My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles Read online

  Churton Collins, the author of the article, was everything that Gosse was not. He was a great and meticulous scholar, but he was little else. When he died in 1908, Arnold Bennett wrote that ‘he was quite bereft of original taste. The root of the matter was not in him. The frowning structure of his vast knowledge overawed many people but it never overawed an artist unless the artist was excessively young and naïve… his essays were arid and tedious.’

  Collins had been an unsuccessful applicant for the Merton Professorship of English at Oxford and his article was manifestly inspired by malice and ill will. At its close he wrote, ‘And now we bring to a conclusion one of the most disagreeable tasks that it has ever been our lot to undertake’, but it is clear that he had relished every spiteful phrase. There were many of them. ‘Will our readers credit.…’ ‘This is a University lecturer.…’ ‘But this is nothing to what follows.…’ ‘Our readers will probably believe us to be jesting when we inform them.…’ ‘Not the least mischievous characteristic of the work is the skill with which its worthlessness is disguised.…’ He compares Gosse with Mr Pecksniff. ‘About the propriety of his epithets, so long as they sound well, he never troubles himself.’

  In tone the article is pompous and self-righteous, but there Churton Collins was in tune with the temper of his time, and when he refers to his victim’s ‘habitual inaccuracy with respect to dates’, he was well armed for the attack. ‘Of all offences of which a writer can be guilty,’ Collins was able to write, ‘the most detestable is that of simulating familiarity with works which he knows only at second-hand or of which he knows nothing more than the title. That a lecturer on English Literature should not know whether the Arcadia of Sidney and the Oceana of Harrington are in prose or verse or, not knowing, should not have taken the trouble to ascertain, is discreditable enough, but that he should under the impression that they are poems, have had the effrontery to sit in judgement on them, might well in Macaulay’s favourite phrase, make us ashamed of our species.

  ‘Unless the Universities give care to the teaching of English,’ the article concluded, ‘so long will our presses continue to pour forth such books as the books on which we have been animadverting and so long will our leading literary journals pronounce them “volumes not to be glanced over and thrown aside but to be read twice and consulted often”.’

  The article caused a great sensation. Letters were written to the Press. No man knows who his friends are till he is in trouble. Gosse had always recognized the hostility of the Henley group, but many whom he had thought his friends had been secretly envious of his success and now joined the chorus of contumely. Gosse in his dismay and indignation may have exaggerated the extent of the calamity, as when a few weeks later he was bewailing to Thomas Hardy that, ‘my little influence for good is almost gone’, but there is small doubt that his prestige at that moment stood perilously low. His income dropped. Editors were no longer so anxious to employ his pen. At Oxford it became a stock saying for anyone who had made ‘a howler’ that he had made ‘a Gosse of himself’. And a ludicrous sidelight on the situation is provided by his cook’s giving notice because she did not like seeing ‘the master’s name so often in the papers’.

  Gosse never got over the attack. It affected his entire conduct. He became hypersensitive to criticism. Warm-hearted and affectionate by nature he was on his guard against betrayal, considering it disloyal of a friend to praise in print someone whom he held to be an enemy. With most of his friends, during the 1890s there were periods of estrangement when something written or repeated had been misunderstood.

  My father shared an experience that was nearly universal. He had written an article that rather pleased him, and in the course of casual talk mentioned it to Gosse, saying he would like him to look at it. Two days later he received a biting letter from Gosse saying that while he recognized that a working journalist had to accept whatever commissions he was offered, he did not see why his attention should be called ‘to such lucubrations’. My father had presumably written a kindly word about someone who, unknown to him, had forfeited Gosse’s regard. My father hit back, and there was a two years’ schism.

  Gosse never overcame the sensitiveness to criticism which Collins’s article created, yet he gauged correctly not only the limited extent of the damage that it could do him but the nature of his own fallibility; and later he found a parallel for his own position in Ralph Brook’s attack on Camden’s Britannia. In an essay in Gossip in a Library Gosse referred to the ‘very hasty pamphlet which created a fine storm in an antiquarian teapot’. This attack was the work of a man who would otherwise be forgotten, who was jealous when Camden was promoted over his head to be Clarenceux King-of-Arms. Camden, like Gosse, was guilty of a number of small inaccuracies, and how accurately Gosse diagnosed his own weakness when he wrote that ‘Camden had sailed too long in fair weather’ and ‘needed a squall to recall him to the duties of the helm’. How completely has Gosse’s prophecy been fulfilled. Is Churton Collins remembered today for anything except his attack on Gosse?

  The incident has its significance in literary history. It shows that attacks are soon forgotten provided the object of them continues to produce works of quality. There is only one answer to attack, to write a better book next time.

  2

  Authors at Underhill

  E. TEMPLE THURSTON, DESMOND COKE, ERNEST RHYS

  My brother Evelyn and myself—Evelyn was born in October 1903—were brought up in an atmosphere not only of books but of professional writing. We lived in Hampstead on the edge of the Heath in a house called Underhill and our father invariably returned at the end of the day with a new book under his arm—one that he had for review or one that Chapman & Hall had published. His conversation with my mother turned on office problems, on difficulties with a bookseller or an agent, or an author’s reluctance to ‘tone down’ a manuscript.

  My father was convivial and hospitable. But he was asthmatic and in consequence reluctant to go out at night in winter. In later years his deafness made him avoid large gatherings, but he loved having his friends round him. Most Sundays there would be visitors. Occasionally one or two would stay on to supper. Most of these friends would in my father’s house avail themselves of their chance of learning about this and the other authoress and author. Writers provide material for gossip. The reader forms a mental picture of his favourite author. He wants to know what So-and-so is ‘really like’. He is also inquisitive about an author’s earnings. ‘How much did So-and-so make out of that?’

  I was continually listening to literary ‘shop’. I was brought up to think of literature as a profession, almost as a trade. I used to hear how this writer’s stock was going up, while that other’s was going down. I was clothed and fed, housed and educated by my father’s pen. There did not seem to me to be anything peculiar about a man being a writer. On the contrary, it seemed to me to be a most natural occupation.

  As a schoolboy I was read poetry by my father almost every evening; I have seldom heard poetry read as well, and never better; I heard much talk of publishing and the auction-room of letters, but I am surprised, in retrospect, that so few authors should have come out to Under-hill. During the ten years before the war, Chapman & Hall published a number of prominent writers, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett—The Old Wives’ Tale was on their list—Somerset Maugham, Sheila Kaye-Smith, but none of them ever sat in his oak-panelled book-room with its warm red lamps. This was in part because of his resolve to forget his office in his home at night, and partly in order to keep business and friendship separate. He had a great distaste for calculated hospitality. ‘I know,’ he would say, ‘why Johnson’s asking me to lunch. He wants me to send a MS. to the Ipswich Press.’ Johnson was a shareholder in Chapman & Hall. The Ipswich Press, which he managed, was every bit as good and no more expensive than any other firm. There was no reason why Johnson should not have had his share of the firm’s printing and several very good reasons why he should, but my father hated the idea of a lunc
h party having a commercial aspect; business, he felt, should be transacted in an office. He did not until his very last years have an entertainment expense account. To him the home was sacrosanct. The only two of his authors whom I remember meeting as a schoolboy were E. Temple Thurston and Desmond Coke.

  Both of these had special and different reasons for making an appeal to me. Temple Thurston because he was the favourite author of a contemporary at Sherborne, two years senior to myself, in whose eyes I managed to acquire prestige as the son of his favourite’s publisher, and I was at pains to return from the holidays each term with gossip-column information about Thurston’s plans and movements.

  This boy, whose name is Noël Whiting, and who has become one of my closer friends, though I see, alas, little of him nowadays—we rarely find ourselves at the same time in the same place—was one of the most remarkable of my contemporaries; and in retrospect I am surprised that I did not include him among the characters in my school novel; I suppose the reason is that I did not recognize then that he was remarkable. In my eyes he was no more than an agreeable and elegant eccentric. It was not till later that I came to recognize him as an insistent individualist, who got his way by passive resistance, a rebel who did not rebel, a nonconformist who did not challenge the conformity of others.

  Graceful and good looking, with a gracious voice, he had the air of an Etonian; but his family had entered him for Winchester, where he failed to pass the College entrance examination, a thing that it was not difficult to do. The educational standard at Winchester has always been exceptionally high; and he had come to Sherborne because our headmaster Nowell Charles Smith was a Wykehamist. He was what was described in those days as well connected. His background was a wealthy one, but he never displayed his ampler means. He never ‘dropped’ important names.

  He had a contented nature, because he had interior resources. He could be perfectly happy, provided that no one interfered with him. He was resolved to enjoy his five years at Sherborne, in his own way. He was physically strong and became one of the best swimmers in the school, but he did not want to play cricket or Rugby football. Games were compulsory at Sherborne until a boy had reached the top form, the sixth, but Noël always arranged to do something in the afternoon for which it was permissible to get ‘leave off games’—a music or a drawing lesson, an archaeological expedition or a game of fives. In the end, house captains ceased to post him on cricket and football sides, and he was able to spend a couple of afternoons every week reading in the library.

  The O.T.C. (Officers’ Training Corps) was technically voluntary, but 95 per cent of the school joined. Noël availed himself of his technical liberty and did not join it; not on pacifist, non-combatant grounds—when the war broke out, he applied immediately for a commission—but because he wanted to use his spare time in other ways. He was not a classical scholar; he never reached the sixth, but he spoke excellent French. The wife of the drawing master was a Frenchwoman, and he used to give weekly tea parties in his study where only French was spoken.

  He interfered with no one and no one interfered with him. He wore his hair a little longer than was officially approved, but no one told him he must get it cut. You would have expected that such a boy would have been ragged and bullied in his early days, that there would have been an equivalent for the ‘Shelley Hunts’ at Eton; that tough Philistines would have insisted that his duty to the house forced him to the football field: ‘get into the scrum and shove, you little scum’; but they never did. From the start his independence was respected. Many years later, as a result possibly of his experiences in India and Burma during the war, he became a Buddhist. Without knowing it, he had been a Buddhist from the start, adopting a policy of non-aggression.

  He had at that time four main objects of enthusiasm—music, painting, Napoleon—the walls of his study were covered with portraits of the Emperor—and the novels of E. Temple Thurston. I still cannot understand why those particular novels should have held such a strong appeal for him. I can think of so many other novelists with whom he might have been expected to find himself in tune.

  Temple Thurston died suddenly, when he was apparently in good health, early in 1933. I do not suppose that any of his books are still in print, but for twenty-five years he was a prominent and successful author. He was one of my father’s discoveries. His first novel The Apple of Eden recounted a priest’s fall from grace; ‘religion and sex is an infallible mixture’, my father said. Thurston wrote two kinds of novel: the one powerful and realistic like The Apple of Eden, the other sentimentally romantic like The City of Beautiful Nonsense—which was a considerable best-seller. He was extremely anxious to succeed on the stage and wrote a number of plays that had little success, but at last, soon after the war, he had a genuine ‘run’ for The Wandering Jew—a lavish full-scale production at His Majesty’s Theatre. He wrote scenarios for the films. He made a reasonable amount of money; he was able to finance his share of matrimonial confusion without excessive strain. He could have looked forward to at least another fifteen years of steady profitable production. Yet he was very far from being a happy man.

  It is possible that he was not a very pleasant one, though, personally, I found him companionable, agreeable and encouraging. He was a great egotist, utterly self-centred; never satisfied that his work was receiving the attention that it deserved from publishers and critics. He was not easy to do business with. He published for ten years with Chapman & Hall and dedicated one of his novels to my father, but he was never satisfied with his books’ sales. ‘Hodders have offered me an advance of £700,’ he would say. ‘You say that my last novel only earned £500. Perhaps Hodders with their bigger organization could push up my sales to seven hundred.’ When eventually he left Chapman & Hall, he changed his publisher several times.

  He made considerable demands upon his publisher. He would bring my father the first four chapters of his new novel, then eight weeks later he would arrive with the next four. My father at Underhill that night would press the back of his hand against his forehead. ‘How can I be expected to remember the precise impression that was made on me by four chapters of a novel two months ago. Think of all I’ve read in between.’ I have taken that lesson to heart and been very careful not to submit my work in short instalments. One of Thurston’s agents said to me: ‘I know that authors ask me out to lunch because they want to talk about their work, but I wish Thurston would wait till I have finished my first cocktail before he starts telling me the plot of his new novel.’

  He was a lone wolf. I do not think that he had many men friends, though he was the kind of man whom you would have expected to have them. He was athletic and played lawn tennis well enough to compete in the opening rounds at Wimbledon. He played cricket at Lord’s for the Authors against the Publishers and took three wickets. His last victim jumped out to drive him, missed the ball and was bowled. By a mistake of the scorer, the batsman appeared next morning in The Times as stumped. This distressed Thurston. He thought that it would look as though the batsman had held his bowling in such contempt that he had run out of his ground to swipe it.

  Tall, dark, lean, photogenic, he looked both as the author of The Apple of Eden and The City of Beautiful Nonsense could have been expected to look; tough with a tender side. But he had a chip upon his shoulder.

  He had not been to a university, nor to one of the recognized public schools. Who’s Who contains no autobiographical details and that mattered quite a bit in England before World War I. His first wife came from a superior social caste. She wrote a novel, John Chilcote M.P., which was a ‘best-seller’ and of which he was so jealous that he persuaded my father to issue one of his novels in minute editions of 250 copies so that he could claim to have sold more editions than she had. Many years later when I was myself published by Chapman & Hall, I followed his example, though for different reasons, and arranged to have one of my novels issued in small editions so that it could be advertised as ‘seventh large printing exhausted before publicatio
n’. In 1957 when my brother brought a libel suit against Nancy Spain and I was one of the witnesses, the question arose of how many copies there were in an edition; the judge was highly amused when I told him of this device. ‘Mr Waugh, Mr Waugh,’ he admonished me, ‘you are giving the whole show away.’

  Thurston evaded military service on the curious medical grounds that he suffered from agrophobia—the fear of open spaces. His nerves, he claimed, would disintegrate on Salisbury Plain or on a battlefield; although, as my father remarked, he could with impunity take a cross-channel steamer to Ireland and France. Perhaps it was a pity that he did not have the opportunity that war provides of mixing in a community. It might have taken him out of himself. Instead he became more ingrown.

  Though a member of the Garrick he never seemed to belong anywhere. In a sense that is an advantage for a writer. It is unhealthy for him, in the long run, to belong to a coterie. A clique becomes a claque. And when fashions change, a writer goes out of favour with his fellow members. But Thurston was never quite strong enough, quite good enough to stand alone. He was never given more than respectful attention in the weekly reviews. He was never included in general articles on ‘trends in the modern novel’, although even though he was not a major novelist, he had many of the minor qualities of a major novelist. He could construct a story; he had a sense of character and of caricature. He was ambitious and hard working. His trilogy The Achievement of Richard Furlong, which was issued in a single volume at no great profit to Chapman & Hall, only just did not ‘come off’. He wrote with feeling. He was a better writer than many of those who were reviewed at length in highbrow columns. His lack of critical acclaim did not, probably, cost him a penny in royalties, and through never having been fashionable, he was spared the chilling experience of finding himself out of fashion. But he himself was perpetually plagued by this lack of recognition. He was so desperately anxious to write ‘a book that mattered’.