Volume 8, Number 3 SIR RALPH BROMPTON
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Volume 8, Number 3 Winter, 1974 SIR RALPH BROMPTON--AN IDENTIFICATION Donald Greene (University of Southern California) The real-life inspiration for many of the characters in Waugh's World War II trilogy is not hard to detect. Sometimes Waugh gives them names and habits which make the identification transparent; sometimes they can be identified from our knowledge of Waugh's biography and prejudices. "Old Ruby," who lives in the Dor chester Hotel and gives dinner parties in honor of celebrities like Sir James Barrie (who, to her annoyance, fails to appear, having been dead for many years), is surely the famous society hostess, Emerald, Lady Cunard, also a denizen of the Dorchester i:.1: '( during the war. Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon, figures as Everard Spruce, ! ,, editor of the avant-qarde Survival, in the pages of which he publishes the writings of a survival from Waugh's earlier works--the poet Parsnip, who, in Put Out More Flags, has fled to America at the beginning of the war, along with his alliterative collaborator, Pimpernell (Auden and Isherwood, of course). Parsnip's future fate . I is disclosed in Love Among the Ruins, both in the text and in a drawing by Waugh, where he is shown as an unhappy, desiccated old figure, waiting patiently for ad mission at the entrance to the voluntary euthanasia chamber kindly provided by the authorities of the British Utopia. Auden's sympathetic treatment of Waugh in his New Yorker review of A. Little Learning is a remarkable feat of Christian forgiveness, if that is what it was. The ubiquitous Mrs. Stitch, also a survival from earlier Waugh, who takes charge of Guy_-Crouchback on his return from Crete to Alexandria, where her husband is an important emissary of the British government, has long been identified with Lady Diana Cooper, whose husband, Duff Cooper (later Viscount Nor wich), held such an office at this time. The commando officer, Brigadier Ritchie Hook, leader of Hookforce, is Waugh's commander, Brigadier Laycock, leader of Layforce. The unnamed poetry-quoting Commander-in-Chief, who gives Guy a lift in his official car, is Field Marshal Lord Wavell, compiler of the poetry anthology, Other Men's Flowers. .~nd so on. In the last volume of the trilogy, Unconditional Surrender (in the U.S., The End of the Battle) a new but important character is introduced, who continually turns up in unexpected places and obviously wields considerable power behind the scenes- the elegant and sinister Sir Ralph Brompton, ex-diplomat, homosexual, leftist in 'politics, infJuential in the world of letters. As the holder of a minor qovernment office, he makes it his business to indoctrinate the British Army, especially its younger members, with leftist views, preaching subservience to Russia and intriquing for the ousting of Mihailovitch in Yugoslavia and Chiang-kai-shek in China. Many years before he had become the lover of the young cavalry trooper Ludovic, made him his valet on his diplomatic posts ("secretary" when travelling), educated him, and now, when Ludovic is in his late thirties--Sir Ralph has replaced him with a series of younger men--sponsors Ludovic's budding efforts as an author _and recommends to Spruce Ludovic's future best-seller The Death Wish (earlier entitled, significantly, !. Pens!!es, and described "as though Logan Pearsall Smith had written Kafka"). Clearly he stands for much that Waugh fears and detests in the brave new world of 1945. The recent publication by Nigel Nicolson of hitherto undisclosed letters and private papers of his parents, the late Sir Harold Nicolson and Lady Nicolson (V. Sackville-West) (Portrait of a Marriage, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), seems to confirm a surmise I made long ago about Sir Ralph's original. Sir Harold, like Sir Ralph, began his career in the diplomatic service. His industrious and varied (but hardly dazzlinq) career as a man of letters is well known. The three volumes of excerpts from his diaries, also edited by his son, reveal his wide ac quaintance in London political and literary circles during the war. Like Sir Ralph, Sir Harold aope3rs in them as a considerable snob--he intrigued assiduously for a - 2 - :-, peerage, but had to make do in the end with a minor knighthood (K.C.V.O.). His snobbishness, however, did not prevent him from choosing the left rather than the right in politics as the road to advancement, and between 1935 and 1945 was a "National Labour" Member of Parliament. Defeated in the general election of 1945, he ran again in 1948, this time as a straight Labour, or Socialist, candidate. He was again defeated, and an article which he published soon afterward, expressing his distaste for having had to canvass among the unwashed masses, finished his prospects in Labour politics and cost him the peerage he thought his efforts had earned. Like Sir Ralph, Sir Harold lived most of the time in a London flat, rather than at Sissinghurst Castle with his wife. From this latest memoir emerges the last de tail needed to establish the identification--like Sir Ralph, Sir Harold also enter ·tained promisinq (and good-looking) young male writers there. Mr. Nicolson frankly discloses that both his parents were practicing homosexuals. My own suspicions were awakened by a passage (pp. 159-60 of the Little Brown ii edition, 1961) describing the career of Guy's uncle Peregrine, "a notorious bore," I a fatuous and feckless but good-hearted individual: Uncle Peregrine ... was obliged to spend the rest of the [first world] war as A.D.C. to a colonial governor who repeatedly but vainly cabled for his recall. In the 1920s he had hung about the diplomatic service as honorary attache( Once Ralph Brompton, as first secretary, had been posted to the same :.'' embassy, and had sought to make him the chancery butt; unsuccessfully; his 1 apathetic self-esteem was impervious to ridicule, no spark could be struck from that inert e 1ement. · · This is a precise summary of what is recounted in Chapter VI, "Titty," of Harold Nicolson's Some People (1927}, a series of thinly disguised autobiographical vig nettes. It is about a similarly fatuous young diplomat, whom his brighter colleagues ii similarly try to make the chancery butt. Nicolson narrates in appreciative detail fi one particular trick they used to play on him--to compress a strong spring binder li in a dispatch box, place boxes of paper clips or a tin of tooth powder on it, and f enjoy the result when the unsuspecting "Titty" opened the box. To their disappoint i ment, however, he never becomes angry; 1~augh' s "his apathetic self-esteem was im pervious to ridicule'' exactly describes it. The whole chapter is a cruel and memorable piece of writing (Sgme People is by far the best thing Nicolson ever wrote) and no doubt stuck in Waugh's mind. It is true that it ends with a curious passage of retraction, or expression of shame, by Nicolson; nevertheless the whole tale is I told with sa,distic relish. But th~re must be.many more such identifications to be made. The pespicable Major "Fido" Hound, the editor of Waugh's diary excerpts in The Observer tells us, J., was an actual officer in the expedition to Crete, but he continues to disguise his identity under that name. I am particularly curious--perhaps readers of EWN can help: who was Ludovic? or" is it yet safe to say? - Vile Bodies: A Revolution in Film Art By Jeffrey M. Heath , (University of Toronto) Evelyn Waugh's love of the visual arts was militantly idiosyncratic. He once said that architecture ceased about the time he was born and that Picasso was just a joke.l Real painting, he claimed, stopped by 1B70.2 As a young man Waugh had wanted to be a painter. By the time he left Oxford in 1924 he was known for his sketches and cartoons in The Isis and The Cherwell. But he left his art-classes in desoair to become a student of carpentry, a schoolteacher, a biographer of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and finally, a novelist. His library, now housed in a modernistic Texan fortress which Waugh fortunately never saw, contains many volumes on Victorian painting, architecture and formal gardening. Waugh knew about sculpture too. In A Tourist in Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1960) he writes discerningly of the ---·+- ~~~+,,,., <roolnture at Campo Santa in Genoa, describing himself as "an amateur - 3 - Among such uncompromisingly antique tastes one does not expect to find, but does find, a lifelong interest in the cinema. In A Little Learning (p. 28), Waugh recalls that his "first visual memory [was] of a camera obscura on the pier at I Weston-super-Mare." At Lancing Public School he advised a novelist friend to go to the cinema if he wished to improve his style. At Oxford he was film critic for The Isis. In middle age he whiled away the tedium of many a rural afternoon in the darkness of the Dursley picturedrome. Critics have been quick to show that Waugh uses a variety of cinematic techniques in his early work, but I should like to suggest, with particular reference to Vile Bodies that while Waugh's mechanical use of the cinema is interesting, its symbolic and thematic role is even more important. In 1924, after Waugh went down from Oxford with no degree, he and some friends made a film called The Scarlet Woman. The scenario, some acting and much of the directing were by Waugh. Though this high-spirited account of Rome's "gigantic attempt at the conversion of England" was Waugh's first and last venture in film making, he did not forget about the cinema.