My own 1949 weekend at Evelyn Waugh’s
May 29th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Alexander Waugh’s new biography of his illustrious family clan, “Fathers and Sons”, with a focus upon its most illustrious member of all, the great satirical novelist Evelyn Waugh (Alexander Waugh’s grandfather), has recalled to my mind an avalanche of eternally fresh memories of my first weekend in Europe, a mere 58 years ago. It would take too long to go into the chain of connections and coincidences that led to that unforgettable weekend, but the key link came in the form of a letter of introduction written by Carl Van Vechten, during the 1920s a celebrated novelist, today almost totally forgotten.
Carl revelled in a close friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, so when he kindly asked whether I’d like to meet any of his European friends I naturally led off with Toklas (Stein had died three years earlier), but in the same breath I zinged in the name of the one person in Europe I longed to meet most: Evelyn Waugh, my literary idol since first reading (under circumstances you’d have trouble believing: when it turned up on my bedside table in the guest room of a ranch outside Kerrville, Texas) what I still regard as his finest novel, “A Handful of Dust”. Carl said he didn’t know Waugh well, but he did know him well enough to write me an introduction to him, and I could barely believe it when I got to Dublin, my first stop after flying from New York, and asked about mail at American Express there, to find a friendly hand-written letter from my idol, telling me in detail how to get from London, my next stop, down to Piers Court, Evelyn Waugh’s country estate in Gloucestershire.
I still hope to write about that wildly improbable weekend in much greater detail, but one such detail that burned itself indelibly into my memory rises immediately to the surface. Waugh and his wife Laura installed me in their guest room, one flight up, with a bathroom alongside it. Affixed above the toilet box there I found a hand-lettered envelope-sized correspondence card with all details about Piers Court printed at its top. The unabridged, unaltered text beneath it, which for me has always since exemplified the benefits of an English classical education:
“The handle should return to the horizontal when the flow of water ceases. Should it fail to do so, agitate it gently until it succeeds.”
And beneath that: the master’s own initials E. W.
