Having finished Evelyn Waugh’s latest novel Brideshead Revisited in May 1945, the aristocraticViolet Clifton was fuming. And the chatelaine of Lytham Hall in Lancashire felt she had goodreason to be: for the novelist had clearly based his main character, the waywardly eccentric Sebastian Flyte, on her ownerrant son, the current squire of the Clifton Estate, Harry Clifton.
While visiting the 18th century estate, my ears pricked up when I heard this from a house guide.
As a fan of Waugh, I wanted to investigate it further. And the stories concerning Harry Clifton and his wild eccentricities also made for some intriguing possibilities. What I discovered was not disappointing – indeed, it has inspired my new novel, Flyte Or Fancy, which reimagines their relationship. Waugh knew the Cliftons and had indeed described them as “all tearing mad” in a letter to the socialite and arts patron Lady Katharine Asquith, but why?
Harry was born the heir to the estates in 1907 and lived a predictably charmed life. His family owned most of the land from Lytham St Annes to Blackpool, Lancashire, as well as a Mayfair mansion and a large Scottish estate. They were one of the UK’s largest landowning families. Lytham Hall played host to many grand families including the Tsar of Russia’s brother, Grand Duke Michael, a friend of the family, who was hosted for a shoot at the time of Harry’s birth.
Harry had a volatile relationship with his father, John Talbot Clifton, which seemed to make him even more rebellious. He was sent to DownsideSchool near Bath, run by Benedictine Monks, where abuse was normal and sport was the dominant activity. His father hoped it would toughen him up, but Harry was a bookworm and more artistic in temperament, so had a pretty miserable time.
By the mid 1920s Harry was ready to attend Oxford. His father, being an old Etonian, had arranged for his son to attend Christ Church to read Modern History. Evelyn Waugh had already been at Oxford for a few years but had become embroiled in a feud withhis tutor who refused to let him graduate. So he hung around in the hope his tutor would change his mind long after his own alumni had graduated and left.
Waugh had been a reckless free spirit at Oxford and had embraced the highly charged drinking culture. He was also rampantly homosexual. This was of course frowned upon by the more stuffy academics and Waugh’s involvement in the Hypocrites Club, a drinking and sexual orgy establishment above a bicycle shop on St Aldates, had caused much consternation.
Into this hive of eccentric and sexual hedonism sailed a tall, handsome Harry Clifton, and the pair became friends. Harry’s father had arranged for him to have rooms at Christ Church, at a price, and Harry threw himself into this world. But he started to accrue gambling debts, frequented private drinking clubs and got into trouble for not attending lectures.
Later Harry admitted in a letter to his father’s estate manager: “I realised when I went up to Oxford how hard men do work and realise I know nothing compared to others. It is a queer, unpleasant situation. I see almost no prospect of getting a degree and yet my family think I work hard.”
Like Waugh, Harry would be sent down without a degree. Waugh’s father threatened to end his allowance unless he got some form of employment. Luckily for Waugh, his father was a partner in a publishing company that had handled the Charles Dickens catalogue and enjoyed plenty of contacts to help his son
Waugh went on to write feature articles for national newspapers, as well as a half-hearted attempt at teaching at a private school – all while he worked on an early novel, Decline And Fall. As for Harry, fate and destiny intervened when his father died suddenly in 1928,the year he turned 21, and he inherited the family estate.
Those who knew him couldn’t help wonder if he was going to cope with all the responsibility. Waugh’s later portrayal of the rather indulged and spoiled Sebastian Flyte certainly had echoes of Harry at this period.
When Waugh introduces us to Flyte’s rooms in Brideshead Revisited they are, like Harry’s, at Christ Church. Interestingly, Violet Clifton used to indulge Harry by sending him groceries in season when he requested them, sometimes driven by the chauffeur all the way from Lytham to Oxford. So Flyte’s demand for Plovers Eggs and Champagne on a whim had echoes of this eccentric and indulged behaviour.
“The truth is,” declared Waugh, “that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.”
Sadly Harry never did. As the 1930s progressed, Harry spiralled into more absurd and bizarre behaviour. He was cross that the estate had to pay death duties that initially curtailed his lavish spending.
He enjoyed London life and as a result took a permanent suite at the Ritz Hotel, the family home in Mayfair having been sold. To add to the already sizable costs he also took a room at Claridge’s. When asked why he had both, he airily declared: “If I go for a walk and need to rest, I have somewhere to go.”
If this seems eccentric, Harry also dined once a week at the Ritz with the “White Goddess” – who he claimed was his mentor, friend and spiritual advisor. Nobody else could see her, but thewaiters served her and Harry spent the evening chatting with her while other diners looked on bemused.
All this while squandering money and selling off prime assets to finance his adventures. Violet was in despair and worried he would destroy the dynasty. She was rightto believe so. It became so desperate she even attempted to get a Harley Street doctor to certify Harry as insane so the estates could pass to his younger brother, Michael.
Waugh visited Lytham Hall in the 1930s.
The surviving letter he wrote to Lady Katharine Asquith gives us an idea ofwhat he thought of Harry’s extended family and Lytham Hall: “A very beautiful house by [William] Kent or someone like him with first-class Italian plaster work… large park entirely surrounded by trams and villas.
“Adam dining room… a lap of luxury flowing with champagne and elaborate cookery… all sitting at separate tables at meals.
“Two or three good pictures including a Renoir…”
Waugh’s opinion of Harry and his siblings was less than enthusiastic, however.
He wrote: “Easter [or so she seems to be called], Orsa [Avia], Michael, a youth seven feet high with a moustache who plays with a clockwork motorcar and an accordion… The Cliftons are all tearing mad…”
By this time Waugh had published Decline And Fall and Vile Bodies, both designed to shock and at times mock the ruling elites. This did not go unnoticed by Violet Clifton who declared she neverread “cheap novels”, no doubt to Waugh’s amusement.
By then, Harry had bought at eye-watering cost at auction two Imperial Faberge Eggs – the Rosebud Egg and the Renais-sance Egg – much to the horror of his mother. He had also met Lilian Griswold, a penniless American socialite, at a drunken party in London. They went on a drinking bender together and woke up married.
Both seemed to be bemused at how it had happened, but it didn’t last.
Waugh had started workon Brideshead Revisited, the novel that would change his fortunes, by the late 1930s but it was put on hold because of the outbreak of the Second World War. When the novel was finally published in 1945, 80 years ago, it sent shockwaves through society.
But it secured Waugh’s success as an author, gave him global fame and made him financially secure for the rest of his life.
Violet however described Waugh as “that awful man” and declared to never speak to him again for what she saw as his betrayal. Harry drifted along in a fog of fantasy, oblivious to anyone’s needs but his own.
A 1981 ITV adaptation two years after his death starred Anthony Andrews as Flyte and a young Jeremy Irons as his friend (and Waugh’s alter-ego) Charles Ryder.
Ironically, Waugh’s fiction had become Harry’s fact in the years after the war.
He roamed Europe’s gambling casinos, like the fictional Flyte, drinking heavily, and declaring himself a bachelor, easy prey to conmen. In the 1960s, a London reporter told of a dishevelled Harry Clifton haunting the casino at Monte Carlo and how he “sometimes speaks to complete strangers under the impression they are old friends, and ignores old friends under the impression they are strangers… he wanders around the gambling tables as if in a trance…”
In 1979 Harry would live his last days in a squalid boarding house in Brighton with just a few hundred pounds left. He spent the equivalent of £70million in today’s money and destroyed his family dynasty.
As for Waugh, who died in 1966 aged 62, his own fame and fortune had been secured by a novel which, in its way, owes a debt to Harry’s self-destruction.
Flyte Or Fancy: Evelyn Waugh Meets Harry Clifton On The Road To Brideshead, by David Slattery-Christy is out now in paperback via Christyplays Publications
Content Source: www.express.co.uk