Edith Sitwell praised their schoolboy writings. They were described as the ‘cream of intellectual Eton’, full of promise, with their plans for theatre trips and magazines. Their American heritage and modernist radicalism liberated them from the constraints of the English. They despised ‘dull frowsy England – awful men in bowler hats and bad tempers trotting up and down wet pavements’. Rebelling against philistinism, as other boys walked up the Eton High Street towards Windsor, they wandered like Parisian flâneurs, heading in the opposite direction for Slough in pursuit of the ‘bourgeois macabre’. Howard fantasised outrageously about hidden perversions behind respectable facades.
The Eton Society of Arts’ sacred meeting place was the Studio, a room in the house of the drawing master. It was a retreat from the school, scruffy and stuffed with pots, jars and drawing implements. The Society comprised an extraordinary group of young men. Henry Yorke, who went on to write novels under the name Henry Green, was secretary; Anthony Powell and Robert Byron, who would become a superb travel writer, were also members, as was Alan Clutton-Brock who went on to be the art critic of The Times and then Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge.
But they were not all artists and intellectuals. The Honourable Hugh Lygon was a member, more on account of his looks than his intellect. He had no artistic pretensions whatsoever. By now he was a slim but muscular youth, always elegantly dressed. It is easy to see why Howard and Acton wanted him in their club. Some said he had a face out of Botticelli, while for Powell he was ‘fair-haired, nice mannered, a Giotto angel living in a narcissistic dream’. Unlike nearly everyone else in the Society of Arts, he was sporty and masculine, a boxer and an athlete. As a rule, Harold and his followers set themselves firmly against ‘macho hearties’. The code of aestheticism that they lived by was partly a reaction against the hearty public school ethos founded on games worship. But they were happy to make Hugh, with his beauty and his charm, an exception to their rule. There was a suspicion that he was only there because one of the more influential members of the group – Howard, perhaps, or Byron – thought that he was absolutely gorgeous and that he was not averse to their advances. An aura of raffishness, if not outright scandal, surrounded the group as they met on Saturday evenings and discussed such subjects as ‘Post-Impressionism’, ‘The Decoration of Rooms’ and ‘Oriental Art’.
The shocking pink Eton Candle for 1922 was indeed known to its detractors as the Eton Scandal. Extravagantly praised by Edith Sitwell, doyenne of high modernism, it was dedicated to the memory of Eton’s most notorious old boy, the arch-aesthete, prolific poet, republican radical and lifelong flagellant, Algernon Charles Swinburne. Beautifully printed on hand-made paper, with yellow endpapers, the Candle included a contribution by a young master called Aldous Huxley and an essay by Brian Howard entitled ‘The New Poetry’, which attacked the staid Georgian poets and praised the innovative verse of Ezra Pound. Like Evelyn Waugh at Lancing, Howard set himself against the ‘old men’ of the pre-war era who had murdered the golden boys of Rupert Brooke’s generation:
You were a great Young Generation …
And then you went and got murdered – magnificently
Went out and got murdered … because a parcel of damned old men
Wanted some fun or some power or something.
As Cyril Connolly put it, if you didn’t get on with your father in those days, you had all the glorious dead on your side.
Having conquered Eton, it was only a matter of time before the two young Turks took on Oxford. Howard once exclaimed to Acton: ‘Do you realise, Harold – please pay attention to this – that you and I are going to have a rather famous career at Oxford?’ Both boys seemed destined for great things, dazzling careers in literature or the arts. But it was Eton that made them. University was to be an enemy of promise: it came to seem something of a let down. Ironically, the person who assured their fame and who immortalised their Oxford turned out to be the Lancing boy.
CHAPTER 3 Oxford: ‘… her secret none can utter’
There is nothing like the aesthetic pleasure of being drunk and if you do it in the right way you can avoid being ill next day. That is the greatest thing Oxford has to teach.
(Evelyn Waugh, Diaries)
He was in love with my brother.
(Lady Sibell Lygon)
January 1922. ‘Half past seven and the Principal’s dead.’ Evelyn Waugh was in bed in his undergraduate rooms in Hertford College, Oxford. He was woken by this call from his servant or ‘scout’, Bateson, a melancholy man, whose job it was to change the chamber pots twice daily and bring jugs of shaving water every morning. Evelyn was eighteen years of age, and he had come up to Oxford at a different time of year from most undergraduates. He had won a scholarship to read History at Hertford. His original plan had been to spend time in France before Oxford, but his father was anxious for him to start university life without delay. Evelyn felt that it put him at a disadvantage. He was resentful. His rooms, up a poky staircase above the Junior Common Room Buttery, overlooking New College Lane, were modest. All the best ones had been taken in Michaelmas (autumn) term. Crockery rattled below and cooking smells drifted up to his rooms, though sometimes that meant a pleasant aroma of anchovy toast and honey buns.
It was not merely the inferior student rooms that Evelyn minded, but the fact that it was difficult to form friendships so late in the year. Looking back, as he wrote his memoirs, he remembered his younger self as a somewhat romantic ‘lone explorer’, a rover on the fringes of various groups (‘sets’) of like-minded students. His letters at the time show a much less self-confident figure, desperately lonely, shy and ill at ease.
His contemporaries fell into two groups: those who were clever and dull, and those who were foolish and charming. Hertford College he found second-rate, respectable but dreary. It had none of the glamour of the more famous colleges such as Christ Church and Merton, though this had its advantages. It lacked the schoolboyish hooliganism of the larger colleges: ‘No one was ever debagged or had his rooms wrecked or his oak screwed up’ (undergraduate rooms had an inner door of baize and an outer of oak – if you did not wish to be disturbed, you closed the outer one, or ‘sported your oak’). A contemporary described Hertford as ‘rather earnest and lower-middle-class’. One of the main reasons Evelyn chose it was to save his father money.
This was not quite the romantic beginning that he had envisioned when as a schoolboy he had daydreamed about Oxford and prepared himself by reading novels such as Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street and Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson. For a sensitive boy with a strong aesthetic sensibility, Oxford had an irresistible aura of enchantment. He went up to the ‘varsity’ with his imagination aglow with literary associations. The sophisticated boys whom he came to know later treated Oxford with studied indifference and cool detachment. Their hearts had been left at Eton. For Evelyn, by contrast, product of a minor public school, there was magic in the beauty of Oxford, its ancient buildings of greys and golds, its tranquil, lush gardens and dreaming spires. ‘All I can say,’ he gushed to a friend shortly after his arrival, ‘is that it is immensely beautiful and immensely different from anything I have seen written about it except perhaps ‘‘Know you her secret none can utter?’’’
The quotation is the opening line of a poem called ‘Alma Mater’ by Arthur Quiller-Couch. Known as ‘Q’, he was the archetypal Oxford man of letters – who by Waugh’s time had, with great disloyalty, seated himself in the King Edward VII Chair of English Literature at Cambridge. A typical stanza from ‘Alma Mater’ reads:
Once, my dear – but the world was young then
