Bridsehead

Brideshead Revisited must surely rank as one of the best-loved novels of the 20th century. Aloysius the teddy bear, Sebastian Flyte being sick through Charles Ryder’s window, Anthony Blanche declaiming TS Eliot through a megaphone – these images offer us a glimpse into an Arcadia we can never hope to enter. Evelyn Waugh believed the novel to be his masterpiece – only later did he come to disapprove of its sentimentality.

People have always tried to pinpoint the “sources” for Waugh’s characters. While acknowledging that Waugh’s supreme artistry lay in his ability to create originals out of composites, Paula Byrne has written a highly accomplished book about the family that came to inspire the Flytes of Brideshead: the Lygons (pronounced Liggon) of Madresfield. It was the family with whom Waugh fell in love, one that had more than its share of tragedy as well as laughter.

Byrne is excellent at sketching in the early lives of Waugh and the Lygons, switching between the two milieux with ease. She shows convincingly that Waugh had a tendency to fall for whole families – first the homely Flemings, then the dashing Plunket Greenes and finally the waiflike Lygons. While Waugh grew up in the comfort of suburbia, the Lygons had a childhood of unimaginable luxury at Madresfield. One of three houses lived in by the Earl Beauchamp and his Countess, Madresfield had its own private railway station and the family and its entourage would shuttle between houses in their own train.

It was rumoured that their footmen’s fingers were covered with diamonds. (Footmen, unfortunately, were to become the downfall of the Lygons.) It was not a perfect idyll, though. The Countess’s idea of parenting was savage: when one of her daughters was stung by a jellyfish, she responded by pelting her with a bucketful. The Earl, on the other hand, was devoted to his children.

Waugh was largely unhappy at Lancing (the school to which he was sent after his brother Alec had published a scandalous novel, The Loom of Youth, about homosexual affairs at Sherborne), finding refuge in japes and pranks and in adoring a heroic schoolmaster. At Oxford, rather like his alter ego Charles Ryder in Brideshead, he consorted with clever, middle-class types, all the time yearning for something essential that he felt was eluding him. Eventually, through the aesthete Harold Acton (who really did declaim Eliot and Sitwell into Christ Church meadows), he was inducted into the Hypocrites Club, a collection of heavy drinkers led by Lord Elmley – the Earl Beauchamp’s elder son – and his brother, the ethereal Hugh Lygon.

Hugh Lygon is the most tragic figure in this book. His sisters always said he suffered from second-son syndrome, and perhaps they were right. He was the favourite of his father, and had been popular at Eton. Owing to his beauty he was always given female parts in plays – even appearing as Helen of Troy in a production of Dr Faustus. It was this fragility that drew Waugh to Hugh – he wanted to protect him. The Hypocrites’ lives were full of day-long lunches, outrageous clothes, plovers’ eggs and strenuous homosexual activity – there wasn’t much else to do, after all. Waugh had affairs with at least two men – delicately beautiful, hard-drinking, self-destructive boys – and almost certainly slept with Hugh.

Hugh Lygon probably formed the basis for Sebastian Flyte: hating himself and his homosexuality, though charming to a point. Among these revellers and rebels Waugh had finally found the love and acceptance he had been looking for, although he “was still the outsider looking in, glimpsing rather than actually passing through the low door in the wall that opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden”. He was the boy from Golders Green among the golden aristocrats, partly in awe, partly in disgust. Though firm friends with Elmley and Hugh, Waugh was never invited to Madresfield.

Waugh left Oxford in comparative disgrace, without a degree, and returned to London where he sponged off his brother, spending most of his time in nightclubs. He wrote a novel, fell in love, taught at a dull Welsh school and attempted suicide; the kinds of things, in fact, that rootless, imaginative young men do when they leave university. His second novel, Vile Bodies, was a satire of the world into which he had been plunged: it is pleasing to note that its most amusing scene, in which Agatha Runcible unwittingly gatecrashes 10 Downing Street, has its origins in fact. Two Lygon sisters, on finding they had left their latch key at home after a party, had gone to their friend Stanley Baldwin, who happened to be the prime minister, for rescue.

The catastrophe for the Lygons was the Earl Beauchamp. Devoted to public service and a man of deep culture, he had “a persistent weakness for footmen”. When interviewing them he would squeeze their buttocks and emit the same noise that grooms do when inspecting horses. His children would warn their good-looking male friends to lock their bedroom doors at night; Lady Christabel Aberconway, on arriving at the Beauchamps’ London house for tea, found the flamboyant actor Ernest Thesiger naked from the waist up and adorned with ropes of pearls. Scandal was inevitable: the Earl was brought down by his wife’s brother, the obscenely wealthy Duke of Westminster, who, when he had succeeded in hounding him out of the country, wrote: “Dear Bugger-in-law, You got what you deserved, Yours, Westminster”. Beauchamp was to become the inspiration for the exiled Lord Marchmain, Sebastian’s father.

After the Earl’s exile, Waugh spent many months staying at Madresfield, known by its young inhabitants as “Mad”. And it was a mad world – there was no one to keep an eye on the young people, as the Countess was in Cheshire. It was the libertarian Arcadia for which Waugh had always longed. It didn’t last long. The war changed everything: Hugh Lygon became an alcoholic and died young; the Lygon sisters made unsuitable marriages (one to an impoverished Russian prince; another, at the age of 70, to a notorious homosexual). Waugh remained fiercely loyal to them.

Byrne has written a marvellous book, warm, witty, and enormously readable. She shows intelligently that as the Lygons had an enormous effect on Waugh, so the Flytes do on Charles Ryder. There’s no point looking for direct correspondences. She notes that “all Waugh’s fictional people and places are subtle transformations, not direct portrayals, of ‘reality’” – the true gift of the artist. The epitaph to Brideshead still stands: “I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they”. It’s a mad world, my masters, and this book is a calm pool of sanity among the tumult of massed humanity.