The Lygons, the Flytes and Evelyn Waugh

Paula Byrne’s Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead scores several significant breakthroughs, and I warmly commend it to general readers as well as Waugh enthusiasts. It follows hard on the heels of Jane Mulvagh’s equally interesting Madresfield: One Home, One Family, One Thousand Years.

The books are complementary. Mad World is a biography of Waugh that works outward from his close friendship with the Lygons of Madresfield. Mulvagh’s Madresfield begins and ends with (unremarkable) chapters about Waugh but is essentially a fascinating history of Madresfield, a country house with a Tudor core and enveloping Neo-Gothic extensions, and of the Lygon (earlier and in the USA, Ligon) family.

The Lygons, who date from the Norman Conquest, have lived uninterruptedly at Madresfield since the sixteenth century. Because the family has been involved in most of the significant developments of the last 400 years, their story illuminates every period of English history since Henry VIII. Family divisions over the Reformation; involvement in plots against Mary Tudor; the role of the house and family during the Civil War; a book written by a Lygon about Barbados that explains the wealth pouring into England from the sugar trade and slavery; a younger son’s apprenticeship to the London Grocers Company (which provided money that saved the family); a disputed inheritance from a very distant connection, Jennens, which brought the Lygons sufficient wealth to buy (for £10,000) the Beauchamp earldom (the interminable legal wrangles over this inheritance inspired Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House); patronage of the Arts and Crafts Movement, with its social implications; heavy financial backing for the Tractarians and deep involvement with Edward Elgar; late Victorian and Edwardian Liberal politics … A more knowledgeable reader might be unimpressed by all this historical information. For me, and I was already acquainted with most of the topics raised, Mulvagh’s revelations proved as riveting as they were enlightening.

Evelyn Waugh biography has been plagued by perverse hostility to its subject. The tone was set by Christopher Sykes’s authorised biography, which barely disguised the “terrible difficulty” Sykes found (and confided to Hugh Trevor-Roper) in writing “the life of a man whose every action showed him to be a shit”. Martin Stannard’s two-volume biography offered much new information and some good literary criticism. But in the manner of Michael Shelden exposing Graham Greene, Stannard puts Waugh on trial. Relentlessly he finds discredit even in trivialities that usually fall below a biographer’s notice. For one of countless possible examples: Evelyn writes to his elderly mother Catherine promising to visit on her birthday and asking what she would like for a present. Catherine answers that “Darling Evelyn’s” visit will be the best present, but adds that she would like gloves, as she is going to a wedding. By some reverse alchemy Stannard twists this affectionate little exchange into a “poor and lonely” Catherine being forced to beg “timorously” for a pair of gloves; and this despite an excited Catherine’s near contemporaneous letter of thanks for Evelyn’s surprise gift of a costly dining room carpet. Hostile misinformation distorts Stannard’s analyses of Waugh’s role in most major matters, with correspondingly more serious effect on Waugh’s reputation.

The Sykes–Stannard tone has become mandatory for the British quality press and the main Catholic journals to the extent that they appear to have a policy of not printing Waugh’s name without matching insults. Thus Isabel Quigley ends her Tablet review of Mulvagh’s Madresfield: “For the literary, there is plenty about Waugh, not always at his most attractive (a great writer, but what a snob! And what a scope, in such a milieu, for snobbery!)” This apropos a book in which only one comment from a predictable source justifies “unattractive” and in which the rest of the evidence contradicts “snobbery”.

Paula Byrne bravely breaks the pattern of biographer as prosecutor and becomes counsel for the defence: “I set out to write this book because I believed that Evelyn Waugh had been persistently misrepresented as a snob and a curmudgeonly misanthropist. I did not recognize Waugh in the popular caricature.” In pursuit of this laudable aim, Byrne presents convincing evidence from the Lygon family, Diana Guinness (Mosley) and other early aristocratic friends that young Evelyn did not try to “climb” into their elevated circles; it was they who sought out the up-and-coming and hilariously funny young novelist. In a typical passage, Byrne implicitly counters the sour critics by beginning her account of Waugh’s trip to the Arctic with Sir Alexander Glen and Hugh Lygon: “Sandy Glen’s memories reveal Evelyn and Hugh at their best.”

But more convincing than any direct arguments justifying Waugh are the fuller portraits Byrne presents of Waugh’s friends and their families. Against a background of fully fleshed-out characters in their own well established milieu, Waugh appears in an attractively human light, a young man with needs and fears and much to offer his friends. Although it seemed that everything that could be said about Waugh’s Oxford had already been repeated ad nauseam, Byrne has gleaned new information from Waugh’s eccentric (non-aristocratic) friend Terence Greenidge through the pioneering American scholar Charles Linck. This enables her to trace more fully Waugh’s progress from sober scholar to companion of upper-class aesthetes, revealing that chance, not ambition, was the driver. In particular, Byrne brings the Plunkett-Green and Lygon families much more fully alive and in doing so makes Waugh, their adopted family member, more comprehensible.

The Lygon family and its house, Madresfield (“Mad” to the young Lygons), are central to Byrne’s and Mulvagh’s books, quite apart from any connection with Waugh. Mulvagh fascinatingly describes the organic growth, generation by generation, of Madresfield from a relatively modest Tudor gentleman’s residence to a Victorian nobleman’s Neo-Gothic mansion, and the history of the Lygon family’s continuous possession, often through the female line. Sometimes a profligate head brought the family close to bankruptcy; then a lucky marriage or a younger son’s success in trade restored the fortune. Relatively late in the day, the surprise Jennens inheritance bought the grand titles.

Byrne paints a fuller picture than does Mulvagh of recent Lygon history, in particular of the banishment of William, the seventh Earl Beauchamp. William was born to intensely religious Tractarian parents. At the age of twenty-six, already a controversial figure in Liberal Party politics, he was “sent out to govern New South Wales” (in the words of Belloc’s satirical poem about him), the last governor of the colony before Federation. He and his sister Mary affected a vice-regal display that brought ridicule from the Bulletin until their policy of inviting all classes to Government House won respect. They also became patrons of artists, most famously of Henry Lawson (the full story of the Governor’s private gifts can be read in Colin Roderick’s Life of Lawson).

On returning to England, William married a fervent Anglo-Catholic, the wealthy sister of the Duke of Westminster, who paid for the famous Arts and Crafts chapel in Madresfield, while William’s imagination and energy brought it to completion. The couple had seven outstanding children. While the mother was strangely detached, William was devoted, and the children loved him dearly. During and beyond the First World War, though anti-war in tendency and a defender of persecuted conscientious objectors, William held important cabinet posts. But he was bisexual and became progressively less cautious about concealing his, then illegal, homosexual affairs, with “footmen” in particular. Eventually his ill-natured and jealous brother-in-law, the Duke of Westminster, apparently in collaboration with King George V, collected evidence of homosexual encounters and presented it to the Countess. She sued for divorce and left Madresfield. Byrne, in a major coup, has uncovered the previously restricted divorce documents and quotes the apparently damning evidence. William was given a choice: face prosecution, or go overseas and stay away. He chose exile over exposure. (This, Ms Byrne, is the opposite of “outing”!)

In 1931 Waugh became friends with three Lygon girls, Mary (Maimie), Dorothy (Coote) and Sibell and with two of the brothers Hugh and Elmley, all of whom lived at Madresfield. Pace Mulvagh, Waugh also spent a holiday in Italy with William. Without either parent in the house, the young Lygons entertained constantly and, while addicted to hunting, also moved in fast Metroland circles. Lettice (the eldest daughter, already married at the time of the catastrophe) and Sibell were one night locked out of their London house in the wee small hours and sought refuge with the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, a family friend. The scene in Vile Bodies in which Agatha Runcible and other Bright Young Things hold a wild late-night party in 10 Downing Street is Waugh’s fantastication of this escapade. Waugh remained a loyal and very generous friend to Maimie and Coote, long after they had become poor.

Parallels between the Lygons of Madresfield and the Flytes of Brideshead Castle abound—father in exile; one daughter, Maimie, beautiful but wayward (like Julia); one daughter, Coote, plain but good (like Cordelia). Sibell had an on-off affair with Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian (like Rex Mottram) newspaper tycoon, and then bigamously wed a man who, on holiday, had impetuously married and walked away from his wife—adventures reflected in the predicaments dogging Julia’s wedding to Rex. One son, Hugh, beautiful and lovable and doomed to alcoholism, was very like (and one of the models for) Sebastian; the other brother, Elmley, a ponderous cigarette-card collector who married a widow older than himself, became the unmistakable model for Bridey.

But while parallels abound, so do differences. No Lady Marchmain ruled the Madresfield establishment, although the religiosity of the absent mother, Lettice, like Lady Marchmain’s, was alienating rather than persuasive. And the Lygon family religion was High Anglican, not Catholic.

Despite the overweening claims made by Mulvagh and David Cannadine, who wrote the foreword to her book—“The house upon which Evelyn Waugh based Brideshead was Madresfield Court in Worcester-shire”—Brideshead Castle is not a fictionalised Madresfield. In A Handful of Dust, Hetton Abbey, rebuilt in the Neo-Gothic style in the 1860s, with its central clock tower and moat and bedrooms named from Malory, is undisguisedly Madresfield. But the only common feature of Madresfield and Brideshead Castle is the Arts and Crafts (not “art deco” as Byrne calls it) chapel, which Waugh transferred in faithful detail.

Nor is Brideshead Castle a “composite” of Madresfield and Castle Howard, as Byrne suggests. Leaving aside the question of whether Waugh knew Castle Howard other than by reputation, what matters is that Brideshead Castle is an artistic composition in which every feature functions, almost programmatically, to support the central theme of the novel. Its foundations are specifically Catholic, not “Anglo-Saxon” as Mulvagh and Byrne describe them, exemplifying Waugh’s often repeated point that England was Catholic for 900 years before it became Protestant, with Catholic origins only lightly buried beneath recent history. The Castle was rebuilt in the eighteenth century by sceptical, humanist Whig oligarchs in the Baroque style. Charles Ryder falls in love with the specifically humanist splendour of the Baroque. The early twentieth-century Arts and Crafts chapel, translated unmodified from Madresfield, is not at all to Charles Ryder’s taste, nor to Waugh’s, a point Byrne badly fudges. Thematically, the chapel in Brideshead Revisited is an unlovely contemporary-Catholic intrusion into the humanly attractive Castle, representing Waugh’s feeling that modern English Catholicism was culturally and socially uninviting. The point of the novel is Charles’s recognition that, however “deplorable in design” the lamp and tabernacle of the chapel may be, they represent an abiding truth that survives the destruction of the worldly glories of the castle and its fountain.

Dorothy Lygon was absolutely right to insist that Waugh’s characters—whoever their models might be—are “entirely credible people in plausible situations”, creatures of Waugh’s “imagination … and powers of invention”. And Byrne is equally correct to argue that the characters are “autobiographical and archetypal”. The parallels between the Lygons and Flytes are fascinating, but they do not determine the meaning of the novel. Bridey collects matchboxes while Elmley collected cigarette cards—why did Elmley not sue?—but Bridey is interesting because he reflects Charles Ryder’s outside-observer view of a certain type of educated, faithful Catholic who, however repellent to the modern secular mind, nevertheless compels grudging respect: a metaphor for the Catholic Church in Waugh’s day.

Neither of these books is without flaws. Informed critics have pointed out errors of detail in Mulvagh’s history. No doubt they are right, but I profited from the book and enjoyed it enormously. Byrne, on the other hand, peppers her book with obtrusive errors, often in the detail she so exuberantly supplies. New Zealanders will be amazed to find Rotorua located “on the Bay of Plenty”. But why did Byrne not simply say that Earl Beauchamp stayed in Rotorua? And if Waugh and Maimie Lygon simultaneously caught “crabs” (not from each other!) and corresponded in a delightfully obscene fashion about the shaving required, why court ridicule by calling “crabs” a “sexual disease”? Surely Waugh did not blandly praise the acerbic innkeeper, John Fothergill, as a “civilizing influence”; he declared him a “civilizing insolence”. “Undergraduettes” were not “kept in purdah with the exception of eight weeks” but with the exception of “Eights Week”. The pages regarding Waugh and Sir Robert Laycock on Crete, based on a scenario constructed by Antony Beevor, are pure bunkum. It would be possible to continue in this vein; but the weight and interest of the book far outweigh the minor blemishes.

On a more serious note, some of Byrne’s readings of Brideshead Revisited are really odd. I am sure, for one example, that in giving Lord Marchmain and Bridey the same politics as Earl Beauchamp and Elmley (“Lord Marchmain is also a Liberal …”) Byrne reverses Waugh’s meaning. The truth is that when Lord Marchmain says he is “all the Socialists would have me to be and a stumbling block to my own party”, he means that as a rich, idle, absentee grandee he is the epitome of everything the Socialists love to denounce as Tory. His son, Bridey, imbued with Catholic social teachings, refuses to help break the General Strike “because he was not satisfied with the justice of the cause”. In short, Lord Marchmain, a Tory, has a Liberal-tending son, Brideshead; this reverses the case of Earl Beauchamp, a Liberal, who has a Tory son, Elmley.

It is impossible to review Byrne’s book without complaining loudly about the fact that it is not documented; although, to be fair, the demand for documentation occurs because Byrne has uncovered so much new and fascinating material. Being familiar with most of what has been written about Waugh, I found it infuriating to keep coming upon new information supplied by Byrne with no clue to its source.

I also disagree profoundly with Byrne’s glib assertion that “Evelyn Waugh’s problem after the war was that his life went right, so his fiction went wrong”. In no way did Waugh’s “settling down as a country squire with a happy brood of children” affect his “sense of being an outsider” on which, according to Byrne, his “creativity depended”. After the war Waugh set himself stridently against the Modern World and in consequence lived, as an outsider, under a torrent of abuse. Of course Waugh did not go on churning out versions of Decline and Fall, much as his public would have enjoyed that (only hacks keep repeating past successes). Waugh was an artist, always developing both in technique and “wisdom”. The unique melding of past and present in Helena and the development of a mature prose style are only some of the brilliant technical advances he made in the postwar years; and the broadly humane religious themes of Sword of Honour far transcend the narrow denominational theology of Brideshead Revisited.

Admittedly, both Byrne and Mulvagh claim too much in the cover titles of their books: “the Secrets of Brideshead” and “the Real Brideshead”. As “hidden keys to Waugh’s great novel”, the books unlock few really important “secrets”; although I for one did not realise how extensive the parallels between the Lygon and the Flyte families were, and was delighted to be told. Both writers are infectiously enthusiastic, and they pack their books with new information about the people among whom Waugh lived. In doing so they present Waugh through the eyes of people who knew him really well, and who loved him, and who saw through both his own self-caricature and the popular vilification. I heartily recommend both books.

Donat Gallagher is an Associate Professor (Adjunct) within the School of Arts and Social Sciences at James Cook University. He has published widely on Evelyn Waugh, including articles and reviews in Quadrant.