A Year to Remember Page 11

  I had the good sense not to suggest that my brother may have been perfectly aware whom he was meeting.

  I cannot remember what we ate or drank. Alfred Kazin, in a long account of his post-war visits to the Villa Mauresque, states that his host was at particular pains about the menus that his chef served. I was not aware of this. Perhaps he did not exert himself particularly on my account. I recall the excellence of the small canapés – usually egg and anchovy – that accompanied the pre-lunch dry martini; after the war I remember an Avocado fool of which he was proud; he had, he said, the only Avocado tree in the Riviera. I did not dine there very often but when I did I was invariably served an excellent champagne. The lunch that I was given by Alan Searle in 1969 in Monte Carlo, with a vintage Krug as an aperitif, a Montrachet with the fish and Chateau Ausone with the entrée was infinitely superior to anything I ever tasted at the Villa Mauresque.

  VIII

  For me in Villefranche it was a warm beneficent summer. It was hard to believe that anyone else had any troubles. My only real worry was my father’s health. As I have already said, he had had a bad winter, he was not well when I had been in England, and in the appalling weather that followed Easter, his general condition deteriorated. He felt sick and giddy, with lights dancing before his eyes. In the last letter that he wrote me, five days before his death, he said, ‘I feel very like the dyspepsia I got in 1951 before we went to Villefranche, but I have never felt anything like as as bad as I did then.’

  I think that he had been over-working. Retirement is a difficult experience. He had always driven himself hard, and he could not suspend the pressure all at once. During the early part of 1950 he wrote Chapman and Hall’s Centenary volume, A Hundred Years of Publishing. It is not a book that could hope to have a large sale, but it has a genuine reference value: it is admirably composed. The sections about Dickens are written with warmth and wit, and John Farrar has told me that he very often concluded his lectures on the publisher’s role by quoting the last paragraph which presents the publisher seated at the end of the day surrounded by the books that bear his imprint. It is a full length book, and the writing of it took a lot out of him. No sooner was that book finished than he started the rewriting and completion of his autobiography which he had started in 1919 and put away. He was also doing an occasional article or review for the Spectator or Fortnightly Review. In addition he was reading and reporting on all the manuscripts that were offered to Chapman and Hall. He was very punctilious about these reports. When I had been a reader, working in the same office as my father, I had contented myself with noting N.B.G. against manuscripts that seemed impossible, and on those that seemed promising I would merely write, ‘A novel about the conflict of the generations in an upper middle class English family. An echo of Galsworthy but dramatically told; I think it is worth your looking at.’ Then at the end of the week we would discuss it along with other manuscripts. My father wrote actual criticisms of half the manuscripts that came in, two to three hundred words on each. It seemed to me a great waste of time. But he enjoyed it, in a way. He wrote his reports wittily, and he appreciated the chuckle that went round the table when he read it out at the Board meeting on Friday. He liked the proof of his work that was provided by the pile of his reports. There was something to show for the hours that he had spent at his desk. There was also a trace of masochism in his need to present himself as a ‘driven man’. Evelyn stressed this point in his character sketch of him in A Little Learning. I had overlooked it, perhaps because I was closer to him in sympathy and was less aware of traits that might cause irritation. Evelyn reminds the reader of the extent to which my father was a born actor, who was constantly casting himself in different roles. One of these was the ‘driven man’. He would throw the back of his hand against his forehead. ‘I’m so driven,’ he would exclaim. When he was not driven, he drove himself.

  During his first fifteen months of retirement, he worked harder than he had when he went each morning to his desk in Henrietta Street. Moreover he worked alone upstairs, in the room that had once been our nursery; it was warmer than his own library down-stairs, but he did not like being alone. He missed the constant dramatic interruptions of an office; the official mail, the telephone calls, the visits from authors and agents; the various problems brought to him by the staff that was under his control. It imposed all of it a strain on him, but it stimulated him. Within three or four years of his retirement he had built up for himself with acquaintances and neighbours a routine that was filled with an hour to hour eventfulness. People were always dropping in to see him. He moved to Highgate where there was a more congenial social life. There was the Highgate Institute which had a collection of magazines and newspapers, and acted as a club. His diary was full of engagements, but that was in the future. In 1930 and 1931 he was between two worlds, and had not got adjusted to the new one. He was lonely, and in consequence overworked himself. He was never to work so hard again; in fact he gave up active writing; he had said all he had to say and contented himself with occasional reviews and essays. He was never to feel really ill again until the very end.

  I think I found the right cure for his complaint when I suggested that he should come out to Villefranche in the early summer. He needed sunlight and a change of atmosphere. He loved France dearly, but he had never been further south than Avignon. The Riviera would open a new world for him.

  His illness was not improved by Evelyn’s being ill at the same time. Evelyn had gone to spend a few days at The Beetle and Wedge, a riverside hotel that is mentioned in H. G. Wells’ Mr. Polly, and that was now owned by Philip Saintsbury – a charming member of the Meynell clan, a bright figure of the ‘20s whose star set too soon. Evelyn returned unexpectedly on the 29th of April, with a temperature of 101. Something was wrong with his mouth, he said. He would have to have all his teeth out. Two days later, his throat came out in ulcers. A hospital nurse was sent for. The family doctor did not know what was wrong. It eventually transpired that he had eaten some poisoned watercress at the Beetle and Wedge. There ensued at 145 North End Road, a comedy of which my brother at least saw the humour. It was, he said, les malades jalouses. My father wanted to have all the attention, always: particularly from his wife, particularly when he was ill. Evelyn was not a good patient; he took a violent dislike to his nurse. Her presence irritated him. She had the good sense to realise this and sat outside the room on a chair, reading. The house was not centrally warmed, and she wrapped herself in a dressing gown. For five days between May 2 and May 7 there are practically no entries in my father’s diary – the only time when there were no entries until the last days of his life.

  In a mood of contrition which was not rare with him, Evelyn ordered from his wine merchant a dozen quarter bottles of Perrier-douet. My father enjoyed them but found them liverish. By May 11, life had returned to normal; Evelyn’s trench mouth was cured, and my parents had decided to take a week’s holiday in Sussex. Evelyn celebrated their joint recovery with a gift to my father of £5 on the condition that the sum was spent in its entirety within a week. But a week in Sussex would not, he knew, be sufficient, particularly as the weather was very bad, Patsy Henderen’s benefit match at Lord’s on the Whitsuntide weekend being completely ruined by the rain. He now decided that he must make the experiment of a four week visit to the South of France and on Friday the 29th of May he and my mother started on the most ambitious excursion of their lives.

  They took it in easy stages. They crossed by the Newhaven and Dieppe boat, spending the night in Paris; on the following day they caught a train which reached Marseilles at 10.45 P.M. I met them there. I had booked rooms for them in the Terminus Hotel. Next day we caught a morning train that reached Villefranche soon after three o’clock. I provided from the buffet a picnic of ham sandwiches. My parents’ summer holidays had been usually spent in the north of France, St Malo, Avranches, Caudebec-en-Caux or further north in Flanders, Bruges especially; once they had taken a cruise through the Norwegian Fjords. They
had never seen ‘the palms, the sunlight, and the South’. It was exciting to see the excitement on their faces after we had passed St Raphael, and reached the red rocks round Agay; an excitement that mounted after we passed La Napoule, and indeed is there anywhere in the world a lovelier stretch of coastline?

  It was a very, very happy holiday. Villefranche was the ideal place for a couple of my parents’ age. It was easy for them to take excursions of an unexacting nature. The morning climb to the Octroi to catch the trolley into Nice was the only real demand upon their energy. Everything else involved a stroll along the level. There was in Villefranche itself the twenty minutes walk to the Darse. In Nice there was the Jardin d’Albert Ier. Sometimes they would take a fiacre along the Promenade des Anglais, and sip a coffee in the café de la Méditerranée. Often they would lunch at Mont Boron, in a restaurant that no longer exists with a terrace looking out over the bay. Quite often my parents lunched alone, leaving me to remain on the harbour with my manuscript. It was the first time that they had been on a holiday when they had not been forced to have all their meals en pension at the same hotel. They appreciated the variety that they could thus enjoy. We took a number of excursions. Once we went to the Casino at Cannes so that I could get the material for a description of it in my novel. My mother and I went on a bus trip to Gourdon and to Grasse where we saw the perfume factories. We lunched the three of us at the Columbe d’Or – lunch at that time, I am reminded by my father’s diary, was thirty francs a head. Then, the franc was 120 to the pound. A film was being made there at the time. This was a cause of great excitement to my father. Eighteen months later I was to see the film. The shots at the Colombe d’Or occupied a bare three minutes. It was very much a B film, in French, but it added immeasurably to my father’s enjoyment of the day; Gwen Le Gallienne happened to be lunching there. That too was a treat for my father.

  In those days the large Customs shed did not exist at Villefranche. I cannot with my mind’s eye picture it all as it was then. I fancy that the sea ran up close to the path that runs above the parking place towards the Darse. Boule was played there, certainly; and we used to bathe off the rocks. That short walk from the hotel to the ramparts of Vauban’s fortress was my father’s favourite. He used to walk there after breakfast smoking his first pipe of the day. Il fume toujours son pipe, votre père, Cécile said to me. It was a warm summer, but my father always wrapped a scarf round his neck. He also wore the same tweed suit that he wore in England in the summer. It had a waistcoat, and he also wore a light-weight vest and long-legged under-pants. ‘I like to feel wool against my skin,’ he said. He did not seem stifled. Yet in London he would be wearing precisely the same clothes when I would be wrapped in a great coat. And he would insist on opening windows even on winter nights. He enjoyed a bracing atmosphere. He liked to feel the wind on his face, but because of his asthma, he wanted to protect his chest. I often remember this contrast when I see how heavily the Moroccans wrap themselves on the hottest July afternoon. Yet they never seem overhot in their brown rough djelabas. Perhaps they – and my father – have reason on their side.

  My father had brought out with him the proofs of his autobiography One Man’s Road. There was half a chapter still to write. He wrote it on his second day. I can still see him coming to where I was sitting over my manuscript, with a broad grin on his face. ‘It’s finished,’ he said. It was not only a book that was finished, but his writing life. He was to write little more, but as I said in my chapter on him in My Brother Evelyn, the last decade of his life was to prove in a great many ways, the happiest.

  I had read a good deal of his autobiography already. But it was at Villefranche that I read it through, for the first time from start to finish. Naturally I was absorbed by it. In the early 50s I suggested that Chapman and Hall should reissue it, with a preface by myself, but the idea did not receive much encouragement. Evelyn suggested that I should prepare a miscellany of our father’s writings, that would include extracts from One Man’s Road, from his Newdicate Prize Poem and the poem he wrote on the death of his brother Alick and that was privately printed. My father had also written a collection of poems ‘Legends of the Wheel’, in the days of the cycling boom. Some of these might be worth reprinting. There should also be examples of his correspondence. Some of his very best writing went into his letters. Many of his friends kept the letters that he had written them all their lives. Only a few years ago I received a collection of letters that he had written to the Parish priest at St Augustine’s Kilburn, some at the start of the century, others in the 30s – annual letters in reply to birthday congratulations. They were wonderfully vivid and alive. They are now in the library of the University of Texas. He used to hope that one day a selection of his letters would be issued. But the difficulty of such a project was that his best letters were written to people of whom the public had never heard, and the witty references to mutual friends would not be understood. Elaborate editing and the writing of innumerable footnotes would be required. For me living nine months of the year abroad, it was a task beyond my powers. I suggest it as an act of pietas to my nephew Auberon or my niece Harriet.

  Very likely Evelyn was right about One Man’s Road, and it has only a reference value now. Certainly the first part is much the best. In autobiographies it invariably is. A man has usually by the time he is thirty, chosen, or had chosen for him, the path that his career will follow. Nothing unexpected is likely to happen to him. Tolstoi said of Karenin – then in his thirties – that he had ceased to be interesting, because one knew what to expect for him, from him. He would rise in his career. Fresh laurels waited him. But he had ceased to be potential. For some men in public life the concluding decades are of dramatic content because they are concerned with big events, but in themselves the authors of such autobiographies act as reporters, as raisonneurs. It is very rare that they are themselves the creators and controllers of big events; for them to be that, they have to be Bismarcks, de Gaulles, Winston Churchills.

  It has been said that every man has one book in him, and every man’s life is of interest up till the point when he has decided on and made a start in his career, and until he has found the woman with whom he is going to share that life. Up till that point he is at the mercy of the winds of chance. Most young men in their first year at a University have four or five roads open to them. It is luck which one they choose. But the choice once made, there is an absence of the unexpected and that is what makes or mars a narrative, the wondering as to what is going to happen next.

  There is another reason why the first half of an autobiography is more interesting – certainly why One Man’s Road is. In the first part the author is dealing with characters who are either no longer alive or no longer an active part; of the author’s life – schoolmasters come into this category. It is not easy, it is very often impossible to write honestly of business associates with whom one is brought into daily contact. My father could write honestly of his first employer, Wolcott Balestier, Kipling’s brother-in-law; he could write of W. L. Courtney, his tutor at Oxford, who had introduced him to Chapman and Hall and had resigned from the Board in 1925; he could also write of his cousin Edmund Gosse, who had introduced him to the world of letters and who had died in 1929; but he could not write honestly of his current problems with his co-directors at Chapman and Hall. He had to pretend that he was happy with them, which he was very far from being. Nor could he write with complete honesty about his sons. He did not write about the troubles that I had had at school, troubles that led to the headmaster asking my father to take me away from school at the end of a term that need not necessarily have been my last; troubles that I described in my own autobiography. He could not refer to my first marriage. This meant that he had to present a very incomplete picture of his life between the years 1914 and 1922. My wife Barbara was the daughter of an old friend, W. W. Jacobs. When I was with the B.E.F. in France, and later when I was a prisoner of war in Germany she stayed at Underhill going each morning into London to
take classes first at Queen’s and then at Bedford College. She and Evelyn became close friends, as he has described in A Little Learning; they decorated the old nursery with modern cubist frescoes. When Barbara and I married in July 1919, we made our home at Underhill, making a study drawing-room in the old nursery. Although a year later, we built a bungalow under the downs in Sussex, Underhill remained our base. The two families were very close, with constant exchange of visits, with Barbara’s brothers and sisters regarding Underhill as a home; Evelyn was at home, too in the Jacobs’ house at Berkhamstead. The break-up of the marriage in January 1922 must not only have been a great blow to my father, but it meant the cutting of innumerable links. It would not have been possible for him to write a completely true story of the war and the immediate post-war years without mentioning Barbara.

  His treatment of Evelyn in the book must seem to the modern reader extra-ordinary. Evelyn published Decline and Fall in 1928, and Vile Bodies in January 1930. He was immediately recognised as one of the most significant of the younger writers. Yet in his father’s autobiography published in September 1931 there is no reference to him as a writer. There are some charming and warm descriptions of his boyhood, but after stating that he won the senior history scholarship at Hertford College, Oxford, in December 1921, there is no reference to him of any kind. There are a few pages about post-war Oxford, but no picture of Evelyn in Oxford, nor of the many friends he made there, many of whom became my father’s friends.

  Readers of A Little Learning will understand how this came about. Evelyn did not have the Oxford career for which his father had hoped. He took a bad third, his scholarship was taken away, and he left Oxford without a degree. That was in July 1924. During the next three and a half years he led an existence that in A Little Learning is the chapter headed as ‘in which our hero’s fortunes fall very low’. A Little Learning ends in 1925. During the next two years they were to fall lower. He went as a schoolmaster from one establishment to another, invariably to one lower in the social order. It was not conducive to my father’s peace of mind. Evelyn was to write of this period, ‘In early manhood, for a short time, I was the cause of anxiety that bordered on despair.’ Most of this time he was making Underhill his base; he added in a later chapter, ‘the intermittent but frequent presence of a dissipated and not always respectful spendthrift disturbed the tranquility of the home to which he always looked for refuge.’