My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Read online

  MY BROTHER EVELYN & OTHER PROFILES

  by

  ALEC WAUGH

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1 COUSIN EDMUND—Sir Edmund Gosse

  2 AUTHORS AT UNDERHILL—E. Temple Thurston, Desmond Coke, Ernest Rhys

  3 MY FIRST PUBLISHER—Grant Richards

  4 FRANK SWINNERTON’S Nocturne

  5 THE SOLDIER POETS—Robert Nichols, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Richard Aldington

  6 THE UNIVERSITY OF MAINZ—Hugh Kingsmill, Gerard Hopkins, Milton Hayes, J. F. Holms

  7 RALPH STRAUS

  8 W. L. GEORGE

  9 THE BAD BOY IN THE GEORGIAN NURSERY—Gilbert Cannan, W. W. Jacobs

  10 THE NAIL IN THE COFFIN—Hugh Walpole

  11 TWO POET CRICKETERS—Clifford Bax, J. C. Squire

  12 MY BROTHER EVELYN

  PART TWO

  Chapter 13 ARTHUR WAUGH’S LAST YEARS

  14 MY SECOND WAR

  15 THE LAWYER—E. S. P. Haynes

  16 SON OF OSCAR WILDE—Vyvyan Holland

  17 MICHAEL ARLEN IN RETIREMENT

  18 W.S.M.: R.I.P.

  19 THE MACDOWELL COLONY

  20 SELF-PORTRAIT—NEARING SIXTY

  21 ISLAND IN THE SUN

  Foreword

  In 1962 I published a partial autobiography, under the title The Early Tears of Alec Waugh. I was born in July 1898 and the book took me up to the summer of 1930. It told how I had become the kind of person that I am, restless, rootless, eager for change, avid of the sun, finding his plots between Capricorn and cancer. The year 1930 was a watershed for me. It marked the end of a major love affair, and the success in America of a travel book Hot Countries—which was a Literary Guild selection—introduced me to the United States. From that point on, my professional base began to shift from London to New York.

  One or two of the reviewers of The Early Years were kind enough to express the hope that I should write a sequel. Perhaps I shall, one day. But this is not that book, although it is reminiscent and told in the first person. Its ‘I’ is the observer and the commentator, the raisonneur. The book is an attempt to present a picture of the English literary world as I have known it, through a series of portraits of some of the men and women who comprised it. Where I have been autobiographical, it is only because certain of my experiences as a writer illustrate my general thesis.

  It is in no sense comprehensive. A number of prominent writers have been omitted, even though I may have known them; but I think that each of the portraits will be found to illustrate and interpret one aspect or another of the writer’s life. It takes all sorts to make a world, and the literary world with its excitement and its monotony, its sudden changes of fortune; its rich rewards, its bitter disappointments; its salutations in the market-place, its essential loneliness; its precariousness, its penury; its deep personal satisfaction from doing in one’s own time, in one’s own way, what one enjoys doing most—presents an infinite scope for drama. I hope that these pages will give the reader some concept of that scope.

  Most of these portraits were sketched separately at different times; some of them have appeared in magazines, some were originally intended for inclusion in The Early Years, but in the end did not seem to fit satisfactorily into its pattern. For the convenience of the reader one or two of the chapters have been dated.

  Part One

  1

  Cousin Edmund

  SIR EDMUND GOSSE

  My first novel was published in July 1917, so that I have been part of the literary scene for half a century, but I have been an observer of it for a good deal longer, through my father, Arthur Waugh, who for forty years directed the fortunes of Chapman & Hall, Dickens’s original publishers. My father has told his own story in One Man’s Road; my brother Evelyn has told it in A Little Learning; I told it in my Early Years.

  My paternal grandfather was a west country doctor, who hoped that his son would inherit his practice, but from early days it was obvious that by taste and temperament my father was unfitted for a life of medicine. He had a passion for books, for the library not the laboratory. At the age of twenty-three, having won the Newdigate Prize Poem at Oxford, he went up to London to earn his living with his pen.

  He started his adventure without financial backing, but he had what was more valuable than capital, a blood relationship with Edmund Gosse. Gosse is far from forgotten, even now. Critical articles constantly refer to his writings and to his personality. His autobiography Father and Son is ‘required reading’. For over forty years he was influential in the world of letters. Nobody could have been better fitted to give a young man like my father his first chances.

  The actual degree of cousinship between the Waughs and Gosses is a little distant—my great-grandmother was the first cousin of Edmund’s father—but the links between the families have long been affectionate and close and they go back many years. My father’s mother spent part of her childhood in the same melancholy religious atmosphere which Edmund Gosse described in Father and Son. ‘The Plymouth Brethren of this circle were,’ my father wrote, ‘a desperately sincere but terribly depressing company whose principal interest was a lively and immediate expectation of the second coming.’ My grandmother recalled how Philip Henry Gosse would stand in the doorway, austere, solemn, confident, unwinding an interminable worsted scarf from about his neck and saying to her mother, ‘Well, Cousin Anne, still looking daily for the coming of the dear Lord Jesus. Are not all the prophecies indeed fulfilled?’ The ominous decision would then go forth that the Lord would accomplish the number of his elect on Saturday afternoon at about three o’clock. When Saturday afternoon came and waned to evening, without the expected event occurring, a new text was found next morning to justify the delay.

  The young Edmund was brought at the age of seven, after his mother’s death, for a visit to my grandmother’s home. He seemed a precocious infant but she, several years his senior, was touched by the eagerness which was one of his greatest charms and used to tell how he knelt excitedly before a case of stuffed birds exclaiming with high pitched enthusiasm, ‘Cousin, you have here a remarkable specimen of the Golden Oriole.’

  Max Beerbohm, in his series of cartoons, ‘The young self meets the old self’, drew Gosse in his last decade, surrounded by important friends, being startled by the unannounced invasion of that august assembly by a small earnest infant waving a flag and shouting ‘Are you saved?’

  To the reader of today, Gosse is remembered in terms of those two selves: the young evangelist of whom he himself has drawn an unforgettable picture in Father and Son, and the doyen of letters whose legend has been enshrined in Osbert Sitwell’s Eminent Presences, Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland and the imaginary conversations in Avowals with George Moore.

  Gosse was the first important writer whom I met, yet it is with hesitation that I write of him. As a schoolboy I asked my father if he had ever met Oscar Wilde. He shook his head. ‘No, and I only saw him twice. Once in London, when he put his head round the door at a party and said, “I have come to tell you I can’t come,” secondly in Paris, after the scandal.’

  My father was in a café, so he told me, with Sidney Pawling, Heinemann’s partner, and Peter Chalmers Mitchell who directed the London Zoo and was subsequently knighted. Wilde came in, looked round him, then went out. Mitchell said, ‘That’s Wilde. I’ll go and speak to him.’ He was away ten minutes. On his return, he said, ‘I don’t see why you should cut a man because he’s had a scandal. I’ve no use for fairweather friends who drink a man’s wine when he’s in favour and look the other way when he’s in trouble.’ He was so persistent and generally self-righteous that finally Pawling said, �
�What are you making all this fuss about? Waugh doesn’t know him. I’ve scarcely met him. Don’t be such an ass, Mitchell, finish up your beer.’

  That was the story as my father told it me. Many years later, in his autobiography My Fill of Days Mitchell described how he found himself in Paris with ‘two quite nice people, one a stockbroker, the other a partner in a publishing house, both what may be called “men of the world”‘. On Wilde’s appearance, so Mitchell said, ‘my friends got up to go. “You can stay if you like,” they said. “He is probably here under a false name. The hotel should be warned.”‘ Mitchell said that he and Wilde talked for two hours.

  Mitchell had the warmest affection for my father. He wrote a few pages later, ‘Arthur Waugh is another of my lifelong friends for whom the years have done nothing worse than to silver his hair. By nature a poet, he is the rare combination of a man of letters and a man of business and has been one of the steady and beneficent forces in the English literature of our time.’ He had clearly forgotten that my father was in his company that evening.

  My father’s account of the incident is far likelier to be correct. He recounted it twenty years before Mitchell wrote his book, his memory was very sound, moreover he was not the kind of man to make a scene in public, and very far from being the man to turn against anyone who was in trouble. It is clear to me that Mitchell confused what might have happened or rather what he would like to have happened with what did happen.

  I recall the anecdote here because it exemplifies the danger of accepting even what is known as first-hand evidence. When we look back at our childhood it is impossible to distinguish between what we actually remember and what has been remembered for us; in later life we are often in the same predicament. However clear may be our mental picture of this episode or that personality, we can never be certain that it has been wholly painted by what we have ourselves seen and heard and not in part by what we have heard repeated, and in the case of Edmund Gosse, I am very conscious that my knowledge of him is largely based on what I have heard my father say of him. Yet even so he is as distinct to me as many men whom I have been meeting regularly over years.

  As a schoolboy I saw him intermittently, when he and his wife came to lunch on Sunday. Those visits are vivid memories. My father was an excellent host, but on the eve of any occasion he was invariably nervous lest ‘everything should not go off all right’, and he was particularly anxious when the Gosses came. I was myself very conscious that we were receiving a visitor from a larger world, who knew personally men and women with whose faces I was familiar in the Press, Balfour and Asquith and Lord Salisbury, men whom I could not quite believe to be real people with headaches and indigestion like the rest of us.

  I remember Gosse describing Queen Alexandra’s lengthy visit to his library (would she never leave?) and how at length he had been driven to exclaim, ‘I fear, Ma’am, that I have nothing else to show you that would be worthy of your attention.’ I was very proud to have so distinguished a relative.

  He had too an imposing presence with his head carried erect above a high collar, whose pointed ends were turned but not folded back. His drooping moustache was tidy; he had retained in full the hair to which Sargent in an early portrait gave a tint of lilac. Maugham described him as the most brilliant talker to whom he had ever listened. Gosse dominated but did not monopolize the talk. With memory’s eye I can see him very clearly, sitting bolt upright in a hard-backed chair, clasping firmly against his waistcoat the spine of our grey-blue Persian cat while he stroked its underbelly with both hands. He professed great love of cats, but I was never convinced that our particular cat appreciated his attentions. When I attempted similar endearments, I was scratched. But perhaps his long fingers possessed a mesmeric quality that mine lacked.

  In the ‘twenties as a member of his own club—the Savile—I saw him oftener. He was then in full enjoyment of a mellow St Martin’s summer. At the age of sixty-six he had had to retire from the Librarianship of the House of Lords. He was irritated at the time, but his release from official duties was in fact a benefit. He had more time for writing and for social activities. His links with European writers had been always close and during the war he acted as a literary ambassador between France and England, taking the chair for Frenchmen visiting London and himself addressing French audiences in Paris.

  After the war honours came thick upon him. On his seventieth birthday he was presented with the bust of which a reproduction stands in the London Library. He was knighted, and as chief literary critic to the Sunday Times he could write within two columns’ length exactly as he liked about any book he chose. Some of his best writing appeared there.

  I have read recently one or two denigrating references to his qualities and capacities as a critic, and it cannot be denied that he was no more infallible in his judgement of contemporary writing than his predecessors were and his successors have proved to be. He was susceptible to personal influence. He liked to be courted, to be approached with deference. My father once asked him if he was interested in a certain young poet. ‘I have not been invited to take an interest in him,’ was the reply.

  But the qualities that make a man a good judge of contemporary writing make him as often as not a pedestrian writer. The best poets and novelists are usually erratic judges of each other’s work. Wilde’s definition of criticism as ‘the adventure of a soul among masterpieces’ asks of the critic flashes of illuminating interpretation, and such flashes Gosse provided in full measure. He was fervent in his love of letters; widely read, he was human in his approach and he saw life itself on a broad scale. Much had he seen of men, climes, peoples, governments. He had wit and a large vocabulary. The English language, in his hands, was a highly flexible and polished instrument. Books such as Gossip in a Library are very well worth re-reading. I doubt if anyone has written more readably about books and writers.

  During the 1920s his many qualities had full scope. The Sunday Times gave him a forum. He had outlived his enemies. The young were gathered round him. He had glamour for them as the friend of Stevenson and Swinburne, of Tennyson and Hardy. They brought their books to him for his approval. Every Saturday he lunched at the same table at the Savile with old cronies, like Ray Lancaster. Against the background of his library and his pictures, in his charming house in Hanover Terrace looking over Regent’s Park, he held court like royalty.

  That is the Gosse whom Osbert Sitwell knew, and that is the Gosse who has found a niche in literary history. But it is a different Gosse that I remember. Through following the same profession as one’s father, one acquires a panoramic outlook; one sees contemporary events and the rise and fall of reputations in the lengthened perspective of an added generation. When I think of Gosse I see him in terms of an episode largely forgotten now, which did in fact colour his later life and explains the eccentricities that marked his behaviour in his middle period. It took place in 1886 and it is worth recalling in a book which is primarily concerned with the rise and fall of literary reputations.

  In the careers of most ambitious men there is a point when the formula of Greek tragedy is fulfilled and a man, through arrogance, through ‘hubris’, incurs the irritation of the gods. Gosse was, then, in his middle forties and his career of unbroken success was at its peak. As a poet, as an essayist, as a lecturer, he was the object of an adulation that passed in places the boundaries of idolatry. No one sets much store by his poetry nowadays, but each new volume was highly praised. He had a genius for friendship, and he was on close and affectionate terms with the best writers of his day.

  Applicants for the post of Clark lecturer at Cambridge were required to support their claims with letters of recommendation from distinguished figures. There was competition to obtain as many signatures as possible. Forty or fifty was considered a modest quota. Gosse presented himself with three, Tennyson, Browning, and Matthew Arnold. He obtained the post.*

  That post was the origin of his reverse. He was a great success at Cambridge. Under the aegis of h
is appointment, he was invited to lecture in America. It is very easy for an English visitor to have his head turned by American hospitality and American readiness to applaud success and welcome ‘the new thing’,* and Gosse lost momentarily his sense of focus, accepting the public’s evaluation of his powers. ‘He was credited,’ Charteris wrote, ‘with the authority of a learned scholar, a position which his knowledge, various and discriminating though it was, never really justified and at this time was far from supporting. It was assumed that anyone who wrote so well and ranged so widely must be erudite in the most specialized sense of the term. Scholarship was in fact being thrust upon him; he was driven to living beyond his intellectual capital.’

  ‘To adjust the minute events of literary history is tedious and troublesome,’ Dr Johnson wrote. ‘It requires indeed no great force of understanding but often depends upon enquiries which there is no opportunity of making

  Gosse was too creative, too original a writer to possess the meticulous painstaking caution of the scholar. He needed an editor who would closely check his manuscript for inaccuracies. But he was now so self-confident that he appears to have trusted his own memory in the very kind of book where accuracy is essential. Under the imprint of the Cambridge University Press, signing himself Clark Lecturer, he published From Shakespeare to Pope: an enquiry into the causes and phenomena of the rise of Classical Poetry in England. A book with such a title requires to be above suspicion, but Gosse in his self-assurance allowed slip after slip to go uncorrected.

  It was the opportunity for which the many who envied him had been waiting and, in October 1886, there appeared in the Quarterly Review one of the most virulent and sustained attacks that has been delivered against a man of letters. Forty pages long, entitled ‘English Literature in the Universities’, it purported to be a review of From Shakespeare to Pope and its opening paragraph contains the sentence: ‘That such a book as this should have been permitted to go forth into the world with the Imprimatur of the University of Cambridge affords matter for very grave reflection. But it is a confirmation of what we have long suspected.’