It’s been years since I read The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. I’m looking at them again because of an email from a reader that sent me down a rabbit hole into a labyrinthine warren.
A Tuesday in July 1946: “Tuesday a drunken day; lunched at the Beefsteak. Ben Nicolson full of discovery of a new Raphael. Went with him and Harold to see it. Drinking in White’s most of afternoon. Then to Beefsteak again where I got drunk with Kenneth Wagg and insulted RA Butler. Then to St James’s for another bottle of champagne where I insulted Beverly Baxter. Was sick on retiring to bed”.
He thought he should move to Ireland.
Saturday 9 November 1946
Throughout the day constantly recurring thoughts of Ireland. Not so much of what I should find there as what I should shake off here. The luxury of being a foreigner, of completely retiring from further experience and settling in an upstairs library to garner the forty-three-year harvest. The certainty that England as a great power is done for, sloth and envy, must produce increasing poverty; that this time the cutting down will start at the top until only a proletariat and a bureaucracy survive.
Saturday 23 November 1946
The French called the occupying German army ‘the grey lice’. That is precisely how I regard the occupying army of English socialist government.
Monday 2 December 1946
A hurricane blowing and bitter cold. Midwinter is no season to prospect for a house. We travelled in smoky, dirty, ill-lit carriages to Liverpool and boarded the boat where there was a tang of civility in the air and ample provisions in the dining-room. The usual St George’s Channel personnel – colonels’ wives covered with regimental badges, priests, drunken commercial travellers. This time a number of Jews, presumably tax-evaders.
Dublin, Tuesday 3 December 1946
On deck early to see the ship berth, breakfast by lamplight, a dawn drive to Shelbourne Hotel, baths and second breakfast. Then with an hour or two spare before the house agent came to fetch us, into the square in the soft Dublin luminance. There was a letter from Billy Wicklow commending a solicitor to us, Terence de Vere White; a letter from a rival house agent who approached us on T de V White’s suggestion; a letter of welcome from a friend of Patrick Kinross, Moragh Bernard; a call from Christine Longford. At 11 we started for Gormanston by car with a man from the house agents and an architect named Hendy. All the way – twenty miles of flat, swampy country – they told us funny stories about Dublin ‘characters’. At last the castle, which was reached by a back-drive through stables and outhouses. It was a fine, solid, grim, square, half-finished block with tower and turrets. Mrs O’Connor, Lord Gormanston’s widow, opened the door, young, small, attractive, common. She had lit peat fires for our benefit in the main rooms, but normally inhabited a small dressing-room upstairs. The ground-floor rooms were large and had traces of fine Regency decoration. Pictures by Lady Butler everywhere. There were countless bedrooms, many uninhabitable, squalid plumbing, vast attics. On the whole I liked the house; the grounds were dreary with no features except some fine box alleys. The chapel unlicensed and Mrs O’Connor evasive about the chances of getting it put to use again. She gave us a substantial luncheon. My hirelings drank brandy and seemed disposed to tell funny stories till dusk, but I routed them out and we paraded the wet fields. Then drove back at nightfall. The house agent came into the hotel with us and began to tell funny stories until I turned him out. That night, very weary, we dined at the hotel, drank a bottle of champagne, went for one act of an unintelligible peasant comedy at the Abbey Theatre, and then to bed.
Although it’s not easy to like Waugh, he cannot help writing well. I like him imagining himself as Lord Emsworth, secluded in a library, no doubt comforted by brandy and cigars and neglecting his Whiffle. The description of crossing the Irish Sea is redolent of the channel crossing at the beginning of Vile Bodies and ‘on the whole I liked the house’ has perfect comic timing.
But I digress. He did indeed like the house, valued at £13,000 and needing £5,000 of repairs and put in a bid. On boarding the boat back to England he bought an evening paper and “read that Butlin had acquired a stretch of property at Gormanston and was setting up a holiday camp there. This announcement made us change all our intentions. It came just in time for us, disastrously for poor Mrs O’Connor”.
It was sold a few years later to the Franciscan Order of Friars and, as you know, Waugh put up with the socialist government and remained curmudgeonly towards friends and family in Somerset and London clubs.
More about the Prestons and Gormanstons tomorrow.