Paula Byrne - Mad World - Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead

Evelyn also doubled in the role of a penniless peer called Lord Borrowington who appears to be a cocaine addict. He was unapologetic about advertising the setting of some scenes in the distinctly unglamorous location of North End Road, Golders Green. Elmley was less eager to advertise himself: he acted under the assumed name Michael Murgatroyd for fear of offending his father, who was close to becoming leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords. An officer in the Guards, who played the part of the king, also hid behind an assumed name. Elsa (who later married Charles Laughton) took no fee, only free lunches. The main purpose of the film was to poke fun at Sligger Urquhart for being ‘Roman Catholic and a snob’. We do not know if he ever saw The Scarlet Woman but it was shown at the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) in 1925. Greenidge came to believe that the film had caught the subversive spirit of Oxford in the twenties, and represented ‘an Evelyn who had seen through Roman Catholicism and the British aristocracy’ – something that could not exactly be said of Brideshead Revisited . The script undoubtedly reveals Evelyn’s interest in religion, his gift for farce and his early attraction to the more glamorous aspects of modernity embodied in the world of movie-making. The film also features a very fine motor car, which probably belonged to Elmley.

The Scarlet Woman was acted in a style that would now be called high camp. Greenidge was an active homosexual, and the entire film-making project was clearly deeply bound up with the Hypocrites’ willingness to push at the boundaries of taste, decency and the law.

Terence Greenidge later remembered Evelyn’s mother telling him that her son had changed profoundly by this time, that as a child he was loving, fun and trusting, but that something had happened to put him on his guard. Yet he was always, according to Greenidge, ‘joyously, healthily rude, as was the great Dr Johnson’. The combination of guarded watchfulness and unabashed smuttiness may suggest that Evelyn was simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the world in which he found himself.

The bohemian gatherings he attended with Alec were often ‘bottle parties’ in ‘unfashionable areas’. He hankered instead for the statelier world of engraved visiting cards and black velvets. The bohemian set didn’t really suit him. The parties were full of actors, painters, and men just down from the university who had no idea of what to do with their lives. Men, in other words, who were all too like himself.

In his diary he recalled one particularly memorable party at Mrs Cecil Chesterton’s flat in Fleet Street, at which ‘pansies, prostitutes and journalists and struggling actors’ all got ‘quite quite drunk and in patches lusty’. Among the guests he singled out a certain ‘Peter Pusey with whom Hugh Lygon sodomises’. Hugh’s taste for the crime that took its name from the City of the Plain was no secret. Alec, meanwhile, turned up late and a little drunk, then proceeded to carry off ‘the ugliest woman in the room’.

At another party Evelyn was so drunk that he ended up playing football with the butler’s top hat. Parties in private houses were followed by hard drinking at nightclubs, but there was a seedy and unglamorous feel to it all. All the promise of his Oxford days seemed to have evaporated. The Scarlet Woman had been a reprieve, but Evelyn had no prospects. It seemed that all his richer friends had places to go after graduating, whereas he sensed himself becoming a hanger-on on the fringes of the artistic world, or, even worse, a sponger (the kind of character he would represent so mercilessly in the character of John Beaver in A Handful of Dust ).

He was yearning for his lost paradise. Spiritually he was still at Oxford. Its lure, the knowledge that the city of dreams was ‘still full of friends’, made him quit art school. Invited to an Oxford party by John Sutro, he accepted gratefully, eager to be reminded of what he was missing. His unexpected attendance was greeted warmly. All the old Hypocrites were there: Harold Acton, Hugh Lygon, Robert Byron, even his first lover Richard Pares. It was a luncheon party that seemed to stretch on for ever, as in the old days. They ate hot lobster, partridges and plum pudding, drank sherry, mulled claret and ‘a strange rum-like liqueur’. Hugh, as usual, was drinking too much. Evelyn left in time for a tea party and then a beer at the New Reform Club with Lord Elmley and Terence Greenidge. A message then came from Hugh, by this time installed in the bar of the Dramatic Society, proposing a trip to Banbury. But instead they reconvened in the old Hypocrites’ rooms, where they drank whisky and watched The Scarlet Woman . Evelyn’s recollection of the rest of the evening was hazy: all he could remember was that he got hold of a sword and escaped from Balliol via a window after the college had been locked for the night.

The next morning he started drinking again with Hugh, and then they had lunch together. An umbilical cord connected him still to his alma mater. He found himself dressing as an undergraduate again, sporting the latest fashion of turtleneck sweater and broad trousers. He was delighted with the roll-neck top – it was ‘convenient for lechery because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like studs and ties’. The garment also served to hide the boils on the necks of dermatologically challenged young gentlemen.

The Jazz Age had come to Oxford. Cars full of flappers came up from London every weekend. There was a new smart set. They danced to the Harlem Blues and the strains of Gershwin. Evelyn threw himself into the rowdy, partying atmosphere. He returned every weekend. But he knew that he was becoming self-destructive. He was often in the company of Hugh. Once he was drunk for three days – a condition that for Hugh was perfectly normal. After lunching together they would continue drinking until they were too drunk to stand.

The only way out from this alcoholic spiral was to get a proper job. And the only job that seemed suitable for an Oxford man who had failed to achieve Honours and who had no inclination for either physical labour or further study was schoolmastering. With great reluctance, he began to look for a position.

Before descending into the teaching profession, Evelyn fell in love again. This time, though, it was not with a fellow undergraduate but with an entire family. They were the Plunket Greenes. For Evelyn, they would prove to be the forerunners of the Lygons.

He of course knew David and Richard Plunket Greene from Oxford. They were members of the Hypocrites and very hard to miss: David was six foot seven inches tall and Richard a powerfully built young man. David, a ‘languid dandy devoted to all that was fashionable’, would die a heroin addict at a tragically early age. Coote (Lady Dorothy) Lygon remembered that he took drugs at a time when that was a very fast thing to do. When Hugh brought him home to Madresfield she used to swoon at the very sight of him. She developed a huge crush.

Evelyn became close friends with Richard, eventually serving as best man at his wedding. The boys’ father, Harry, was a singer and their mother a gifted amateur violinist. Harry Plunket Greene was friendly with England’s leading composer, Edward Elgar. He sang the baritone part in the first performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius and was the first to sing settings of A. E. Housman’s poems, A Shropshire Lad . He frequently appeared in events at Elgar’s Malvern Concert Club. This brought him into contact with the Lygons, who were Malvern’s most famous family and leading patrons of the festival. Elgar was supposed to have composed the most enigmatic of his famous Enigma Variations as a musical portrait of Hugh’s aunt, Mary. When Plunket Greene married Gwen Ponsonby, he came into a family relationship with the Lygons, who were cousins to the Ponsonbys.