A Year to Remember Read online

  When Berta Ruck was staying in the Welcome in 1929, she insisted on my accompanying her on a strenuous walk, after an hour’s pause to digest our lunch. It was very good for me. Once we climbed to the Hotel Pyramides. I look at the hotel now and wonder if I could ever have reached it, without Berta Ruck to goad me into exercise. I worked quietly till my day’s stint was finished, then I went to my final bathe. The waterfront was in shadow, but the water had taken on the mauvish glaze that had made Homer call it wine-coloured, and the sun’s last colours were reflected on to the tall straight houses. I would lie on the shingled beach letting the heat soak into my bones.

  Today there is a terrace outside the Welcome dining-room, and during dinner there is a procession of musicians; there is a flame swallower; there is a trick cyclist who performs all along the coast and who has appeared in a number of Riviera films. But then it was all very quiet along the harbour, except when a ship was in. It was restful sitting in front of the Welcome bar with a fine maison and a coffee until it was time to go up to the Garden Bar, to play dice or cards, or dance to the gramophone. I would content myself with a single glass of wine there – I was resolved to wake fresh on the next day. The streets would be silent when I walked back to the Hotel; I would lean on my balcony window; the humped shadow of Cap Ferrat would be veiled and poetic in the dusk: the red light on the edge of the port would flicker on and off. All was quiet. What peace, I would think. What beauty; and it was reassuring to look at the cahier on my writing table, waiting for my assault on it next morning.

  That was how it was, day after day, week after week, with the variety offered by my discovering every fifth or sixth morning that I was not in the mood for work. I needed a change and would spend the day in Nice: it was a pleasant break after five days on the island that Villefranche had become for me. There was the effort of the climb up to the Octroi where the trolley stopped. It was a slow rattling journey past Mont Boron, and that fantastic pink castellated ‘folly’ that had been built by an eccentric Englishman in the days when the English believed that the Riviera was as much their’s as Brighton. And it was good to see the port of the old town where the ‘Ile de Beauté’ took off for Corsica. I have always vowed that I would take it but something has always intervened to stop me. Even in 1969 when the P.E.N. Club held their Congress in Menton. There are some admirable restaurants along the port – particularly Garrac’s which has two stars in Michelin and the best bouillabaisse sans langouste that I know. It was pleasant looking at the smart shops in the Avenue de Verdun, and sauntering along the Promenade des Anglais. I did not make it an expensive day; I would lunch at one of the Alsatian restaurants; there was one, there still is, just where the trolley stopped. I might have a choucroute, or I might be content with a long ham roll, which I would wash down with a stein of light yellow beer. There was a Turkish Bath there with a domed roof, run by a very fat lame masseur; there was in the rue d’Alger an accommodating establishment that displayed blue films. The room in which they were shown was lined with mirrors; I found that the films were more inflammatory when I watched their reflections in the mirror. The frames of the mirrors cut across the film, but a greater sense of reality was obtained. I had the feeling of being a ‘voyeur’. After the Turkish Bath or the film, whichever I patronised, I would go to Voyade’s, a tea shop in the Place Masséna, which still exists though the shop is now half its size.

  A half day in Nice was the recreation I needed from my manuscript, yet even so the best moment of it all was the slow walk down the steep streets from the Octroi, while the slow healing tides of peace stole over me.

  Nowadays it is in November that hotels and restaurants along the Riviera close. November is the rainy month. Most tourists would prefer to be somewhere else, or else to be preparing at home for Christmas. But in 1931, the Victorian tradition of the season that ended after Easter still persisted and, in early May, the Welcome decided to close down. It was a disappointment for me, but I was fortunate in having my friend Eldred Curwen installed in a villa in Antibes. He invited me to spend a fortnight with him.

  VI

  It was with Eldred Curwen that I started in December 1928 for the trip through the West Indies that was to prove so determining a factor in my writing, and during that trip Eldred became closer to me than any man has ever been. He died in September 1955 and the world has not been the same place since.

  We met in April 1924. I had spent ten days with Luke and Renée Hansard in their villa above Cannes in Mougins and I was on my way to Florence to spend ten days with C. K. Scott Moncrieff who had a flat there. I arrived early in the morning, shortly after eight. My taximan had no change for a thousand lire note. I had some difficulty, as I did not speak Italian, in obtaining admittance. When I did, it was to find a young, small, but well-built, red-haired young man in his bath. He was astonished by what he took to be my request to lend him 1,000 lire. Eventually we came to understand each other, and the taximan went on his way contented. The young man was Eldred Curwen. Scott-Moncrieff had gone to Montecatini because a great friend of his, a Colonel Evans, had needed to take the waters. He had written to me at Mougins explaining this, but the posts to Mougins were erratic, and the letter had not reached me. Eldred had only happened to be in the flat because he had been afraid that he had caught a dose of clap and had come to Florence to see a doctor. I had never heard of him, he had barely heard of me. I do not know what would have happened if he had not been in the flat. I should never have thought of Moncrieff being in Montecatini. ‘We had better cable him that you are here,’ Eldred suggested. ‘I have a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon. We can catch the evening train.’

  That is how our friendship started. Knowing nothing of each other we had to spend a whole day together in each other’s company. It was a strange day for both of us. Eldred, fearing that he might have clap, did not want to have wine at lunch until he had received his doctor’s clearance. I do not mind drinking by myself, but two men get on cordial terms much quicker if they can split a bottle. He was shy of telling me why he was not drinking wine. He assumed that as I had written several books I would want an educational morning, so we went round the Uffizi gallery. After lunch we went to the Pitti Palace. At four o’clock he had his appointment with the doctor: he had had his preliminary interview the day before and was now awaiting the outcome of his tests. The tests were negative. He came out of the consulting room with a wide grin. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘No need to worry. Let’s have a Negroni.’ It was my first visit to Italy. I did not know what a Negroni was. ‘It’s a gin and vermouth,’ he said. ‘You’ll like it.’ Four thirty on a sunny afternoon did not seem the best time for a drink like that. But I made no opposition. Two sips of the Negroni, and Eldred became the lively indefatigable companion that he was to remain for the next thirty years. He then told me what had been on his mind all the morning. It was not surprising that he had been indifferent company and picture galleries are not perhaps the best setting for the growth of intimacy.

  We were together for ten days in Montecatini: it was a refreshing time. The baths were not open for the first four days and Colonel Evans had the waters sent in a bottle to his room. Moncrieff spent the early hours of the morning and the late hours of the afternoon upon his translation of Proust. He was then on the second volume of Le Côté de Guermantes. He would sit at a table in a café, with two dictionaries beside him, writing by hand into an exercise book. He proceeded at an even pace, about two hundred words an hour. He worked for two hours in the morning: then we went for a long walk, before lunching off Pasta and Chianti. In London he had worked on The Times in some form of secretarial capacity to Northcliffe. ‘I used to get paid £1,500, heavily taxed, with some expenses; here I get paid £750 untaxed but with no expenses. No,’ he went on, ‘it isn’t hackwork, besides, what else can I do except hackwork. I haven’t a creative talent. It isn’t hackwork because I am enabled to enter into the mind of a writer in the way that no reader, no critic could. A writer is plannin
g for a scene that will take place in forty pages. A special tension is created and mounts as he approaches the scene. He pictures himself writing that scene, in, shall we say, the second week in August. As I translate the book, I enter his excitement in a way that a reader cannot who reads in two hours what it took a man two months to write. No, it’s not hackwork, besides I know that it’s worth doing: the world will be better off for having this book on its library shelves.’

  Moncrieff was a Catholic, a convert. ‘I am paid by the thousand words. I am engaged in trying to interpret eternal truth in terms of such a temporal measure as two guineas a thousand words. Non-Catholics ask ‘how can you get the remission of so many hours in purgatory in terms of so many penances?’ There’s an exact parallel I think. You need on earth a temporal yardstick to measure what cannot be measured.’

  From Scott-Moncrieff, and from Eldred himself, I learnt a lot about Eldred during those ten days. Eldred was then twenty-two. He was the heir to Workington, an estate in Cumberland on the edge of Windermere. He was a member of a family that went so far back that, as a gossip columnist once said ‘it made the Plantagenets seem parvenus.’ He had had a curious upbringing. His mother whom he adored had died when he was eleven; his elder brother was killed in the war. That brother had been the object of all his father’s ambitions. After his death his father lost interest in life. He had sent his elder son to Harrow, but was uninterested when Eldred was superannuated from Shrewsbury. When Eldred was expelled from a smaller school, he decided that the best thing to do was to give Eldred £50 a month and let him live abroad on it. When a local girl complained that as a result of Eldred’s attentions she was pregnant he sent her a cheque for £20 and told her that he did not want to hear any more about the matter.

  In the conventional sense Eldred had no education at all. He could not spell because he knew no grammar; for instance, he would spell ‘didn’t’ ‘dident’ because he did not realise it was a contraction of ‘did not’. He knew enough mathematics to work out his own accounts. He had never learnt any foreign languages but he spoke French, Italian, German and Spanish ungrammatically but colloquially and fluently, with a pleasant accent. He was an excellent mechanic, and could keep his own car in good repair. He had no interest in organised games; he had never played cricket or football. But he was a good lawn tennis player, and a keen skier. He never let himself get fat.

  He never did a day’s work. He considered it his job to spend an income not to earn it. He had to decide how to get the most out of whatever he received from the family estates. He never got into debt. In that he showed great character. He knew exactly what he could afford. He was glad, naturally, to be a guest, but he never cadged. A guest has to sing for his supper. All animals develop a protective covering. I wish I had known Eldred in his first years in Europe. He must have then recognised what was to be his role. He would never become a person of any consequence or position. Workington, when he inherited it, would not make him rich. He would always be on his own. He would have to fit in to other people’s lives. He had to be someone whom people would like to have around. It was in his nature to become just that. He was gregarious. He was noisy. He enjoyed a good time. He was affectionate. He was an assiduous amorist. After the Second War, when he was in his middle forties, he was, when skiing, caught in a snow drift. He was completely submerged. It was great luck that the top of his ski protruding above the snow showed his companions where he was. He had lost consciousness, but during the minutes that he was being stifled, he had two substantial orgasms. It is, I believe, a medical fact that a man who is being hanged, has an orgasm as his neck breaks. A double orgasm is a proof surely of unusual potency. In his first days, when I knew him, his allowance from his father had been increased to £900 a year. A little later he broke the entail on Workington in return for an annuity of £2,000 free of tax. He could therefore manage if he was cautious; but very few young men would have been so cautious. He was resolved to be independent. He was unique. No one occupied a position in the least like his. He had a great many devoted friends. Though he was not conventionally educated, he read a great deal; invariably books of merit: he enjoyed the company of writers and of painters. He held his own in any party he attended. Parties were always more fun if he was there. At times he could cast himself for the role of jester. He would say the most outrageous things, which because he said them did not seem outrageous. He would ‘camp’ about the place, dancing pas seuls in night clubs, but he never went too far. He had an infallible sense of where to stop. He was never gross.

  It was a great piece of luck for me that he came to the West Indies with me. When we started we did not know each other very well. He told me later that he had great qualms during the week before we sailed. ‘You hardly know this man,’ his friends had warned him. ‘He’s older than you are. He’s got a certain position in the world. He may make social demands on you.’

  I, however, had no such qualms. I was certain it would work out and I knew from earlier trips that I had made, how often I had felt the need for a companion. I had enjoyed my trip round the world, but I enjoyed this trip infinitely more. I also got more out of it as a writer, because through his technique of making friends quickly, I saw many more sides of the islands that we visited. I wrote Hot Countries during the trip and Hot Countries was the book that started me in America. Every evening he would read what I had written in the morning. His interest, his enthusiasm quickened my own interest. As I wrote in the morning I would think ‘that sentence should make Eldred chuckle.’

  Quite often he would make suggestions. ‘Don’t you think you ought to mention what the Judge of St Kitts said about that poisoning trial?’ Writing is a solitary occupation. I have always been careful not to talk about my work until it is finished. Eldred was the only person to whom I have ever talked about my ‘work in progress’. He would have made a good husband for a novelist. On the whole, the women novelists who have been most successful and happy in their marriages are those who have married men without professions. A woman novelist needs as much attention and cherishing in her profession as a lawyer or a politician does. She needs to have burdens taken off her shoulders, which is exactly what Eldred would have done. He would have run the home efficiently, would have kept household accounts, would have supervised her entertaining. He would have been a good lover. His annuity would have been a useful addition to the budget. His wife would not have needed to write, when she was not inclined, to pay the rent. And he would have been encouraging and helpful with her work. Instead, at a later day, he linked his life with a woman of independent means who was his equivalent in many ways – a playgirl to his playboy. They made a success of their life together, but it lacked the ballast that would have been given to it by one or other having a profession.

  When Eldred and I had finished our trip to the West Indies, we began to plan the next trip that we would take. We were convinced that we would take one one day, but always something intervened; he wanted to ski, I wanted to play cricket. He was constantly falling in love. And then the pattern of his life was changed by his aunt leaving him in the summer of 1930 her villa in Antibes.

  It was, and is, a charming, old-fashioned house in the Chemin de l’Ermitage. It had thick walls and its garden, a narrow strip of land, ran straight down to the sea on the Garoupe side. From its wall, which had a little platform above its gate, you could see across the water the twin towers and bastions of the old town, with beyond the Baie des Anges, the long curve of the Promenade des Anglais, the villas and hotels mounting up the hill to Cimiez, and behind the snow-capped summits of the Alpes Maritimes. In one of his short stories Maupassant describes this view. He says it is one of the most beautiful in the world. I never tired of looking at it.

  When his aunt told him that she was leaving it to him she said, ‘Of course, I know that you will sell it sooner or later, but I’d like to think of your having some happy times here.’ She believed that he was, at his age, committed to his wandering existence; but in point
of fact the villa gave him the roots that he was beginning to need. It was the equivalent of a profession for him. He continued to travel. Very often he let it in the summer. Occasionally he would exchange it with me for my London flat – I spent my honeymoon there in the autumn of 1932. It became increasingly the centre of his life; without it the liaison with a companion who could not get a divorce would never have lasted from 1937 until his death in 1955.

  I was to pay him many visits there, and I am still quite often the guest of the companion now married to the painter, John Strachey, to whom he left the villa. But of all those many visits, the one of which I have the warmest memories is that of the two weeks in the spring of 1931, when I worked on the manuscript of So Lovers Dream. It was unlike any of the other times that I spent there, because Eldred, who had recently undergone an operation for tonsilitis, was by doctor’s orders ‘on the wagon’. 1 drank wine with my meals, but to keep him company I abjured aperitifs and liqueurs. We avoided parties – not that very many were being given at that time of year – and we kept early hours. Eldred was a late riser. Breakfast was brought up to him at nine o’clock. I had had mine at eight; and usually I had written six or seven hundred words by then. Eldred’s getting up was leisurely – it was almost a levée. He would read his paper. Before he had shaved he would go downstairs and interview his butler, a distinguished Italian who added greatly to the house’s charm. He would potter about the garden, examining the rabbits and the poultry, perhaps washing down his car. By then it would be warm enough for me to write in the garden. It did not interrupt my concentration to exchange gossip as I wrote. Once when I was at work on a description of a Riviera garden, I asked him the name of a certain shrub. ‘Spergum,’ he answered. I did not know that he was pulling my leg. I wonder if any readers of So Lovers Dream were surprised to read of a garden ‘scented with spergum’.