Let me not be Mad

I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.’ Few epigraphs to fiction have been so widely disregarded as the disclaimer with which Evelyn Waugh presaged Brideshead Revisited.

Immediately it was published, as Waugh’s great friend Nancy Mitford wrote to him, the general view was simply: ‘It is the Lygon family. Too much Catholic stuff.’ And it is easy to see why people were tempted to see Madresfield Court, seat of the Earl of Beauchamp, as the original of Brideshead.

Just as in Brideshead, here is a stiff older son and a younger son losing the golden beauty of his youth to alcoholism. Here were clever sisters, a starchy and religious materfamilias, and a father in exile following a scandal. And here — in Charles Ryder, just like Evelyn Waugh at Madresfield or ‘Mad’ — was a child of the middle classes bewitched by aristocracy, while watching it go to ruin.

Paula Byrne’s book is not, as she explains in her introduction, a full biography of Waugh. If it is a biography of anything, it is a biography of Brideshead Revisited — and the complex of memory and feeling from which it arose. It takes in the by now familiar brew of Oxford homosexuality, Catholic theology, class anxiety, architectural nostalgia and heavy, heavy drinking.

But it sets out to concentrate on how all these arose from, and played into, Waugh’s infatuated friendship with the Lygon family: from a probable romance at Oxford with the second son, Hugh; through spectacular jazz-age parties at Madresfield; to decades-long correspondence with his sisters Mary (Maimie, or Blondy) and Dorothy (Coote).

The Waugh who emerges in Byrne’s book is a more sympathetic one than you sometimes get: of course, incredibly funny; but also a loyal and kind friend and someone blessed, or cursed, with self-knowledge of particular astringency.