by Alec Waugh
Nor should it be forgotten that as a master of dialogue, he was as sensitive to clumsy speech as is a man with an acute sense of smell to odours that the majority of us do not find offensive. The opening of the third chapter of Black Mischief is the supreme example of his gift in this direction. The revolution in Azania is being discussed in England by anonymous characters. There are ten or so short sections of dialogue, the longest of six lines, but you know exactly from what social milieu each group came. You even know the sex. ‘But of course you remember; that madly attractive blackamoor at Balliol,’ could only have been said by a young lady of quality.
A man with such an acute ear for language could not help being irritated by phrases like ‘kind of’, ‘sort of’. I remember very many years later, using the word ‘you’ when I should have said ‘one’. I was referring to the way in which two people are so close that they do not need to explain themselves to one another. ‘You’d say,’ I remarked, ‘that they could talk in shorthand.’ ‘I wouldn’t say anything of the kind,’ he snapped. His irritation was due to his being more sensitive than the rest of us; had he not been, he could not have written such superb dialogue. His sudden explosions of irritability were the penalty his friends had to pay for the immense pleasure that he gave them as a novelist.
In 1924, however, he was not giving them that compensating pleasure, and it was unlucky that he should have fallen in love with the last person equipped to restore his self-confidence and self-esteem. Evelyn has written in A Little Learning about Olivia Plunket Greene. I only met her a few times. She was pretty, gracious and well-mannered. She was not negative, since on several points she held strong opinions; but she was profoundly indifferent to the forces that activate most creative lives. She was without personal ambition, and could not understand the hold ambition takes on others. She was supremely un-Balzacian. The need ‘to be famous and to be loved’ was incomprehensible to her. Many men seek fame in the hope that it will secure them the favours of a woman. But Evelyn must have known that no public success of his would enhance her opinion of him. She was a profound depressant. One values the women who make one feel better about oneself. Olivia invariably diminished Evelyn’s self-esteem, not willingly, not consciously: she was basically good natured, but through her indifference to his problems. He would come up to London from his exile as a schoolmaster especially to lunch with her and would return in heavy gloom. He was loyal to her and chivalrous. ‘Down there at my school I see her as the symbol of everything from which I am cut off,’ he said to me. ‘I expect too much; it isn’t fair to her.’
Her apathy towards ambition increased his contempt for his friends’ complacence over their small successes. They might think themselves terrific figures, but their posturing cut no ice with Olivia Greene. Perhaps in this respect, her indifference was a bond between them. I never saw her after 1927. I have no idea how she reacted to Evelyn’s subsequent success. I question if she was much impressed by it. She was consistent.
Evelyn’s second school which was the model for Dr Fagan’s academy was very much more congenial than the preparatory school in North Wales; it was within reach of London; the pupils were older, it was a training ground for misfits who ordinarily would have been at their public schools; they came, the majority of them, from good families; many of them had charm and intelligence. Evelyn did not feel that he was wasting his time with them. They were capable of appreciating what he had to give. I paid him a couple of visits during the spring and early summer of 1926, staying at the local inn. Once I lectured on the modern novel and found them a responsive audience. He seemed happy enough. He acquired a motor bicycle which made it possible for him to visit friends. But he was headed nowhere. Such a school could only be a dead-end road.
It may surprise many that it was not apparent to himself and to his friends that a career as a novelist awaited him. But he did not seem at this time to have any inclination to write, and what little he did write, did not seem exceptional. He had not revealed his capacity for satiric comedy. On the other hand his drawings had a very definite individuality. At Oxford he designed book jackets, letter headings and book plates. The illustrations to the first edition of Decline and Fall surely show a very special talent. It seemed to all of us that it was in this direction that his true bent lay. It was also what he most liked doing.
Evelyn was, in fact—at any rate until 1945—almost the only writer I know who did not like writing. In those early days he resisted his fate. He was, perhaps, subconsciously aware of the demands that it would make on him. He was reluctant to yield himself. ‘My ambition,’ he wrote, ‘was to decorate, design and illustrate. I worked with the brush and was entirely happy in my employment of it, as I was not when reading or writing. Later in this chronicle, I shall note various attempts to escape from my literary destiny into pleasanter but less appropriate work with my hands.’
Yet he was doing some writing. Early in 1926 he wrote a long avant-garde short story, The Balance which I included in Georgian Stories 1926, of which I was the editor. Several writers—G. B. Stern in particular—recognized its originality, and Michael Sadleir asked him to contribute to his symposium the New Decameron. I have not read The Balance for forty years. Evelyn did not think it worth including in Mr Loveday’s Little Outing. But I hope that it will appear in the eventual canon of his writings. It gives me pleasure to be able to boast that I was his first editor.
In June 1926, I started on a tour round the world. I was away nine months; there was no air mail in those days. I made one or two changes of plan. The last letters that I received from England were waiting me in Sydney in December. They had been posted in October. I cannot remember now when I learnt that Evelyn was no longer employed at Dr Fagan’s. I never learnt the exact conditions under which he had left. I am not sure that he knew them himself. He had returned late at night on his motor bicycle; the matron had complained and next morning Dr Fagan had reluctantly informed him that he did not consider that a man of his particular qualities was really fitted for an establishment such as his. Dr Fagan did not bear Evelyn the least ill-will. The letter of sympathy that he wrote him four years later, after his divorce, could not have been bettered, even by its recipient.
He reluctantly took Evelyn’s side against the matron; an unmarried lady in her middle thirties should have been flattered by nocturnal attentions. But the matron was an essential bulwark in his establishment. To keep her in a good humour, the temporary inconvenience of a young man must be sacrificed. Evelyn had to go.
No doubt my father wrote me a gloomy letter announcing Evelyn’s enforced return to Underhill, but I never received it and when I returned to England in mid-March it was to find Evelyn in high spirits. Tom Balston, one of the partners in Duckworth’s publishing house, had decided to invest a certain amount of capital in Young Oxford. He published Harold Acton’s poetry and he gave Evelyn an advance of £50 on an unwritten book about Rossetti. My father, who as a publisher never made an advance without a manuscript, shook his head gloomily. ‘Balston will never see that book. I suppose I’ll have to make it good.’ But rarely has £50 been invested more profitably. Duckworth not only got the book on Rossetti, but all of Evelyn’s subsequent travel books. They would have got his novels too, had not Duckworth in Balston’s absence been scared of the audacities of Decline and Fall. Evelyn was very loyal. As Father Caraman pointed out in his Requiem address, he had the same publishers and the same agent all his life.
In addition to this commission to write a book Evelyn had been taken on the staff of the Daily Express as a probationary reporter, and he was in funds. ‘I am so glad that you came back now,’ he said, ‘when I don’t need you: I can welcome you without any thought of self advantage.’ London in that early summer of 1927 was very gay. A year earlier the general strike had been defeated. The political climate was encouraging and though there was no equivalent in London for the stock market boom in New York, a lot of money was being made and spent. Florence Mills and her ‘Blackbirds’ wer
e being courted by Mayfair and Belgravia hostesses. ‘The Bright Young Things’ were news and Evelyn joined the rout. He seemed to be seeing less of Olivia, and more of Evelyn Gardner, a daughter of the late Lord Burghclere.
For him the rout did not last very long. Towards the end of May he invited me to dinner at the Gargoyle Club. He said, when I joined him there, ‘We had better make this a good dinner. It is probably the last one I shall be able to give you for quite a while. I was fired from the Express this morning.’
It was at that time the practice of the large dailies to hire university graduates as probationers, at less than union rates. If they retained them after six months, they had to pay them the minimum union salary. It was a satisfactory system for everyone. The newspapers got good work cheap; they might make ‘a discovery’; the young men got valuable experience. Evelyn’s period was up. Not one line that he wrote during it was printed. Fifteen months later the same editor who had fired him, was offering the author of Decline and Fall twenty-five guineas a thousand words to write on anything he liked. But at the moment our hero was once again in exceedingly low water.
I was due to catch in mid-June, at Marseilles, a slow French steamer for Tahiti. I was to spend a few days on the way with my parents, who were taking a holiday in Nîmes. I suggested to Evelyn that he should come along with me. On my last evening in London, I gave a goodbye cocktail party. It was composed, as my larger parties tended to be at that time, partly of Bohemians, partly of athletes and their attendant nymphs. Evelyn and I were seen off at Waterloo Station by a group of ‘football hearties’. One of them was to serve later as a partial model for Rex Mottram. In the train afterwards, Evelyn said of him, ‘I feel awkward with men like that; but I wonder whether he wouldn’t be right for Olivia. Vulgar but not common.’
It was a very happy few days that we spent together. We travelled south by daylight; between Dijon and Beaune we rose and bowed reverently to the sacred vineyards, Chambertin, Clos de Vougeot, Corton. We changed trains at Tarascon, and with an hour to wait, drank Tavel, I for the first time, with our sandwiches. In Nîmes we watched in the arena, the film of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Evelyn found it ‘appropriately inappropriate’. The photograph of Evelyn and his father sitting at a café table, which illustrated his article ‘My Father and I’ that appeared in the Sunday Telegraph in November 1962, was taken then. As my ship sailed at 11.30 in the morning, Evelyn and I spent my last night in Marseilles. Our evening in the Vieux Port provided him with material for Decline and Fall. Later he went on with his parents to Les Baux, with which he was delighted. Both my parents agreed that their five days there were among the very happiest that they had spent with him.
It was to a very different atmosphere that I returned early in November. I was myself involved in a love affair with an American married woman, which I have described in my Early Years. I knew inside myself that it could have no future; but I had to act as though it had. I had to make quickly enough money to be able to finance the start of a joint life if she elected to elope with me. I did not want to spend money on a flat in London, so I decided to go down into the country, to a small inn, during the week and work upon a novel, spending the week-ends at Underhill. I was no doubt in an edgy mood.
My father had lost during the autumn a dearly loved sister: he was becoming increasingly worried about the future of Chapman & Hall. Evelyn, also, was living at Underhill with his fortunes at their lowest. During the autumn, he had been knocking on innumerable doors. At one point, he had been interviewed by the headmaster of an excellent preparatory school. He had liked the headmaster; the headmaster had said, ‘You seem to be exactly the man I’m looking for.’ Evelyn had returned home jubilant. ‘Mr Toad on top,’ he told his mother. But the headmaster knew Cruttwell, and that was that.
He had letters of introduction to a few London editors. They all said the same thing. ‘The market’s crowded; not a glimmer of an opening, old boy; fix up something with the provincial press, then worm your way in from there.’ I have not known a single prospective journalist who has not been given that advice. I have not known one who has taken it. Either they have ‘crashed Fleet Street’ on their own, as buccaneers; or they have failed and sought some other source of livelihood.
Evelyn was receiving from his father a dole of four pounds a week—which he preferred to call an annual allowance of two hundred pounds—and he was a part-time instructor at a third-rate day school in Golders Green. I learnt of this from his mother; he was himself too ashamed to mention it. It is not surprising that he was fractious. I would not care to re-live the November and early December of 1927. Eventually it was agreed that Evelyn should be apprenticed to a carpenter. A premium was paid, and he was to enter into residence with a master of the craft in January. But before that could happen he announced his engagement to Evelyn Gardner.
I was very curious to know what he would say in ‘A Little Hope’ (which was to have followed A Little Learning), of his first marriage. It may well have been that doubt of how to deal with it, contributed to ‘the writing block’ that held him inoperative during his last year. He must inevitably have held harsh feelings for Evelyn Gardner, but he must have known that nearly everyone found her a delightful person; certainly I did. She was pretty and neat and gracious; she had winning ways; she had race but unobtrusively. She was friendly, welcoming, and cosy. She spent Christmas at Underhill. It was a modest house, compared with the many grand ones with which she was familiar. But she was appreciative of everything that was done for her. She made herself very pleasant to my parents. Recognizing that Evelyn and I were ‘at outs’ she put herself at once ‘to set that straight’. And she succeeded.
She and Evelyn were a delightful team; they were so at ease, so affectionate together, their having the same Christian name was an amusing bond. They were called ‘He-Evelyn’ and ‘She-Evelyn’. But of course from every worldly point of view, it was a ridiculous engagement.
Lord Burghclere, a man of great distinction, was from one point of view a self-made man. His widow, who had adored him and was bitterly disappointed at not having had a son who could carry on the title, was one of the Carnarvon Herberts, so that when at a later date Evelyn became engaged to Laura Herbert, the same great-aunt Lady Victoria Herbert who had protested against his marriage to her neice was able to exclaim, ‘What, this young man again, I thought we’d seen the last of him.’
She was far from being the only relative who objected. Lady Burghclere was not rich. She had two other daughters; no doubt the family could have rallied to a deserving cause, a hundred from this uncle, three hundred from that aunt. But my brother did not seem a deserving cause. The Baroness made enquiries at Oxford. And Cruttwell for the last time had the satisfaction of performing ‘his unwelcome duty’. My father and Lady Burghclere met; there was, as politicians say ‘a frank exchange of views’. Evelyn remarked on how useful it was at such a time to have a father with an unblemished reputation. But there was no public announcement of the betrothal in The Times. One thing was certain, if He-Evelyn was to marry She-Evelyn, the union could not be supported by cabinets and chairs from Sussex. Evelyn could evade his literary destiny no longer. As P. G. Wodehouse would have said, ‘he bit the bullet’ and went to a small country-inn to write Decline and Fall.
At the end of January I went to California. I was not back until early May. This time I found Evelyn in high good humour. Decline and Fall was finished and his book on Rossetti had either just been or was shortly to be published. A critical study of Rossetti cannot expect a large sale, but it was well reviewed; the Times Literary Supplement noticing it at length, referred to its author as Miss Waugh, which gave Evelyn the opportunity of making an amusing ripost, and he was delighted to receive a letter of congratulation from Rebecca West in which she praised in particular his flashes of wit, recognizing in advance of anyone the eventual direction of his writing. The two Evelyns were as charming a team as ever and though there was still no definite engagement, there was a gener
al understanding that if Decline and Fall was a success, family opposition would be relaxed.
I read Decline and Fall while it was under consideration at Duckworth’s. I had no doubt of its quality. I found it hilariously funny, and was astonished at the ridiculous corrections that Duckworth’s wanted him to make in it. They were shocked for instance at a ‘debagged’ undergraduate running round the quad without his trousers. Tom Balston was, as I have said, away on a holiday; and Gerald Duckworth who was a considerable friend of Lady Burghclere was nervous about her reaction to the book. Evelyn could not accept their emendations. He knew that the book was good, though he wondered whether he should not publish it under a different name, on the principle that a poet publishes his detective stories under a pseudonym. Could a serious literary critic sponsor Captain Grimes?
I do not keep a diary and cannot recall the exact sequence of events. My parents went for a holiday in early June, and it is my belief that my father left his fellow directors to decide whether or not Chapman & Hall should publish Decline and Fall. He admired the book immensely but he was hypersensitive on the use of the firm’s money to finance his family. Ironically enough the decisive vote in Evelyn’s favour was cast by a scientist who three years earlier had been voted onto the board after a stormy shareholder’s meeting, to ensure that the firm’s money was not wasted on avant-garde belles-lettres when such sound profits could be made on ‘mathematics for engineers’. When the final acceptance letter was sent I do not know, but it was certainly while my parents were still away on a holiday that Harold Acton and Evelyn came round to my flat to announce that the Evelyns were being married clandestinely in two days’ time, to invite me to the ceremony at St Paul’s Church, Baker Street, and to luncheon afterwards at Boulestin’s.