My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Read online

  His liaisons followed, unconsciously, the principle of the rotation of crops, a ‘lady of quality’ succeeding a Bohemian, and someone frivolous following someone serious. During 1923 he was occupied with an austere lady, not unattractive, but tall and grim, forbidding at a first and indeed seventh meeting. She was possessive, jealous of his friends, limited and exclusive in her tastes, insisting that he should only know people whom she thought ‘worth while’. But I may be prejudiced. I was one of the friends who was not ‘worth while’.

  When her reign ended, in mid-1924, he completely altered the pattern of his existence, moving out of his studio into a comfortable house north of the Park, with an establishment consisting of a married couple and a valet. This move coincided with and was perhaps occasioned by the entry into his life of an old friend, Vera Leslie. A House of Words contained a number of character poems. One of them called ‘The Flirt’ was inscribed to her.

  Myriad-lovered

  Vain provocative

  Heartless, honeyed

  Exquisite girl.

  Are you merely

  Something enchanted?

  Could we unspell you

  What should we find?

  Vera was a socialite. She was smart. She had a gift for drawing. She appreciated elegance. Though her background was ‘army and county’, she preferred the company of artists. Her first husband had been an artist and printer, Stanley North; her second and at that time current one was Filson Young. There was not a great difference in age between herself and Clifford and they had been friends in youth. When I had questioned him about ‘Flirt’ he had told me that she was one of the most fascinating women he had ever known.

  Under Vera’s guidance he changed his appearance to suit his new address. He went to a good tailor, bought patent leather evening shoes, adopted a wider-brimmed style of hat and grew a beard. He had a good cook and he gave charming dinner parties for which he expected his guests to change. I have very happy memories of those dinners. He always maintained that four is the best number for a party;* sometimes he invited three other men, sometimes two women and a man. Sometimes he wrote verses on the place cards. I cherish one on which he combined within a couplet the titles of three of my books:

  Myself when young spurned Pleasure and sought Truth;

  Weave wiselier thou upon The Loom of Youth,

  Nineteen-twenty-five was a happy year for him. He was working well. Midsummer Madness was produced. He enjoyed his change of circumstance. He was a man who in some respects grew up upside-down, and he now at the age of forty was showing an undergraduate’s interest in clothes. A valet was a great adventure for him.

  He was also very happy with Vera. He was in the mood for a gay companion, after the gaunt guardian of his diary, and the fact that he and Vera had known each other when they were young gave him a sense of having the threads of his life drawn together. So often one feels incomplete with a new friend because one cannot talk about one’s past; in the same way for that matter one often feels incomplete with an old friend because one cannot discuss with him one’s immediate concerns. Vera and Clifford could let their talk wander at will over twenty years.

  During this period he wrote several of the stories that were published under the title Many a Green Isle. One of them was inspired by Vera. In it he wrote, ‘on a sudden I realized that as great a wonder had happened to me as if I had stepped into an enchanted pool and had come forth ten years younger. And my new self laughed at the arrogance of the self whom I had shed. After all then—the world had been right; the simple souls had been right; they were not mere sentimentalists because they assumed that the love between men and women was the inmost treasure obtainable from life. “Proud poet,” I said to myself. “Now you are with the humblest. Now you are back at the beginning of wisdom and perceive that those who belittle love are those who could never find it.”’

  It is not impossible that this friendship might have been a lasting one, might have been the anchor for him that a later friendship was to become, but Vera’s husband, Filson Young, took exception to it. Divorce proceedings were initiated and Vera and Clifford married. Vera was a person of much charm, was a good hostess, who knew how to decorate and run a house, but Clifford never looked himself in it. He needed to be alone. Four years later he took a set in Albany.

  He was now in his late forties and it was here that he appeared to catch up with himself, to complete the process of growing up the wrong way round and stand square upon his feet, to reach a point of development that was in keeping with his nature. Both as a Bohemian and as a socialite he had been cast for the wrong roles, and he had been out of character in marriage. He needed solitude and freedom, and a setting in which he could meet and entertain different kinds of friend. He did not need formality but he did need comfort. He did not need a valet but he did need a good housekeeper.

  He was in tune with the whole atmosphere of Albany with its quiet, its privacy, the college atmosphere of the ropewalk, the red-uniformed porter with his cockaded hat, and the rounded windows with their view of Vigo Street. Seeing him with his books and pictures round him, I felt that he was himself at last. His book, Evenings in Albany, a graceful blending of reverie and reminiscence gave a happy picture of his life there. It was during this period that he made friends with men of his own type—men like E. V. Lucas and C. B. Fry.

  No two men could have been more different than Bax and Squire. They were very different too, as captains of a cricket side.

  It might have been expected that Bax, who had shown little sense of stage-management in his career as a writer, would have been a vague and casual captain of a cricket side and that Squire, who had such a marked sense of self-direction, would have been on the field a brisk, military martinet. Not at all; though Bax looked like an Elizabethan poet, he was a business-like manager. The staff work of his tours was smooth, and his teams arrived on time with an umpire, a scorer and a twelfth man in flannels.

  The Invalids were very different. England, Their England is dedicated to Squire. He figures in its pages as Mr Hodge. The book is comic and the comedian’s licence to exaggerate is freely used. Into the famous cricket match are crowded the high spots of a dozen matches, and no real game could have ended in that kind of a tie with half the fielders colliding in mid-wicket. It is full, rich caricature. But in the presentation of Mr Hodge’s captaincy and management there was no caricature at all. It really was like that.

  I first met the Invalids as an opponent in the summer of 1921. I was living in Ditchling and captained the village side. Squire had wanted to make it a whole-day match. But it was harvest time, the villagers could not get away, so we agreed on a one-thirty start with a buffet lunch first for the visitors in my bungalow. I expected my guests around midday, but the first opponent appeared at half past nine, in the belief that it was a whole-day match. I have forgotten his name. I have never seen him since, he was a very silent man. I soon began to hope that other members of the side would be under a similar misapprehension, but the slow passing hours of the morning were only broken by a couple of telegrams for Squire from players who had been delayed. Noon came, half past twelve, one o’clock; then the solitary arrival and myself ate a portion of the lunch, covered over the remains in the hope that they would be reasonably fresh at supper-time, and made our way to the ground where the villagers were patiently waiting for the ‘toffs from London’. Eventually the game began at five to four, with the last two places filled by an eleven-year-old schoolboy and the taxi driver who had driven half the side from the remote station to which they had been misdirected.

  I will not call that a typical experience—but it was an effective introduction to the Invalids. Squire was at that time the busiest man of letters in the country: more often than not he was forced to leave the writing of his Sunday article for the Observer till the Saturday morning, and most regular members of his side can recall fidgeting in his study, beside the messenger who was waiting to take down his manuscript to the printer, while the
Invalids, one by one, were assembling forty miles away in a Sussex pub. Every regular Invalid has his own pet story of a side six short without its captain being put in to bat and desperately trying to hold out till lunch when a further instalment of players might be expected.

  No side can have been managed more capriciously off the field and its management in the field was unexpected. Squire, unlike Bax, had not had, well, how shall I put it—the conventional grooming of a cricketer, and he captained his sides, as Hitler led his armies, not from a study of the textbooks but by the light of poetic intuition.

  In a half-day game once against a good side on a good wicket, he opened his attack with his second and third change bowlers. At tea, with the score at 165 for two, he explained his plan. ‘I thought I would get two or three quick wickets, then loose my good bowlers, when they were fresh, against the tail.’

  He enjoyed bowling, and some maintained that his tactics in the field were dictated by the subconscious need to create a situation when he would be justified in putting himself on to bowl. He had, as a bowler, some curious idiosyncrasies. The average captain, when deciding from which end he will prefer to bowl, studies the slope of the ground and gauges the direction of the wind with a wetted finger. Squire looked at the sun. ‘I’ll go on this end,’ he would say. ‘At the other end the glint of the sun upon the stumps would put me off.’ ‘Mr Hodge,’ A. G. MacDonell wrote, ‘was a poet, and therefore a theorist and an idealist. Every ball that he bowled had brain behind it, if not exactness of pitch.’ He took a four-step trot, and tossed high into the air a ball guileless of spin and swerve. It was astonishing how often he broke a partnership.

  But the most remarkable feature of a remarkable eleven was Squire’s capacity to get the best play out of his side. Was it an innate gift of leadership or did the memory of an earlier Sir John who would not ‘march through Coventry with that’, inspire or rather goad a reasonable club cricketer, who recognized how hopelessly the odds were laid against him, into a desperate resolve to put a face on things? Something of both most likely. Certainly most regular Invalids will admit that they played ten per cent above their normal form for Squire and two high victories stand upon his records—against a strong R.A.O.C. side at Aldershot, when that fine musician Walton O’Donnell took seven wickets and made over 80, and at the Oval against the Lords and Commons largely owing to a three-figure partnership between Clifford Bax and that sound writer of detective stories, Milward Kennedy, who appeared on the score card disguised by his baptismal name, M. R. K. Burge.

  It is one of the anomalies of leadership that Squire, untrained as a cricketer, with no skill at the game and little knowledge of it, should have been able to get the best out of his team, while as editor of the London Mercury, with his great knowledge of literature and feeling for the humanities of literature, he should not have been able to get the best work out of his friends. The rates of pay on the Mercury were low but most writers would sooner have £10 from a paper they respect and an encouraging editor who takes pleasure in their work than £30 from an impersonal, commercially-minded magazine. Over the years a number of excellent poems, essays and stories appeared within the yellow covers of the Mercury, but few of Squire’s juniors felt when they had reached a final sentence, ‘This really is rather good. I’ll let Jack have first look at it.’

  12

  My Brother Evelyn

  I wrote in my Early Years in explanation of the fact that it contained so little about my brother, ‘I lack the key to Evelyn. I cannot enter imaginatively into the mind of a person for whom religion is the dominant force in his life, for whom religion is a crusade.… You cannot appraise a stained-glass window if you look at it from the outside and, not possessing that key to Evelyn’s nature, I might give in a full-length essay… a misleading picture of him.’ I was afraid ‘that I might get the picture out of focus. I might lay the wrong emphasis on certain episodes, and mislead rather than guide his readers.’

  But when I wrote that, I could not have foreseen that Evelyn would never finish his own autobiography; and though for those same reasons I do not feel myself competent to draw a full-length portrait of him, I do feel that I owe it to his memory to sketch for the benefit of his readers a picture of his early days, up till his conversion.

  During the last fifteen years of his life, I saw him so seldom that I can remember each separate occasion on which we met—there were fewer than a dozen—weddings and funerals, his libel action against Nancy Spain; once we lunched in London; once a trip of his to Monte Carlo coincided with one of mine to Villefranche. I twice visited him in his house in Somerset. But though we met so little, we were in constant touch. We frequently corresponded; I have a large folder of his letters which I shall one day annotate and edit for presentation to a university library. I was very conscious of him down there in Combe Florey, at work among his books or pottering round his garden. I was questioned about him constantly. Mutual friends would recount this or the other piece of gossip. When something happened I would think, ‘That will make Evelyn chuckle. I must write to him.’ I still involuntarily go on thinking that. I cannot believe he is no longer here.

  The only period when we were really close was the decade between his going up to Oxford and my second marriage—January 1922 to October 1932. I saw little of him during his childhood. He was by five and a quarter years my junior. Two-thirds of the year I was away at a boarding school. He took no interest in athletics. When my father announced his birth, I said, ‘Good, now we’ll have a wicket keeper.’ But my attempts to teach him cricket inculcated in him a permanent repugnance for the game.

  He was, inevitably, something of a nuisance to me. Presumably I was to him. In our first home, in West Hampstead, my nursery cricket—a game I played by myself—was restricted by the danger of hitting a ball into his cot. When we moved to Underhill, a larger house, I at first left the nursery to him, and spent the winter daytime reading in my father’s book-room. But after a while I became interested in billiards, and a small table was installed in the nursery. Evelyn must have regarded this as an invasion of his territorial rights.

  It is probable that he realized that I considered him a nuisance and that he resented it. He made friends, soon after we moved to Underhill, with a family that lived a quarter of a mile away in a house called Wyldesmead. He has described how he and this family organized ‘the Pistol troop’, to resist the German invasion which at that early day was to them obviously imminent. A clay heap in a builder’s plot was fortified, and provisions for a siege were buried. The parents of the family, who had not yet met my parents, were for a time under the impression that Evelyn was an only child. ‘Oh no,’ said one of them, ‘he has a brother whom he hates.’

  It is possible that I was not very kind to Evelyn. I can still visualize the occasion when my mother lectured me on this point. We were spending an August with my father’s family, where I had to see rather more than usual of my brother. My mother said, ‘I don’t like hearing your aunts complain that you aren’t kind to Evelyn.’

  I fancy that I, an indulged child, very much my father’s favourite, grew up with a superiority complex. I was confident that I was going to make a considerable mark in the world. Evelyn may well have felt himself relegated to a second place. He once said to his mother, ‘Daddy loves Alec more than me. But you love me more than you love Alec’ This was indeed true, but my mother felt that she should not show favouritism. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I love you both the same.’ ‘Then I am lacking in love,’ he said.

  When I returned for the school holidays, my father used to paste over the face of the grandfather clock in the hall, ‘Welcome home to the heir of Underhill’. Evelyn’s comment on this was—he was then only six—’When Alec has Underhill, and all that’s in it, what will be left for me?’ My father never put the notice up again. The incident had an amusing sequel; forty years later my mother, who had inherited my father’s estate, apart from his library which had been left to Evelyn and myself, consulted me about he
r will. She had not a great deal to leave, apart from the furniture, most of her capital having been invested in an annuity. I was by then a resident alien of the United States. I had no need for furniture. Evelyn had six children; reasonable provision had been made by my father-in-law for my three children; Evelyn had contributed generously to his mother’s support during her last years, so that it seemed to me both equitable and trouble-saving for me to disinherit myself. With some reluctance she agreed and made Evelyn her sole heir, so that in the end it was Evelyn who got ‘Underhill and all that’s in it.’

  Cyril Connolly reviewing a life of Ian Fleming wrote in connection with the rivalry, fostered by their mother, between Ian and his elder brother, Peter, ‘One can detect a similarity of predicament as between Alec and Evelyn Waugh and Peter and Ian Fleming, but one can strain Adlerian principles too far. Without Peter (or Alec) the second brothers might have done just as well.’ But it is indeed possible that Evelyn as a second son was challenged to assert himself. He seemed to detect a conspiracy against him between his father and his brother, though he treated it jokingly; when he was sixteen or so he appeared in a tail-coat at an evening party. The neighbours to whom I have referred, commented on his smartness. ‘It was my father’s coat,’ he said, ‘then it was Alec’s; now it is mine. In fact it has come down from generation to generation of them that hate me.’

  Evelyn has described his childhood as being blissfully happy. He adored his mother and his nurse. He resented his father’s intrusion on their life together. His day ended with the click of his father’s latch-key in the lock, and the shout from the hall, ‘Where is K, where is my wife.’ My life, on the other hand, started with my father’s return from work. I do not really know how I spent my Christmas and Easter holidays. I did not have a single friend in the neighbourhood, until during my second year at Sherborne, another boy from Hampstead came to the School House, H. S. Mackintosh, to whom I have already made reference in these pages. I was never lonely, but I certainly led a solitary life.