The Loom of Youth (1917) is a work of mind-numbing simplicity. It chronicles Gordon Caruthers’s triumphs on the footer field, cricket pitch and in the classroom during his four years at ‘Fernhurst’ and reads like a guide to public school life for those poor swine (most of England, that is) unlucky enough not to attend one. For example: ‘Breakfast is always rather a scramble, and nowhere more so than at a Public School. The usual Fernhurst breakfast lasted about ten minutes. Hardly anyone spoke, only the ring of forks on plates was heard and an occasional shout of “Tea” from the Sixth Form table.’ When Gordon is himself a sixth-former, the narrative touches delicately on what is going on between him and a lower-form boy when, instead of applying themselves to evening prep, they bathe in ‘the feverish waters of pleasure’.
The novel was circulated to a string of publishers, including his pater’s Chapman and Hall, who thought it too hot to handle – on libel grounds principally, although the recent burning of Lawrence’s The Rainbow was also a deterrent. It was eventually taken by Grant Richards, a newly founded house with no reputation to lose. In the intervening months before being old enough for the Front, the newly commissioned Alec continued with his overtures to Barbara, two years younger than he (‘a dumpy muskrat of a girl’, Alec’s biographer calls her). It was her photograph, and his father’s, that he took with him when he was finally posted to France. He survived Passchendaele by a fluke (100,000 of his comrades didn’t) and soon saw war as the horrible thing it was. Disillusionment inspired the fine poem ‘Carrion’, a meditation on a corpse being eaten by rats in no man’s land. ‘I’ve done with warfare,’ Alec wrote after the Somme – but it had not done with him. He surrendered to the Germans in the next big battle. ‘My brother was no hero,’ Evelyn was at pains to point out in later life and there were persistent allegations of a lack of pluck. When the situation was hopeless officers were expected to die, Webley revolver in hand, shouting ‘for King and Country’.
While he saw out the war as a prisoner of war, Alec’s novel was enjoying a wholly unanticipated success, running through five editions in as many months. The author was extravagantly praised. ‘Your son is an astounding young man,’ wrote H. G. Wells to Arthur, who needed no reassurance whatsoever on that score. The Loom of Youth was not, however, the source of unalloyed paternal pleasure. Sherborne saw it as ‘a poisoned dagger’ aimed at the school’s heart. Alec’s name was ritually removed, like Dreyfus’s epaulettes, from the roll of Old Shirburnians, and Arthur was obliged himself to resign the same honour. It was the bitterest moment of his life. But it did not extinguish his love for his first-born – nothing could.
On his return in 1919, Alec married his Barbara. It would be a disaster; he was unable to consummate the union and the marriage was annulled two years later. According to Alec, ‘inexperience was entirely to blame’. Girls, he discovered, were rather different from boys when it came to bathing in the feverish waters. He was, however, a quick learner and after this initial setback became a lifelong philanderer. He married twice more. His second wife, an Australian heiress, enabled him to buy his country house, Silchester, shortly before Evelyn acquired Piers Court. Joan Waugh indulged her husband’s love of what he called ‘hot countries’ and hotter women, but the marriage fell apart, having yielded three children. In later life, Alec took American citizenship and a third wife. Engagingly modest, living entirely for sybaritic pleasure, he regarded himself as a ‘very minor writer’ with a genius for a brother.
His father had persuaded him not to publish two novels on homosexual themes while The Loom of Youth was still sensational. A small success with a less dangerous novel in the late 1920s, and his wife’s wealth, allowed him to give up the sinecure with Chapman and Hall which Arthur had secured for him. Thereafter, apart from some stints as a creative writing instructor, he never worked again (other than writing). His life subsequently was that of a seedy international playboy. He wrote a lot – publishers were always interested in anything with the name ‘Waugh’ on the title page – and everyone liked him. In 1956 his melodrama about inter-racial love, Island in the Sun, enjoyed an unexpectedly huge success. A month or two earlier he had been considering ending it all with prussic acid. The novel and the movie (starring Harry Belafonte, who sang the title song) coincided with the boom in West Indian reggae music and growing civil rights unrest in the US. After the success of Island in the Sun Alec, Evelyn sarcastically observed, ‘never drew a sober breath’.
Alec and Evelyn rarely crossed each other’s paths over the years. Oddly it was the younger brother who seems to have been the more envious. In 1957 Evelyn brought a lawsuit against the Daily Express, a paper which had never forgiven him for the depiction of Beaverbrook as Lord Copper in Scoop. The Express columnist, Nancy Spain had claimed, gleefully, that Island in the Sun had sold more copies than all Evelyn’s novels combined – so much for satire. The verdict was swung Evelyn’s way by Alec good-naturedly testifying, in person, that Spain’s allegation was untrue. The author of Brideshead ended up some £7,000 richer, untaxed. An amusingly spiteful portrait of the writer in old age is given by his nephew, Auberon:
He lived for much of the year in Tangier, Morocco, where an old age pension from the state of New York enabled him to equip a house with cook, butler, and houseboy; at other times, he lived austerely as writer-in-residence at a midwestern university, eating his meals from divided, plastic plates in a room above the students’ canteen, and emerging from time to time to entertain his friends in London at elegant dinner parties, where he wore immaculately tailored but increasingly eccentric suits.
He died in Florida.
FN
Alexander Raban Waugh (‘Alec’)
MRT
The Loom of Youth
Biog
A. Waugh, Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004)
176. Nathanael West 1903–1940
West was about the most thoroughly pessimistic person I have ever known.
Robert M. Coates
West was born Nathan Weinstein, the son of first-generation Russian-Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. In the country they left, and that in which they settled, the Weinsteins were prosperous, secular and assimilationist by lifestyle. Nathan’s father Max, a builder, had arrived in New York in the late 1890s at a period when Manhattan was exploding skywards. Brought up in an English-speaking household on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the future novelist did not regard himself as a Jew at all, but as an ‘American’. Critics like Edmund Wilson (himself snootily WASP) none the less detect in West’s work ‘a kind of Eastern European suffering in common with Gogol … and a sad, quick Jewish humour’.
At high school, Nathan (nicknamed ‘Pep’) was a contemporary of fellow Jew Lionel Trilling, later the most influential literary critic of his age: more influential, indeed, than Edmund Wilson. Unlike the over-achieving Lionel, Pep was defiantly idle – but quite as omnivorous in his private reading as the future King of Columbia University. He also knew his own mind, and from the first developed a distaste for the ‘muddle-class’ realism of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser and a taste for French aesthetes and intellectual dandyism of the Wildean kind.
Nathan enterprisingly falsified his abysmal school transcript to get into Tufts where, after a couple of terms, he again falsified his academic record to transfer to Brown University. He was no model student – arriving, as he did, dripping with a dose of gonorrhoea, the effects of which embarrassed him for life in relations with women. At Brown he formed the most important relationship of his literary life with fellow undergraduate S. J. Perelman – later in life, the Marx Brothers’ scriptwriter. Nathan scraped a degree. He always intended to be a writer and to that end in 1926 he ‘went West’ (as it pleased him to joke) by legally changing his name. It was an act of self-fashioning. At the same period he persuaded his father – who wanted his son to follow him into the family property business – to stump up for a trip to Paris where, for three months, the young would-be writer could lose hims
elf among the Lost Generation.
For years he had been working on his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a phantasmagorical satire on human delusion. Its concept bit off far more than even an embryonic genius could chew, but the novel’s ‘play on styles’ was a useful apprenticeship. Returning from Paris in January 1927, West went to work as a night manager in a New York residential hotel. This observation post on the passing metropolitan tide suited him, as did the bohemian society of Greenwich Village. He had not the slightest long-term interest in the hotel business, however, and followed his idol, H. L. Mencken, in his maxim ‘my sole interest is my writing’. In March 1929, Perelman introduced him, momentously, to a woman who wrote an agony column for a Brooklyn paper, and who showed him a batch of heart-rending letters. Later West would criminally steam open letters at the hotel he managed to examine the suffering they contained. Thus was born Miss Lonelyhearts.
West published his first story in 1929. The world collapsed in October that year, taking the Weinsteins’ prosperity, which had been dwindling for some years, down with it. The Depression radicalised West politically. He would certainly have been hauled up as a ‘Red’ before McCarthy had he lived to be fifty-five. The unluckiest of writers, his debut novel, Balso Snell (six years in the writing), was delivered to the world in 1931. It was stillborn as the combined result of the financial collapse of its publisher, its printer, the whole US bookshop network and, with the Wall Street crash, the purchasing power of the American citizen. Had it made the shop windows and libraries of the country, Balso Snell’s bitter whimsy was anyway out of key with the mood of the moment.
West soldiered on with Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). His own description of the novel is succinct: ‘A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he’s tired of being a legman.’ Being an agony aunt, he discovers, is worse than doorstepping. It’s an open line to the misery of the world. The eponymous, unnamed hero becomes a Christ-figure, tormented by a nihilist editor, Shrike (a bird which West, a knowledgeable ornithologist and avid hunter, particularly loathed). In Delehanty’s bar, where hard-bitten newspapermen hole up, he is regarded contemptuously as a ‘leper-licker’. He is, ultimately, assassinated by a cripple he tried in vain to help spiritually. The novel, razor-sharp in its writing, is a parable of Marxist alienation. W. H. Auden, one of the novelist’s admirers, called it ‘West’s Disease’. Unfortunately the author’s albatross-luck struck again. Miss Lonelyhearts was glowingly reviewed but, thanks to a distributor’s glitch, no copies reached the bookstores. But even a novel as great as The Great Gatsby withered on the vine at this period, with only a couple of thousand sales. Towards the end of his life West calculated that all his novels combined had barely brought him a thousand dollars’ income.
For his third novel, A Cool Million (1934), he refined his ‘comic strip’ technique. A Voltairean parody of Horatio Alger, it is ironically subtitled ‘The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin’ and has the even more ironic epigraph: ‘John D. Rockefeller would give a cool million to have a stomach like yours. (Old saying).’ Assured that ‘the world is an oyster’, and buoyed by an Algerist belief in the American Dream, Lemuel sets out on his life’s adventure. America defeats him and he ends up a prostheticised clown, dismembered daily on stage for the amusement of burlesque-house audiences. Meanwhile, the American financial system crashes, the ‘Leather Shirts’ take over the country and adopt the martyred Lemuel Pitkin as their Horst Wessel.
In 1933 West was hired as a screenwriter by Columbia Studios, then under the management of the crassest of moguls, Harry Cohn. Cynic about the movie industry that he was, the work came easily to West and for the last years of his life he was a prisoner of what he called the ‘dream dump’. It furnished the material for his last effort in fiction, The Day of the Locust (1939). While his friend Scott Fitzgerald, in The Last Tycoon, targeted moguls such as Irving Thalberg, West did Hollywood from the bottom, with painter Tod Hackett (i.e. ‘Death-Hack’), an artist forced into studio hackery, dreaming all the while of the burning of Los Angeles. The novel ends with a ‘premier’ outside a thinly disguised Grauman’s Chinese Theater, on Hollywood Boulevard, under a huge marquee sign: ‘Mr Kahn a Pleasure Dome Decreed’. (He was, luckily for him, no longer working for Cohn who, anyway, would have needed one of his flunkeys to explain the Coleridge allusion.) The rubber-neck crowd explodes into city-destroying rioters, engendered by the sheer tedium vitae of LA life. ‘Sunshine isn’t enough’ was West’s verdict on the west.
Aged thirty-seven, a few days after Scott Fitzgerald had died of a heart attack, West crashed his car, driving back from a hunting trip. He was a ‘murderous’ driver and had recklessly shot a crossing. He was killed, as was his newly married wife, Eileen McKenney, who normally, for reasons of self-preservation, refused to drive with him. As Freud maintained, there are no accidents in life. Everything has its motive – particularly self-destruction.
FN
Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein)
MRT
Miss Lonelyhearts
Biog
J. Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (1970)
177. Margery Allingham 1904–1966
The whole of life is about escape.
Allingham’s parents (‘second-generation London Irish’) were journalists – her father Herbert specialising in hack adventure stories for the magazines. The line of work paid better than the quality fiction he was capable of writing, and he was not a writer to make sacrifices for art. Born in Ealing, Margery was brought up, until her thirteenth year, in an old rectory in rural Essex which she found idyllic, despite difficulties with her mother ‘who never wanted children’. As the family fortunes waned with the decline of her father’s energies, the Allinghams returned to London and Margery – a ‘nervy, big-boned girl’ and a precocious writer of stories – was bundled off to the Perse boarding school in Cambridge. She went on to study speech and drama at Regent Street Polytechnic in London, partly to ‘cure her stammering and snobbery’ but mainly ‘to learn to write under my father’. She actually outwrote him. He was, however, her closest male companion until her twenties – a period of life which, incredibly, she passed ignorant of the ‘facts of life’, as sex was coyly called. Her speech impediment (‘my ingrown hobble’) was cured, but her lifelong tendency to thyroid-driven bulimia was not. It put an end to any dreams she might have had of a stage career – what trade paper, she wryly asked, advertised for ‘fat actresses’? Her first effort in fiction, Blackkerchief Dick (1923), a tale of eighteenth-century smuggling, in her father’s derring-do mould, was published when she was nineteen. It signposts two lifelong preoccupations: her love of coastal Essex and her fascination with spiritualism.
For a few years Margery earned an honest penny reviewing films – the newfangled ‘talkies’ were all the rage. She took up longer fiction again at the time of her marriage in 1927 to Philip (‘Pip’) Youngman Carter, an artist who would later specialise as a skilled designer of book jackets, including those covering his wife’s novels. She wrote, throughout life, under her father’s surname. ‘Sex’, Youngman Carter ruefully confessed, ‘was of minor importance to us.’ Margery, in later life, described it as ‘petrol’ – a fuel which could be usefully diverted to writing ends. There were no children from the marriage, which seems to have had little internal combustion to it, but intermittent fondness.
Allingham’s first thriller – which she suppressed in later life – was The White Cottage Mystery (1928), followed by the work which made her name and which introduced the amateur detective, Albert Campion, The Crime at Black Dudley (1929). The narrative was dictated to Pip, who took it down longhand. The younger son of a duke, and described on his first appearance as a ‘silly ass’, Campion owed something to Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. He would later marry Lady Amanda Fitton, introduced in Sweet Danger (1933) and, over the cour
se of thirty years and eighteen novels, would evolve into something much less silly and ass-like. Allingham’s finest ‘Campion’ is The Tiger in the Smoke (1952): the ‘Smoke’ is London and the ‘Tiger’ is a sadistic killer, Jack Havoc, just out of prison and on the homicidal prowl. The narrative grips from its first sentence (‘It may just be blackmail’) to its last (‘The body was never found’). The novel’s composition was preceded by Allingham’s discovery of Pip’s flagrant adulteries, which led to a three-year separation, and extreme emotional distress – for her, particularly.
Her mature novels take the form of intricate puzzle pieces which cross-hatch sinister crime with light social comedy. ‘The thriller,’ she believed, ‘is a work of art as delicate and precise as a sonnet.’ None the less, she voiced from time to time the ambition to write a ‘real novel’, but never quite got round to it, any more than her father had. Allingham and her husband had moved to Tolleshunt D’Arcy in 1934 (with her money, of course), where they were to spend the remainder of their life. Rural Essex was where Allingham felt safe. As her biographer notes, ‘A secret unhappiness with her appearance may have contributed to her decision to move out of London.’ She had grown enormously fat.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 67