A Year to Remember

  A Year to Remember

  A Reminiscence of 1931

  Alec Waugh

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  I

  One lives in the past when one is over seventy, and I was born in July 1898.

  At the M.C.C. dinner in 1969, I asked E. W. Swanton if he would like me to write an article for The Cricketer on the fiftieth anniversary of Plum Warner’s last match at Lord’s. I was a keen Middlesex supporter, and for such a one as myself, August 1920 was a desperately exciting month. To everyone’s astonishment, Middlesex had won nine matches in succession and on August 28th stood at the head of the table, but they had to win their last game against Surrey to carry off the championship. The last day was one of the most dramatic that Lord’s has ever seen. When it started, the betting against a Middlesex victory was a hundred to one, at least. But by twenty past six it was all over, and the crowd was streaming across the ground, with Warner carried shoulder high to the Pavilion.

  I finished my piece by saying, ‘All that is half a century ago. During that half century I have had a whole lot of fun and I am still ticking over, but there is no single day that I would sooner live again than August 51st 1920.’

  I entitled the article The day that Pd soonest relive, and after I had mailed it I began to wonder which whole year I would soonest live again. To my surprise I found myself selecting 1931.

  I say ‘to my surprise’ because in synopsis it may well seem unexceptional. At its start I was a bachelor of thirty-two, living in a rented furnished apartment in New York, about to start a lecture tour. When it was over, a bachelor still, I was in mid-Atlantic on my way back to New York. At that period of my life I was constantly making ambitious trips to the Far East, the South Seas, the West Indies. But 1931 was geographically unadventurous. I returned to England at the end of March. After a few days in London, I spent ten weeks in the South of France, mainly at Villefranche. I was back in England at the end of June, but by mid-July I was again in Villefranche. This time, though, only for two weeks. The rest of the year I spent in England.

  It was an industrious year. During January and February, I finished a novel that I had begun in England in October. In Villefranche I wrote in its entirety a novel that was published in England in November with the title So Lovers Dream and in the U.S.A. in January as That American Woman; the original version was 140,000 words long.

  In the autumn the London publishing house of Benn sponsored a series of short (40,000 word) novels, paper covered, at 9d each. I adapted a newspaper serial as my contribution. At the end of the year, I assembled, under the title Thirteen Such Years, a miscellany of sketches, portraits and short stories, that attempted to present a picture of England between 1918 and 1931. I wrote several articles and half a dozen short stories. I must have written a quarter of a million words. They were on the whole well enough received. I enjoyed the writing of So Lovers Dream more than I had that of any novel since my first, and a few months ago it was reissued in a hard back edition.

  For me as a writer, the tides were then flowing hopefully. A pound bought six times what it does today. I was paying £225 a year for a four-roomed flat in Chelsea. Cassell’s paid me an advance of £600 a novel. In the U.S.A. I usually got $1000. Travel books brought in about £250 on each side; a short story in England – Nash’s was my best market – earned £40. In the U.S.A. –not having yet achieved the ‘glossies’ — I was happy to get $150 from Harper’s Bazaar. But I did not always, by any means, sell my short stories in the U.S.A. Newspaper articles fetched £10 to £15 a piece. I was making some £1,600 a year. I was always slightly in debt, but not uncomfortably, provided I did not spend too much time in London.

  My friends used to wonder how I could afford to do so much travelling. But actually travel was an economy for me. I did not have to indulge in costly entertaining. My social life was provided by the ships in which I travelled, and in the islands that I visited I was a guest more often than a host. I never during 1951 had a substantial credit balance at my bank; more than once I received one of those notes so typical of English banking, ‘Your account appears to be overdrawn £23. 11.6. We shall be glad to receive your instructions in this matter.’ But I was never insolvent.

  At the same time I did not receive a single one of those surprises that make authorship so constant an adventure. Hilaire Belloc wrote of that dream of us all, ‘the return of lost loves and great wads of unexpected wealth’ and how often is not a writer enlivened and encouraged, ‘restored to life and power and thought’ by a cable or a telephone call announcing a serial, book club, paperback or film sale. Not a single such cable came to me in 1931. It was as undramatic a year professionally as it had been an unadventurous year geographically.

  And in romance, too, it was unremarkable. There was no ‘soul shattering’ experience; instead there were two delightful passages, one in New York and one in Villefranche. I call them ‘passages’ rather than ‘passades’ because my two partners remained in my life; we separated but did not part. With the Villefranche friend I was in touch until her death, four years ago, with the last letter that I had written her returned unopened. Both of them came to mean much more to me than at the start I had suspected that they would. But I did not guess that then. It might indeed seem that 1931 was for me a year in which very little happened, rather like the calm in the centre of a typhoon. But it did not seem like that at the time nor does it now in retrospect. It has on the contrary a very special quality of sustained variety, of anticipation and fulfilment. Most things went right; hardly anything went wrong.

  A few years ago I published a partial autobiography called The Early Years of Alec Waugh. It closed in June 1930, a few weeks before my thirty-second birthday. I had reached, I said, a watershed. A love affair with a married woman, Ruth, a Californian, round which, for three years, my plans had been arranged, had just come to a close. I had travelled many thousand miles on her account. Now my long bondage was at an end. At the same time a new life had started for me in New York. My travel book Hot Countries had been chosen by an American book club, the Literary Guild, and I had been fêted in Manhattan in the manner traditional for such spoilt beneficiaries of fortune.

  My early novels had all of them been published in America; one of them, a story called Kept about post-war London, had not sold badly, but I had had scarcely any personal contacts there. The publicity that attended the launching of Hot Countries made me in a small way a New York personality. Colston Leigh, just starting as a lecture agent, was ready to finance a tour for me.

  June 1930 was a good point at which to stop the first part of an autobiography, with some things ending, with other things beginning. Yet a watershed is more than a railway station where you change trains. The Random House Dictionary’s first definition of the word is ‘the ridge or crest line dividing two drainage areas’. Its third definition is ‘a point of division as between two periods of history’. It has, that is to say, dimensions; it has a terrain, a climate, a foliage of its own; and, as I thought of what it had been for me, I realised that for the modern world, too, it had been a watershed. 1930 marked the end of the post-war period. 1932 was the start of the pre-war period. 1931 was a no man’s land and I felt that there would be a point in reliving that year on paper in terms of what was happening both to me and to my friends and to the world around us. I hoped, too, it might be of inter
est to record the problems and activities of a professional writer during a single year. I had no source of income other than the earnings of my pen.

  In 1966 I was installed as a writer in residence at Central State College, Edmond, Oklahoma, to teach ‘creative writing’. In my opening address I warned my students that creative writing could not be taught; the most I could do was to tell them what being a professional writer meant. And so in the course of two semesters I explained to them the problems that I had been set by the forty-odd books that I had written, with each book setting its own special problem. I told them that they could learn as much for the purpose of their own writing from studying the mistakes that a professional writer has made as from examining the technique by which a master has achieved his effects, and seen in that light the various projects that I undertook during 1931 contain useful examples of the pitfalls that befall a writer along his way. One cannot be taught how to write. One teaches oneself by writing.

  There is another reason why I am yielding to an impulse to write about 1931. In the following year I married. The marriage produced three children. I do not believe that it is possible to write the complete truth about a marriage that has produced children.

  II

  1931 began for me in a New York flat to which Muriel Draper had invited a number of friends to see a bad year out. Muriel Draper, the sister of Ruth Draper, was one of the more vivid ornaments of the New York scene. For days afterwards I heard anecdotes of what had happened there later in the morning; it was undoubtedly an historic party, as most of Muriel Draper’s were, but I was not present to assess the veracity of those rumours. I left soon after twelve because next morning I was due at Albany to hear Franklin D. Roosevelt deliver his inaugural address to the State Assembly as the re-elected Governor of New York State. The train left early. I wanted to feel well and rested. There would be other wild parties in New York, and I was not likely to be invited again to a gubernatorial opening.

  In the apartment house in which I lived, 136 E 36 – a building on the corner of Lexington which still stands – was also living an assemblyman, Langdon Post. I had arranged to go down with him to Albany. I knocked on his door at five o’clock. He clearly had not been as cautious as I had the night before. I had to knock a number of times and I doubt if I should have succeeded in rousing him if I had not had the co-operation of his dog. He was under thirty, but he looked over forty when he eventually peered round the door. His eyes were half closed and his chin was bristly. Electric razors did not exist in those days. I assumed that he would arrive at the station with either a lacerated or a half-shaven jaw.

  He arrived with both. Others were in his plight. The railroad coach was filled with, I presumed, distinguished citizens. They did not look as though they were. They resembled an army in retreat that has flung away its packs and rifles. Most of them slumped into slumber the moment they were stretched out on a seat. Two hours later, when a sandwich man came round with coffee and doughnuts, they fought their way back to consciousness. Some of them, I supposed, were members of the State Assembly. Others were notables whom Roosevelt had invited for the buffet barbecue that would follow the inauguration ceremony. They did not lack powers of recovery, for at the subsequent reception I did not notice anyone with a haggard or dishevelled look.

  My presence in Albany was due to the fact that in the previous summer I had brought out from England a letter of introduction to Eleanor Roosevelt from Lady Willert, the wife of Sir Arthur Willert, who, during the war as The Times’ representative in New York, had been able to perform several important intelligence operations for the government; for these he had been knighted. He was now press attaché to the Foreign Office.

  It has been often remarked that the arriviste can get farther in three days in a foreign country if he is provided with the right letters of introduction than he can in three years in the country of his birth. On the strength of that letter I was during the summer invited for a weekend to the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park; and during the winter I was regularly invited to parties both by Eleanor Roosevelt and her mother-in-law.

  I cannot remember much of what happened at the inaugural ceremony. I seem to remember that when the assemblymen were sworn in Lang took some oath. Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered an eloquent but at the same time colloquial address. He gave the impression that he was talking to a group of friends, which was the impression that he was to give later in his ‘fireside talks’. As I listened to him I wondered whether in two years’ time he would be taking the oath of office in Washington. It was already apparent that the Republican administration was doomed. But would Roosevelt get the Democratic nomination? Al Smith was waiting in the wings.

  I can remember little of the buffet barbecue. The food was, I am sure, admirable, but I can never enjoy a meal that is not accompanied by wine or beer, or preceded by something that is laced with something. My cousin, Claud Cockburn, then the London Times man in New York, was there and he and I and Lang went back by train: a slow train that stopped many times. That night Lang took me to see Late Star Final, which had opened three days before. The press after the first night left no doubt that it was going to be a considerable success, but the house on this occasion was three-quarters empty. New York was sleeping it off. Two rows in front of me, a woman, in full evening dress, slept uninterruptedly. She did not move even in the intervals. On her shoulder she wore a bedraggled orchid, plunder of the previous night.

  I had come over to New York at the end of November. I had long wanted to spend four or five months there, living as I would in London: in a flat of my own, working in the mornings, playing squash racquets, seeing friends, going to films and theatres, absorbing the atmosphere of the city, living as New Yorkers did. It is the only time I have ever rented an apartment in New York. Since then I have stayed at the Algonquin; New York is adapted to hotel life. But these four months at 136 E 36 made me feel that I was a part of New York as I could not have done had I started in an hotel.

  One of my first friends in New York was the novelist I. A. R. Wylie. When I told her that I had taken an apartment she advised me to make a picnic life of it. In London I had maintained what amounted to an establishment, with ‘the woman who did for me’ arriving in time to prepare my breakfast. But in New York – at that time – a maid coming all the way from Harlem charged fifty cents an hour; it was much simpler for a moderately incomed bachelor to go out to breakfast.

  It was a bitter winter. Every letter that I received from London spoke of frost and fog; of colds and influenza and broken water-pipes. But in New York, though the puddles in the streets were frozen, though the grass blades in the park were rimmed with frost, five days in seven the sun shone out of a blue sky. I had the feeling of waking to a summer day, in a steam heated room with the sunlight pouring across its floor. It was in a picnic spirit that, with my bath taken, my morning exercises done, I walked to the drug store at the corner of Thirty-fourth and Lexington and, perched on a stool, consumed a twenty-five cent special of orange juice, coffee and hot buttered toast. In London the idea of going out to breakfast at an A.B.C. would have appalled me, but I enjoyed the atmosphere of this busy bar, with its white-coated attendants, wise-cracking with the girls who hastily wolfed their muffins on their way to work, who wore all of them, in spite of the hardness of their lives, a look of smartness, and of gay confidence and defiance; who made a gesture, as they pulled their rabbit fur cloaks round them, and with a toss of their shoulders and a daub of kiss-proof on their pretty mouths went out into the cold. Only young people went there in the mornings. It was later in the day that you found melancholy people drinking bromoseltzers. There was reality there and hopefulness. And it was an hour during which one had need of hopefulness and youth.

  My maid Mary did not arrive till half past nine. She was from St Kitts and a Britisher, she proudly told me; her laugh was a genuine West Indian cackle. She screamed with delight when I asked her what her husband did. At first I thought she was telling me that he was a coal he
aver, but it was not that. ‘He’s under de cold earth,’ she said. ‘Hab you got a job for him?’ With her I had none of the leisurely discussions about meals with which time passed so pleasantly in my London flat. Every quarter of an hour of her conversation cost me twelve cents fifty. I encouraged her to make the bed, scour the apartment and prepare a salad for my lunch with all the despatch of which her aged limbs were capable. I used to write till half past eleven, then I would go to a racquet club four blocks away, play for half an hour with the pro, come back to lunch and work through the afternoon. Entertainment of some kind was waiting for me in the evening. I cannot remember spending an evening in my flat alone. Once or twice a week there would be one of those prohibition teas, at which everything would be drunk but tea. Usually those teas ended with my ‘going on somewhere else’. Most weeks I made my own modest contribution to the city’s gaiety. I would invite ten or twelve friends round for drinks at half past five – we kept earlier hours in those days – arranging that four or five of them would stay on for dinner at some speakeasy. Cocktail parties were, for someone like myself, an easy form of entertainment; there were no elaborate canapés. Janet Post used to serve crisp bacon wrapped round hot toast soaked in peanut butter, but that was beyond my scope. Crackers spread with cream cheese sufficed. I bought gin and whiskey from the pro at the squash racquets club. The whiskey – more often rye than bourbon – was reasonably good, but I did not like the taste of the gin that may or may not have been concocted in a bath-tub. I was not then an aficionado of the Five to One Dry Martini – and indeed it took many years for an English barman to learn how to make a Martini that a New Yorker could sip without distaste. I never liked Janet’s cocktails, lethally potent though they were. I used to conceal the taste of gin with tinned grapefruit juice, in the proportions of three to one – a kind of gimlet. I thought the mixture excellent but my friends, I was to learn later, were not enthusiastic. When I returned to England I used to serve my gimlets explaining that they were the mode in Manhattan. My friends were delighted with them, but Janet was horrified when, some years later as a weekend guest, she was presented with one of ‘Alec’s specials’. ‘This is too much,’ she expostulated. ‘It was hard to get French Vermouth in New York during prohibition so we made allowances, but here, no really, there is no excuse.’ I learnt then that my friends used to chuckle together over an Englishman’s idea of what a cocktail was. It was very polite of them not to have told me at the time.