My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles

by Alec Waugh

  No romance could have collapsed more disastrously. And I think the nature of that collapse was determined by Aldington’s indifference to the organization of a personal life. Most men, l’ homme moyen sensual, manage to conduct their passades so that they do not impair irretrievably the fabric of their domesticity. They do not make love to their wife’s best friend. They maintain appearances. I do not say that this is an admirable characteristic, but it is a social lubricant. Aldington, like Shelley, within the narrow limits of his domestic circle, stumbled, unknowing, unwittingly into confusion. He fell in love with his consort’s daughter-in-law. Could anything be more humiliating for a woman than to have a lover younger than herself desert her for her son’s wife: and to become the father of that woman’s daughter. Yet let any one who feels censorious read Aldington’s ‘The Crystal World’. It is a fine and noble poem. It is not an apologia. It says quite simply, ‘When this happens, when this ultimate mystery is revealed, there is no alternative but to accept it.’ All this happened just before the outbreak of the Second War.

  Aldington died in 1961, shortly after his seventieth birthday which he had celebrated in Moscow and where he had been given a hero’s welcome. A few weeks later I received a letter in faulty English from a Frenchman, Fréderic-Jacques Temple, who asked me if I would contribute to a ‘Homage’ to Richard Aldington. I exchanged a couple of letters with him without getting a clear idea of what form the testimonial would take, but eventually, feeling that Aldington would have been hurt if there were to be a publication of some kind in which I was not represented, I wrote a five-hundred-word pen-picture, and suggested to Monsieur Temple that he should get in touch with Richard Church who had, I knew, seen something of Aldington in recent years. I also wrote to Church telling him that I had given Temple his address.

  My contribution to the ‘Homage’ was not acknowledged and as I heard nothing more from Monsieur Temple, I presumed that the plan, like so many other pious projects, had been abandoned. I was considerably surprised, therefore, to receive in November 1965, a bound volume, two hundred pages long, called Richard Aldington, edited by Fréderic-Jacques Temple and Alister Kershaw, an Australian journalist with whom Aldington had lived during his last years in France.

  The book had been published by the Syracuse University Press. It contained contributions from a number of Aldington’s early friends, Richard Church, Sir Herbert Read, Henry Williamson, T. S. Eliot, John Gawsworth, Roy Campbell. It had an extract from C. P. Snow’s brochure Richard Aldington, an Appreciation—I suspect that Lord Snow scarcely knew him—a long panegyric from a Japanese student, high praise from two of the Russians who had honoured him on his seventieth birthday: and two long pieces of reminiscence, by Temple and Alister Kershaw.

  Oliver Edwardes reviewing it in The Times said that he found Sir Herbert Read’s contribution the most interesting because it told him about Aldington’s early years when he was a subaltern in France; and as writing, Read’s contribution, along with a thumb-nail sketch by Henry Miller is, I think, the best; but to me Alister Kershaw’s article was the most interesting because it told me a great deal that I did not know about Aldington’s last years, and explained in considerable part, the resentful state of mind in which he found himself: in particular his anglophobia.

  I had heard something of this from Richard Church, and Church refers to it in his own essay. What had happened was, so I have gathered, this. In August 1939, Aldington was over forty-nine years old; he had had, a few years earlier, a serious motor smash. He was unfit for military service and it is hard to see what part he could have played in the general war effort. Not unnaturally, since he had spent little time in recent years in England, he went to the U.S.A. and stayed there throughout the war: some of the time in Hollywood. Presumably he made a comfortable amount of money, most of which he spent. At that time there was no double tax relief agreement between Britain and the U.S.A. so that Aldington as a British subject was liable to taxes in England on his American earnings. He could not in consequence afford to return to England and was forced to exile himself in France. He resented this strongly; at least that is the impression that I got from Richard Church. But I had not realized how resentful he was towards the lack of critical attention that he was receiving in England, till I read Kershaw’s article.

  He considered himself, so I gathered from it, ‘despised and rejected’; he fancied that a conspiracy of denigration was at work against him and he attributed this in large part to his attack on Lawrence of Arabia; he believed that the admirers of Lawrence and a whole group of interested and influential people were in league against him. I had heard, of course, that his book on Lawrence had been received with a good deal of indignation by T. E.’s friends. I had not read it when it came out. I am an admirer of Lawrence. I did not believe that Aldington knew anything about the Middle East. I imagined that the writing of the book was a symptom of his anglophobia. I suspected that the book would annoy me. And I did not want to be annoyed by Aldington. But after I had read Kershaw’s essay, I got hold both of Lawrence of Arabia and Aldington’s book on Norman Douglas that published a few years earlier had been considered to be in exceedingly bad taste. The standards of taste have changed considerably in the last dozen years, and I do not think that if the book on Douglas were to be published for the first time today, it would cause much offence. But Lawrence of Arabia is a different matter.

  In his dedicatory letter to Alister Kershaw, Aldington explains that it was Kershaw who suggested that ‘I should gratify your admiration for a hero by writing a life of Lawrence of Arabia.’ Aldington started with the hope of investigating a hero and his deeds. But when he discovered that there was no truth in Lawrence’s assertion that he had been offered the post of High Commissioner for Egypt in 1922 and 1925, he felt suspicious. He began to sift the evidence; and decided to write not a biography but a biographical enquiry. His investigations led him ‘to find proof after proof that much he reports of himself, including and especially his Arabian experiences, was heightened, exaggerated, faked, boastful and sometimes entirely without foundation.… The national hero turned out at least half a fraud. My book is a criticism of those writings which have fostered the Lawrence legend.… I have tried but perhaps not always successfully to give the evidence in the whole of this book fairly and in such a way that it can be instantly unified, though not without some indignation that such a man should have been given the fame and glory of the real heroes of 1914–1918.’

  Aldington’s investigations revealed that Lawrence’s birth was illegitimate and to this fact he attributes ‘the systematic falsification and overvaluing of himself and his achievements which Lawrence practised from a very early date.’ He acts throughout as the prosecuting counsel. Admitting, though reluctantly, ‘the difficulty of finding any adequate means of verifying Lawrence’s statements and one danger is that his unsupported testimony may be doubted when it is in fact as reasonably true as human tendency to error permits,’ he assumed Lawrence to be guilty where he could not be proved innocent.

  The attack was delivered with spleen and venom; a sustained sneer; and it is hard not to feel that Aldington was trying to get his own back at the country that had failed to appreciate him, by destroying a national idol, ‘These be your Gods, O Israel’. He must, when he corrected the final proofs, have thought, ‘Well, that’ll show them’. Surely he must have known that those whom he had attacked would hit back with vigour? Yet he appears to have been indignant.

  Most writers who have enjoyed a measure of popular favour have a difficult time when they are forced to realize that they are no longer ‘the new thing’, that they have become back numbers. They feel that they are writing as well as ever, yet their books sell fewer copies, editors no longer want their articles. Because of the war, this period came for Aldington sooner than it should. He had cut himself off from English life. He had not been a part of England’s life during its period of greatest stress. The English are in part isolationist: there are two kinds of Eng
lishman, those who won the Empire on the high seas and those who administered it from Whitehall offices. During the war they were imprisoned within a beleaguered fortress and after the war they were fettered by currency controls and austerity conditions. For a dozen years they were forced back upon themselves. Aldington had no longer a point of communication with his fellow countrymen. He had nothing to say to them. And is it surprising that the English should lose interest in a writer who had shown no interest in them during their hardest and ‘their finest hour’, any more than that the Russians should suddenly have begun to take notice of a writer who was in conflict with the country of his birth. In the ‘thirties, a few of his novels had been published in Russia in small editions, but now Death of a Hero and All Men are Enemies became best-sellers. Aldington was saying there precisely what the Russians wanted to hear and believe about and against England. His stud of novels were for them fine debating points. They were also fine novels: they had everything to recommend them.

  Aldington’s last years cannot have been happy. He was in poor health. He had not a great deal of money. He was dependent on Alister Kershaw’s generosity. His second marriage had broken up soon after the war. His emotional nature was concentrated entirely on his daughter, and she had now started a life of her own. He was as a writer at the end of his material. He had no more to say. He concentrated on translations. But at the very end he had the excitement and gratification of his visit to Russia where he was welcomed with adulation. He ended on a high note.

  Death of a Hero is considered his best novel, but All Men are Enemies is his most revealing, because in it the two sides of his nature are most markedly contrasted. There is the poetic side of him, and the angry aggressive side. They are not allowed to mix. They are kept separate. When he is writing of love he is tender, wistful, passionate: the same man who wrote A Dream in the Luxemburg and The Crystal World; when he is concerned with social satire, he is the man who wrote Lawrence of Arabia.

  6

  The University of Mainz

  HUGH KINGSMILL, GERARD HOPKINS, MILTON HAYES, J. F. HOLMS

  The Lost Generation’ is a cliché; it has been claimed that Gertrude Stein used it first in reference to Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, but it was in general currency earlier than that. I met it myself for the first time in 1920 when Douglas Jerrold, for many years a prominent London journalist and the author of several substantial books, in particular the autobiographical Georgian Adventure, offered Chapman & Hall a novel with that title. There was a very small market then for war books, Jerrold’s novel was not particularly good and we declined it. As far as I know, it never found a publisher. All that I can remember about it is the title.

  There were in fact a number of lost generations, each being lost in a different way: my own was lost in this, that it never became a generation.

  A generation is formed when a group of young contemporaries, on the brink of their careers, meet and exchange ideas either on a college campus or in a sidewalk café. They are ruthless, intolerant, generous and self-assured: they are impatient to beat down the doors of middle-aged complacence and remould the world nearer to their heart’s desire. As the years go by they watch each other, forging ahead or lagging in the race, failures, successes, or half-successes, most of them compromising with necessity, but remaining, in sympathy and heart, members of their own generation: serving the same shrines.

  An Oxford contemporary of my brother, who spent the greater part of the Second War and the first two years of peace in Egypt, finally decided to return to his base in London on these grounds. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘nearly all the people one really wants to see still live in England.’ He was able to say that because he was part of a generation. I never could. I was twenty and a half when the war ended. I was engaged to be married. I had started a career. It seemed too late to go up to Oxford.

  Yet even so I had my university.

  I was captured in the big retreat in March 1918. Louis Napoleon, who was a prisoner for three years, spoke of himself as a graduate of the University of Ham. The seven months I spent in the Citadel at Mainz were my equivalent for a university. A high barbed-wire fence was patrolled by sentries, but mentally my freedom was complete. I had no duties, no responsibilities. My time was my own, to read, write, talk, play bridge or chess as I chose. In the elaborate educational programme that was organized by a camp committee, one small narrow room opening off the main dining-hall was reserved for ‘authors, architects and other students’. A long table ran down its centre. It was called ‘the Alcove’, and here I spent my mornings and late afternoons.

  I was lucky in my fellow captives; in Sir Henry Lunn’s second son Hugh who later wrote under the name Hugh Kingsmill, in Gerard Hopkins who is better known as the translator of François Mauriac than he is as a novelist, good though those novels are in their careful studied way, and in Milton Hayes, the music-hall artist, creator of the Monologues of Monty and the author of ‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God’. I also had my first experience, in the person of J. F. Holms, of the negative, uncreating artist, who is always going to write a book, but never does, and who is intolerantly critical of those who do. I did not then recognize Holms as a familiar type in half a hundred novels. How could I have? He was young and hopeful; strong and handsome, a fine athlete at Rugby, who had won the M.C., and a brilliant talker. His fits of brooding melancholy, his dark alcoholic bouts seemed the inevitable dark shadows in a portrait.

  Morning after morning we assembled the five of us in the Alcove, with our books and pens and papers. There was no privacy and no attempt was made to impose silence. We talked to each other as we wrote, consulting Roget’s Thesaurus for a synonym, reading out loud a passage from a book that struck us. Holms in particular provided interruptions. He always carried a school exercise book, a number of whose pages were covered with illegible pencil-inscribed sentences. I never saw him write anything in it, and he refused to read us what he had written, but he was never without that notebook. Occasionally he would pick it up and read a page or two, nod approvingly, lay it down and take up a book; after a few pages he would emit a snort of disgust and turn to Kingsmill. ‘Listen to this, old man, isn’t it revolting.’ It was in the Alcove that I acquired the useful habit of working in public. Some of my pleasantest writing hours have been on the terrace of the Welcome Hotel in Ville-franche, at a round blue-topped table with friends breakfasting all round me.

  Kingsmill was then working upon a novel The Will to Love. He had been captured a year earlier than I and by the time I arrived it was a third finished. In appearance he was an untidy man; loosely built, stocky rather than fat, with his short hair half brushed; he walked with a lurching gait. On his arrival at the Alcove he would take off his tie and collar and wrap round his neck a thin dark green velvet scarf. One needed to be physically at ease, he explained, if one’s mind was to function freely. But though he was untidy in his personal appearance, he was punctilious in his habits. He would arrange neatly in front of him his pipe and tobacco pouch, his dictionary and Thesaurus and write his story in a clear, open script, keeping an exact tally of his words and averaging three hundred words a day. He copied each chapter as he finished it into another notebook, but he made few revisions.

  He was equally precise in the arrangement of his day’s routine. He drew up a time-table; so many hours for reading, so many for chess, so many for exercise: he allotted himself four pipes a day; the half-hour between 2 and 2.30 was devoted to sensual reverie.

  He was then twenty-eight years old, and fourteen months’ captivity had not damped his spirits. He had a basically sunny nature. He was warmhearted and affectionate. He had a great booming laugh. It is not easy to convey in writing the quality of conversational humour. You need the look, the gesture, the pitch of voice. Kings-mill’s sallies were spiced with bawdy. ‘Matthew Arnold,’ he once flashed out, ‘grew sidewhiskers to intimidate his J.T.’

  His parody of ‘A Shropshire Lad’—which Housman himself is said to hav
e approved—is an example of his written wit. It begins,

  What, still alive at twenty-two

  A fine upstanding lad like you

  and contains the couplet,

  Bacon’s not the only thing

  That’s cured by hanging from a string.

  During the early post-war years we saw a lot of one another, Hopkins, Holms, Hayes, Kingsmill and myself. Hopkins had a place waiting for him with the Oxford University Press. Kingsmill returned to his father’s travel agency. Holms prepared—if prepared is the right word—to produce a masterpiece. He had by birth well-placed connections; he was never completely without money; he was strong, and with his vivid red hair and striking appearance, those women to whom he appealed found him irresistible; his fortunes may be said to have risen and fallen in accordance with the financial status of the particular woman of whom he was the consort.

  During the early ‘twenties his fortunes ebbed. In January 1919 I saw him for the first time in civilian clothes. He had been to a good tailor and looked very smart. Up to then I had only seen him collarless in ragged khaki. He was full of confidence: he was in love—’a sultry, savage passion after the long Sahara of captivity’.

  ‘I shall soon be ready,’ he informed us, ‘to start on the works of my immaturity.’ He always saw himself in terms of his future biographers.

  The spring of 1919 was a boom period with war gratuities in the bank. They were soon spent, however, and Holms found himself with negligible resources. Kingsmill was at his side. Kingsmill had no doubt that Holms would produce a series of masterpieces one day. The problem was to find the right conditions for their creation. Kingsmill had through his family firm many facilities for finding his friends jobs. But Holms considered such employment menial. At least that was what he appeared to be telling us but it is possible that Sir Henry had doubts about his suitability as a courier. By the autumn of 1919 Holms was wearing pre-war shabby clothes, but he wore them with an air. He had grown a short pointed beard and looked like a Spanish grandee. People stared at him when he came into a room. His manner became more sombre; he was clearly the prey of intense and violent emotions. He was how I expected a genius to look before he had found his medium.