the spring of 1924, Evelyn informed his old school friend, Dudley Carew, that his life had become ‘quite incredibly depraved morally’. Drunkenness at the Hypocrites was part of the story, but hardly sufficient to qualify as incredible depravity. Something else was being hinted at. Tom Driberg, dancing with a fellow member, saw a drunken Evelyn rolling on the sofa with another boy, ‘with (as one of them later said) their tongues licking each others’ tonsils’. Anthony Powell’s first encounter with Evelyn was a sighting of him at the Hypocrites sitting on the knee of another member, Christopher Hollis. A club guest, Isaiah Berlin, also saw him on a settee kissing a friend. Evelyn later teased Christopher Sykes for not having had a homosexual phase, saying that he had missed out on something special.
But it was not just sexual experimentation. There were genuine love affairs. When the staunchly heterosexual Henry Yorke read Brideshead Revisited, he told Evelyn that it made him regret not falling in love at Oxford himself: ‘I see now what I have missed.’ What he missed was what Waugh experienced: real passion. Evelyn’s sexual abstinence at school seemed to make his Oxford love affairs even more intense.
Though Evelyn relished the companionship of eccentric and slightly crazed friends like Terence Greenidge and Harold Acton, romantically he was drawn to fragile, beautiful boys. Before being seduced by the Hypocrites, he had become intimate with a shy and scholarly left-wing Wykehamist from Balliol called Richard Pares. Evelyn described him as ‘abnormally clever’. In a later letter to Nancy Mitford, he also described Pares as ‘my first homosexual love’.
Pares was pale skinned, with a mop of fair hair and large blue eyes that somehow seemed blank. Their affair began in the summer of 1922. Evelyn later recalled: ‘I loved him dearly, but an excess of wine nauseated him and this made an insurmountable barrier between us. When I felt most intimate, he felt queasy.’ In other words, Waugh needed to be very drunk to release his strongest emotions, whereas Pares could not hold his drink. Nevertheless the young men spent two intense terms together. They only drifted apart when Waugh developed his ‘indiscriminate bonhomie’ among the Hypocrites. Being drunk was becoming his greatest ‘aesthetic pleasure’, whereas Pares was more interested in his research on the West Indian sugar trade. He was duly rescued from Bohemia by a homosexual don called Urquhart (known as ‘Sligger’), Dean of Balliol, who encouraged him to become an academic. He took a first and was elected to a fellowship of All Souls. Evelyn always remembered him with great affection and late in life Pares, happily married and respectable, remembered the affair as one of the most passionate and intense of his life.
Christopher Hollis, on whose knee Anthony Powell had first spotted Evelyn at the Hypocrites, wrote a memoir of Oxford in the Twenties, in which he said that Waugh had two homosexual lovers, first Richard Pares and then Alastair Graham. In A Little Learning, Waugh records that Richard Pares’ successor as what he called ‘the friend of my heart’ was a boy that ‘I will call Hamish Lennox’. ‘Hamish’ is described as ‘no scholar’: he ‘soon went down to take a course in architecture in London; but he continued to haunt Oxford and for two or three years we were inseparable or, if separated, in almost daily communication, until like so many of my generation, he heard the call of the Levant and went to live abroad’. ‘Hamish,’ says Waugh, ‘had no repugnance to the bottle and we drank deep together. At times he was as gay as any Hypocrite, but there were always hints of the spirit that in later years has made him a recluse.’ This account precisely fits Alastair Graham and Waugh’s relationship with him.
The two boys drank deep together of both alcohol and love. In one of his letters Alastair enclosed a naked photo of himself, leaning against a rock face, with arms outstretched, buttocks in full view, along with a description of the best way to drink fine wine: ‘You must take a peach and peel it, and put it in a finger bowl, and pour the Burgundy over it. The flavour is exquisite.’ The letter ended: ‘With love from Alastair, and his poor dead heart.’
Alastair came from the Scottish borders. His father was dead, his mother ‘high-tempered, possessive, jolly and erratic’. A southern belle from Savannah, she was the model for the character of Lady Circumference in Decline and Fall. She had settled in Warwickshire for the sake of the hunting. She devoted herself to frenzied gardening, disingenuously claiming that she was keeping the place on solely for the sake of Alastair (who in reality was no huntsman).
Alastair invited Evelyn home. His mother’s residence in the village of Barford, between Stratford-upon-Avon and Warwick, gave Evelyn his first taste of country-house living. Though on nothing like the scale of Madresfield, Barford House is much the grandest building in the village. It still stands behind a high wall. Albeit more shabby genteel than aristocratic grand, it was still a world away from Underhill. There was a ballroom that had been built especially for Alastair’s coming-of-age party.
Alastair, like Hugh Lygon, was a dreamer. He loved lying in the garden looking at flowers, or searching the fields for edible fungi. He drove his mother mad. She befriended Evelyn in the hope that he would persuade her son to cut down on his drinking and start living a less indolent life. He did not oblige.
Though Alastair frequently visited Evelyn in Oxford, he was resident in London. So did Evelyn have another undergraduate lover? Most biographers follow Hollis in identifying only Pares and Graham, but according to the Oxford don A. L. Rowse, Evelyn had three lovers at Oxford. The third man was Hugh Lygon. Rowse was convinced that Evelyn was bisexual and that as a novelist he ‘made use of every little scrap of his experience – he wasted nothing’. He remembered a conversation with Lady Sibell, eldest of the three Lygon sisters, who knew Evelyn well. ‘He was in love with my brother,’ she recalled.
Evelyn’s three lovers were of a very similar type: pale and beautiful, with the aura of Rupert Brooke. Richard and Hugh were both blond. After Oxford he fell in love with women of the same ethereal beauty: Diana Mitford, Teresa Jungman, Diana Cooper, Laura Herbert.
Evelyn was drawn to Alastair and Hugh not only because of their delicate beauty and gentility, but also because they were hard-drinking and self-destructive. He liked their child-like qualities and their lack of intellectual fervour (he never fell in love with Harold Acton or Brian Howard, much as he admired their abilities). He definitely had a type: the objects of his desire were invariably richer and better-looking, though never funnier, than he was. They had a dreaminess about them and a fragility that he found irresistible. They brought out his protective instincts. Waugh was speaking equally of himself when he wrote in his biography of the theologian Ronald Knox that he was susceptible to good looks and drawn to those with an air of sadness, of ‘tristesse’. Hugh Lygon had exactly this quality. He drifted round Oxford like a lost boy, a Peter Pan who refused to grow up. Terence Greenidge remembered him carrying a teddy bear.
Greenidge, a fervent socialist, admired Hugh’s classical good looks and thought he had ‘charm and elegance’, but said that he was ‘rather empty’. But Evelyn found him full of humour. The same things made them laugh. He loved Hugh’s eccentricities and was impressed by his lack of snobbery.
Hugh, along with Robert Byron, Patrick Balfour and Brian Howard, was regarded as one of the most sexually active of the Hypocrites. Harold Acton wrote to Evelyn after the publication of A Little Learning to reprove him for singling out his homosexuality, whilst failing to mention ‘Robert’s, Patrick’s, Brian’s and Hugh’s promiscuities’. Evelyn himself called Hugh the ‘lascivious Mr Lygon’.
Tamara Abelson (later Talbot Rice) was an exotic White Russian exile, who knew Evelyn at Oxford where she was one of the rare under-graduettes. As far as she was concerned, ‘everyone knew that Evelyn and Hugh Lygon had an affair’. She reported that John Fothergill let Evelyn have rooms in the Spreadeagle at Thame at a special midweek rate so that he and Hugh could meet in private.
Not everyone approved of Evelyn’s translation to a new set. His brother Alec came to remonstrate about his dissipated lifestyle. But Evelyn was not going to
