–Lytham Hall is cited in a recent article as having inspired or influenced the country house setting of Brideshead Revisited. This is in a feature-length article by David Slattery-Christy in the Sunday Express. The author thinks that both the owner (Harry Clifton) and house in Lancashire contributed to Sebastian Flyte and Brideshead Castle in the novel. Here is an excerpt:
…When Waugh introduces us to Flyteâs rooms in Brideshead Revisited they are, like Harryâs, at Christ Church. Interestingly, Violet Clifton used to indulge Harry by sending him groceries in season when he requested them, sometimes driven by the chauffeur all the way from Lytham to Oxford. So Flyteâs demand for Plovers Eggs and Champagne on a whim had echoes of this eccentric and indulged behaviour. âThe truth is,â declared Waugh, âthat Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.â
Sadly Harry never did. As the 1930s progressed, Harry spiralled into more absurd and bizarre behaviour. He was cross that the estate had to pay death duties that initially curtailed his lavish spending. He enjoyed London life and as a result took a permanent suite at the Ritz Hotel, the family home in Mayfair having been sold. To add to the already sizable costs he also took a room at Claridgeâs. When asked why he had both, he airily declared: âIf I go for a walk and need to rest, I have somewhere to go.â
If this seems eccentric, Harry also dined once a week at the Ritz with the âWhite Goddessâ â who he claimed was his mentor, friend and spiritual advisor. Nobody else could see her, but the waiters served her and Harry spent the evening chatting with her while other diners looked on bemused. All this while squandering money and selling off prime assets to finance his adventures. Violet [Clifton] was in despair and worried he would destroy the dynasty. She was right to believe so. It became so desperate she even attempted to get a Harley Street doctor to certify Harry as insane so the estates could pass to his younger brother, Michael…
After a photograph of Waugh, the text continues:
…Waugh visited Lytham in the 1930s. The surviving letter [24 June 1935, Letters, 94-95] he wrote to Lady Katharine Asquith gives us an idea of what he thought of Harry [Cliftonâ]s extended family and Lytham Hall: âA very beautiful house by [William] Kent or someone like him with first-class Italian plaster work⊠large park entirely surrounded by trams and villas. Adam dining room⊠a lap of luxury flowing with champagne and elaborate cookery⊠all sitting at separate tables at meals”…âTwo or three good pictures including a RenoirâŠâ Waughâs opinion of Harry and his siblings was less than enthusiastic, however. He wrote: âEaster (or so she seems to be called), Orsa [Avia], Michael, a youth seven feet high with a moustache who plays with a clockwork motorcar and an accordion⊠The Cliftons are all tearing madâŠâ
By this time Waugh had published Decline And Fall and Vile Bodies, both designed to shock and at times mock the ruling elites. This did not go unnoticed by Violet Clifton who declared she never read âcheap novelsâ, no doubt to Waughâs amusement.
By then, Harry had bought at eye-watering cost at auction two Imperial Faberge Eggs â the Rosebud Egg and the Renaissance Egg â much to the horror of his mother. He had also met Lilian Griswold, a penniless American socialite, at a drunken party in London. They went on a drinking bender together and woke up married. Both seemed to be bemused at how it had happened, but it didnât last.
Waugh had started work on Brideshead Revisited, the novel that would change his fortunes, by the late 1930s [sic] but it was put on hold because of the outbreak of the Second World War. When the novel was finally published in 1945, 80 years ago, it sent shockwaves through society.
But it secured Waughâs success as an author, gave him global fame and made him financially secure for the rest of his life. Violet however described Waugh as âthat awful manâ and declared to never speak to him again for what she saw as his betrayal. Harry drifted along in a fog of fantasy, oblivious to anyoneâs needs but his own…
There is no surviving correspondence thus far published referring to any close relationship between Waugh and Harry Clifton as there is with other models cited for Sebastian Flyte: Alastair Graham and Hugh Lygon. Indeed, the author of this article relies, as have others, on Waugh’s report on his visit to Lytham Hall to Katherine Asquith. But you can make what you will of how the visit to Lytham Hall and Harry Clifton’s lifestyle may have influenced Waugh’s novel. The family circumstances and the house do seem to be quite like those other influences more traditionally cited. Waugh did not start writing Brideshead Revisited until early 1944 (10 years after his visit to Lytham Hall) but seems to have started thinking about it several years before that.
–The new biography of Pamela Berry by her daughter Harriet Cullen (mentioned in previous posts) is reviewed by Simon Heffer in the Sunday Telegraph. This includes discussion of an important chapter of the book that involves Evelyn Waugh:
…Cullen describes how her mother took her and her siblings to France on a beach holiday, but blew all her foreign currency on objets dâart in Paris on her way there, and had no money left to feed the children.
To make matters worse, she had invited Evelyn Waugh, without first ascertaining that there was somewhere for him to stay, and Waugh â who was not of the rosiest disposition at the best of times â not only had to endure inferior lodgings, but also had to save the Berry children from âmalnutritionâ.
Cullen describes, commendably neutrally, her motherâs lack of interest in most of her children, partly because of her obsession with society and, for a decade, because of her affair with Malcolm Muggeridge, and how it strained their relationships with her. As a result, she has created a truly fine biography â and an object lesson in how to do it properly.
–A new biography of novelist Muriel Spark has been published in the UK. This is entitled Electric Spark and is written by Frances Wilson. Here is an excerpt from a description of the book by the author that appeared in the New Statesman:
…Spark made an art of beginnings and endings. We see it in The Girls of Slender Means, which begins and ends with the line âlong ago in 1945â, and in her use of flash-forwards, so that the manner of a characterâs death is revealed at the start. The schoolgirl Mary McGregor, for example, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, âwho was later famous for being stupid and always to blame⊠at the age of 23, lost her life in a hotel fireâ. Lise in The Driverâs Seat, who selects a stranger to murder her, will be âfound tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a manâs necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.â
The Driverâs Seat might be seen as the blueprint for the game Spark set in motion with [Martin] Stannard, whom she handpicked after reviewing the second volume of his biography of Evelyn Waugh. Stannard, Spark wrote, was âa literary critic and a scrupulous scholarâ, who understood the relationship between a writerâs life and his work. When she first invited to him to her home, Stannard assumed it was to interview him for the job, but Spark had decided already that this stranger was the man she wanted…
The book has been reviewed favorably in The Guardian, The Spectator and Financial Times. It will be published in the US in September.
–Duncan McLaren has added several articles in his Combe Florey section before announcing that he is going on a break. These can all be accessed from this link. I most enjoyed the ones on the second visit of the photographer (“Photo Session: October 1963”) and the writing and publishing of Basil Seal Rides Again (“The Last Loved One”). The final article, recounting the various versions of Waugh’s death (“Easter Sunday 1966”), is also of particular interest.