The story is told through the memories of Charles Ryder who recalls his strange and homoerotic friendship with Sebastian Flyte, who he met at Oxford when they were undergraduates. Flyte’s family seem cold and distant when he meets them and Sebastian has only happy memories of his childhood nanny. Flyte’s sister Julia, although young, is the only one that seems to have any warmth towards her brother, but she also finds herself attracted to Charles. The novel takes us on their journey of love, friendship, faith and the decline of the English aristocratic dynasties. From Oxford in the 1920s to the eve of World War II, the novel hypnotise us with their folly.
There has been much speculation that Harry Clifton, the last squire of Lytham Hall, was an inspiration for Flyte. Harry attended Oxford in the 1920s and studied Modern History at Christ Church. In Brideshead Revisited Charles first meet Flyte in his rooms at Christ Church and in many ways Harry was as indulged and eccentric as Flyte. His demands for plover’s eggs and champagne on a whim has echoes of truth.
Waugh also attended Oxford but a few years before Harry arrived, but he stayed longer than most as he missed a year, and was also lazy, and in the end he haunted the place in the hope his tutor would relent and let him graduate. He never did. Indeed, both Harry and Waugh were sent down without degrees. Waugh was a rampant homosexual at Oxford and spent much time in the private drinking clubs where literally every type of sexual deviancy was embraced. It is suggested that this is where Waugh first became aware of, and possibly met, Harry Clifton.
Waugh visited Lytham Hall in the 1930s. The surviving letter he wrote to Lady Katherine Asquith, a patron of the arts, gives us an idea of what 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:
“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…”
Waugh was kinder to Violet Clifton, Harry’s mother. 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 never read “cheap novels”, no doubt to Waugh’s amusement. Waugh’s opinion of her was softer declaring her: “More sombre and full of soul.”
However, when Brideshead Revisted was published in 1945 Violet Clifton was outraged and was convinced he had based Sebastian Flyte on her son, Harry Clifton. Form then on she referred to Waugh as “that awful man” and never spoke to him again. Harry was in decline in the years after the war and became more and more eccentric and detached from reality, happily squandering the family estates and destroying everything that lay in front of him.
In 1981 Granada TV created a remarkable, beautiful, and some say definitive, adaptation of Brideshead Revisted, starring Anthony Andrews as Sebastian Flyte and Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder. It captured the tragic beauty of the novel and was widely acclaimed.
Ironically Waugh’s fiction became 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 shabby room of a squalid boarding house in Brighton with just a few hundred pounds left. He spent the equivalent of £70 million in today’s money and destroyed his family dynasty.
Brideshead Revisited established Waugh’s literary reputation and made him very rich. He continued to write and review other works up until his death in 1966 aged just 62, but he never surpassed the success of this remarkable novel.
Paperback release on 28th May for Flyte or Fancy - Evelyn Waugh Meets Harry Clifton on the Road to Brideshead, the 80th Anniversary of Brideshead Revisted’s publication.
Flyte or Fancy
Evelyn Waugh Meets Harry Clifton on the Road to Brideshead
By David Slattery-Christy
ISBN 9781838136581
Available at Lytham Hall Shop & Plackitt & Booth Bookstore, Lytham. Amazon UK, Waterstones, Blackwells, Foyles and all good book stores.
Words approx 900