Brideshead Re-revisited

Evelyn Waugh first visited Madresfield, the Worcestershire seat of the Earls Beauchamp, in October 1931, shortly before his twenty-eighth birthday. He had been a friend of the heir, Lord Elmley, at Oxford and, according to Paula Byrne's new book, was also, briefly, lover of a younger son, the attractive, alcoholic Hugh Lygon. But Waugh's first visit to the house was not on the invitation of either of these two: it followed from a recommendation of Teresa 'Baby' Jungman to enlist at Captain Jack Hance's famous Riding Academy in Malvern. At a dinner in London, he was introduced to a Lygon sister and through this connection was brought several times to Madresfield during his week-long stay at a nearby hotel. The Lygon paterfamilias, Lord Beauchamp, was abroad, exiled on threat of arrest for homosexuality, and Lady Beauchamp, from whom he was divorced, no longer lived in the house. This left the younger generation in giddy command of an enormous, well-run, moated treasure palace. It is well known that Waugh was entranced by 'Mad' (as the house was known) and by the lively siblings who lived there, forming deep, lifelong friendships with two of the Lygon sisters, Ladies Mary and Dorothy. It is also well known that the family and the spirit of the house inspired the story of Brideshead Revisited.
Waugh hated it when readers tried to identify real people behind the masks of his fictional characters. 'Fuck you,' he wrote to his friend Ann Fleming in 1961 when she guessed that Brigadier Bob Laycock was the model for Captain Ivor Claire in Unconditional Surrender. 'For Christ's sake lay off the idea of Bob=Claire ... Just shut up about Laycock.' 'If she breathes a suspicion of this cruel fact,' he wrote in his diary, 'it will be the end of our friendship.' An 'author's note' at the beginning of Brideshead reads, 'I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they. EW', and to Dorothy Lygon he said at the time of his writing Brideshead:
It's all about a family whose father lives abroad, as it might be Boom [your father] - but it's not Boom - and a younger son: people will say he is like Hughie, but you'll see he's not really Hughie - and there's a house as it might be Mad, but it isn't really Mad.
Few have taken Waugh at his word, though Dorothy Lygon (clearly the model for Cordelia Flyte) loyally wrote: 'When I first read it [Brideshead], it did not seem to me he had used us as characters.' Her sister Mary, however, instantly recognised aspects of Hughie in Waugh's portrait of the dissolute aristocrat Sebastian Flyte. The art-deco chapel at Brideshead is indisputably modelled on the private chapel at Madresfield, the park and drive are also Madresfield, and there are hundreds of other connections between real life and the apparently fictional world of Brideshead. If Waugh were still alive and had any 'Fuck You's left in his breath he would be directing them now at Paula Byrne - not because her book is unsympathetic to Waugh (unlike many of his biographers she seems to be entirely on his side), but because her whole thesis is devoted to the unpicking of real history from the intricate shadow of Waugh's fiction.
In her dedication to this singular task Byrne has been exceptionally zealous. I know this because she came several times to rummage through my archive. She was a most welcome guest but it was only with the utmost strength that I succeeded in refusing her entreaties to be shown bundles of letters that had been entrusted to me on the strict understanding that I would not reveal them to anyone. In the end I compromised by summarising a few of them in my own words. The keeper of the National Archives at Kew was less resilient. Somehow Byrne succeeded in persuading him to release to her the divorce petition of Lord and Lady Beauchamp that was supposed to be kept as a closed file until 2032. It is a lurid document that details incidents of fellatio, sodomy and intercrural masturbation, naming eleven men (mostly household servants) with whom Lord Beauchamp had committed 'acts of gross indecency'. She even managed to outperform detectives at the time by uncovering further names of Beauchamp boyfriends including one servant-lover, confusingly called Robert Byron.
Lord Beauchamp's forced exile was precipitated by the jealousy of his brother-in-law, Bendor, Duke of Westminster, whom Waugh later described as of 'mediocre intelligence, liable to aberrations of malevolence ... a man whose restlessness and capricious vanity made him less than universally loved'. An understatement - the Duke was detested by his Lygon nephews and nieces, who never forgave him for his involvement in their father's downfall.
Waugh first met Beauchamp on the occasion of his confirmation in Rome in the summer of 1932. They got on well together and there can be little doubt that the older man was used as one of several models for the exiled father in Brideshead, Lord Marchmain. Another, incidentally, was Hubert Duggan (a onetime boyfriend of Mary Lygon), whose deathbed conversion in October 1943, aided, abetted and witnessed by Waugh, inspired Lord Marchmain's similar final act of Christian acceptance - a sign of the cross.
At the time that Waugh was writing Brideshead, between February and June 1944, his old friend, Hugh, was long dead, killed in an unexplained accident in Germany in August 1936, involving a car, a pavement, a lot of hot sun and, one suspects, a large amount of alcohol. 'A sweet, sweet man ... He was one of the gentlest of them all, very knowledgeable, very quiet,' is how Sir Alexander Glen (who led Waugh and Lygon on a near fatal expedition to Spitsbergen in 1934) remembered him. 'It is the saddest news I ever heard,' Waugh wrote. 'I shall miss him bitterly.' As in Brideshead, where the youthful homosexual love of Charles Ryder for Sebastian Flyte matures into the richer devotion of Charles for Sebastian's sister, Julia, so, in real life, Evelyn's friendship grew away from Hugh towards his younger sister Mary Lygon. There is something ineffably moving about the Evelyn-Mary Lygon relationship - always platonic, sometimes smutty, humorous, loyal, deep and lifelong. In their letters to one another - some of them reproduced here for the first time - an extraordinary bond is revealed, one that I find far more memorable and affecting than the relationships that are revealed in the pages of Waugh's correspondence with his other close female friends, Ann Fleming, Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford.
Paula Byrne's Mad World skilfully traces the bonds not just between Waugh and the Lygons but between all the Lygons themselves - their passion for their father, their ambiguous attitude to their mother, the terrible rift caused by Beauchamp's ignominious exile, the cruelty of Elmley to his younger brother in financial distress, Elmley's marriage to a divorcée Dane (strong echoes here of Bridey's marriage to Mrs Muspratt in Brideshead) and another sister, Sibell's, problematic affair with Max Beaverbrook.
Mad World is full of fascinating anecdotes, many of which will be new, even to the most fanatical amasser of Wavian trivia. Paula Byrne has produced a strong and romantic book that is at once a touching story of deep friendships, an astute piece of literary criticism and an important contribution to the canon of Waugh biography.
Alexander Waugh is working on a scholarly edition of his grandfather's letters and is eager to make contact with anyone who knows the whereabouts of any unpublished Evelyn Waugh correspondence.