New Book About Early Waugh Love Interest

A new book has appeared featuring one of Waugh’s love interests of the 1930s. This is entitled The Many Lives and Loves of Hazel Lavery and is described on its cover as a Novel. Here’s an excerpt from a review in The Times by Sophie Grenham based on an interview of the author Lois Cahall:

The American journalist and bestselling author Lois Cahall is unusually jittery for someone who is used to interviews. A few years ago, she set about writing a novel about Hazel Lavery, the wife and muse of the Belfast-born painter John Lavery, and the rumoured lover of Michael Collins, who played a pivotal role in Ireland’s war of independence. Cahall was daunted by the prospect of fictionalising this very Irish story. “I’m nervous because this book is about someone else,” she says. “It’s my responsibility to the Irish.”

Lavery was the daughter of a Chicago industrialist of Irish descent, and an artist, a great beauty and society figure. When her father died suddenly, she and her family travelled around Europe, and it was in Brittany that she first met John Lavery, who was considerably older. She married him a few years later. She is immortalised in more than 40 of John’s works, and her face even appeared on Irish banknotes. Cahall’s novel, The Many Lives and Loves of Hazel Lavery, is inspired by the relationships that shaped her and her role in a crucial moment for Anglo-Irish relations…

Cahall was born and raised in Boston and now lives near Manhattan. She sees parallels between her own life story and that of Lavery. After Cahall’s father left the family when she was a toddler, she was educated by nuns in a convent boarding school. Her mother banned her from discussing her father’s Irish heritage, so it wasn’t until she was ten and a family friend brought her to a St Patrick’s Day parade that she discovered what she calls “big Irish energy”.

“I think when you’re Irish your country is always with you,” she says. “When famous Irish people do interviews, they love wherever they’re from. The people are proud of their history and the old and the new weaves together. I feel a sense of loyalty, and I’m all about loyalty.”

It was Cahall’s friend who brought Lavery to her attention. “Lois, you have to write this book because Hazel had this incredible life with fascinating friends and lovers,” she told her. “She’s you, only from another country.” At the time Downton Abbey and Outlander were two of the biggest shows on television, and Cahall is a fan of grand, sweeping stories with a bit of history thrown in.

Lavery entertained many influential people at her London home, including Winston and Clementine Churchill, Cecil Beaton, JM Barrie and Evelyn Waugh. Cahall also has a glittering social circle; she worked for the author James Patterson after she sought his advice when starting her Palm Beach Book Festival ten years ago. She also founded the Cape Cod Book Festival, which celebrated its inaugural year in 2024. Cahall has also enjoyed friendships with Salman Rushdie and Colin Firth. “I didn’t see these people as famous. I saw them as colleagues,” she tells me. “I’m not someone who would ask for an autograph. I’d be on the arm of someone giving the autograph.”…

Waugh met Hazel Lavery in the socializing he enjoyed after the success of Vile Bodies.  The occasion was a dinner party given by Emerald Cunard. There followed an affair of some sort, but it seems to have been relatively brief according to Waugh’s biographers. Hazel was 16 years his senior and the wife of a well known painter who was nearly twice as many years her senior. Their “affair”, if that is what it was, seems to have been sufficiently memorable to cause Waugh to dedicate Remote People (1931) to her. How much of their liaison is described in Cahall’s new book is not discussed in The Times’ review. The most detailed description probably is that contained in the Selina Hastings biography pp. 245-46. Here’s an excerpt:

…[Hazel] had a reputation for what some described as nymphomania, others less censoriously as excessive romantic attachments, and for a time she pursued Evelyn with ardour. He, although slightly embarrassed by her flamboyant attentions, was nonetheless flattered, and quite ready to enjoy a brief liaison. He took her to tea with his parents and allowed her to drive him about when he had errands to do. But he soon grew bored by the hysterical demands, rebuffing her unkindly, behaviour which, when Hazel died in 1935, caused him to suffer remorse. He had a Mass said for her which he attended very early in the morning as a penance.

The new book is available here in hardback, paperback and digital editions. An earlier book (Hazel: A Life of Hazel Lavery) written by Sinead McCoole and published as a “biography” in 1997 is available at this link.

 

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