So Lovers Dream

  SO LOVERS DREAM

  ALEC WAUGH

  So, lovers dream a rich and long delight,

  But get a winter-seeming summer’s night.

  —John Donne.

  Contents

  Preface

  Part 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part 2

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part 3

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Preface

  This is an autobiographical novel. I wrote it during the early summer of 1931, at the end of my thirty-third year, and called its protagonist, as I had called the hero of my first novel, Gordon Carruthers. Though it made no reference to my family, it presented an accurate picture of my personal and professional life. It gave an account of my emotional involvements. It contained a portrait of my London agent, A. D. Peters; it described my flat in Chelsea and the housekeeper who looked after me. It told how, in 1926, I had started on large scale travel—a nine months voyage round the world, a return trip to Tahiti, a five months tour of the West Indies. In May 1930 my travel book Hot Countries was an American Literary Guild selection. I went across to celebrate its publication and almost overnight became a part of the New York scene. . Booked for a lecture tour in the following January, I returned to New York in mid-November and rented an apartment on Lexington and 36th. For many New Yorkers it was a depressing winter, with breadlines forming in Times Square and 5 cent apples on sale along the streets for the benefit of the unemployed. But for me New York was a breathlessly exciting city. The air in those days was clear and clean, ‘the champagne air’ they called it. However late one might have revelled, one woke with alert and tingling nerves. And though the stock market was in the doldrums, books and magazines and the theatre were doing well. In the particular crowd that I frequented, there was usually one of us who had something to celebrate most weeks. I was making new friends all the time. I was beginning to think of myself as a New Yorker.

  In my partial autobiography, The Early Years of Alec Waugh, I told how in February 1927 on a liner sailing from Tahiti to San Francisco, I fell in love with an American, Ruth―, who was married to a rich and prominent man very much older than herself. It was from the start an impossible situation, and in several of my novels I have written of a couple who feel themselves born for one another yet are not free to marry. In July 1927 I went back to see her in Tahiti. For nine weeks I inhabited a tortured paradise. I touched heights and sank to depths of which I had not suspected myself capable. We had our final meeting in San Francisco in June 1930.

  When my American lecture tour ended in the following March, I felt that I had reached the last page of a chapter. I had no immediate plans. I wanted to get away by myself and think it all out, on paper; just as I had, fifteen years earlier, when I had been impelled to relive in The Loom of Youth my four years at a Public School. I decided to go to the South of France, to the Welcome Hotel in Villefranche, where I had already spent many pleasant and profitable hours. ‘A café restaurant in the sun’ solves many of a writer’s problems; a hotel bedroom is the equivalent of a monk’s cell.

  I had nine unmortgaged weeks at my disposal. I had written my first Gordon Carruthers novel in six and a half weeks, when I was in the army. I ought to be able to settle with its sequel in a third as much time again. But this time I had a different problem. I could not put it all down as it had happened. I could not write a story with which Ruth could be identified, which would embarrass her among her friends. I had to find an equivalent situation. In Tahiti she and her husband had rented a house some twenty miles southwest of Papeete; I was halfway between the two places, in a hotel that had a central building where guests took their meals, and a number of cabins along the beach. In one of these was staying a Californian friend of Ruth’s whose husband was on a pearl-buying expedition in the Paumotus. Ruth visited her as often as she could. My role was to sit and wait.

  There was no means of communication. The telephone was on a party line; if her plans were changed at the last moment she could not warn me. I told her once that I was in the position of an Edwardian mistress, tucked away in a small house in Acacia Road, waiting till a busy man could find time for her. I said it laughingly and she laughed too, but it was true. Could I not find an equivalent situation here in Villefranche? Could I not have Ruth and her husband living in a rented villa on Cap Ferrat and Gordon in Villefranche at the Welcome? Morning after morning, he would sit on the terrace writing at a round blue table, waiting for a grey-green Chevrolet to swing down into the market place, just as I had four years earlier in Tahiti.

  I began the book on the 20th of April and finished it on the 30th of June. Those nine weeks were as happy as any I have known. In England cricket match after cricket match was being washed out by rain. On the banks of the Garonne and on the slopes between Beaune and Dijon damp grapes shivered on the vines. But the sun shone steadily on the little harbour. Friends from London loitered there. My brother Evelyn, Patrick Kinross, Edward Sackville West, Keith Winter. I made friends with Somerset Maugham across the water. At the end of May my parents joined us for their annual holiday. The Continental Daily Mail reported bleak news of trade deficits. But all that seemed a very long way off. We had no idea that the crash that had hit Wall Street in October 1929 was on its way to England and that at the end of September we should be waking to the news that Britain had gone off gold and that the phrase ‘safe as the Bank of England’ had become obsolete. As long as we had enough sterling to see us over the next two weeks we could live as unconcernedly as Englishmen had always done on the Riviera since Lord Brougham, nearly a hundred years before, had discovered the charms of Cannes. The Riviera has never been quite the same again.

  For me So Lovers Dream makes nostalgic reading—because of Ruth, because of the New York of 1930-1931, and because of the Villefranche where Cocteau, Scott Fitzgerald, Glenway Westcott and so many others loitered in the later twenties.

  A.W.

  February 1973

  Part One

  Chapter One

  ‘Mr Stanley, here’s a cable for Gordon Carruthers.’

  It was in a Western Union envelope. Stanley tore it open. ‘New York,’ it ran, ‘is desolate without you.’ It was signed Faith.

  Stanley considered it pensively. Then looked up at his secretary.

  ‘What was Mr Carruthers’ last address?’ he asked.

  ‘The Chatham Hotel, New York. He said he was going down to the West Indies.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to have.’

  ‘Shall I ring up his parents and ask if they know anything?’

  Stanley hesitated, re-read the cable, then shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It will probably explain itself.’

  At a first, and indeed at a second glance, Stanley gave the impression of being a person who made a practice of leaving things to explain themselves. In the latish thirties; tall, light-haired, grey-eyed, fresh-coloured, with a graceful indolence of manner, he never hurried, he was never flurried. On the cricket field, on the rare occasions when he dropped a catch, the bowler would invariably grumble ‘My luck, Stanley asleep again.’ When he brought off a gallery catch at second slip, there would be a knowing twinkle in the wicket-keeper’s eyes. ‘You wouldn’t have held that if you’d been awake.’

  An American coming into the large Adams-ceilinged room in Adelphi Terrace, with its large log fire blazing in an Adams grate, w
ith one of its walls filled with a Queen Anne bookcase, with high windows opening on the river, and with Stanley seated at a Chippendale writing-desk, would have felt that he was visiting in a private house rather than making a business call. ‘So this is what they call working over here,’ he’ld think. ‘If I had my office in a place like this, it would take me a week to get a morning’s work done.’ Cricketers, however, came after a season or two to realize that Stanley, in spite of his abstracted manner, for every difficult catch he dropped, would hold a dozen hard ones; and the American would realize after the second or third visit that though he had been greeted as though he had come to stay for a week-end, he was in point of fact in the passage within five minutes, with everything that had needed saying, said.

  In some professions this manner of apparent indolence would have been a liability. To a literary agent it was a marked asset. Editors and publishers could never be certain how anxious Stanley was to put through a deal. His ‘take it or leave it’ gestures were never threats. He gave the impression that neither he nor his client cared in particular either way. There were other markets. And should the editor decide to leave it, Stanley did not look disappointed, argue or cut his price. He would say, ‘I’m sorry. I had thought it was rather your cup of tea,’ then change the subject. As a matter of fact, editors did not very often decide to leave it. Stanley did not take to an editor what he did not believe that editor would want. Nor did he attempt to force on an editor purchases that would be subsequently regretted. Such tactics would have prejudiced with that editor the output of his other clients. He maintained that no business was satisfactory that did not leave both parties satisfied.

  For several years he had handled Gordon Carruthers’ work. It was an association whose success was a source of particular satisfaction to him because, of all his friends, Gordon alone had been discouraging when he had announced his project of opening a literary agency. Gordon had been in fact one of the first people with whom he had discussed it. Their friendship was of long standing. It had begun in the summer of 1914 when Gordon was still at school and Stanley, a graduate at John’s, had come to play for the M.C.C. against the school. The Club had arrived one short. Gordon, on the brink of the eleven, had been lent to them. Desperately anxious to convince the Fernhurst captain that his omission from the school side was a mistake, he compiled a longish innings, during the greater part of which he was Stanley’s partner. A long partnership on the cricket field creates a more personal and lasting bond than is provided by any other game. They had felt friends when they had met again, five years later, on the Hampstead cricket field.

  Their friendship had begun with cricket and for three years as a cricket friendship it had continued. The Londoner arranges his life in pigeon-holes. He has his home, his office, his club, his games. There are the people he does business with, the people he goes dancing with, the people he plays games with. He does not invite to his home the people he plays bridge with at his club; nor does he meet at his club those with whom he does business in the city. When stumps are drawn after a cricket match, he may say, ‘Can I drop anyone? I’m going back by Baker Street and Knightsbridge.’ But he does drop whomsoever he gives a lift to, and when he drops him, he drops at the same time all the side of life that that particular friend represented. It is not that one side of his life is more important to him than another; it is simply that he keeps his interests separate.

  For three years Gordon and Stanley met each other during the summer three or four times a week on the Hampstead cricket ground. They arranged their practice at the same nets and at the same hour. They travelled together to the various matches; they sat next one another at lunch, strolled round the ground arm in arm between the innings, knew each other as well as any two men can. Then the cricket season would end and between the fifteenth of September and the fourth Saturday in April they would be unlikely to see each other once. Quite often they would think, ‘It’ll be nice when cricket begins and we can see each other,’ but neither thought of ringing the other up.

  There was nothing apart from cricket to bring them directly into touch. They belonged at that time to different clubs. Stanley was editing a boys’ magazine. His contributors received small emolument. His columns were un-adapted to Gordon’s pen. Gordon was busy during the winter. He did all his solid writing between October and March. Two days a week he was employed as reader, advertisement drafter and paragraphist, by a firm of publishers. The middle days of the week he would spend in the country writing. On the Saturday he played football. His spare time was strictly mortgaged. For three years it had gone on like that. Then Stanley gave up hockey. Between the end of the cricket season and Michaelmas he put on four pounds. He rang Gordon up about it. ‘I’m going to start playing squash,’ he said. ‘Will you learn with me?’ And so through the winter as well as the summer they met three or four times a week.

  It was while they were changing at the end of an afternoon’s game that Stanley announced his intention of abandoning editorship and becoming a literary agent.

  ‘An editor’s limited by his paper’s policy,’ he said. ‘He never earns much. There’s always the danger of his getting fired. A literary agent touches life at more amusing angles.’

  ‘Aren’t there a good many literary agents as it is?’

  ‘There’s room for another one. As far as I can see most of the unestablished young writers feel that they’re overlooked in a big organization.’

  ‘It’s going to take a long time before unestablished young writers are earning your office expenses for you.’

  ‘Perhaps. If I’m wrong I can always go back to journalism.’

  He spoke with his customary unconcern.

  Himself, Gordon had no agent. He was producing very little in point of fact that an agent could profitably handle. The publisher to whom he had sent his first novel—a story of Army life—had presented him with one of the long term agreements by which the beginner’s future is invariably mortgaged. It was a fair enough agreement, which Gordon had signed after a careless scrutiny. He wanted his book published. In war time no one could afford to look far ahead. The side of life that was concerned with livelihood had yet to touch him. It was not till the war was over, with the necessity for earning a living urgently presented, that he realized that his next three books along with their subsidiary rights were already sold on terms by which the writing of them would only by the caprice of chance prove profitable. Later he was to consider this disability as a piece of fortune. His first book had been not only in England, but in the States as well, a moderate success. Had he been free to make an agreement with large advances paid to him on the delivery of each book, he would almost inevitably have overwritten, so that by the time he had begun to find out where he was and what he wanted to do, his reputation and market alike would have been severely damaged.

  Even as it was, the two novels that he published during the first four years after the war were successful neither from a literary nor a commercial standpoint. His first book had been a story of Army life. It was photographic. It had been in the main autobiographical. He was writing of what he knew. It was a direct straightforward narrative. Since its subject matter was dramatic, it was exciting. It also was controversial, in the way that Siegfried Sassoon’s early poetry was controversial. It was one of the first novels to expose the death and glory, the Agincourt attitude to war. It had news value. It sold eight thousand copies in England and five thousand in America.

  His first book had been a comparatively easy one to write. He had described a self-contained and self-sufficient world. He had not needed to know more than he actually had seen. He had been able to see his characters four-square. He had known what they were doing at every hour of the twenty-four. He had known how they would react to every situation which the action of his plot demanded. But later, writing of adult life in London, he had to describe men and women whom he saw periodically, for a few moments, under an arranged light. He had to guess at what they were doing at other times
. He had not the breadth of experience which would enable him to guess correctly. A writer in the early twenties cannot portray accurately and detachedly the adult life of a big city. He can only describe the effects that that adult life makes on him. He must write subjectively. And that was not Carruthers’ way of writing. He aimed at the study on a broad canvas of sections of society. And for such studies he was unequipped. His experience was too fragmentary, too adolescent. Now and again in his second and third novels there would be a passage of vivid writing when he was describing an actual event. But such passages would be separated by chapters built on guesswork, veneered by an attempt to conceal their guesswork. They were unreal.

  His second novel sold three thousand copies in England and twelve hundred in America. His third sold eighteen hundred in England and did not find a publisher in the States. Out of his first novel he had made four hundred pounds, out of his second he made a hundred and thirty, out of his third, ninety-six. ‘It’s lucky,’ he thought, ‘that Miser-man & Grove pay me six pounds a week to sort their manuscripts and write their “blurbs.”’

  It was while Gordon was at work on his fourth novel that Stanley decided to abandon editorship.

  Stanley made no direct reference to his friend’s discouraging criticism. But a few months later, as they were changing for a game of squash, he asked Gordon casually if he would like to earn a couple of hundred pounds.

  ‘That’s a silly kind of question to put to a man like me. Why?’

  ‘I could probably put you in the way of earning it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll tell you afterwards.’

  The opportunity had come by chance. The editor of the Daily Argus had wanted a series of London sketches, each of them to take the shape of a short story describing the life of the Londoner from various aspects. There was to be a sketch of the suburban Londoner, of the East-end Londoner, of the Mayfair Londoner. There were to be pictures of London’s various playgrounds: Hampstead Heath, the Oval, Southend, Ranelagh, a night club. The editor had wanted Manning Lewes to do the series. Stanley was at the time representing Lewes. Lewes was, however, extremely busy on a novel from which he did not want his attention taken. The price offered was not appreciably attractive, a couple of discussions proved abortive.