So… happy 77th anniversary to a diary entry describing a day in London in which then 43-year-old Evelyn Waugh drinks enough to incapacitate a yeti.
Thursday 19 December 1946
I went to London by the early train. I have now reached an age when any disturbance of routine is disagreeable, and I sat misanthropic, smoking cigars, while the train lost more and more time until it halted for three-quarters of an hour in a snowstorm just outside the Paddington station. I had time to try on a suit which has taken six months to make and then went to luncheon at the Beefsteak where I talked to Harold Nicolson and Clive Bell and drank enough wine to fuddle me slightly. In that condition I went to Duckworth and signed sixteen copies of When the Going was Good for Christmas presents. Also to the travel agency who are sending me to Hollywood. At 5 o’clock there was the Beefsteak committee meeting. My candidates Maurice Bowra, Ran Antrim and Randolph Churchill all got in the latter after long discussion in which 1 Hugh Sherwood made a spirited defence and overbore two men who had come with the firm purpose of blackballing him. During the meeting I drank a lot of whisky and went rather drunk to a cocktail party given by John Murray’ where I got very drunk. Rose Macaulay attempted a serious conversation in which I did not shine. I spent most of the time with Hermione Ranfurly jeering at people who were introduced to me and ended by bearing off a diminutive man called Gibbings to White’s for champagne cocktails. From then my memory is vague but I went to bed early I think at the Hyde Park Hotel.
It’s (a) a wonder he even made it to the age of 62, and (b) remarkable that anyone in that day and age ever got anything done, let alone writing several novels that are still in print, studied, and adapted today.
Incidentally, the Hermione Ranfurly he mentions is a Countess who published a WWII diary in 1994 — accurately described by the Times as
a madcap, aristocratic window behind the lines of war
To War With Whitaker is, indeed, a deeply eccentric book in which she follows her husband to the Middle East and, when he’s taken prisoner, refuses to go home until he’s out. She has lots of adventures and spends a great deal of time telling you how fat the people she meets are.
Through her I heard of Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, who “served in the Boer War, WWI and WWII … shot in the face … through the skull, hip, leg, ankle and ear”, and has one of the most extraordinary life stories you’ll ever read:
His book, Happy Odyssey, is in print, and I can recommend it very much. He also lost part of a hand, although not entirely due to enemy action. He’d been shot through said hand, and two fingers were hanging off, so
I asked the doctor to take my fingers off; he refused, so I pulled them off myself and felt absolutely no pain in doing it.
The only effect he reported of being shot in the back of the head was that whenever he had a haircut after that, his scalp tickled. He wore a glass eye just once — to a medical board to prove his fitness for service — and hurled it from the window of a taxi immediately afterwards.
Mind you, one of his friends, who had a pet lion cub, lost a leg in WWII, came round from his anaesthetic and said
I hope they have given my leg to the lion
so Carton de Wiart may not have been unique in his insouciant attitude to injury and death. His finest hour, though, came during WWI, when — recovering from one of his many wounds — he happened to be in his London club one afternoon when someone asked him to be a second in a duel over a woman.
I agreed at once.
Obviously.
He went to see the opponent and suggested that he leave the woman alone, because
my man was a tremendous fire-eater with only one object in view, to kill his opponent
but the rival refused to back down, perhaps not taking this threat to life and limb seriously. The only thing he was worried about was getting into trouble, what with duelling having been outlawed about a century earlier. Carton de Wiart replied that:
the war was on, everyone [was] too busy to be interested, and … it would be simple to go to some secluded spot like Ashdown Forest with a can of petrol and cremate the remains of whichever was killed … He promptly sat down and wrote an affidavit not to see the lady again.
(Do you know, I think there might be a reason why it was a British writer who came up with James Bond, rather than one of any other nationality.)
Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart (to give him his full monicker) was also a model for the character of Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook in Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy Sword of Honour.
I know what you’re thinking, though: yes, Coates, you have gone off an an absurd tangent and somehow brought the subject back to Waugh, but have you shown us what old Evelyn looked like while deploying an ear trumpet?
And you’re right; I haven’t.
…until now.
