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Evelyn Waugh Newsletter EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER Volume 21, Number 1 Spring, 1987 ANOTHER WAUGH IDENTIFICATION: MRS. BEAVER By Donald Greene Mrs. Beaver, the indefatigable interior decorator in A Handful of Dust, is almost certainly based on Syrie, daughter of the philanthropist Dr. Barnardo, who established the Barnardo Homes for destitute children ("Barnardo case?" Tony Last asks Brenda sympathetically, when she returns from London depressed after having failed in her first pass at John Beaver). She first married (Sir) Henry Wellcome, the Wisconsin-born pharmaceutical magnate, who founded the great drug firm of Burroughs-Wellcome and the Well come Institute for the History of Medicine in London, and later became Mrs. Somerset Maugham. Between weddings she had numerous affairs, most notably with another Wisconsin-born magnate, Gordon Selfridge, builder of one of the largest department stores in London. By Maugham she had a daughter, Liza, named after the heroine of Maugham's first novel Liza of Lambeth. Though Maugham acknowledged his paternity, late in life he attempted to disinherit her on the grounds that when she was born, in 1915, Syrie was still Wellcome's wife, and therefore in law Liza was not Maugham's daughter but Wellcome's. Eventually Wellcome divorced Syrie, picking Maugham, among several other candidates, as co-respondent, and in 1917 Syrie and Maugham were married in, of all places, Jersey City. It was termed a "marriage of convenience," but it seems to have resulted in nothing but inconvenience for both parties. This squalid bit of biography would be of no interest to Waughians-apart from the light it sheds on the social milieu with which Wauth was familiar-except for the fact that after she and Maugham were (quickly) separated, Syrie started a small business in interior decoration and antiques at 85 Baker Street, London, which in the 1920s became a stunning success. She made her name by inaugurating a vogue for "white-on-white" decoration, and became (according to Ted Morgan's biography of Maugham, 1980, from which much of the information in this note is taken) "the first of the society shopkeepers." According to (Sir) Cecil Beaton (whom Waugh used to stick pins into when they were fellow pupils at Heath Mount School), himself a famous interior decorator, stage designer, and photographer-he is undoubtedly the original of David Lennox in Decline and Fall- For the next decade, she bleached, pickled, or scraped every piece of furniture in sight. White sheepskin rugs were strewn on the eggshell surfaced floors, vast white sofas were flanked with crackled white incidental tables, white ostrich and peacock feathers were put in white vases against white walls. Her all-white drawing room in Chelsea became a place of pilgrimage among the intelligentsia. Readers of A Handful of Dust will recognize Mrs. Beaver's strategy for redecorating the morning room at Helton. She wished to find some treatment so definite that it carried the room, if you see what I mean ... supposing we covered the walls with white chromium plating and had natural sheepskin carpets. (Ill: 2) Her white chromium plating becomes an obsession with Tony during his delirium near the end of the novel. Those who empathize with Tony are pleased to find in later portions of the novel that Mrs. Beaver's improvements are being scrapped and the room is being restored to its earlier appearance. Maugham, then at the height of his fame, was understandably annoyed that his detested wife, by her own efforts, was gaining equal prominence to his, and applied all his malice and wit to putting her down. He spread the story that she had stolen her concept of interior decoration from the wife of a coal merchant, who, to counteract that background, had adopted all-white for her drawing room. Crossing the street so as to avoid passing Syrie's shop, he explained to a friend, "I could not bear to look through the window and see what my wife may be doing. She is almost certainly on her knees to an American millionairess trying to sell her a chamber pot." Mrs. Beaver's assiduous salesmanship with American, Canadian, and other naive visitors will be remembered. Waugh of course knew the Maughams. His father Arthur, at Chapman and Hall, published Maugham's early novel The Bishop's Apron, though Maugham grumbled at the financial arrange­ ments. But Waugh must have been immensely gratified when, only twenty-seven, he was mentioned in Maugham's best-selling (and conceivably best) novel, Cakes and Ale: "A little while ago I read in the Evening Standard an article by Mr. Evelyn Waugh in the course of which he remarked that to write novels in the first person was a contemptible practice." Alec Waugh protested to Maugham that his brother had not written such an article; Maugham only shrugged. Although he did write for the Standard, no such article seems to be listed in the huge bibliography of Evelyn Waugh's journalism, but perhaps it may yet turn up. It is true that a great deal of Maugham's fiction is written in the first person, but very little of Waugh's, and there are those who think that the -2- chief exceptions, Work Suspended and Brideshead Revisited, do not contain his finest artistry. Perhaps it was by way of reciprocation for the compliment that Waugh gave Maugham's undistinguished novel Christmas Holiday a glowing review. · The literary detective would find it satisfying if he could identify a child of Syrie Maugham as the despicable John Beaver. She had a son by Well come, but he was mentally retarded and spent his life in seclusion. Liza, later Mrs. Vincent Paravicini and still later Lady John Hope and Lady Glendevon, charitably forgave her father's atrocious treatment of her-to be sure, he was senile at the time-and led the procession of mourners at his funeral in 1965. But novelists can pick and choose the originals for their characters as it suits them, and the leading candidate for Waugh's John Beaver is still John Heygate, who cuckolded him. Incidentally, the famous dramatic, not to say melodramatic, scene in A Handful of Dust, where Brenda, distressed at the news of the death of "John," thanks God when she learns that it was not her lover but her young son who had been killed, has an earlier parallel in Thackeray's Henry Esmond. There Rachel, Lady Castlewood faints on being told that "Harry" has been killed in a driving accident, thinking it to have been her protege (and future husband) Henry Esmond. The victim however (who had merely been stunned) was Henry, Lord Mohun. Lord Castlewood chooses to think that his wife's fainting is evidence of an affair between her and Mohun, challenges Mohun to a duel, and is killed himself. Waugh's debt to the great Victorian novelists should not be overlooked. In earlier notes in EWN I've called attention to the similarities between the Marquis of Marchmain and his family in Brideshead and the Marquis of Steyne and his family in Vanity Fair and between Father Rothschild in Vile Bodies and Father Holt in Esmond. Waugh's intimate acquaintance with Dickens-whose publishers after all were Chapman and Hall-is made clear at the end of A Handful of Dust. WAUGH'S THE LOVED ONE: RESPONSES TO THE DREAM MACHINE PHILOSOPHY By Francis A. Williams Robert Barnard notes that both of the chief objects of satire in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Hollywood and Whispering Glades Memorial Park, deal with the presentation of illusion; "Life's dream factory is complemented and completed by Death's dream factory" (176). He refers to this operation as the "dream machine" and observes that, "on the whole the dream machine works its magic, and blurs the distinction between reality and illusion" (177). Vogel also comments on the number of references to false appearances, and suggests that the central theme of The Loved One is "illusion substituted for truth" (3). The concept of the "dream machine" in this novel bears further investigation, especially regarding the attitudes of the characters who come in contact with it. The dream machine is a philosophical system, and like all such systems, must attempt to resolve difficult, often unpleasant questions of existence, such as identity, aimlessness, desperation, and death. The weakness of the dream machine's approach to such issues is that it seeks to resolve them by denying that they exist. The machine allows itself a free hand in reshaping reality into palatable form through a process of "transformation." Unable to accept the reality of Baby Aaronson, the dream machine transforms her into Juanita del Pablo and, upon further consideration, into an Irish colleen. Unable to accept the reality of death, the dream machine temporalizes death and creates an earthbound version of Paradise in the Lake Island of lnnisfree, and fill Whispering Glades with practices which ostensibly deal with death but in reality deny its existence (for example, the substitution of the euphemism "loved one" for corpse). When none of Sir Francis Hinsley's works can be found to read at the funeral, Sir Ambrose Abercrombie blithely suggests that Dennis forge something. When suicide leaves Sir Francis's face horribly disfigured, Mr. Joyboy erases without a second thought the mask of death and gives the corpse a "radiant childhood" smile. Such is the purpose of the dream machine: replacing reality with an illusory "perfection." Yet the frayed edges of the machine's artifice can be detected by a discerning observer. The studio may turn Juanita del Pablo (nee Aaronson) into a colleen, but cannot erase the flamenco overtones in her singing voice.
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