How Evelyn Waugh’s ‘cantankerous’ Catholicism clashed with America’s literary scene at a dinner party in Florence

The conservative Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) paid three visits to Harold Acton in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s. I should like to focus on a literary dinner party, a “social and culinary failure”, that took place in Florence in April 1950, during the first of Waugh’s three visits.

In the spring of that year Acton’s amusing novella Prince Isidore had just been published. Waugh, whom Acton had not seen since the War, wrote out of the blue praising the novella (“What a delight Prince Isidore is!”) and inviting himself to stay.

Waugh spent Holy Week in Rome, where he heard Mass sung in San Pietro by Pope Pius XII Pacelli, then came up to Florence to meet Acton. They dined together at the Villa Natalia on the La Pietra estate, which was a pensione in those days.

On the following day Acton took Waugh to San Lorenzo and to the Bargello, and they dined in the restaurant Olivero in via delle Terme; it was there that the great US novelist Sinclair Lewis – as Acton recalled in his memoirs – “loped diagonally across the room to our table and hailed him [Waugh] as a dear old pal. Evelyn looked startled…”

This inauspicious beginning resulted in the painful dinner party described on pp. 307-309 of Acton’s More Memoirs of an Aesthete. Lewis (who went by the name “Red”), author of Main Street and Babbitt, had in 1930 become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

At this time his health was not at all good, in fact he was to die in Rome the following year, 1951; he was trying to finish a book, was drinking a good deal, and was living in a kitsch rented house on Pian dei Giullari, Villa La Costa, a beautiful and sought-after hillside area of the city of Florence.

Red told Acton and Waugh that he had not given a dinner party for months, but was most pressing that they should both come.

Waugh had by this date completely shed the fun-loving, party-going persona that had entranced Acton in the iconoclastic 1920s; in its place he had fully assumed the cantankerous, reactionary persona of his later years. His country house in Gloucestershire, Piers Court, where he lived with his wife Laura and their six children, had a sign outside that read “No admittance on business”.

When abroad he refused to speak any language but English, which he expected everyone to understand, and he was consistently rude to waiters and to anyone else who annoyed him.

One example of his appalling rudeness will be more than sufficient. A friendly American told him how much she had enjoyed his novel Brideshead Revisited, whereupon he rolled his eyes and replied: “I thought it was good myself, but now I know that a vulgar, common American woman like you admires it, I’m not so sure.”

This makes him sound odious, of course; but he was much loved by a large circle of friends, and he was often spontaneously generous. In a televised interview after his death, Nancy Mitford said: “What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything. That’s what none of the people who wrote about him seem to have taken into account.”

Harold Acton thought that in the whole of Florence Lewis could not have chosen a more hideous, garish house in which to live. Acton found the ugliness of the rooms, furniture and pictures quite depressing, no doubt comparing them in his mind with the splendours of La Pietra, his parents’ grand villa on the via Bolognese outside Florence.

Waugh visited Osbert Sitwell at Montegufoni, but was back in Florence in good time for Lewis’s dinner party.

Also invited together with Acton and Waugh were Una Lady Troubridge, who for twenty-eight years had been the companion of Radclyffe Hall, the monocle-wearing, dog-loving authoress of the celebrated lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (which Lewis had defended when it was banned in the late 1920s); Lewis’s half-Polish secretary, Alec Manson; and Manson’s Florentine girlfriend, Tina Lazzerini.

Lewis had apparently been eating little and drinking plenty – when he wrote he could scarcely bring himself to eat and he was just on the verge of finishing a novel about modern Florence – and consequently his speech was incoherent and obscure.

The guests were offered tiny glasses of weak vermouth and a poor dinner of tepid spaghetti, veal and sweet whipped cream cake with watered wine – watered by the secretary because Lewis was apt to drink too much of it! These horrid catering arrangements evidently did not improve the mood of the guests. Their host did not touch his food and burped loudly and long several times during dinner.

Waugh’s face was a study, as he flinched and sat back in his chair. Some of the halting and awkward conversation is reproduced in Acton’s More Memoirs of an Aesthete, published in 1970:

“Evelyn flinched in his chair on the host’s right with an expression of growing alarm. ‘What is that frightful noise?’, he kept asking me. Red’s speech was incoherent but at length he noticed that Evelyn was fasting and he urged him to taste the veal, the spécialité de la maison.

“Evelyn answered severely: ‘It’s Friday.’ Diverted by this, Red prompted his companion, who had been an army captain serving in Trieste, to entertain us with the saga of his war exploits. ‘I don’t want to hear them,’ said Evelyn. ‘Oh but you must. They’re absolutely hilarious. Tell Evelyn about the holy-water font that was mistaken for a urinal.’

“The captain, an ingenuous type, proceeded to spin his yarns, which convulsed Red with guffaws interspersed with hiccups. Evelyn pressed his fingers to his ears and sat back with an air of weary resignation. Towards the climax he turned to me and asked: ‘Has he finished?’ When I nodded he removed his fingers and contemplated the table cloth. Lady Troubridge strove to remedy the gaffe, but the dinner was a social and culinary failure.”

After dinner, they were taken on a tour the house – Lewis seemed quite aware of its hideousness but rather pleased and amused by it at the same time – and they sat in his bedroom beside the fire while he maundered on about how much he had enjoyed writing his novel: “it may be bad, but it has given me a lot of fun,” he kept repeating. The novel Lewis was working on was called World so Wide, his twenty-second, and it was published posthumously in 1951.

According to Acton’s memoirs, Lewis was provoked by what he took to be Evelyn Waugh’s standoffishness, and “delivered a panegyric upon the vigour, the splendour, the creative genius of America, which was moving in the circumstances despite its platitudes…Red’s bloodshot eyes bulged, his fingers trembled clutching the chair, as he wound up with a denunciation of contemporary English literature…Evelyn reddened more with embarrassment than resentment, but he endured it all most patiently and politely. I suspect he was aware of the pathos underlying this…defiant monologue.

“‘I can’t think what got into him,’ said Lady Troubridge when we escorted her home. ‘I’m afraid poor old Red is off colour. He doesn’t usually behave like that, I assure you.’ ‘I rather enjoyed the latter part of it,’ said Evelyn. ‘I was only afraid he might burst a blood vessel.’”

From Paris, Waugh sent a postcard, sending his love to “Red Lewis, Mrs Walston and all stray yanks” (Catherine Walston was Graham Greene’s American mistress, and they had been staying at the Villa Natalia; by “yanks” he means Americans in general, not necessarily ones from New England).

In a letter to Waugh later that year, Acton thanked him for the copy of his novel Helena, which follows the quest of Helena of Constantinople to find the relics of the true cross on which Christ was crucified, and reported that Lewis seemed to have departed, but that Una Troubridge still plodded the via Tornabuoni, the shop-lined street in central Florence, “hatless and grim”.

And that phrase is the final ripple from the unsuccessful dinner party at Villa La Costa, so far as I have been able to discover.

Photo: Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh on his wedding day with his wife Miss Laura Herbert, grand-daughter of the fourth Earl of Canarven ,at the Church of the Assumption, London, 17 April 1937. (Photo by Fred Morley/Fox Photos/Getty Images.)

Evelyn Waugh is one of over a hundred writers that Mark Roberts discusses in his new book ‘Florence Has Won my Heart: Literary Visitors to the Tuscan Capital, 1750-1950’, published by Anthony Eyre (Mount Orleans Press, £25). The above extract has had minor edits for brevity and clarity.

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