Free Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings by Craig Brown

woman suddenly says, ‘Did I hear the word “whisky”?’
    ‘Do you want one?’ asks Waugh.
    ‘More than anything in the world.’
    ‘I’ll get you some.’
    But at this point the Portuguese poet steps in. He nudges Waugh and says, ‘It would be disastrous.’ So Waugh persuades her to stick with the white wine. Repeating the words of the Portuguese poet, he explains to Guinness that ‘we couldn’t face another disaster from that quarter.’
    Over lunch, Guinness tipsily shares his few remaining theological anxieties with the blond English youth and the Portuguese poet. ‘Would wehave to drink the Pope’s health? If Edith died on the spot would she go straight to heaven? And would that be a case for ecclesiastical rejoicing or worldly and artistic distress?’ A great deal is drunk; the following morning, try as he may, Guinness cannot recollect any of them leaving the table.

EVELYN WAUGH
    WRONG-FOOTS
IGOR STRAVINSKY
    The Ambassador Hotel, Park Avenue, New York
    February 4th 1949
    Evelyn Waugh claims to dislike all music, with the possible exception of plainchant. This does not bode well for Igor Stravinsky as he prepares to meet him in New York. He has already been warned by Aldous Huxley that Waugh can be ‘prickly, pompous, and downright unpleasant’. But he is an admirer of Waugh’s writing, particularly his talent for dialogue and the naming of characters (Dr Kakaphilos; Father Rothschild, S.J.), and is pleased when a friend arranges a meeting.
    Stravinsky spent last night in the more congenial company of Vladimir Nabokov, W.H. Auden and George Balanchine, playing them his draft score of Act 1 of The Rake’s Progress . As usual, he found himself a little irritated by Auden’s tendency to talk during any performance, but this is small fry compared to what lies ahead: Waugh is, after all, notoriously prickly.
    ‘Why does everybody except me find it so easy to be nice?’ asks the distracted Gilbert Pinfold in Waugh’s most autobiographical novel. 24 Tom Driberg identifies this as ‘a true outcry’ from Pinfold’s creator. At the age of only forty-five, Waugh has somehow boxed himself into the character of a grumpy old curmudgeon. Penelope Fitzgerald sums up the social message he wishes to convey as: I am bored, you are frightened .
    His rudeness has no age limit. When Ann Fleming brings her uninvited three-year-old son to tea at the Grand Hotel, Folkestone, Waugh is so annoyed that he puts ‘his face close to the child’s, dragging down the corners of eyes and mouth with forefingers and thumbs, producing an effect of such unbelievable malignity that the child shrieked with terrorand fell to the floor’. Fleming retaliates by giving Waugh’s face a hard slap and overturning a plate of éclairs.
    Observing him at Pratt’s Club, Malcolm Muggeridge thinks Waugh presents a ‘quite ludicrous figure in dinner jacket, silk shirt; extraordinarily like a loquacious woman, with dinner jacket cut like a maternity gown to hide his bulging stomach. He was very genial, probably pretty plastered – all the time playing this part of a crotchety old character rather deaf, cupping his ear – “Feller’s a bit of a Socialist, I suspect.” Amusing for about a quarter of an hour. Tony [Powell] and I agreed that an essential difference between Graham [Greene] and Waugh is that, whereas Graham tends to impose an agonized silence, Waugh demands agonized attention.’
    Some of his rudest remarks are delivered in such a way that few, perhaps including himself, can tell whether they are intended. ‘I spent two nights at Cap Ferrat with Mr Maugham (who has lost his fine cook) and made a great gaffe,’ he writes to Harold Acton in April 1952. ‘The first evening he asked me what someone was like and I said “A pansy with a stammer.” All the Picassos on the walls blanched.’
    He delights in wrong-footing one and all. When Feliks Topolski and Hugh Burnett arrive for lunch at Combe Florey to prepare for Waugh’s