A Year to Remember Page 7

  There is only one way in which a novelist can be used as a central character and that is as the ‘I’ of the narrative, as a raisonneur. This method has been perfected by Maugham in The Razor’s Edge. He also used it in Cakes and Ale, though there he does make himself in his scenes with Rosie a protagonist: he does so, however, with great caution, standing outside himself, seeing himself from a distance of many years. In The Razor’s Edge he is consistently the observer and there he takes full advantage of the novelist’s power to travel; to be part of a great many different lives. In the course of his account of other people’s histories, he tells us a great deal about himself. I have used this device in my novel The Fatal Gift.

  In So Lovers Dream I was on the wrong tack from the start. I should have realised this. But I wanted to write the book.

  In my partial autobiography. The Early Years of Alec Waugh, I told the story of my romance with Ruth. I could do that then because Ruth and her husband were both dead, and though I did not mention her by name, because his daughters are still alive, it would not have mattered at this late day if Ruth could be identified in Pebble Beach. But in 1931 it was very important that no one in California should say ‘So that’s what those two were about, is it?’ I had to find, therefore, equivalent situations for the real ones. I placed their American meetings in New York instead of in California, and I chose Villefranche as an alternative for Tahiti.

  The parallel was reasonably close. In Tahiti, Ruth and her husband had rented a bungalow in Paea, forty or so kilometres from Papeete. I was staying in a guest house half way between Paea and Papeete: There were cabins along the beach. A friend of Ruth’s was staying at the guest house, her husband was on a pearl hunt in the Paumutos. It was logical that Ruth should visit her every fourth or fifth night, and during the day she could often look in for a short talk, a drink or a cup of coffee. I did not have a car, for the simple reason that I did not know how to drive one. In London, in the early ’20s, a Londoner in my position did not own a car. My brother Evelyn did not learn to drive until his second marriage. But he was never at ease at the wheel and soon abandoned the experiment. I had therefore to wait at my beach hotel, hour after hour, day after day, waiting for the chance of Ruth’s being free. I was a prisoner ‘like one of those shop girls in a Victorian novel,’ I told her, ‘who were kept by their protector in a villa in Acacia Road., and in the days before there were telephones had to wait till their lord and master could escape from a Parliamentary Debate.’ The parallel was not inexact. There were telephones in Tahiti, but every one was on a party line: I could not risk them. It was an intolerable situation. I had no alternative to a return to London. Though I was heartbroken at the thought of leaving Ruth, I counted the days till my ship’s sailing.

  For the purposes of my novel, I could find an equivalent in the South of France, with me staying in the Welcome, while Ruth had a villa on Cap Ferrat. There, as in Tahiti, it would be my role to wait until Ruth was free: till her grey-green Chevrolet swung into the square, and a small urchin would hurry down to the beach in search of me, ‘I’Américaine est ici’ he would say. I had intended to call the book l’Américaine.

  That situation was psychologically an equivalent for the one in the South Seas, and though I was careful not to make the husband in any way a portrait of Ruth’s, I could make him a psychological equivalent. I made him a New Yorker in his middle forties, a prosperous business man: hearty, an extrovert, making himself the centre figure of any group. He was not exactly aggressive, but you were conscious of him all the time. He might have been called by a European ‘a typical American’. He was not quite a stock character, because I had the husband so much in mind that he was real to me. He disarmed the hero of the book just as I had been disarmed by his taking control of every situation, by always picking up the check, by refusing to let me be the host. When my hero had invited the pair to Villefranche for lunch a servant was sent over at the last moment to say that two friends had unexpectedly turned up, and would Gordon mind a change of plan; would he instead come over to Cap Ferrat? A chauffeur was beside the car; there was no alternative to acceptance. In just that way in Tahiti had I been forced to accept a minor role, yet no one reading the book in California would have taken it as a portrait of Ruth’s husband who was a writer, who had been to Yale, who was a scholar as well as an athlete. He had the background of a well known ancestor, whose despatches when he was ambassador to Louis XVI were familiar to any student of history. I handled that piece of portraiture satisfactorily.

  But in the portrait of Ruth – I called her Faith – my resolve to make her unrecognisable made her shadowy. In my autobiography I have drawn what is I hope a vivid picture of her. She was described as:

  … small and trim, her hair was brown with a glint of red in it. I do not think that she was pretty, but she had the most beautiful voice I have ever heard. She could light up a party, not by ‘stealing the show’, but by making the others more alive, so that they talked better, laughed more readily, contributed more to the general fund of gaiety. She was a dramatic person and she had led a dramatic life. She was one of the first Americans to fly an aeroplane, and one of the seven or eight American women to be given an Army commission in the first war, in her case to train pilots. She had driven racing cars professionally. She had written scripts for motion pictures. In Spain she had remarked unguardedly that bullfighting did not look so difficult. Someone retorted ‘You try to do it’: she took up the challenge, trained, learned the technique and having killed her bull, went to fashionable parties in Madrid in her matador costume. She was wild, very wild, with an at times ungovernable temper. But she was capable of an extreme sweetness. She could make you feel as though you were living in an enchanted country where the air was softer, the scent of the flowers richer, the plumage of the birds more bright.

  That is how I described her in my autobiography. But the Faith of So Lovers Dream was not in the least like that: she was quiet, withdrawn, a shrine, a shrouded goddess. There is no reason why such a character should not be an effective heroine of a novel, but in this case, since I had Ruth in mind all the time, and I was making this shadowy creature do the things and say the things that Ruth had done and said, she did not ring true. A novel is an artificial creation, and real life incidents are out of place in it. Theodore Benson’s mother placed in one of her novels a proposal of marriage in which the suitor quoted from Browning. A critic complained that no suitor would quote from Browning, in that way. Theodora’s mother retorted that two of the men who had proposed to her had quoted Browning. But that does not prove the critic wrong. To him a proposal of marriage with a quotation from Browning did not ring true. In my opinion the best way of putting a real character into a book is to devise an entirely imaginary setting and series of incidents and let the character behave and speak as you know he or she would. I did this with the heroine of my novel The Mule on the Minaret! There I had a direct portrait of a woman I knew extremely well, so well that I knew precisely how she would behave and what she would say in the circumstances I had devised.

  In So Lovers Dream I followed this practice in the case of a minor character. I mentioned earlier that I had had a romance while I was in New York. I also mentioned that on my return to my flat in London, two days in my pocket diary were ringed. For this purpose I transferred my American friend from New York to London. She was a New Englander, in her middle 20s, who had a rebel and a truant nature. Breaking loose from the rigid circumstances of her home, and hitch-hiking across America, she wrote a description of her trip in the course of which she had two love affairs – one of them with a truck driver – and published it under the name Barbara Starke, with the title Touch and Go. In the preface which I wrote for the English edition, I described it as the most outspoken book ever written by a young girl. She was the greatest fun – independent, light-hearted, undemanding.

  If any readers of these pages will look up So Lovers Dream in their local library and turn to pages 74–87, they will see how
I transported her from New York to London. In my opinion they are fourteen of the best pages I have ever written. Several of my English friends asked me who she was. They refused to believe that it was an imaginary portrait. ‘There’s something in it that rings true,’ they said, and they were sceptical when I told them that I did have an American girl in mind. ‘You’re being very noble,’ they said. ‘You are protecting a woman’s honour.’ But Barbara had no doubt that it was a portrait of herself. She was, in fact, delighted with it. As an example of the different use to which two writers can put a similar experience, may I refer to Eric Linklater’s Magnus Merriman, in which the American girl is photographically like Barbara, whom he met in Scotland in the summer of 1952?

  The story that I wrote in Villefranche had, therefore, two strikes against it: a hero in whose problems, because he appeared a playboy, the reader could not be expected to take a warm personal interest, and a shadowy heroine. At the same time it was written with considerable emotion: it has some good descriptive passages, and some lively minor characters. It is not a bad book by any means.

  I should have enjoyed the writing of it wherever I had been, even in The White Horse at Shenley, and in winter time. But the Welcome Hotel in early summer was perfect for such a project. It is one of the Inns of Legend. In the first edition of Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night there are pen and ink sketches at the head of every chapter. There is one of the Villefranche waterfront. The Welcome is the hotel at which the lovers broke their drive from Juan to Monte Carlo and there is an account of a lady of the town waving goodbye to her French sailor as he leaves to join his battleship. There are descriptions of the Welcome in Glenway Westcott’s Goodbye Wisconsin and his recent Images of Truth. In front of the Welcome, the old Tribunal de Peche which was never used as a tribunal in my day has been converted by Jean Cocteau into a chapel dedicated to the patron saint of fishermen. In the lounge of the hotel hangs one of the sketches that Cocteau made for his frescoes. It is inscribed à mon cher Welcome où j’ai passé les meilleurs de ma vie. In the 1920s Paul Morand and Monroe Wheeler had villas on the slopes above the harbour. They both used the Welcome as a club. Across the bay Somerset Maugham was sumptuously installed at the Villa Mauresque. When friends of his arrived at Villefranche, they would announce their presence at the Welcome by note or telephone. It was not unlike the routine in a small West Indian Island when you sign the book at Government House and await an appropriate invitation. Indeed there was something of an island’s atmosphere about Villefranche in the 1930s. You were cut off from the main current of Riviera life. Fast trains, the rapides, rarely stopped there. If you wanted to go into Nice and did not have a car – and at that time Welcome Hotel patrons did not ordinarily have cars – you had to climb the hill to the lower Corniche Road, to what is still called the Octroi (though it is many years since any customs dues have been collected there) and take a trolley. That trolley was like a ferry connecting an island with the mainland. This feeling of being apart from the main traffic of the coast gave Villefranche a particular appeal for the writer and the painter. You could concentrate upon your work with the weeks passing in a day-to-day eventlessness.

  From the railway line, the waterfront looks very much the same as it did today, when I saw it first fifty years ago: but the entire inside of the Welcome has been rebuilt and an extra floor been added: a row of restaurants stretches along the Quay: a road has been carried to the beach below the railway line; there is a constant flow of cars. The young girls no longer stroll along the harbourside in couples, with their long black hair hanging low upon their necks, while the young men seated on the steps eye them enviously. The harbourside is now given over to the tourist: the young people have moved to the upper town.

  My life followed a smooth routine. I would wake around six, with the ripples of the sea reflected by the sunlight on my ceiling. I would stroll to the pebbled beach below the railway line. The waterfront stopped, by what is still called the Réserve and there was a pool where the fishermen kept their lobsters. I climbed up a flight of steps that still exists to the road leading to the station, and from which a flight of steps then as now leads to the beach. Probably there would be a fisherman seated on the rocks. While I swam, a train would come through from Italy. It was one of the few main trains that stopped at Villefranche. The wagon-lits windows would be tightly shuttered, but grubby unshaven Italians would lean out of the third class windows. By the time I had finished my swim the market would have opened and I would buy, from Doleen’s store, some figs to accompany my breakfast on the terrace at one of its three or four round blue-topped tables. The Continental Daily Mail arrived a day late from Paris, and I would read it as I sipped my coffee. In England it was an exceedingly wet summer; The Times at the end of the year described it as ‘dour beyond belief’—the second of the three bad summers that produced such negligible wine on the banks of the Medoc and on the golden slopes that rise south of Dijon. Day after day, I would read that not a ball had been bowled on any first-class cricket ground in England. The news gave a zest to my appreciation of the good things that lay about me. How lucky I was to be here not there; how wise I had been to take full advantage of a writer’s luck.

  By eight o’clock I had started my morning’s writing. The hotel was barely a quarter full. Most of the other guests preferred to take breakfast in their rooms, but a young American couple, Kathy and Walker Ellis, who were staying at the Réserve – the couple about whom Glenway Westcott wrote in Images of Truth – often came across for a second cup of coffee. Their presence did not disturb me. My concentration was so complete that I could join in their intermittent gossip. They contributed to the morning’s peace, just as did the children who came to look over my shoulder at my manuscript and surreptitiously purloin a lump of sugar: they were part of the morning scene. The nets stretched out to dry upon the cobbles, the women at work on them, the boats awash against their moorings; the men cleaning their boats; and then at about nine fifteen the facteur coming round with the morning’s mail, were all so many figures on a frieze: they no more disturbed my concentration than the headlines in the Daily Mail. The continuing slump on the Stock Market, the rising number of unemployed in England belonged to another world.

  I have always worked to a fixed formula of so many words a day. In those days I did three thousand. Sometimes I would wake sleepless at 2 a.m. Rather than read myself back to sleep, I would return to my manuscript and write till my eyes felt heavy. I used to think it was a good sign when a manuscript woke me up. It showed that my subconscious was working while I slept. I was never woken by a piece of hackwork, a magazine serial would stay on the surface of my mind. The number of words that I had written during the night was added to my scheduled stretch for the next day. I would think as I walked to the beach for my first swim, ‘only 2,250 more words to do.’

  It may seem unromantic to break off a piece of narrative in the middle of a scene. The public likes to believe in the white hot frenzy of inspiration. Anthony Trollope lost his public for thirty years, by explaining how he worked with his watch in front of him every morning, and a fixed task set so that he would finish one novel at 7.21 and begin its successor at 7.23. Browning did not send up his stock by admitting that he never sat down to his desk without reluctance or rose from it without relief. But most professional writers have to resort to some artificial means to keep the machinery of production oiled. Arnold Bennett advised the novelist to leave himself an easy piece of writing to do next morning, so that he could get back quickly into the last day’s mood; and to resist the temptation to finish off an exciting scene the night before. He would end up exhausted, and have next day to make a new beginning. The first paragraph, the ‘lead’ of any piece of writing is the most difficult. Michael Arlen when he was writing The Green Hat used each morning to copy out the last half page that he had written the night before. This put him back into the mood. Each writer evolves the method that suits him best. I have enjoyed the sight of my handwriting moving do
wn to the foot of the page. The manuscript of So Lovers Dream is the only one that I retained when my home in England was broken up and my library sold. It is bound in half dark-blue calf. I kept it because it reminded me of happy days and I often turn its pages to be reminded of them. It was also my one uniform manuscript, written throughout on French cahiers with ruled lines; when I started on the last half I wrote on every other line instead of every fourth line, 47 lines a page at 23 words a line made 1,100 words a page. At this point I switched to a 3,300 word a day schedule. It is clearly legible but I do not think any typist today would undertake such a manuscript; once again, twelve years later, I was to write in an equally compressed form. When I was in the Middle East as a serving officer and limited to six airmail letter cards a week, I managed to cram a 2,000 word short story on to a single card. If anyone would be interested to see one of my MSS they can find them in the Boston University Libraries and in the University of Texas.

  I wrote about 500 words an hour. By eleven o’clock it was time for my morning swim. Sometimes when I could persuade the Walker Ellis’s to join me, I would hire a row boat and cross to the beach, passable, on Cap Ferrat. There was real sand there and the water was clean. With so many ships anchoring in the harbour, I cannot but believe that the water under the railway bridge was highly septic. I remember once that after a heavy cloudburst a cow drowned in Nice was washed into the harbour, where it remained untended for half a week.

  In those days during the season – and the winter season continued into the middle of May – there were no demi-pension rates at the Welcome, so that for Scottish reasons I took most of my meals at the hotel. The Welcome liked one to be punctual. Lunch was announced for half past twelve. By two o’clock I was back at my desk to tackle the remainder of my daily task. I still, over forty years later, follow the same routine. But I write fewer words, 2,000 if it is a novel, 1,500 if it is a biography I have only an hour to put in after lunch: then I take a siesta. That in 1951 I did not do; not even when I was in the tropics. Young people always wake from a siesta with a rough mouth and a heavy head. The young cannot take the short, ten minute nap that the elderly find so refreshing. They sleep for ninety minutes. The relief of the siesta is one of the recompenses that old age brings. I began to savour it during the Second War when I was in the Middle East.