A LITTLE CORRESPONDENCE
Or
TWO MENTORS
ONE
Evelyn Waugh embarked on the first volume of his autobiography in 1963. Progress was slow. In March, Waugh wrote a letter to his publishers about sourcing images of his great grandparents. So the book was underway by then, at the same time as Chapman and Hall were putting together the deluxe edition of Basil Seal Rides Again, which was published in the autumn.
By the beginning of September, Evelyn was writing to his daughter, Meg: 'I go on sentence by sentence writing my autobiography. Still at Oxford.'
By the end of October, he was waiting for the manuscript to come back from typing to decide whether it was sufficient, or needed another chapter adding to what he envisaged as being the first of three volumes.
At the beginning of November, he told his agent that the typescript was only 63,000 words so that he would indeed have to add another chapter. Taking him from his 'homosexual phase' at Oxford to the nadir of his life, as a schoolmaster in Wales in 1926.
This meant Evelyn getting in touch with Dick Young, the original of Grimes, to ask permission to write about what Young got up to at Arnold House, the school they both taught at near Llandudno. For some reason the letters that Evelyn wrote are not in the Waugh Archive. Perhaps they touch on matters too delicate. But Young's three replies from the second half of November 1963 are on file. I feel I should quote extensively from them:
From: W.R.B. Young, 12 St. Cross Hospital, Winchester
'Dear Waugh,
'What fun hearing from you! A voice from a distant, but quite vivid, past. In the meantime you have risen to fame and, I hope, fortune.
'How did you know I was at St. Cross? The only Arnold House inmate I have met here was Francis Longworth. A charming fellow. He came to see our chapel here - which people like you and my Holy Roman sister-in-law would describe as a desecrated shrine! But perhaps you too know this place? I enclose a pamphlet that might interest you.
'If anyone had told me 50 years ago that I should end up as an Old Age Pensioner in an Almshouse, I should have been horrified. But, now that I've done it, I've never been so comfortable or so well off. It might be an ideal place for you if you were not married and were a trifle older. But the only way to know about it is to visit the place; and I suppose you are unlikely to be in this neighbourhood in the foreseeable future? If so, so give me a hail and tell me beforehand.
'But I haven't dealt with your query. You have already embodied some of your Arnold House memoirs in "Decline and Fall" - or was it "Vile Bodies"? I always flatter myself that I was the original Capt. Grimes. I even perpetrated, under the pseudonym of Richard MacNaughton, a very very bad and sloppy Whodunit called "The Preparatory School Murder", in which some of my ideas came from Arnold House. But that was 30 years ago, and the outrage is decently buried! Shortly after that I met, and stayed a few days with, Rob. Chaplin who then had a living in Northampton. But I'm not good at keeping in touch with people and I haven't looked up Rob recently. He might have a good store of A.H. items for you if your book is going to support the Establishment. But if (which would be much better-selling) you want to go as far beyond T. W. As you can without being prosecuted, then I doubt if Rob would have much inspiration! Do tell me what you plan. Perhaps you will do general autobiography, of which good ones are so rare?'
What does Dick Young mean when he says that Evelyn might want to go as far beyond T.W. as he could without being prosecuted? It doesn't matter. He may mean T.E. for the Establishment. I'm correcting the odd error but something else about Young's way with words is worth conserving at length.
Nice touch about pretending that he can't remember which book Captain Grimes crops up in. And I like the implication that Evelyn should think about the possibility of getting rooms at the religious establishment in Winchester where Young resided. "Ditch Somerset, your wife and family and come live in the lap of charity, Waugh!"
Okay, back to the letter which is about to come to the crunch:
'By all means "publish-and-be-damned" as far as I am concerned; tho' I am so undistinguished and we have been out of touch for so long that I cannot imagine you would have any gen about me that would interest anyone else.
'Unfortunately I have no transport and no telephone here. But doubtless you drive a car, and Taunton isn't a thousand miles away.
'I took to the Law when I gave up prep-schooling (or vice versa), but I was then too old to start a learned profession and never took much interest in it. I am still nominally a solicitor, tho' I have not renewed my practising certificate for several years. I came here nearly two years ago when my father, who was pushing 95, died. And now I am actually paid to occupy a delightful flat in Winchester, with even my heat and light free. My own furniture and all most comfortable. Better even, than some of the "Grace-and-favour" rooms in such places as Windsor or Hampton Court where one has to be a bit distinguished and even pay rent sometimes - to say nothing of having kept the 11th Commandment.
'But a letter is a poor substitute for a talk, and in any case I must dry up and join my partner in a game of bridge at the local Club - Thursday being partnership day. I should love to hear the story of your "unpublished" life sometime.
Yours sincerely,
Dick Young
That's a typical Grimes communication, full of surprises. From the 'publish and be damned' attitude to the news that Grimes had gone from schoolmastering to practising as a solicitor. Also surprising is that on his retirement he was given lodgings in an almshouse that he was paid to live in.
What's also clear is that Young would like to meet up. Whereas all Evelyn wanted was permission to describe some of Young's terrible behaviour from nearly forty years before.
Let's see what Young wrote a few days later:
Dear Waugh,
Many thanks for your latest letter. You do not indicate whether you are likely to be in this neighbourhood at any time. At least I can always give you a small selection of drinks. Shades of Mrs Roberts!
Incidentally, when I say 'publish and be damned', I trust you will mention no scandal that could remotely connect me in the mind of the Master of St. Cross - the 'local vicar' to you. True, no man is entitled to a better reputation than he has earned. But one is at St. Cross in some slight degree on the word of "referees", and it might be extremely awkward to have any 'suspicions' about oneself floating around, tho' I imagine that several of our old Brothers may have incidents in their past to which they would not purposely draw attention!
Perhaps the Ecumenical Council may qualify you for St. Cross, tho' they move terribly slowly and I don't imagine that the Roman Church will shift its basic position by one jot or tittle. Actually, we did have an old Irish Catholic here for years who only died this year: and he was quite ready to put up a "bit prayer" in our chapel for a few minutes in the mornings. Doubtless he is burning in Hell for it at this moment!
Yours sincerely, Dick Young.
PS. Is your new book going to be something like Peter Barker's "Time Out of Life"?
Again, insouciance is to the fore. True, Young wants some reassurance that the 'Master of St Cross' is not going to link retired solicitor Young with whatever Evelyn says about paedo schoolmaster Grimes. But he is more concerned that a place might be found for Evelyn at St Cross. Yes, the two of them could be happy living together in an almshouse, swopping reminiscences late into the night while enjoying free, heat, light and beer!
As for the book mentioned, it wasn't written by Peter Barker but Peter Baker, and it's about a guy who was sentenced to 7 years at the Old Bailey. A frank account of what life was like inside a British prison at the time. I can see why such an autobiographical work would have intrigued Dick Young. I don't see why Evelyn Waugh would have considered writing such a book. Or was Young thinking of chapters of Decline and Fall: Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make. Nor iron Bars a Cage.
Are you looking forward to reading, Young's third and last letter, dear reader? Clearly written straight after receiving an immediate reply from Evelyn. Here goes:
'Dear Evelyn,
'By all means refer to any Arnold House incident. The penny doesn't quite drop for Smithers minor, tho' I remember him well. A charming child - probably a grandfather by now. And I feel sure that nobody who matters would connect me at St Cross with any pseudonym at prep school in North Wales. So 'publish and be damned'.
'"Time Out of Life" rather shows up the Home Office and Judges - as also do many of Gordon's books eg "Alibi for a Judge", tho' I think his "No Bail for the Judge" is a better yarn.
'So sorry you have no plans to be near here. But, come the summer, who knows?
Yours ever,
Dick Young
Obviously, Evelyn had told Young what he intended to write. And Young was OK with it! But I think the joke this time is the mentioning books by 'Gordon' rather than anything by Waugh. Alibi for a Judge and No Bail for a Judge trump Brideshead Revisited every time.
Anyway, Evelyn had been given carte blanche to say what he likes. So what did he say?
A few pages from the end of A Little Learning, Grimes is introduced as the new schoolmaster, about ten years older than Evelyn, a dapper man of sunny disposition who spoke in the idiom of the army: name of Captain Grimes. At first he was something of a mystery, but soon his character was revealed. Waugh describes how during a holiday the school was bussed out to the slopes of Mount Snowdon. Games were played, lunch was eaten al fresco and a great deal of license was allowed as to behaviour: boys and masters chased one another and scuffled on the grass. When it was all over and the boys were in bed back at Arnold House, the teachers sat in the common room deploring the miseries of the day. Grimes alone sat with a complacent smile.
"I confess I enjoyed myself greatly," he said as we groused. We regarded him incredulously. "Enjoyed yourself, Grimes? What did you find to enjoy?"
"Knox minor," he said with radiant simplicity. "I felt the games a little too boisterous, so I took Knox minor away behind some rocks. I removed his boot and stocking, opened my trousers, put his dear little foot in there and experienced a most satisfying emission."
Waugh does not report the gobsmacked response of his fellow masters. Just that on meeting him in later life, Grimes had forgotten the incident. Such episodes were not exceptional in his chosen lifestyle.
When Evelyn's Catholic friend, Katherine Asquith read this section in the book, she was appalled. Waugh wrote to her to explain why he'd included it. The comic timing and the surprise element were gifts that the writer simply could not turn down. But what did Young think, reading the published book in his St. Cross digs? There is no 1964 letter from Young in the Waugh Archive. But in a letter to a third party, Waugh refers to having received a 'fan' letter from Young who claimed that the book made him feel 'nostalgic'.
TWO
If Dick Young was fine about A Little Learning, there was another reader who wasn't. The first letter Evelyn received about the book after its publication was written by Dudley Carew, a friend of Evelyn's from Lancing. In fact, his best friend from his pre-Oxford years. Again I will take the liberty of reproducing the communication, more or less in full, so as the contrast with Young can be fully appreciated:
From Dudley Carew
I hope I am not being unduly bitter or stupid, but why on earth you should deliberately spit in the eye of one who has always wished you well passes my comprehension.
Crikey!
I have long letters of yours over the period of years which give a very different picture of an old friendship from the contemptuous squiggle of a caricature you have drawn of our relationship, a relationship which relegates me to a half-witted hanger-on you tolerantly patronised for a term or two in the Upper Fifth. I also have some early writings of yours. If I reproduced them, a thing I would never dream of doing, it would, I think, have annoyed you considerably.
Yipes!
I like to think that your mother and father and, for instance, Roger Fulford and Olivia, would have been better without the inclusion of that cruel, distorting, ungenerous, unnecessary little passage. The public harm you have done me is small, minute even, yet it is not altogether negligible and many people whose opinion of me I value will have little difficulty, thanks to your gratuitous clues, in identifying me with the grotesque figure of the "boy in another house".
Crivvens!
As for my private feelings, you have hurt them most damnably. If you feel like writing an amicable letter, showing some kind of understanding, it would help - and for Heaven's sake don't think you will be involved in any further correspondence or that I shall ever bore you with any news of myself or my affairs. If you don't feel like writing, tear this up and don't answer at all - it is, I suppose, petty and ridiculous anyway.
Actually, one cannot help but feel for the writer of this letter. But I'll come to that in a minute. There is one further paragraph that has been added by pen to the typed letter:
'Whatever happens, nothing can alter the gratitude I owe to you and your family for the many and most happy times I spent at Underhill.'
One can tell that the writer has been deeply hurt by Evelyn's words. One can also tell that he has things just about in proportion. He could release juvenilia of Waugh's into the world, but he wouldn't stoop so low. He could pursue Waugh to the ends of the earth with embittered correspondence, but he won't. (Though he is tempted.) He would very much like to receive some kind of apology.
So what had Waugh written in A Little Learning that had so upset Carew? The passage lasts a page, half of which is a poem that young Dudley wrote in tribute to young Evelyn. I've missed out the beginning of that. The rest is as follows:
'In the role of iconoclast which I assumed, I fascinated and dominated a boy of my own age in another House, who had previously enjoyed all the enthusiasms proper to his condition. I set out to ridicule his loyalties, particularly his devotion to myself, which secretly I rather relished. He was warmly confidential; I patronising and sardonic. He addressed an ode to me which had a certain affinity to Hymns Ancient and Modern. It concluded:
For you I've given up all that I cherish
Curses I find now where once friendship grew
Give me then freely of your knowledge
Be fair, my friend, 'tis all I ask of you.
I copied this into my diary with the comment: "It is rather embarrassing to have so large an influence which works out in such a bad poem."
I do not believe that I ever called down curses on this devotee's head. Some of his former associates in his house may have looked askance at him. He was a natural hero-worshipper and in a year or two transferred his homage to J.C. Squire, who encouraged his interest in cricket, introduced him to whisky, and was altogether a kinder and more fortifying mentor than I.'
Is that so bad? In my opinion, it is not one hundredth as bad as what Waugh said about Young. Waugh did write back to Dudley Carew straight away. I don't know what was said exactly, but I know that Waugh suggested that if Dudley read the chapter again he would see that the author was being hard on himself rather than anyone else. The letter ends: '…forgive me in the name of our old friendship…Yours ever affectionately, Evelyn.'
This much of the letter was reproduced in a 96-page book A Fragment of Friendship, published by Dudley Carew in 1974. 
Why wait so long to reply in print? Well, Carew had suggested in his letter that he didn't want to have a go at Evelyn in public, not when he was alive. By 1966, when Evelyn died, Carew's hurt may have faded. But then in 1973 some of Waugh's diaries were published in The Observer, focussing on his post-Oxford diaries as well as some World War 2 entries, provoking outrage and astonishment in the minds of the paper's readers. Perhaps that was what inspired Carew to put pen to paper.
Although seemingly quickly written and loosely structured, the book does add valuable information to what we know of Waugh as a young man. The first part is 'Evelyn at Lancing, 1921' and the second 'Evelyn at Underhill and Elsewhere, 1921-1931.' This second part could usefully have been divided into an Underhill section and a third part called 'Four women'. The four women being Anthea Gamble (who Dudley married), Olivia Plunkett Greene (who Dudley knew and who Evelyn fell in love with) , Evelyn Gardner (who Dudley introduced Waugh to) and Audrey Lucas (who was with Dudley one day when they witnessed Evelyn 'hitting the bottle'). Dudley Carew and Evelyn Waugh had been brought up in all-male environments. Carew seems to have an understanding of the sort of young man that Evelyn was, attracted to very unusual, ostensibly simple and innocent women.
And the book reveals that there was more to Dudley Carew than Evelyn gave him credit for. Sure, they were best friends at Lancing, where Evelyn was the dominant partner. Then they drifted apart with Evelyn at Oxford and Dudley failing to get a place there. But Carew was first off the mark as a writer and had three novels published before Evelyn had begun to turn his thoughts towards novel writing. Carew reminds us that Waugh was delighted to get a drawing included in The London Mercury. What Waugh doesn't mention in A Little Learning was that the reason J.C. Squire accepted it, was because Dudley Carew recommended Waugh as a draughtsman. Waugh even designed two covers for one of Dudley's books, though in the end the Bodley Head went for someone else's design.
A point that Carew makes in A Fragment of Friendship is that as Evelyn got older, a developing snobbery meant that he didn't spare a thought for people who came from humbler backgrounds. This echoes the opinion of Alastair Graham and it has to be recognised as a truth.
But not the only truth. Best of all - in A Fragment of Friendship - Dudley Carew was invited to Underhill to hear Evelyn read from the early pages of the Decline and Fall manuscript. The readings were hilarious, with both Dudley and Evelyn laughing their heads off. Anthony Powell confirmed this impression of private readings of D&F in his own memoirs. Both Powell and Carew thought the novel was most original and very funny, but neither was convinced it would find a publisher. Dudley sensed that it was vital to Evelyn that he did get this book published, and that it be a success. Evelyn was battling his own personal demons, suffered bouts of despair and would drink excessively so as to lose consciousness, as Didley and Audrey had shockingly realised when they were twenty minutes late to meet him in Central London. The barman told the pair that he had never seen anything like it, the way that Waugh had set about downing alcohol so as to get himself insensible.
Reaction of other friends to A Little Learning were positive. Most people would seem to have had the contents page in front of them as they composed their letter of praise.
Anthony Powell admired the 'Heredity' section and compared his own impressions of Oxford with Waugh's. Graham Greene confined himself to explaining why they didn't see much of each other at Oxford. Christopher Sykes thought the section about Waugh's father was superb, but thought that the 'brief history of my religious views' was too brief. A couple of people Waugh had known at Lancing praised Two Mentors, with more reaction to the J.R. Roxburgh portrait than the gentler Francis Crease one. Harold Acton pointed out that the book outed himself as gay at Oxford while remaining silent about several contemporaries similar proclivities, not that he minded.
All the responses were positive, though the ever-observant Anthony Powell reckoned that the book covered an awful lot of very different ground, making it difficult to review in the space the Daily Telegraph had allocated him for it.
But I suspect that Carew's singular response shook Waugh. And it may have held him back from carrying on with later memoirs, where more of the individuals were still alive and might have felt they had more reason to resent what Waugh was saying or not saying.
THREE
Let us end this chapter by paying a visit to the rooms of Dick Young in Winchester. It turns out that when he said 'Gordon' in his third letter to Evelyn, he meant Henry Cecil, who was born in 1902, went to St Paul's School and King's College, Cambridge. Cecil published a novel each year from 1951 to 1965. As Wiki states: 'His books typically feature educated and genteel fraudsters and blackmailers who lay ludicrously ingenious plots exploiting loopholes in the legal system.'
No wonder Young liked them. Exploiting loopholes in the legal system indeed! These are the titles in pride of place in Young's bookcase. No Bail for the Judge, Natural Causes, According to the Evidence, Brothers in Law, Friends at Court, Sober as a Judge, Settled out of Court, Alibi for a Judge, Unlawful Occasions and, last in the line, Fathers in Law.
Perhaps also in the bookcase, Grimes had copies of the cricket books that Dudley Carew wrote after his novel-writing dried up. England Over: A Cricket Book. Also: To the Wicket, this one published by Chapman and Hall. Indeed, Dudley Carew kept in touch with Arthur Waugh, Evelyn's father, after drifting apart from Evelyn in the 1930s.
Now let's not pretend that Young's sitting room was dominated by books, because it wasn't. It was dominated by the pieces of exquisite porcelain that Young would eventually donate to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Perhaps this was a favourite of his, but there were scores of similar models featuring naked urchins.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. WA1971.315 Bequeathed by W.R.B. Young in 1971. Date of manufacture 1765-90 .
A knock n the door. That would be the Master of St. Cross come to give Young his monthly rent cheque and to offer him a late night drink from his bottle of vintage port. With both of them seated comfortably, Young asks the Master to place the cheque on top of the bookcase and to take the book that has been temporarily shelved between Friends at Court and Sober as a Judge.
"A Little Learning?"
"That's the ticket. Now turn to page 129 and tell me what you make of the passage that begins 'In the role of iconoclast which I assumed…' You'll need to turn over the page and read until about half way down page 130, to the sentence that ends '…a kinder and more fortifying mentor than I.'"
The Master of St Cross does as he's directed, reads aloud the recent section, then closes the book and places it on his lap. After a few moments he delivers his verdict. "What a strange young man."
"The author or his unfortunate chum?"
"Both, I suppose. Could I borrow this book?"
"Be my guest. If you enjoy it, you might also enjoy his earlier Decline and Fall. There are passages in that book I can never read without the temptation to weep."
Next essay.
