Byrne Paula - Mad world: Evelyn Waugh and the secrets of Brideshead

Early 1944 and Captain Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh has fallen out of love with the army. He has turned forty and is considering his options. To become a screenwriter? An overture to Alexander Korda comes to nothing. To join MI5, the intelligence service? He is turned down without an interview. Only one possibility remains: to revert to his pre-war occupation.

On 24 January he writes a letter to Colonel Ferguson, Officer Commanding, Household Cavalry Training Regiment. Copies are sent to the Secretary of State for War and to Brendan Bracken, Winston Churchills Minister of Information and string-puller in chief on behalf of Captain Waugh. I have the honour to request, the letter begins, that, for the understated reasons I may be granted leave of absence from duty without pay for three months. The understated reasons are various. That his previous service in the Royal Marines, the Commandos, the Special Services and the Special Air Service Regiment does not qualify him for his current position in a mechanised unit of the cavalry. That he no longer has the necessary physical agility for active service. That he is no good at admin, so cant do a desk job. And that he doesnt have the foreign languages to make him useful for the purposes of intelligence work.

Assurances are given: the novel to which he will devote his leave will have no direct dealing with the war. But expectations are dampened: it is not pretended that it will have any immediate propaganda value. The necessity of immediate action is stressed: It is a peculiarity of the literary profession that, once an idea becomes fully formed in the authors mind, it cannot be left unexploited without deterioration. If, in fact, the book is not written now it will never be written.

Colonel Ferguson responds by ordering Waugh to go and train the Home Guard at Windsor. A less determined man than Evelyn might have capitulated and the book would never have been written. But he perseveres. By the end of January he has been granted his three months leave, qualified only by a commitment to a little light part-time work for the Ministry of Information. He leaves his comfortable billet in the Hyde Park Hotel and his military uniform with it.

On the morning of Tuesday 1 February 1944 he is settled in another hotel, deep in the West Country: Easton Court, Chagford, Devon a thatched fourteenth-century farmhouse with low, dark rooms and small windows. He has been there before, in the late autumn of one of the momentous years of his life, 1931. It is a place that in his memory he cannot separate from a house and a family with which he had fallen in love that year.

In London he had regularly lain in till mid-morning. At Chagford he is up at 8.30 and at work by 10. By dinnertime on that first Tuesday, though his mind is stiff from the tedium of army life, he has written and rewritten 1,300 words. He reports to his wife that he has made a good beginning on what he calls his magnum opus. He has bought a very expensive concoction of calcium and halibut liver oil which the chemist thought would restore me to strength but on reading the label more closely I find it to be a cure for chilblains. This may prove handy, since the lounge he has been given as a private room in which to write has a fire that smokes so badly that he has to choose between streaming eyes and frozen extremities.

By close of play on Wednesday the score is 3,000 words odd. Through the ensuing weeks he works steadily at the rate of up to 2,000 words a day, occasionally more. He revises arduously as he goes. In the end it takes him closer to five months than three, but the book that he knows in his heart he has to write is completed. The idea that had become fully formed in his mind is exploited without deterioration.

What was that idea? The books original working title was The Household of the Faith. The story of a household, a family. A journey shaped by religious faith. These are its key themes. But the working title does not find its way into print. When the book is published the following year, its title page reads Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder: A Novel.

On the reverse side of that title page there is a notice to the effect that the volume has been produced in complete conformity with the authorised economy standards of wartime publishing. You can tell that this is true when you hold a first edition in your hands and turn the coarse, rough-hewn pages.

Above the routine announcement concerning production standards, there is something more intriguing. A mysterious Authors Note is signed E. W., Evelyn Waugh. It reads: I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.

I am not I: yet Charles Ryder manifestly is Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited contains as large a dose of autobiography as Charles Dickenss David Copperfield or Marcel Prousts la recherche du temps perdu. So who, then, was the thou who was and was not he or she? The they who were and were not they? What was the household of the faith that was and was not Brideshead? What were the events that inspired the novel?

This biography sets out to find the hidden key to Waughs great novel, to unlock for the first time the full extent to which Brideshead encodes and subtly transforms the authors own experiences. In so doing, it illuminates the obsessions that shaped his life: the search for an ideal family and the quest for a secure faith. The solution to the mystery can be found in that magical year of 1931. The hidden key will also unlock several of Waughs other major novels, including his very best one, A Handful of Dust. And it will bring us to a secret that dared not speak its name.

But we must begin with two very different childhoods. And then we must go, as Captain Charles Ryder does when he begins his recollections, to Oxford, in the years immediately after the Great War.