My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles

by Alec Waugh

  In 1932 I married, in 1937 Evelyn married. My father was delighted with his daughters-in-law: he was proud of being a grandfather.

  Not many Englishmen of his age were happier than he was on the first of January in that year of unlucky omen 1939. Nor would I say that he was in a very different mood, two years later, when the worst had happened, when for so many the future was completely black. Evelyn was under orders for the Middle East, my wife, who had been brought up in Australia, had taken our children there. But I had been posted to London as a staff captain in the Ministry of Mines.

  I had a flat in Buckingham Street, Adelphi, but I spent every week-end at Highgate. My mother would lunch with me in London and we would go to a film afterwards, returning to Hampstead Lane by six o’clock. They were happy times. We did not talk much about the actual war, we gossiped of what our different friends were doing, of the difficulties of war-time publishing, of how one writer’s stock was going up while another’s was going down, talking as we had ten years before, assuming that we should be talking in just that way in 1950; never letting the thought intrude that in ten years’ time England would be a very different place, that there might indeed no longer exist an England that we would recognize as England.

  At a War Intelligence course at Swanage that I had attended early in the year we had been set problems beginning, ‘It is the year 1943, we have invaded the continent of Europe.…’ As my syndicate sat down to work out its solution, I would say to myself, ‘What with?’ Many must have been thinking the same thing, but they said nothing, nor did I. There were certain possibilities we declined to look at. That is one of the advantages of not being a logical race. The French were too logical. They added up the score and then packed up.

  Did my father ever wonder what would happen to himself, his home and his wife if England were invaded? He never did out loud. In peace-time he had been apprehensive, worrying in September about what would happen in April at the shareholders’ meeting. But in wartime he went on quietly with his routine, writing to his friends, having friends in for tea or sherry, reading manuscripts and preparing reports on them, discussing the manuscripts with authors, taking out the poodle on the Heath, telephoning the office daily, reading the weekly papers at the Hampstead Institute, in the summer watching the school cricket matches at the Highgate Ground and talking with the groundsman, the old England cricketer A. E. Knight.

  From the business point of view he had little to worry over. Books invariably do well in war-time, they did particularly well in this last war when the quota of paper was strictly rationed and every book sold out, irrespective of its quality. Publishers were able to dispose of old stock that had not moved for years and had been written off as valueless. A large part of Chapman & Hall’s stock was burnt and they received in compensation £18,000. Normally they would have been delighted at such a deal, but in 1941 they would have got even more for it from the public. It was a puzzling time for authors. They had no idea how many copies would have been sold if the demand could have been met. They could not tell how they stood. It was cruel luck on those authors who published their best books during the war.

  Publishers had their problems but they were very different from those which had harassed them in peacetime. They had not to worry about selling books but about producing them. They were fretted by government controls, by delays in printing and in binding, by the crippling demands of income-tax. But my father was spared such worries. His post as reader and adviser had never been so simple. He had no longer the two-pronged problem, was a book good, was it the kind of book to sell; now he had only to decide if it was good. It could not fail to sell.

  One major change took place at this time in Henrietta Street. In 1938 Inman had taken over the chairmanship of Methuen. The firm was in difficulties and on E. V. Lucas’s death, Lloyds Bank had invited him to take Lucas’s place. He soon found that he had created an awkward situation for himself. In his autobiography No Going Back he said, ‘When manuscripts of new books were sent to me personally, as they often were, it fell to me to decide to which of the two firms they should be given. I found myself in a clash of loyalties.…’ It was finally agreed that a solution of the problem would be for Methuen’s to purchase the share capital of Chapman & Hall. The arrangement worked satisfactorily for all sides until September 1939.

  Inman then found that his official war-time commitments were too heavy for him to remain in publishing and asked Lloyds Bank to release him from his contract. During the distractions of 1940 the interior economy of a publishing firm did not seem as involved as it would have done at another time. Directors were ready to accept compromises. The amalgamation of Methuen and Chapman & Hall took place without dissension and my father resumed his chairmanship of Chapman & Hall. My prophecy for the firm’s future had been fulfilled, in the happiest possible way, without any member of the staff being forced into unemployment.

  The flourishing condition of the two firms today is ample testimony to the debt that they owe to Inman.

  I was posted overseas to Spears Mission (Syria) in September 1941. One does not look ahead in war-time and I did not ask myself whether I was seeing my father for the last time, nor did he make any of the remarks that had come so easily to his grandfather: he did not dramatize the occasion. I had been away so many times on so many voyages. A few months earlier Evelyn had sailed with his Commando for the Middle East and he was already back, to join a new formation. I, too, might be home within a year. Nine months was the longest I had ever been away.

  Evelyn had landed at Plymouth a few days before I sailed, and his first week-end in London was my last. I was leaving on the Saturday night and Evelyn came out to lunch that day at Highgate. It was a cosy lunch, the four of us together. I gave a small good-bye cocktail party in my flat and Evelyn came for the first hour before leaving to write for Life the article on Commandos which caused so much confusion with the censorship authorities when it appeared later in the Evening Standard. From the restaurant where I dined after the party, I rang up my parents to say good-bye and tell them how the party had gone; just as I had done so often in the past on the eve of a sailing for New York or the West Indies.

  It was not till four days later when the convoy left that I realized how different this sailing was. The first night on board, the O.C. ship addressed us. The journey round the Cape, he told us, would take eight weeks.

  I remembered his talk when I saw the great massing of ships at Gourock. Eight weeks and all these men and ships and all these preparations. The War Office would not send us on an eight weeks’ journey unless it was going to keep us there for a long time. This was not like those other sailings.

  My father died on 26 June 1943, three and a half months before the golden wedding day to which he had so looked forward. He died suddenly and very peacefully, on a Saturday morning. He had been in bed only two days, and the previous Saturday he had spent the whole afternoon on the school ground watching a cricket match.

  During those twenty months he and I were closer than we had been since the winters of 1915-17. We wrote every four or five days to one another, first by airgraph, later when they became generally available, by letter card. He was a wonderful letter writer. I knew exactly what he was doing, thinking, feeling. He had wanted to die in harness and his wish was granted him.

  He had two special protégés on Chapman & Hall’s list, Alex Comfort and Elizabeth Myers. He had met Comfort as a schoolboy. Comfort had caught his hand in a machine, mangling it badly. His father, to help him recover from the shock, took him on a long sea voyage to Central and South America. Comfort’s account of his trip seemed so remarkable that the school authorities showed it to my father. He published it under the title The Silver River.

  I only saw Comfort a few times, when he was still at school: he was shy and awkward then, very conscious of his injured hand which he wrapped round in his school cap. But I felt that I knew him well. I heard so much about him in my father’s letters, about his career at Cambridge, his ma
rriage and the various discussions of his first novel. I was happy that my father in his last years should have sponsored so vital a talent.

  My father’s last letters were very occupied with Elizabeth Myers whose A Well Full of Leaves was then in the press; he unfortunately did not live long enough to see it published. I only met her once, several years later, a few months before her death, but I could well understand how magnetic and instantaneous a fascination she exerted on her friends. She was tubercular, with a frail look, but she had immense energy. She was lit with a bright inner flame: one was conscious in her of a spiritual quality, the same poetic quality that shone through A Well Full of Leaves.

  She was a frequent visitor to Hampstead Lane during 1942. My father’s encouragement and belief in her work and future sustained her when she was worried by ill health and lack of money. Indirectly he was responsible for the happy and comfortable conditions in which the last years of her life were spent. She had never been to Sherborne: she was anxious to visit it and he gave her a letter of introduction to Littleton Powys, the one conformist of the Powys brotherhood, who had been in charge of the prep, for many years. Powys was a widower, and within a short time he and Elizabeth married. The one time I saw her was in their house at Sherborne. Powys’s care and love made her last years her happiest.

  My father kept a diary from the day he gave up the managing directorship of Chapman & Hall. He wrote it in a large Boots’s diary, sixteen inches long, with ten lines to every day. He was most punctilious about its upkeep. In one sense it is of no public interest since it is a day-to-day, hour-by-hour record of everything that he did and everyone he saw. He made no attempt to spotlight events that might become important twenty years later. Yet it has so many references to books and writers that I have given it to the Boston University Library in the hope that it may be of value to the research student. In a case like this for instance: an entry that is typical of the way in which he intermingled events of permanent and trivial interest, putting things down in the order in which they occurred.

  Alexander Woollcott shortly before his death wrote to Mrs Belloc Lowndes that, ‘one of the good things I got out of my last trip to London was a talk with Arthur Waugh about Wolcott Balestier.’ The entry in my father’s diary reads:

  1941 Nov. 4. Woke at 6.50. Another dark, cold day, raining as well. Once more could not go out all day and felt very bronchial. Heard from Haynes about an entry in his notebooks which he wished me to read, from Beazley a very interesting letter about Oxford in wartime, and from Mrs Wingate sister of Eustace Heriz-Smith, who wanted advice for her boy now serving in the Navy, with regard to the chance of getting into a publishing house. Wrote a report on the American novel by Fannie Cook and K [my mother] did it up for post with proofs of ‘Botany Bay’. Wrote a card to Haynes and a long letter to Joan [my wife]. At 10.30 Alexander Woollcott of N.Y. called in a super saloon car to talk to me about Wolcott Balestier. I found that he knew ‘The Road’ [his autobiography ‘One Man’s Road’] quite well, so the best I could do was to lend him Edmund Gosse’s little brochure from The Century and answer any questions. He proved a genial fellow and the hour went all too soon. In the p.m. Nannie [my children’s former nurse] came to tea and stayed 2 hrs talking much about Florence Desmond and a row they had had. When she had gone I tackled the crossword and did it all, K making two successful shots. Listened in to Alexander Woollcott on Benedict Arnold, so it was certainly Woollcott’s day. Again very bronchial at bedtime, but again had a good night with only a short interval for tea at 2.45.

  To me as his son, the fourteen volumes of his diaries are of absorbing interest. They give me a picture of his life that I could never have acquired otherwise. It is very hard for children to visualize their parents’ lives in the round. Parents alter their own plans to suit their children’s; tea parties and expeditions are promptly cancelled and friends put off when a daughter rings up at the last moment to announce that she will be bringing down two friends for the week-end or when a son returns unexpectedly on leave. Children forget that their parents have real lives of their own and do not go into hibernation in their absences. My father’s diary showed me how much he was doing all the time; particularly during his last twenty months.

  There are many references to my brother in his final entries. Evelyn had a dramatic war. He was a regimental officer the entire time, first in the Royal Marines, later in the Blues, attached to a Commando. He went on three separate campaigns, in the summer of 1940 to Dakar, in 1941 to the Middle East where he was in the raid on Bardia and in the Crete evacuation. Later he went to Yugoslavia, with Randolph Churchill, as part of a military mission and was lucky not to lose his life in an aeroplane crash. But from the close of 1941 through mid-1944 he was stationed in England.

  It made a great difference to our father; Evelyn was now a director of Chapman & Hall as well as a Chapman & Hall author and they worked together in easy harmony. During a part of 1942 Evelyn was stationed at Sherborne, in the Digby Hotel where my father had always stayed when he came down to see me, which was an added bond. That Christmas when food was scarce, Evelyn managed to acquire a goose which he sent up to Highgate by his batman; a no doubt highly irregular operation which touched my father as much as the goose delighted him. If only my father could have lived long enough to read Brideshead Revisited. How proud of it he would have been.

  Three weeks before my father died, he presided over Chapman & Hall’s annual shareholders’ meeting. ‘Of course there were no shareholders left,’ he wrote to me, ‘except the directors of C. H. and Methuen. Chamberlain spoke most generously, that they were all pleased to see me looking so well, long to reign over us, happy and glorious and so on. It really looks as though the old firm would live out its need of me. It will be very pleasant if we manage to keep light at eventide.’

  The first two pages of the letter were written in his firm, clear Greek script. Earlier in the year I had been worried by a change in his handwriting. He seemed unable to control his pen and the sheet was scored by scratches. Occasionally it was impossible to read. But the warm spring had brought improvement. I remembered the old adage of the creaking door. He was only seventy-six. As I read his account of the shareholders’ meeting, I saw no reason why he should not celebrate his golden wedding day in October, but on the third page of his letter the script was again criss-crossed with scratches. ‘My hand seems wearing out, but I have been two hours over this,’ he wrote.

  It was with no real surprise that I received the telegram that announced his death.

  The funeral service was in Hampstead Parish Church, on a day of sunlight, with the friends of a lifetime gathered round him. He had chosen for the inscription on his tombstone a line from Revelations: ‘And another book was opened which is the book of life’.

  Half a week later I received in Baghdad the last letter that he had written me. There are words in it which try as I could I have been unable to decipher.

  I have been feeling villainously guilty in my relations vis à vis à toi, having had 3 really splendid letters from you and being prevented from replying by this exasperating failure of my writing hand. I was plugging away when your mother said ‘My dear you can’t possibly send that, it is illegible’. So I tore my letter to pieces and had not the endurance to begin again. But here is another attempt which I hope may be more successful.

  I am pretty well in myself, except for bad sleeping which is bound to knock me up. I feel very like the dyspepsia I got in 1931. At any rate I feel very much as I did then, before we went to Villefranche, but I have never felt anything like as bad as I did then.

  My one pleasure has been watching the school cricket which has had many good days and successful wins.… I never remember a boy not much higher than the stumps getting 102 not out twice as young Laws did while Maclure was getting 74 and 30.

  Evelyn has been over to see us several Sundays. He has had Laura with him. He has been most agreeable and has brought me some wine.…

  Well, I have looke
d through what I have written, but I must confess that it has made me sad. So often I have said to myself ‘Well, when I am growing old and ugly, at least I shall have the old gift of communication and if I can still speak in the old language, I shall be able to bring the old look back… But alas it will not. I can see the old secret vanished and when a letter comes, my dear ones can no longer.… The old clouds lose their colour in the sky. Never mind, God bless you, son of my soul, there will never be shadows in the… With every tender remembrance. May every base be broad in honour.…

  Your loving and grateful

  Father

  14

  My Second War

  When I returned to New York in September 1945, an engaging female enquired if I had had ‘a chic war’. No, I answered, but I had had a lucky one. My birthday, 8 July 1898, which had made me old enough for the First War, made me just young enough for the Second; as a Lieutenant in the R.A.R.O. (Regular Army Reserve of Officers) I was recalled to my regiment on the first Monday of the war, and was not demobilized till June 1945. Those six years away from my desk gave me a much needed ‘breather’ in midstream. I had been writing for twenty years and was beginning to be conscious of the strain. In the autumn of 1945 I returned to professional authorship refreshed. I also returned with sharpened susceptibilities, with broadened interests. I never rose higher in rank than major, so that my opposite numbers were always men considerably younger than myself. In the early ‘twenties most of my friends had been older than myself. Now the balance was adjusted.

  In September 1941 as I have already mentioned I was posted to the Middle East—six months in the Lebanon and Syria, two months in Cairo; then thirty-three months in Baghdad. But for the war, I might never have seen the Arab world. How much I should have missed if I had not. Moreover I gained an insight into the machinery not only of military intelligence but of police procedure; this insight has been invaluable to me as a novelist.