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ALEC GUINNESS

CRAWLS WITH

EVELYN WAUGH

The Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, London W1

August 4th 1955

On Tuesday, July 19th 1955, the postman delivers a parcel and a letter to Evelyn Waugh. The parcel contains his weekly box of cigars. He is put out when the postman tries to charge him almost £8 duty on it. The letter is from his sixty-seven-year-old goddaughter, Edith Sitwell. She says she is to be received into the Roman Catholic Church in just over a fortnight. The news makes Waugh uneasy. He is aware of her tendency to show off. ‘She might be making an occasion of it,’ he confides to his diary, adding that he has written to her confessor, Father Caraman, ‘urging the example of St Helena’. This particular saint is noted for her piety.

August 4th is a bright, sunny day. Waugh wakes up in the Grand Hotel, Folkestone. The staff are civil and obliging, the food dull and lukewarm. ‘If only the cook and the patrons were better it would be admirable,’ he thinks. He keeps sending notes to the chef (‘Don’t put cornflour in the sauce’), who reacts badly. ‘He comes up and glowers at me in his white hat from behind a screen in the dining room.’

Waugh catches the 9 a.m. train to Charing Cross. One of his fellow passengers is ‘a ginger-whiskered giant who looked like a farmer and read the Financial Times’. Waugh’s journey is enlivened by a cinder blowing in from the engine, landing on the giant’s tweed coat and burning a hole in it.

From Charing Cross, Waugh walks to White’s Club, stopping to buy a carnation on the way. At White’s, he refreshes himself with a mug filled with stout, gin and ginger beer, before arriving at Farm Street at 11.45 a.m. He is wearing a loud black-and-white houndstooth tweed suit, a red tie and a boater from which stream red and blue ribbons. Waugh enters the Ignatius Chapel, which he finds empty save for ‘a bald shy man’ who introduces himself as Alec Guinness.

Getting dressed this morning, Alec Guinness found it hard to know what to wear. Eventually, he picked a navy-blue hopsack suit as ‘suitably formal’. He felt a black or grey tie would be ‘too severe’, preferring a bright blue tie as ‘more in keeping for what I assumed was a joyous event’. He has not yet become a Catholic himself.^*

They are joined, in Waugh’s words, by ‘an old deaf woman with dyed red hair whose name I never learned’. Guinness, too, fails to catch her name, ‘even when she barked at us’. She walks unsteadily with the aid of two sticks, and her bare arms are encased in metal bangles which give him the impression that she is some ancient warrior.^†

Guinness watches as she attempts to sit down on a complicated seat she has brought with her – ‘half prie-dieu and half collapsible deckchair’. Somehow, she manages to entangle herself in the mechanism, with disastrous results: ‘The sticks slid from under her, the chair heaped itself on the floor and all the bangles rolled down her arms and sticks and propelled themselves in every direction around the room.’

‘My jewels!’ she cries. ‘Please to bring back my jewels!’

Waugh and Guinness dutifully get down on all fours and wriggle their way under the pews and around the candle sconces, trying to retrieve ‘everything round and glittering’.

‘How many jewels were you wearing?’ Waugh asks the old deaf woman.

‘Seventy,’ she replies.

Under the pews, Waugh whispers to Guinness, ‘What nationality?’

‘Russian, at a guess,’ says Guinness, sliding on his stomach beneath a pew and dirtying his smart suit.

‘Or Rumanian,’ says Waugh. ‘She crossed herself backwards. She may be a Maronite Christian, in which case beware.’

The two men start laughing, and soon, according to Guinness, get ‘barely controllable hysterics’. They pick up all the bangles they can find. Guinness counts them into her hands, but the old deaf woman looks suspiciously at the pair of them, as if they might have pocketed a few.

‘Is that all?’ she asks.

‘Sixty-eight,’ says Guinness.

‘You are still wearing two,’ observes Waugh.

At that moment, the organ strikes a deep note, and the other three witnesses enter. Waugh turns his unforgiving owlish stare upon ‘Father D’Arcy … a little swarthy man who looked like a Jew but claimed to be Portuguese, and a blond youth who looked American but claimed to be English’. Guinness notes that the Portuguese man, a poet, looks ‘a little peevishly atheistic’.

Then, up the aisle, ‘swathed in black like a sixteenth-century infanta’, glides Edith Sitwell, to be received into the Church by Father Caraman.^*

The service concluded, they are driven in a Daimler from Farm Street to the Sesame Club, just two streets away. Waugh has heard bad things about it, but is pleasantly surprised by the ‘gargantuan feast’ that has been laid on: cold consommé, lobster Newberg, steak, strawberry flan and ‘great quantities of wine’. All in all, he considers it ‘a rich blow-out’.^† Guinness notes, ‘Edith presiding like a bride in black and Fr Caraman frequently casting his eyes heavenwards as if in ecstasy.’

An awkward moment comes when the old deaf woman suddenly says, ‘Did I hear the word “whisky”?’

‘Do you want one?’ asks Waugh.

‘More than anything in the world.’

‘I’ll get you some.’

But at this point the Portuguese poet steps in. He nudges Waugh and says, ‘It would be disastrous.’ So Waugh persuades her to stick with the white wine. Repeating the words of the Portuguese poet, he explains to Guinness that ‘We couldn’t face another disaster from that quarter.’

Over lunch, Guinness tipsily shares his few remaining theological anxieties with the blond English youth and the Portuguese poet. ‘Would we have to drink the Pope’s health? If Edith died on the spot would she go straight to heaven? And would that be a case for ecclesiastical rejoicing or worldly and artistic distress?’ A great deal is drunk; the following morning, try as he may, Guinness cannot recollect any of them leaving the table.