A footnote to my weekend at Evelyn Waugh’s
Jun 1st, 2007 by Paul Moor
In the summer of 1948, an invitation from Yaddo, the foundation and artists’ colony outside Saratoga Springs, brought me two months of heaven-sent respite from steaming, suppurating New York. Yaddo’s other guests that summer included Patricia Highsmith, then at work on her first novel, “Strangers on a Train”, which Alfred Hitchcock would subsequently turn into a film; Flannery O’Connor, then an all but unknown short-story writer I brought together with her life-long literary agent Elizabeth McKee; Chester Himes, at that point known primarily for his novel “Catch a Nigger by the Toe”; and Arna Bontemps, another black writer who, together with Langston Hughes and a few others, had launched what had become known as the Negro renaissance. When I left Yaddo to return to my unremitting struggle against destitution in Manhattan, Arna said he thought I ought to meet Carl Van Vechten, the writer who more than any other white American had played such an important part in discovering and appreciating black American culture and furthering that renaissance.
At the age of twenty-five, thanks to the kind intercession of Carl van Vechten, I had the invigorating experience of spending my first European weekend ever as the house-guest of Evelyn Waugh and his family down at Piers Court, their country place in Gloucestershire. He overwhelmed me when he announced at dinner that he’d hired a car and driver so he could show me Gloucester Cathedral the following morning.
As a Catholic convert, Waugh regarded that noble stone pile as no more hallowed than he would have a mere museum. He had donned the most outrageously loud suit I have ever seen anywhere in the world - a rough tweed with enormous brownish red checks - and draped a heavy gold watch-chain across his paunch.
As I stood rapt before one of the ornate stone tombs inside the cathedral nave - in this instance a life-sized stone effigy of the nobleman interred there, lying atop a waist-high granite catafalque and with a delicately skeletal miniature stone replica of the cathedral itself enclosing the body from above - I heard Waugh’s voice directly over my shoulder: “King Edward the Second. Great esthete, you know.” He pronounced it EES-thete, and added for my possible benefit, “patron of the arts, you know.”
He spoke in so uninhibitedly conversational a tone that several of the hushed, whispering tourists nearby, most of them elderly ladies, some recognizably American, looked our way. At the same level of volume, he continued: “Homosexual, you know - died near here at Berkeley [pronounced Barkley] Castle with a red-hot poker thrust up his anus.”
His words turned his auditors to stone. Everyone within earshot gaped and stared, and Waugh, visibly delighted, strode on, no doubt to plot his next outrage.
