A Year to Remember Read online

  I also committed the solecism of on occasions filling my hipflask with gin. In California where whiskey was hard to get, gin had been the staple alcoholic commodity. In England where – owing to taxation – there is very little difference in price between the cost of gin and Scotch a host would not be considered parsimonious if he offered a friend a gin and ginger ale. But in New York, where it was cheap, gin occupied the same social status that it had in England in Hogarth’s day. A gentleman did not offer a lady gin, but my friends were very patient. I should learn in time; at any rate I was well-intentioned.

  I drank too much. Everybody drank too much during prohibition. But I felt remarkably well. New York air then had a tonic, a champagne quality. I could do twice as much there as I could in London, and I could manage on very little sleep. When I drove back at one or two o’clock, my heart would lift at the sight across the park of the incredible skyline of 59th street. How good life was. What a world to be a young man in. I would buy a copy of the Daily Mirror, read the ‘latest dirt’ in Winchell’s column, until my eyelids closed. I would shake myself, switch off the light. ‘In four hours I’ll be ready for anything,’ I’d think.

  I was working at this time on a novel that was published in England with the title No Quarter and in the U.S.A. as Tropic Seed. It was a history of piracy told in the form of fiction. It opened in the 1630s with the illegitimate son of a French nobleman running away to sea and joining up with the Buccaneers in Tortuga. It told through a series of separate stories how the strain of piracy ran through the buccaneer’s descendants until in the 1930s a business man in Marseilles is proposing to his fellow directors that by issuing a fraudulent company prospectus he and they can raise a million francs on a half million issue, the public being sold the same shares twice.

  The novel ended with the following paragraph. ‘Doublon rose to his feet. He was such a conventional looking city man in his morning coat, stiff white collar, neatly arranged tie, as you would see in the offices of any big business house in London, New York, Chicago, Paris. It was hard to recognise at a first glance any kinship between this man and the bearded cut-throats who two and a half centuries back had plundered Maracaibo and burnt Panama. But the same blood ran through his veins. That old spirit of the Buccaneers who neither asked quarter nor gave it; whose motto was ‘no prey, no pay,’ who went ruthlessly for the thing they wanted, who had no use for what was smug and easy, was flaming through Doublon’s mind. The same spirit was blazing behind his eyes: the same reckless need of adventure for adventure’s sake. His eyes flashed with the old light. Into his voice came the old ruthless ring as he brought down his fist with a crash upon the table. “A gamble?” he said, “yes, a gamble. But gentlemen, what’s life for if not to gamble with?”‘

  The book would at the same time be a history of the West Indies.

  I had for some time been wanting to write a history of Haïti and it seemed to me that I could here combine two techniques. I had got the idea eighteen months before, during a trip that I had made down the East African coast, and John Farrar (with whom I had discussed it when I arrived in New York for the launching of Hot Countries) thought it would be a good ‘follow-up’. A contract was prepared and signed. It was an entirely new kind of venture for me. Up till then my novels had been pictures of contemporary London. In my more roseate moments I pictured reviews that would begin ‘Mr Alec Waugh has added a dimension to himself; but it did not work out that way. John Farrar, when I delivered the manuscript before my return to England, looked dubious. ‘I’m not sure that this is quite the book we’d expected.’

  ‘But you want to publish it?’

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  Cassell’s were not enthusiastic. It was the first novel that I had brought them, and they did not feel that it was the kind of book for which they could launch, as they had hoped, the big publicity campaign that would build me up. Its sales were to be smaller than those of any of my novels since my second and third, which had done very little. It was not the kind of book that library readers had come to expect from me. In America, where I was primarily known as the author of Hot Countries, it did rather better, because it was the kind of thing my public did expect, and it had some encouraging reviews. But it was very far from being the success that John Farrar and I had hoped.

  I once said to the cutter at my tailors, referring to the suit that I was wearing, ‘This suit never turned out quite right.’

  ‘I know, sir, that’s what happens to one suit in four.’

  The same thing happens to a novel. I know now what was wrong with No Quarter. It had no continuous thread of interest. It began with one character, then shifted to another, then a third, a fourth and then a fifth; the theme of piracy was not a sufficiently strong thread to hold the reader’s interest. There was no real link between the buccaneers of Tortuga and the planters of colonial France. Maugham, so he tells us in The Summing Up, made a similar mistake in his novel The Merry-Go-Round. He had felt that life was falsified by taking two or three people, or a group of people, and ‘describing their adventures as though no one else existed and nothing else was happening in the world.’ He himself was living in several sets that had no connection with one another and he felt that he might give a truer picture of life by carrying on at the same time ‘the various stories of equal importance that were enacted during a certain period in different circles.’ He constructed therefore five independent stories, which were connected through an elderly woman knowing at least one person in each group. The attempt failed because, in his words, the story lacked ‘the continuous line that directs the reader’s interest; the stories were not after all of equal importance and it was tiresome to divert one’s attention from one set of people to another.’ He made another mistake; he did not make the old lady the raison-neur of the piece. Later he came to realise that he could have solved his problems by telling the tale in the first person, as he was himself to do in his last major book, The Razor’s Edge. Writers, it cannot be repeated too often, teach themselves how to write by writing.

  Indeed I was myself aware at the time where I had gone wrong. When I was revising the final draft, about a third of the way through I pencilled in the margin, to amuse the friend who was typing it, ‘this is where this should have ended’. Up to that point I had concentrated on the illegitimate son of the French nobleman. It ended with him established in the world, a grandfather living in a large house on the edge of the town that is now Cap-Haïtien. One evening he breaks away from the formalities of his daughter’s house. He cannot be bothered to wear a heavy brocaded jacket and pointed buckled shoes. Twenty-five pages earlier there had been a description of the kind of shoe that he and his mates had worn at Tortuga; like an Indian moccasin, they were made out of oxhide or pigskin. Having skinned the beast they would place the big toe where the knee had been, then bind the top of a sinew round it. The rest was taken a few inches above the heel and tied there till the skin had dried when, having taken the impress of the man’s foot, it would keep in shape.

  Tortuga – those were the days, he thinks, as, having broken away from his formal house upon the hill, ridden his unsaddled horse to a dockside tavern, frequented by sailors where the rum is good, he sits with his arms bare, and his shirt open at the throat, sipping at his rum, listening to the sailors’ talk.

  Presently he is joined by his grandson. ‘They were worried up there about you. I was sent to look for you.’ To the boy of sixteen, the old man is a figure of respect and awe. He feels very proud sitting there beside him, in silence, sipping at a glass of rum. He could not ask his grandfather too many questions about those days which had already become a part of history. ‘You must have had a pretty exciting time, grandfather, in those old days.’ The old man shrugs. Yes, he supposed he had, his mind abrood upon his past. Exciting, well, he supposed it had been. But he had an idea that life in the end amounted to much the same. You had too much of a thing or too little of it. You were either on the equator with the sweat running down
your face and the fo’castle too hot to sleep in or you were soaked by Antarctic seas, shivering with cold, with your food sodden and sleep only possible in uncertain snatches. For days on end you would be cruising in the Caribbean tacking to desultory July winds, bored, weary, listless, then suddenly you’d sight a sail; you’d give chase to it, there’d be the noise of cannon and the clash of steel, the sockets of your arms would ache with fighting, so that you could cry with the pain of it.

  For weeks on end, you would not see a woman: the thought of women would run maddeningly, inflamingly through your brain; then there’d be a sacked city, and suddenly half a dozen exquisite creatures would be yours for the taking, but with yourself so full of liquor that you could scarcely deal satisfactorily with one of them. Too much of a thing or too little of a thing. Whatever the framework of your life that was the way things went. ‘You must have enjoyed life in those days, grandfather,’ the young man was repeating. The Buccaneer shrugged his shoulders. Yes, perhaps he had. He had found life pretty good all through, but perhaps the days in Tortuga had been his best. ‘We wore a pretty comfortable kind of shoe,’ he said.

  Up to that point I had written a continuous piece of narrative, but from then onwards, the interest was shifted to one group and then another; the reader could put the book aside and feel no need to take it up again. He was no longer being told about the characters in whom he had first been invited to take an interest. The book should have stopped there: but there is no market for a story of thirty thousand words. No one would have published it. Many years later, however, I was to organise a collection of the pieces that I had written about the West Indies between 1928 and 1959. It was called The Sugar Islands in England and Love and the Caribbean in the U.S.A. In this book I included the first fifty pages of No Quarter as a single piece called The Buccaneer. It fitted harmoniously into the volume.

  III

  In the January or February of 1951, the New York telephone company altered the numbering of its subscribers. A numeral took the place of the third letter. Pla-3102 became Pl-9 3102. John O’Hara called his second novel Butterfield 8 and on its title page, he printed the public announcement of this change. I presume that he did this to date the novel, rather than give it a locale as he did later with Frederick North Ten.

  The action of Butterfield 8 was contemporaneous with my own first long visit to New York. My life was, however, very different from that of the majority of the characters in O’Hara’s novel; in the first place because I did not have nearly as much money, and secondly, I was not a person who had a fixed place in the New York scene; I was someone who was working his way into it.

  When I came to New York in May 1930 for the launching of Hot Countries, I knew no New Yorkers except my publisher John Farrar, my agent Carl Brandt, my cousin Claud Cockburn, and two trusted and loved London friends, Hugh Miller, the actor, and his wife, the poetess Olga Katzin. During those three weeks I met a number of people with whom I felt myself on the brink of friendship, in particular Elinor Sherwin, a very pretty socialite in her middle twenties, whom I met at the Millers, and through whom I was later to meet the Langdon Posts. Janet Post, the daughter of Rollin Kirby, the cartoonist, who added to her income as a fashion model, was to become one of my very dearest friends.

  I had taken my first steps to becoming a New Yorker, but I was in fact starting very much from scratch when I arrived in New York for the second time, for that four months’ visit. I had my own way to make in a strange and foreign city. It was a very big adventure. The average Englishman of my generation who was brought up in the Galsworthian pattern had by the time he was twenty-five met most of the people that he wanted to; at his ‘prep’, his public school, his university; when, in the early twenties, he embarked on his profession he knew the men with whom he would be working, his colleagues and his rivals. It has been said that in England every one knows every one. And that was true of the Galsworthian world fifty years ago. We had heard of those of our contemporaries whom we had not met, so that when we did meet them we could establish quickly our identities. This added to the intimacy of English life, and because England is a small country geographically, we did not need to make any particular effort to keep up with our old friends. We knew that we should be running into them sooner or later, at this wedding, this cricket match, this race meeting, this or the other anniversary dinner. When on such occasions we met somebody once close to us, we would have a long and cosy chat. We would agree that it was disgraceful that we saw so little of one another. ‘We must do something about it,’ we would say. But we never would. We would rely on the next meeting, which would surely take place if not this year then the next, and if not then, well then within four years.

  This readiness to rely on chance encounters is one of the many themes that thread their way through Anthony Powell’s The Music of Time. It also adds to the fascination of London’s social life. It makes every occasion an adventure; you never know which old friends you may not meet at lunch or cocktails.

  This explains why the English do not show much enthusiasm when friends from abroad turn up in England. Many Americans and many Britons who are stationed abroad feel resentful after having entertained Britons lavishly in their own countries, at rating only a dish of tea when they turn up in England. Henry James has written about this in International Episode and so has Noël Coward in Hands Across the Sea. Yet how often have I, delighted though I am to welcome a friend in Tangier or New York, felt my heart sink when a quite dear couple announce their intention of turning up in London. I have looked at my diary in dismay. ‘How on earth am I going to fit them in?’ It is not that I am doing anything of any real concern; it is just that I do not seem to have an evening free until the week after next. It is all a part of our English pattern of keeping in touch with our old friends; of keeping in touch with ourselves I might almost say, for our friends are ourselves: they are a part of our lives.

  This is a fact that one realises more and more acutely as one reaches one’s later sixties; one sees a friend’s name in the obituary column, and one thinks ‘Now I’ll never be able to talk about any of that again.’

  There is a great deal to be said for the insularly exclusive manner in which Edwardian and early Georgian Londoners organised their social life, but there is every bit as much to be said for the informal manner in which New Yorkers organised their lives forty years ago. There was, too, this primary difference that New York is a port; that men come there to make a living. It has been said that no one is born in New York and that no one dies there. Hospital and cemetery statistics disprove this. But there is admittedly an atmosphere of transience, a coming and going. London is a port, too, but few Londoners are aware of that. In New York, in the twenties and the thirties, you were always conscious of the liners that you saw from your office and apartment windows. There was a feeling, in consequence, that you had very little time, that you had to make the most of every contact quickly. I was told as a young bachelor in London that if you met at a party a young woman whom you found attractive, it was good manners to ask the hostess if she could arrange a second meeting. In New York if you did not ring up such a person the first thing next morning, it was likely to be the last you saw of her.

  In 1931 informality was increased by prohibition. In quite a number of homes, alcohol was not served. In hotels you had to rely upon a hip flask. A great many people preferred speakeasies. I hardly ever went into a club. I now spend a great deal of my time in New York in the Century on 7 W 43rd and in the Coffee House which is two blocks over on 45th. During prohibition, I was twice taken to the Coffee House by Charles Hanson Towne. I was not offered a cocktail or a highball. In his own apartment Towne was a punctilious host. I have no idea whether or not it was possible to obtain an alcoholic drink at the Coffee House during prohibition. I have asked a number of the older members but none of them can remember what the arrangements were. Once Stanley Rinehart took me to the Harvard Club with Bob Winans, Katherine Brush’s husband, where we heightened our
enjoyment of an admirable steak with a flask of authentic Bourbon. I remember drinking a highball in the locker room. Did we take the flask into the dining-room, or was the steak served in the locker room?

  Carl Brandt gave me a card to the Players’ Club. There are few pleasanter club houses. I dined there once, to see what it was like. I remember thinking ‘this place would be heaven without prohibition’, as indeed it is today. But I had no wish to go again. I could not imagine myself enjoying masculine society without the stimulus of alcohol. I am sure that members of clubs had their private stores of alcohol on the premises. But where they did their drinking I have no idea. I wish, for the purposes of history, that I had given myself that particular research assignment, but in a city so companionably supplied with attractive and not unpermissive females, I felt I could leave club life until my return to London.

  Within a very short time my days were crowded. Every party that I went to was an adventure; I was bound to meet someone new who would throw a new light upon the life of this exciting city. The depression was growing more intense every week. Hoover had talked of ‘prosperity being round the corner’. But no one believed him any longer. The thing had to run its course. To say that one had a good time during the depression, will not, I hope, sound an equivalent of a Frenchman’s having had a good time in Paris during the Occupation, but if one is thirty-two years old, in good health with one’s circumstances promising, one is likely to be having a good time anyhow. There was a lot of talk about the depression but it was a dramatic gloominess. Elinor said, ‘When all the men were telling you how much money they had made that day, you could act bored and say “let’s talk of something else”. You have to try and be sympathetic when they tell you how much they’ve lost.’