Mad World

Unlike his aristocratic friends, Waugh needed to earn a living after leaving Oxford. After a short stint teaching, he followed his older brother Alec – who had published a bestselling novel while still in his teens – by creating a splash with his very first novel. “Decline and Fall” captured the zeitgeist of the disaffected “bright young things” of his generation, caught between two great wars.

Throughout his life, Waugh retreated from society periodically to either gather material or write. He was enormously prolific, turning out a book every year or so, including such trenchant novels as “Vile Bodies” and “A Handful of Dust,” several prize-winning biographies, and books about his dangerous travel adventures in Africa, the Arctic, and South America.

For more than a decade – until his 1937 marriage – Waugh did not maintain a home but instead bounced among friends. Chief among these were Hugh Lygon’s sisters, Sibell, Mary (Maimie), and Dorothy (Coote), whom he befriended in 1931 and stayed close to until his death in 1966. Madresfield Court, their imposing ancestral estate in Worcestershire, was affectionately called “Mad” – hence Byrne’s title.

As another friend, writer Nancy Mitford, commented after first reading “Brideshead,” it was, “So true to life being in love with a whole family.” As smitten as he was with Hugh and his sisters, Waugh was also taken with their cultivated father. He was much affected by Lord Beauchamp’s plight: a leading liberal politician forced into exile for homosexuality. (In “Brideshead,” the source of Lord Marchmain’s disgrace was altered to an exotic mistress.)

Among the papers Byrne gained access to for the first time is Countess Beauchamp’s 1932 petition for divorce, which had been sealed through 2032 and which explicitly spells out her husband’s many homosexual liaisons – at a time when homosexuality was still a crime subject to prosecution in England.

As Byrne makes clear, Madresfield was Waugh’s Arcadia, encapsulating his “search for an ideal family” and his lifelong “theme of exile and exclusion.” Waugh’s world changed irrevocably with World War II – which explains the elegiac nostalgia that suffuses “Brideshead.” Deftly interweaving biographical details and textual analysis, Byrne makes the connections between Waugh’s art, Roman Catholic faith, and life dance.

Heller McAlpin, a freelance critic in New York, is a frequent Monitor contributor.

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