First, a confession. When Evelyn Waugh published Sword of Honour, as fine a post-war novel as any in the English language, I wrote a crass review of it. It was 1965; I was then in my late twenties and should have known better. Accusing Waugh of being “a social Philistine” unable to imagine the lives of those outside his own class, I was enlisting in the chorus of fashionable leftists making it their business to dismiss him as a preposterous reactionary. Waugh liked to tease my father, Alan Pryce-Jones, a writer and a Catholic convert like him, as “the man Jones.” When my piece appeared, he let it be known that “the boy Jones” had given offense. Mea culpa.
My first meeting with Waugh had been at a lunch party in the highly respectable Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Teresa Waugh, his eldest daughter, had invited a dozen of her university contemporaries. In the course of the meal, someone said that the person we were speaking about had children and therefore wasn’t homosexual. “Nonsense, buggers have babies,” said Waugh in a voice that stopped conversation throughout the dining room. “Lord Beauchamp had six, Oscar had two, and even little Loulou Harcourt managed one.” (I could place Lord Beauchamp and Oscar Wilde but little Loulou was an unknown quantity to me.) That same term, Teresa further invited me for the weekend at Combe Florey, the Waugh house in Somerset. As we drove up to the door after three hours on the road, Waugh leaned out of a first-floor window shouting, “Go away!” There seemed to be nothing for it. We duly turned around and left. A year or two later, I received a letter in his handwriting but oddly signed in the name of Laura, his wife, inviting me to a white-tie dance. A military band played “The Post Horn Gallop,” music for brass to which it is impossible to dance. The moment midnight struck, Waugh clapped his hands and dismissed everybody.
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