One on One. Craig Brown

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СКАЧАТЬ watches as she attempts to sit down on a complicated seat she has brought with her – ‘half prie-dieu and half collapsible deckchair’. Somehow, she manages to entangle herself in the mechanism, with disastrous results: ‘The sticks slid from under her, the chair heaped itself on the floor and all the bangles rolled down her arms and sticks and propelled themselves in every direction around the room.’

      ‘My jewels!’ she cries. ‘Please to bring back my jewels!’

      Waugh and Guinness dutifully get down on all fours and wriggle their way under the pews and around the candle sconces, trying to retrieve ‘everything round and glittering’.

      ‘How many jewels were you wearing?’ Waugh asks the old deaf woman.

      ‘Seventy,’ she replies.

      Under the pews, Waugh whispers to Guinness, ‘What nationality?’

      ‘Russian, at a guess,’ says Guinness, sliding on his stomach beneath a pew and dirtying his smart suit.

      ‘Or Rumanian,’ says Waugh. ‘She crossed herself backwards. She may be a Maronite Christian, in which case beware.’

      The two men start laughing, and soon, according to Guinness, get ‘barely controllable hysterics’. They pick up all the bangles they can find. Guinness counts them into her hands, but the old deaf woman looks suspiciously at the pair of them, as if they might have pocketed a few.

      ‘Is that all?’ she asks.

      ‘Sixty-eight,’ says Guinness.

      ‘You are still wearing two,’ observes Waugh.

      At that moment, the organ strikes a deep note, and the other three witnesses enter. Waugh turns his unforgiving owlish stare upon ‘Father D’Arcy … a little swarthy man who looked like a Jew but claimed to be Portuguese, and a blond youth who looked American but claimed to be English’. Guinness notes that the Portuguese man, a poet, looks ‘a little peevishly atheistic’.

      Then, up the aisle, ‘swathed in black like a sixteenth-century infanta’, glides Edith Sitwell, to be received into the Church by Father Caraman.^*

      The service concluded, they are driven in a Daimler from Farm Street to the Sesame Club, just two streets away. Waugh has heard bad things about it, but is pleasantly surprised by the ‘gargantuan feast’ that has been laid on: cold consommé, lobster Newberg, steak, strawberry flan and ‘great quantities of wine’. All in all, he considers it ‘a rich blow-out’.^† Guinness notes, ‘Edith presiding like a bride in black and Fr Caraman frequently casting his eyes heavenwards as if in ecstasy.’

      An awkward moment comes when the old deaf woman suddenly says, ‘Did I hear the word “whisky”?’

      ‘Do you want one?’ asks Waugh.

      ‘More than anything in the world.’

      ‘I’ll get you some.’

      But at this point the Portuguese poet steps in. He nudges Waugh and says, ‘It would be disastrous.’ So Waugh persuades her to stick with the white wine. Repeating the words of the Portuguese poet, he explains to Guinness that ‘We couldn’t face another disaster from that quarter.’

      Over lunch, Guinness tipsily shares his few remaining theological anxieties with the blond English youth and the Portuguese poet. ‘Would we have to drink the Pope’s health? If Edith died on the spot would she go straight to heaven? And would that be a case for ecclesiastical rejoicing or worldly and artistic distress?’ A great deal is drunk; the following morning, try as he may, Guinness cannot recollect any of them leaving the table.

      EVELYN WAUGH

      WRONG-FOOTS

      IGOR STRAVINSKY

      The Ambassador Hotel, Park Avenue, New York

       February 4th 1949

      Evelyn Waugh claims to dislike all music, with the possible exception of plainchant. This does not bode well for Igor Stravinsky as he prepares to meet him in New York. He has already been warned by Aldous Huxley that Waugh can be ‘prickly, pompous, and downright unpleasant’. But he is an admirer of Waugh’s writing, particularly his talent for dialogue and the naming of characters (Dr Kakaphilos; Father Rothschild, S.J.), and is pleased when a friend arranges a meeting.

      Stravinsky spent last night in the more congenial company of Vladimir Nabokov, W.H. Auden and George Balanchine, playing them his draft score of Act 1 of The Rake’s Progress. As usual, he found himself a little irritated by Auden’s tendency to talk during any performance, but this is small fry compared to what lies ahead: Waugh is, after all, notoriously prickly.

      ‘Why does everybody except me find it so easy to be nice?’ asks the distracted Gilbert Pinfold in Waugh’s most autobiographical novel.^* Tom Driberg identifies this as ‘a true outcry’ from Pinfold’s creator. At the age of only forty-five, Waugh has somehow boxed himself into the character of a grumpy old curmudgeon: Penelope Fitzgerald sums up the social message he wishes to convey as: I am bored, you are frightened.

      His rudeness has no age limit. When Ann Fleming brings her uninvited three-year-old son to tea at the Grand Hotel, Folkestone, Waugh is so annoyed that he puts ‘his face close to the child’s, dragging down the corners of eyes and mouth with forefingers and thumbs, producing an effect of such unbelievable malignity that the child shrieked with terror and fell to the floor’. Fleming retaliates by giving Waugh’s face a hard slap and overturning a plate of éclairs.

      Observing him at Pratt’s Club, Malcolm Muggeridge thinks Waugh presents a ‘quite ludicrous figure in dinner jacket, silk shirt; extraordinarily like a loquacious woman, with dinner jacket cut like a maternity gown to hide his bulging stomach. He was very genial, probably pretty plastered – all the time playing this part of a crotchety old character rather deaf, cupping his ear – “Feller’s a bit of a Socialist, I suspect.” Amusing for about a quarter of an hour. Tony [Powell] and I agreed that an essential difference between Graham [Greene] and Waugh is that, whereas Graham tends to impose an agonized silence, Waugh demands agonized attention.’

      Some of his rudest remarks are delivered in such a way that few, perhaps including himself, can tell whether they are intended. ‘I spent two nights at Cap Ferrat with Mr Maugham (who has lost his fine cook) and made a great gaffe,’ he writes to Harold Acton in April 1952. ‘The first evening he asked me what someone was like and I said “A pansy with a stammer.” All the Picassos on the walls blanched.’

      He delights in wrong-footing one and all. When Feliks Topolski and Hugh Burnett arrive for lunch at Combe Florey to prepare for Waugh’s appearance on Face to Face, he is at pains to point out that his house has no television set and a radio only in the servants’ quarters. He then serves them a large tureen of green-tufted strawberries. ‘Too late I saw the problem,’ recalls Burnett. ‘Put the strawberries on the plate, add the cream, take the spoon – and you were trapped with the strawberry tufts. My attempt to spear one shot it under the sideboard. That was the BBC disgraced. Topolski, seeing what had happened, did the socially unthinkable – dipped a strawberry into the cream with his fingers. “Ah, Mr Topolski,” Waugh observed helpfully, “You need a spoon.”’ When the day for the recording comes, Burnett introduces him to his interviewer, John Freeman. ‘How СКАЧАТЬ