The Pursuit of Laughter (4 page)

When I was about 14 the organist left the village and Mr Ward asked me to play the organ. It was a very old organ; a village boy pumped the air into it, and if he stopped no sound came. I knew the service by heart; the little tunes of hymns and canticles were
simple
, and I knew just when to give Mr Ward his note and how to play the responses
accompanying
Mrs Ward’s powerful contralto. Occasionally the organ seemed to come alive and emitted squeaks and groans, but I knew it would have to stay quiet when it ran out of air. I used two stops, one for noise, one for pathos.

The Asthall manor was on the edge of the Heythrop country; we were allowed to hunt accompanied by the groom, but only if we rode sidesaddle. My habit, made in Cirencester, was probably not very elegant. I hacked to the meet, almost everyone did in those days.

The years went by, the slow years of childhood. We became very fond of the old house, and wondered if my father had forgotten about his dream. He loved fishing for trout in the Windrush, which flowed by the bottom of our garden. But he spent most of his time in the coverts, shooting in winter and watching the baby pheasants in spring, with his favourite keeper, Steele who, during the rearing season, lived in an old railway carriage in the wood, tending his broody hens.

But my father had another hobby: motorcars. He spent hours at Cowley with William Morris. As he had nothing much to do, it seems a pity, looking back, that he didn’t earn his living by joining this immensely successful firm. It never occurred either to him or Morris, later Lord Nuffield, that his expertise might be turned to gold.

The dream persisted. My father sold Asthall and began to build again. Not just a house; he built cottages, stables, garages, all over again. As though at a loss as to what to build next, he even built a squash court, although none of us played.

How much did we mind leaving Asthall? Speaking for myself, not desperately. We had the same village life, the same Christmas parties for all the children from Asthall and Swinbrook and, although my parents saw no neighbours, there were some we liked. In any case, I was nearly grown up, life was about to begin, real life not dreams in a cold
schoolroom
. Being so incompetent, so ‘bad’ at everything, no longer seemed to matter.

‘Families, I hate you!’ said André Gide.

We never again had real family life after we left Asthall. We grew up, married; Tom no longer came for endless holidays. We saw each other constantly, but there was no longer the daunting, rather stifling feeling that you knew whom you would see, eat with, quarrel with, ride with, bore and be bored by, laugh with, day after day, week after week. Yet I did miss Asthall, its aged beauty, its terrifying pitch darkness at night, the odd sounds and
fresh smells.

Nearly 20 years later my sister Nancy wrote her best-selling novels
The Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
. Her masterpiece was her lifelike portrait of my father as Uncle Matthew. An old refugee from eastern Europe came into Heywood Hill’s bookshop where she worked, to congratulate her. ‘Onkel Matthew!’ he said. ‘He woz my father!’ Rather
surprised
, she told this to Evelyn Waugh. ‘Uncle Matthew is everybody’s father,’ was his reply.

My father was at his most Uncle-Matthew-like at Asthall. Angry, funny, affectionate, furious, uproarious by turns, and always totally unpredictable. At Swinbrook his gaiety seemed to diminish, and he became almost, if never quite, grown up.

Sunday Times
(1997)

Malicious, witty, sometimes affectionate, mercilessly teasing each other, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh corresponded for twenty years until his death. Having both sides more than doubles the fun of these letters.

They began to write regularly when she went to live in France. In 1945 Nancy told everyone she had voted Labour, and Evelyn pretended to think she alone was responsible for the grey and dreary England of the late 40s. At the end of the war he had written
Brideshead Revisited
; it made a lot of money which was snatched away from him by the tax gatherer. Rations became smaller. It was all her fault, and then she deserted the country she had ruined.

The War itself had been a disillusion. He had wished to look upon it as a crusade, but it ended with half Europe ruled by godless communists, while France and Italy seethed with barely hidden civil war.

Nancy was on the crest of the wave. She was in love with a Frenchman, ‘the Colonel’, and she too had written a bestseller,
The Pursuit of Love
, so that she was rich enough to
follow
him to Paris. Her marriage to Peter Rodd was on the rocks. She pretended to be
living
in a land flowing with cream and caviar, and shut her eyes to the shortages of Liberation. Evelyn rebuked her for saying ‘Heavenly 1948’, the blackest year in world
history
since 1793, according to him. The Colonel was as slippery as an eel, but she shut her eyes to that too. It is all so long ago that shafts of bitter humour, once deleted for fear of libel, can now illumine the scene. The actors are all dead.

Both writers were wildly funny, and the result is an irresistible book. The victims of their unkind jokes are mostly well-known, so that the letters will delight and possibly
horrify
nearly everybody.

Nancy and Evelyn earned their living by writing; money is a constant theme and worry. Evelyn had a large family to educate; Nancy’s only extravagance was Dior. She implored
Evelyn to come to France, but when he did it was seldom a success. He quarrelled with Duff Cooper at Chantilly, and generally made himself objectionable, as only he knew how.

Nancy found this quite difficult to deal with, and their friendship was really based on the letters. They made each other scream with laughter, the shadows were light. All the same, they lengthened: Nancy’s love affair did not prosper, and Evelyn began to feel his Church under threat.

The advent of Pope John XXIII was a sorrow to Evelyn. The reforms of the Vatican Council knocked him flat. He was only 62, and he dreaded the possibility of having to live with these reforms another twenty years. Strangely enough, his desperately sad last letters, in March 1966, were to me. I had asked him a question. He wrote: ‘There is nowhere I want to go, nothing I want to do.’ He died on Easter Day 1966.

The letters are impeccably edited by Charlotte Mosley, an expert on the period and its fauna; she has cleverly solved every puzzle.

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh,
ed. Mosley, C.
The Times
(1996)

‘He was one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century’ but ‘as a man he was a monster’. These are the two premises upon which, Selina Hastings says, Evelyn Waugh’s reputation rests. No mention of the wittiest and funniest writer of our time. She has depicted an authentic monster, more monstrous by far than the Evelyn of previous
biographers
. Drunken, snobbish, insultingly rude; a neglectful son, a bullying father, a
quarrelsome
friend, an impossible man. Her source is Evelyn himself, who would have readily admitted to this catalogue of sins of commission and omission.

She sees him as a great artist and admirable craftsman, but with a character so flawed by rage and cruelty and so overlaid with deep and selfish boredom that nobody in their senses would want to spend much time with him, however admiringly they read his books. Her biography is beautifully written and fascinatingly told, but something is missing.

If Selina Hastings could have spent one single day with Evelyn Waugh, how
enormously
she would have appreciated the irresistible charm of the man, the cleverness, the sharply expressed and individual point of view, the wonderful jokes, the laughter!

To take his sins listed above: drunkenness yes, when young, and more drink than was good for him all his life. Rudeness, yes, if people were rude or annoying to him. But the neglectful son had from earliest childhood known that his elder brother Alec was the adored favourite; and the bullying father was moody but often too, the originator of
family
jokes.

As to the quarrelsome friend, he quarrelled with Henry Yorke and with Randolph Churchill, both alcoholics like himself. All three became prematurely old, decrepit and
furiously miserable; bored, literally, to death. All died in their late fifties or early sixties, their lives a sort of temperance tract. His other friends were devoted and life-long.

Naturally the rage and cruelty that were part of his character were exacerbated by drink. At Oxford he was drunk for days on end, which was devastating for his finances, his university work and, ultimately, for his health. Yet all his disasters, all his quirks were put to use by him; nothing was wasted.

His failures at Oxford were distressing to the good old father, who paid his debts but had hoped for a brilliant degree to be followed by a steady publishing job in his firm. He bored and irritated Evelyn, who in order to get away became a private schoolmaster, which produced the hilarious
Decline and Fall
. His Oxford friendships, much later, were the origin of
Brideshead
.

Waugh’s raffish London life and failed first marriage went into
Vile Bodies
and
A
Handful of Dust
; his travels as a newspaper reporter made
Scoop
and
Black Mischief
. Even his distressing breakdown, the result of sleeping pills mixed with alcohol, became the brilliant
Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
. And so on throughout life with the war and his appalling
disillusions
producing his masterpiece,
Sword of Honour
. His novels are autobiographical,
embellished
with his uniquely comic genius.

Selina Hastings is perceptive about his religion, to him all important. The final tragedy for Evelyn, far more terrible than the Common Man whose Age he so disliked, was when the foundations of his faith were shaken by the upheavals in the Church caused by the Vatican Council and Pope John XXIII. The common man with a guitar performing in the aisle was more than he could bear.

His quarrel with Randolph Churchill was triggered by their forced intimacy during their mission to Tito during the war. This famous episode is told here to perfection, and is one of the funniest things in a fundamentally sad book: the history of a monster. But such a charming, witty, clever, amusing monster as never was; quite simply the best
company
on earth.

It is impossible not to think how greatly the author of this brilliant book and her
subject
would have appreciated one another, and to regret they were not contemporaries.

When Evelyn Waugh died, Nancy Mitford wrote to a friend: ‘I see he is one of the people I have loved most in my life.’ Are monsters so deeply mourned?

Evelyn Waugh
, Hastings, S.
Evening Standard
(1994)