{"id":5091,"date":"2017-01-15T17:55:21","date_gmt":"2017-01-15T06:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/?p=5091"},"modified":"2017-01-21T17:42:42","modified_gmt":"2017-01-21T06:42:42","slug":"mad-world-evelyn-waugh-and-the-secrets-of-brideshead-by-paula-byrne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/mad-world-evelyn-waugh-and-the-secrets-of-brideshead-by-paula-byrne\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead\u2019 by Paula Byrne"},"content":{"rendered":"

I really enjoyed Mad World<\/em> by Paula Byrne<\/a>, which is an engrossing account of the people who inspired Evelyn Waugh\u2019s novels \u2013 specifically, the troubled Lygon family of Madresfield Court, so similar to the Flyte family in Brideshead Revisited<\/em>. <\/p>\n

\"'MadThe true story of the Lygons turns out to be even more dramatic and tragic than that of their fictional counterparts. Lord Beauchamp<\/a>, a very grand earl, didn\u2019t merely choose to live away from England with his lover because he disliked his pious wife \u2013 he was forced into permanent exile in 1931 to evade arrest for \u201ccommitting acts of gross homosexual indecency\u201d with his servants. While aristocratic men of the time often got away with flouting this law, Lord Beauchamp had been flagrant in his disregard for social and legal conventions. This became a problem when it appeared one of his daughters, Lady Mary, might marry Prince George. The King took action and recruited Beauchamp\u2019s brother-in-law, Bendor<\/a>, the Duke of Westminster, who\u2019d long resented Beauchamp:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seemed grotesquely unfair that his brother-in-law should have three sons, a loyal wife, a string of homosexual lovers, a glittering career and great standing in politics, while he himself had got through three wives without producing a single male heir \u2026 Bendor set about his task with great relish and ruthless dispatch.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Lygon family was torn apart, with most of the children taking their father\u2019s side and refusing to forgive their mother for divorcing him. The girls, previously the most eligible debutantes of their time, were unable to make \u2018good\u2019 marriages, due to the scandal. Lady Mary, the most beautiful, eventually married a philandering Russian aristocrat, who left her penniless and battling mental illness, alcoholism and loneliness. The heir, Lord Elmley, married a much older woman and had no children; Hugh, the model for Sebastian Flyte, quickly lost his good looks and his money and spent the remainder of his short life in a drunken stupor, trying to block out the guilt and shame of his own homosexuality; only Lady Dorothy, portrayed as Cordelia Flyte, seemed to live a relatively happy and productive life, although she had her own brief and disastrous marriage. <\/p>\n

The author says that she wrote this book because she believed \u201cthat Evelyn Waugh had been persistently misrepresented as a snob and a curmudgeonly misanthropist.\u201d However, I finished this book disliking Waugh, as a person, even more than I already did, which I didn\u2019t think was possible. He was<\/em> a snob. He spent his life attaching himself to a series of rich, aristocratic families, happy to be their court jester if he got to stay in grand country houses for extended periods at their expense, especially if it also provided him with good writing fodder. From his earliest years, he was spiteful and nasty, bullying anyone he regarded as his inferior in either social status or intelligence. He may have possessed wit and humour, but it always had a sharp edge. There is a lot of description of his idiotic drunken escapades with friends, which we are meant to admire:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026to an outsider, the banter and play that characterised Mad World [that is, life at Madresfield Court with the Lygon siblings] appear frivolous and jejune, but in reality the comedy was a means of survival and a manifestation of love.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"'BridesheadHmm. Waugh at least had some self-awareness and admitted, when proposing to the woman who would become his second wife, \u201cI am restless and moody and misanthropic and lazy and have no money\u2026\u201d (It reminded me of Mr Mybug in Cold Comfort Farm<\/em><\/a> trying to appear more interesting to Flora by hinting at his dark depths.) Perhaps the poor woman thought he was joking, but she agreed to marry him and then spent years living in the country, perpetually pregnant, looking after their huge brood of children while he caroused around London. Despite his fervent Roman Catholicism, he had no moral qualms about buying the services of prostitutes, including \u201clittle Arab girls of fifteen and sixteen, for ten francs each\u201d in Morocco. Even his brief military service during the war was marked by impropriety, when he falsified the official record of his battalion\u2019s withdrawal from Crete in 1941. He told his friend Nancy Mitford that his behaviour would have been even worse<\/em> if he hadn\u2019t been under the moral influence of the Church. The mind boggles.<\/p>\n

Paula Byrne provides an interesting analysis of most of Waugh\u2019s books, including Vile Bodies<\/em>, A Handful of Dust<\/em> and the Sword of Honour<\/em> trilogy, but I found her detailed chapter on Brideshead Revisited<\/em> the most fascinating. She examines his descriptions of Oxford, homosexuality, Roman Catholicism and aristocratic life, linking the major characters in the novel to their real-life counterparts. I think readers who love Waugh\u2019s writing will find this book rewarding \u2013 but don\u2019t expect to feel very fond of Waugh by the end of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I really enjoyed Mad World by Paula Byrne, which is an engrossing account of the people who inspired Evelyn Waugh\u2019s novels \u2013 specifically, the troubled Lygon family of Madresfield Court, so similar to the Flyte family in Brideshead Revisited. The true story of the Lygons turns out to be even more dramatic and tragic than … Continue reading \u2018Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead\u2019 by Paula Byrne<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,21,5],"tags":[243,242],"class_list":["post-5091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1930s","category-books","category-lgb","category-wwii","tag-evelyn-waugh","tag-paula-byrne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5091"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5108,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5091\/revisions\/5108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}