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Entries and exits

Auberon Waugh

The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh edited by Michael Davie (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £795) Late in Evelyn Waugh's•diaries there comes an entry for 28 December 1960 describing a luncheon party at Christopher Sykes's home in Dorset. The two old friends reminisced about a jaunt to Paris they had taken together in 1949 which involved a visit to Paul Claudel, the playwright who would then have been eighty-one years old. My father's account was presumably written soon after the luncheon party:

Christopher and I talked of our luncheon with Claudel which was dim in Illy memory. He had taken me there on the day of our jaunt to Paris after we had drunk heavily en voyage. The old man was deaf and dumb. All his family—wife, sons and daughters-in-law—sat round the table . .. Lively conversation, mostly in English. Every now and then the old man's lips were seen to .move and there would be a cry 'Papa is speaking!' and a hush broken only by unintelligible animal noises. Some of these were addressed to me and I thought he said: 'How would You put into English "potage de midi"?' I replied: 'Soup at luncheon'. It transpired that he was the author of a work named Partage de Midi. His tortoise eyes glistened with hostility.'

He later describes being made to sit beside the old man looking at an album as 'his arthritic fingers turned the pages . . . Anything that caught his fancy had been pasted in. Some were humorous, some not. There Was a group of the Goebbels family. "That's runny," I said, feeling on safe ground. "I think it's very sad," he mumbled. The flat in Passy was dark and ugly with objects brought from Japan. When we left he came to the drawing room door and .. . gave me another look of reptilian hate.'

When Sykes came to write Waugh's official biography ten yearslater, his account of the incident was rather different :

Evelyn was much surprised at the invitation to meet Claudel. He was also rather nervous, so much so that before driving to the Claudel apartment he insisted on us both praying for success in the Madeleine.

Our petitions Were but partially granted ... The host was in high spirits and ques tioned Evelyn closely and with overflowing mirth about the burial customs of Forest Lawns

At the end of this formidable and excellent repast, we moved into the main room

of the apartment. There then occurred an incident of which Evelyn gave many accounts which vary essentially from what I remember. Claudel kept a book of press cuttings . . . [in which] eminent people were made to look ridiculous. They were very funny and Claudel kept up a continuous and witty commentary while displaying these treasures. According to Evelyn, Claudel turned a page on which there was a grotesque photograph funnier than any hitherto. Evelyn roared with' redoubled laughter, upon which Claudel shut the book, rose and stiffly said goodbye. The photograph that had aroused Evelyn's special mirth was of Claude!. Sykes then proceeds to suggest that this never happened: 'He [E.W.] stuck to it after that and came to believe it sincerely. I feel fairly sure that it was his novelist's instinct at work again ...'

The curious thing about these two accounts is not so much that their memories should differ—in one, Claude! is 'deaf and dumb', capable only of 'unintelligible animal noises', in the other he is in 'high spirits', full of 'overflowing mirth' and keeping up a 'continuous and witty commentary' —but that Sykes's memory of Waugh's account should be so imperfect. Plainly he has confused the 'pwage-purtage' episode with the Goebbels episode, although I have no doubt that Sykes's description of the lunch party is as honest a description of what actually took place. It suggests that, what with one thing and another, Sykes never got round to reading the account of his own lunch party of 28 December 1960— admittedly written eleven years after the Claudel -episode, for which period no diary survives. If he had, he would surely have substituted what was in fact Waugh's account of the incident, which is much funnier.

Others will seize on a final discrepancy as being even more significant. Sykes gives this account of Claudel's verdict on the meeting: Later. Claude! told a friend of mine that k had been very interested to meet Evelyn Waugh, 'nuns.' he added, 'i/ hri .manque rallure tin vrai gentleman'.

Waugh's version of this, in his Diaries, is: Next .clay he told a daughter-in-law that both Christopher and I were fres gentlemen'.

One's instinct, here, is to suppose that Sykes has got it right, although it is a feature of his biography that whatever puzzling anxiety my father may have shown to be thought a • vrai gentleman' is more than matched by Sykes's equally. puzzling anxiety to show that he was no such thing. My guess is that Sykes had just told the story at the end of a formidable and excellent repast in his own home; Waugh, being very bad at French, slightly had of hearing and no doubt half-tipsy, had picked up the words 'vrai gentlemen' had joined in the general

mirth under the impression that he had just

been described as 'fres gentleman'. But I very much doubt whether Claudel des cribed him as 'fres gentleman'. Quite apart from any other considerations, it is sloppy and unidiomatic French.

Perhaps I will be accused of spending too much time on a single and not particularly

important incident. My reason is that on reflection I decided this was the best way to illustrate the value and shortcomings of the Diaries. If my method also seems to hint at shortcomings in the official biography, that is an additional misfortune. In fact, the decision to publish the diaries was taken long before anybody had seen the Official biography—Sykes was still engaged on his bouquet to the fragrant memory of Nancy Astor—and the reasons behind the decision Were, I gather, largely financial.

The sequence of events leading to publication of an edited version of the Diaries in the Observer, as I understand them, was that the Diarieswere first sent to my father's agent and old friend, A. D. Peters, for forwarding to Sykes. Peters immediately saw their value and took them to the Sunday Times where they were read by Leonard Russell who-advised against buying them. However, the Sunday Times made a small offer which Astor doubled.

In the light of subsequent criticism, Peters's behaviour may seem curious. He was a jealous guardian of my father's reputation, if anything erring on the side of excessive caution, and sent many film producers away with fleas in their ears. He may have been influenced by my mother's anxieties about money, which later proved groundless. He died before the Observer serialisations appeared; Russell died not long after. In fact, the obituary columns of The Times over the last few years might make a useful appendix to the Diaries. But I am sure that his decision was the right one, just as I am sure that nobody could have written a better biography than Christopher Sykes.

The Diaries themselves are monstrously long and have been very little edited by Michael Davie, who supplies useful footnotes and occasional, quite inoffensive, linking material. Those who read the much more heavily edited version which appeared in the Observer may have formed the impression that they comprise a monotonous succession of unrelated episodes of drunkenness and sodomy, with occasional, bizarre protestations of Catholic piety. It is true there is a certain amount of this, and the Diaries would be much less readable without it.

The first long section is the diary he kept as a schoolboy at Lancing. Many years later, he reveals that he re-read this passage in one of his spasmodic attempts to 'understand' his own son (the reviewer) who was then the same age: In the hope of understanding Bron better I read the diaries 1 kept at his age. 1 was appalled at the vulgarity and priggishness. (13 February 1958) Elsewhere (I think in the first volume of his autobiography) he wrote of the consistent caddishness' of his Lancing diaries and people may decide that it is a scurvy trick of his executor and sole trustee (like Pooh-Bah, I now combine both these high offices in my own person) to expose them to the vulgar gaze when he was so ashamed of them in his own life-time. Yes, well, I can see they have a point. The editor spotted important.traits in the writer's character which persist throughout his life, listing these as 'interest in prose style, intellectual self-confidence, a sceptical attitude towards those in authority, detachment, a certain puritanism.' There is also discernible in this section (it cannot be denied) a certain crude snobbery which is not particularly apparent in the later sections. He may have overcome this failing in later life, as he certainly overcame the extraordinarily exuberant team spirit which emerges from time to time. Or he may have refined it into that insistence on the highest standards which, as his apologists argue, was so often mistaken for snobbery by his critics. Certainly it is a grotesque'calumny to describe him as a simple snob.

What the Diaries to a certain extent obscure is the fact that for the last twentynine years of his shortish life, he was more than anything else a family man, albeit a reluctant one, living most of his days at his country home in the bosom of his family. Hischildren makevariousshortappearances, nearly always in some opprobrious context, but it would need an exceptionally astute reader to divine the true extent of the burden they were on him. There is no suggestion that he ever grudged the vast amounts he spent on their education—rather the reverse, he welcomed the end of the school holidays with loud cries--but there is very little suggestion, either, that the bulk of his adult life was spent cowering away from them. Growing children are seldom very elegant, amusing or smart, and 1 think it was this vulgarity he resented most. It is not a usual thing for a man to decide against his own children for snobbish reasons, but it was an undeniably awkward aspect of the parent-child relationship in his case that he was liable to decide against any of his children at any moment on these grounds. and frequently did so.

At any rate, Michael Davie decided to give us the Lancing section pretty well in full. If I had been editor--I never dreamed, when the appointment was made, that there would be so much money in it --I would have cut it savagely. This would not have been on the grounds that certain passages cast my father in an unacceptably odious light-how many of us can put our hands on our hearts and say we have always been as delightful as we are now? By the standards of most adolescents' secret lives, I should judge these revelations less odious than might have been expected. NO, the reason I should have cut the Lancing section so drastically would have been boredom. Perhaps Mr Davie is right in his more reverent approach, but it would be a shame if anyone missed the later years through having been bored stiff in the early ones.

There isn't really much in the Lancing section, although it is intriguing to find Tom Driberg up to his tricks at such an early stage. The inventor of the William Hickey column reported finding J. F. Roxburgh, later to become the great headmaster of Stowe, in flagrante della() with a boy called --. Waugh comments rather priggishly: 'I should have thought J.F. had better taste.'

Intrigued by this, [turned to my typescript version of the Diaries to see whose identity was hidden by Mr Davie's, charitable omission. A common surname, it meant nothing to me, and I was reluctant to read through the forty-four entries listed in Who's Who to see which was at Lancing in October 1921. The lad is probably into his seventies by now, and it seems strange that Davie should judge him incapable of laughing at the fact that he was found in an armchair with J. F. Roxburgh fifty-five years ago.

Davie's use of this device to proteCt the identity of individuals named strikes me as rum, but then I suppose it is one of the privileges of editorship to indulge an occasional caprice or two. In a preface, Davie suggests that apart from libel and the risk of causing intolerable offence, he has been governed by his own judgment of what is likely to cause lasting distress and what will cause only temporary embarrassment, irritation or anger. Under one or another of these dispensations, my Lord Weidenfeld's name disappears from various anecdotes about his allegedly adulterous affair with the Mrs Cyril Connolly who later, briefly, had the pleasure of becoming the second Mrs Weidenfeld. This seems strange to me, as I do not believe that Lord Weidenfeld is ' the sort of man who would demand. such excisions in his capacity as publisher of the Evelyn Waugh Diaries--under penalty, one must suppose, of suing himself for libel.

An even odder omission occurs on page 740, where my father describes a visit to a Victorian picture exhibition in Peckham: 'Two pansies were going round. One proved to be ----the critic so I took him back to St James's for a drink,—

A comparison with the original shows this to have read: 'One proved to be Russell, the Sunday Times critic.' The only other mention of Leonard Russell, the man who, later, aS Associate Editor and Chief Literary Editor of -the Sunday Times, was t o discourage that newspaper from serialising the Diaries, comes on page 692: 'I was disappointed to find my story (Scott-King's Modern Europe) reviewed by a young man called Russell in the Sunday Times after Desmond had expressed unqualified pleasure in it. The standard of modern reviewing is lamentably low.' , I should have thought that Russell's widow, the splendid Ms Dilys Powell, could take it on the chin that once. twenty-one years ago, Evelyn Waugh mistook her husband for a pansy. Strange.

It is enjoyable to speculate on what my father would have made of literary London nowadays, to the extent that it survives at all. He would certainly have been tickled to discover that in the grammar schooland provincial university-infested reaches of the Times Literary Supplement the ludicrous Alastair Forbes (whom my father dismisses in a single phrase as 'a smart aleck employee of Esmond's)) is now taken for (a) a tremendous swell /and (b) a grand old man of letters. I think he would be sad to see what has happened to his old friend AnthonY Powell, whose earlier work he so much admired..

He would be even sadder, of course, to see what has happened to White's Club. On my rare visits there, even I am appalled bY the vulgarity of the fat businessmen who sit around thinking they have inherited the world of Evelyn Waugh. No, the trail which Mr Michael Davie so admirably blazes does not lead to White's Club, or to any furtive, drawling, insecure relics of the upper class ascendancy to be found there. It leads, I should like to think, to its closest equivaletlt in recent history, the newly disbanded Court of King Harold.

Mr Michael Davie is an excellent editor and first class journalist,_ and only verY slightly common. I suspect he went to Charterhouse, or possibly Marlborough or Stowe. It really doesn't matter at all that he should refer to the late Lord Dufferin as 'Basil Ava' in a biographical footnote on page 796, although I can't escape a certaia frisson of anxiety when I think how much my father would have minded. More importantly, he is one of the -very few journalists among all the cringing hacks of Fleet Street, who has dipped his toe into the murky pool of what will undoubtedly prove the major newspaper story of the last tea years.

One day, of course, the story of the Fantastic Lady Falkender will have to be told, of the curious collection of emigre businessmen, sycophants, crooks, runts and crooked runts who descended in warring factions on the centre of government power. It can be kept out of the public print for a time by the rattle of libel writs, but so long as there are patient and conscientious journalists like Mr Davie around, we can be sure it will eventually see the light of dayOnce'again, I think the Sunday Times maY be inhibited from breaking the story, this time possibly by too close association with one or two of the runts involved. What the Observer's new editor—a small but pluck)/ man called Donald Gilchrist-Trelford—has to do is .to point Davie's nose in the right direction and give him his head. It maY Yet prove to be the Waugh Diaries' most important achievement that they gave Davie the stature to tackle this job. They

may also have been useful in putting him in touch with the enterprising Lord Weidenfeld, who will undoubtedly be pleased to publish the Falkender book in due course—with or without various unimportant omissions.