the ex- hausted Brideshead Generation.
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