My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles

by Alec Waugh

  Stooping, grey-haired Haynes recalled to-day a remark by his father (also a solicitor). ‘He told me, no matter how idle I was I could expect about £1500 a year.’

  Says Haynes: ‘I have not been idle, and I have earned much more than that. But those days are ended now.’

  Haynes plans to spend his time writing now, has a book due for publication soon.

  I re-read it, trying to envisage all its complications. I had been away a month and on our last walk Haynes had told me that he would be appearing shortly before some board. ‘It was intolerable,’ he had grumbled. All these forms. With his old managing clerk alive he had known exactly where he was. The accounts had been prepared for him. A man like himself should not have to bother about trivial details. He was concerned with the strategy not the tactics of a campaign. As I read the paragraph again, I recalled the misgivings that I had felt on his account on that first walk with him. Those misgivings had been justified. He had taken on too much.

  I was going straight from the airport into the country. I was not planning to spend much time in London before Christmas. I should have no chance of finding out the facts from mutual friends, of discovering from a neutral source ‘how Ted was taking it’. I thought it was better to write than telephone. I dropped him a note, telling him that I was back, asking if he would suggest a day for lunch. Five days later having had no answer I rang up. He was always hard to hear over the telephone. He regarded the telephone as a commercial convenience, to be used by secretaries, not by principals. His voice gave me no indication of his state of mind.

  We made a date for the following week. I went up to London with some trepidation. My last walk had been a painful one. It had been a chill, bleak day. Wuff had been more than usually fractious. Haynes had been more than usually asthmatic. Every few hundred yards he had stopped and choked and coughed. We proceeded at a glacier’s pace. My fur coat was in cold storage in New York. I was very cold. Haynes himself had been in a gloomy mood. He would never, he said, get through this winter. He had nearly died last February. This February would finish him. His face was pallid like stale plaster. He was very thin. This might well be, I had thought, the last time that I should see him.

  That had been in late September. Now in early December, by a caprice of climate, the sky was blue and the air vivid with a sense of spring. The stucco-fronted house took on a golden tone in the mild amber sunlight.

  Haynes was no longer living in St John’s Wood Park. The proprietors had at last succeeded in obtaining his eviction. But his youngest daughter had a house half a mile away in Hamilton Road. It was a smaller house, but it had been built in the same period; early nineteenth century. It had the dignity of solid unpretentious things that are built to last. He had moved his furniture across—the John Wells portrait of his wife in the wide-spreading gold skirt, the eighteenth-century ancestor, the dresser with its Wedgwood dinner service. On my first visit it had all looked uncomfortably tidy, but within a few weeks the old litter of books and pipes had been restored, and the curious smell, a mixture of leather, garlic, cigar smoke, undusted magazines, a smell that was by no means unpleasant but that was peculiar to Haynes, pervaded again the rooms and passages.

  As always my reception from Wuff was boisterous. He ran past me into the front garden and barked for a full three minutes. ‘Don’t your neighbours object to that?’ I asked. It had been one thing to bark in the wilderness of a bombed area; it was quite another to disturb a respectable residential district. ‘Yes,’ said Haynes. That laconic ‘yes’ was as typical, as symptomatic as his first ‘Why not?’ Nothing could have been more complete than his refusal to have his personal preferences disturbed.

  As usual, though I had arrived a little late, it was to find him in his night-shirt. His dressing proceeded slowly. Although his litter of half-worn shoes matched his litter of half-smoked pipes, he had bought a new pair of shoes the week before. It was the first time I had seen him with any new article of attire. I fancy that he had only bought them because shoes were at that time rationed and he felt that by using his clothing coupons he was getting his own back on the Government. He had great difficulty in getting into these shoes, and could not find his shoe-horn. Finally with the leverage of a spoon I effected the introduction.

  In September Haynes had looked pasty and exhausted. Now there was a buoyancy in his step that reminded me of the days when he had taken Fitzjohn’s Avenue in his stride. He did not once stop for breath. Wuff was relatively docile. Instead of stopping at the foot of Primrose Hill we had time to mount its summit. We sat on a wooden seat looking over London.

  ‘I suppose you’ve heard about my being unfrocked,’ he said.

  To the ordinary person, being struck off the Roll of Solicitors would be a disgrace, comparable to the cashiering of an officer. But Haynes was not an ordinary person. He ordered his life by a different set of rules, and by his own standards he had done nothing of which he needed to be ashamed. Several solicitors have assured me that he had done nothing except be casual and muddled, that since his managing clerk’s death he had not bothered to keep his accounts in order; a negligence that is in a solicitor reprehensible but implied no reflection on the E. S. P. Haynes whom his friends knew and loved. It was in character.

  He could not have taken his reverse more calmly. When an Englishman goes bankrupt, or fails to meet his obligations, he is expected to resign from his clubs, because he might put a club servant in the awkward position of having to refuse a member’s cheque. But Haynes could clearly not be bothered with unnecessary correspondence, and he had been amused by the devices adopted by the various club committees to remedy this omission. A personal friend of long standing at the Achilles had written to say that as the subscription was being raised in January he would probably prefer not to continue his membership. A city company on the other hand gilded the pill by returning him not only his entrance fee but his subscription over thirty years. He could not have been more delighted with his cheque for three hundred pounds.

  He was as full of plans now as ten weeks earlier he had been despondent. At last he would have the leisure to write the kinds of book he wanted.

  I had never known him so self-confident. His confidence was not bravado; a need ‘to show people’ that he still ‘had it in him’; to justify, to vindicate himself. He was genuinely relieved to be rid of the necessity for paying daily visits to his chambers; to have the whole day free for writing.

  Confident though he was, however, I had never seen him feebler. He looked well, but he looked very old. As Christmas was near, I had brought him as a present a bottle of champagne. He insisted on our drinking it together there and then. It was pleasant to drink it with him; it was pleasant to watch his enjoyment of it; but he kept falling asleep at table, a thing I had never seen him do before, even when he was bending his head over the broad-brimmed goblet inhaling the aroma of the wine. His talk grew vague and indeterminate. I did not believe that he would have the vitality to complete his reminiscences. At the same time he would be happy working on them intermittently. The next two years might be among his happiest; an Indian summer.

  On several earlier occasions on grey cold days when I had taken those freezing walks with him, when he had stopped and choked and Wuff had disobeyed him, I had stifled my irritation with the thought, ‘This may be the last time you’ll ever see him. You must make a happy occasion of it.’ This time I had no such feeling. Many more lunches were awaiting me in these next few years. We went upstairs for coffee. He lit a cigar. I have no recollection of what we talked about. Before the cigar was a quarter finished, he fell asleep. As was my wont, I let myself out quietly. It was the last time I saw him.

  A few days after Christmas as he was standing in his bedroom in front of the gas fire, the tails of his shirt caught fire. The burns were serious: pneumonia followed: he died in his sleep.

  The funeral was at the crematorium at Golders Green. It was the first time that I had been to the funeral of anyone for whom I closely cared;
in thirty years our contact with each other had been unbroken. There are those who say that the crematorium service is cold and clinical. I did not feel it was. On the contrary I felt my heartstrings pulled as they never had been at the scattering of earth, by the symbol of the coffin passing out of sight, towards the furnace, followed by the words ‘Go Christian soul’.

  They were discussing Haynes at the Savile that day at lunch. ‘What a pity,’ someone said, ‘that he didn’t die four months earlier, before the trouble broke.’

  I could see what that someone meant: and for his family the trouble inevitably must have been a cause of grief. And he himself may have been saddened by the suspicion that no obituary might appear of him in The Times. At the same time that trouble gave a sense of classic completeness to his life; it rounded the thing off. His full stature became apparent in those last weeks when he displayed in adversity his full stoic calm, his capacity to carry on, to remain an individualist to the end. I would not have had Ted Haynes in himself one iota different: he was of a piece. I would not change the end.

  16

  Son of Oscar Wilde

  VYVYAN HOLLAND

  A traveller such as myself relies on clubs to give a cohesion to his scattered life. I belong to four clubs in London, and two in New York; in addition I have several dining clubs. In London none has mattered to me more than Ye Sette of Odde Volumes. Founded in the 1870s by the bookseller, Bernard Quaritch, who grew tired of paying for his friends’ meals and decided that by forming them into a club he could ensure that his intimates became self-supporting, the Sette is, I believe, the oldest dining club in London. Bookish in its inception somewhat in the trade sense of the word, the rules and ritual suggest a Mason’s handiwork. There are elaborate initiation and inauguration ceremonies. The members wear badges, and the officers assume chains of office. The master of ceremonies carries a seven-foot silver and ebony wand. Until very recently full evening dress was worn. In fact, almost the only times since the war when I have worn white tie and tails have been at the Odde Volumes. Each member has a special cognomen and is known and addressed as Brother Idler, Brother Spectator, or Corinthian. The president is called ‘His Oddship’.

  The constitution was drawn up in terms of what the 1870s considered humorous; facetiousness is the prevailing note. Rule XVI provides a typical example: ‘There shall be no Rule XVI’. It is the habit for the brethren to introduce their guests, one by one, in a speech. It is traditional to insult one’s guests. The more distinguished the guest, the less veiled the insult, Vyvyan Holland once remarking of a well-known publicist, ‘I joined the Sette because I needed somewhere to entertain the kind of man I could not invite to my own house. Mr——is the kind of guest I had in mind.’ The wittiest introduction was that of Eustace Hoare by Maurice Healy. ‘My guest is a member of the second oldest profession in the world. Mr Hoare is a banker.’ Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited made an amusing and irreverent reference to the Sette—Bridey was a member—as ‘a curious association of men, distinguished in their professions, who met once a month for an evening of ceremonious buffoonery’.

  The first half of the evening is conducted on that note. Then the Sette proceeds to justify its claim to be regarded if not as a learned society, at least as a gathering of specialists in different fields. A paper is read, and a relatively serious discussion follows. These papers are twenty to forty minutes long and very often they are printed in a standardized format at the expense of their author and presented to the members. They are listed as opuscula, and over a hundred have been issued. The early ones are considerably the longer, and as I have turned their pages I have wondered how the Odde Volumes of the 1890s, after consuming the many-coursed banquets that were then the fashion, managed to stay awake while they were being read. But most of the more recent opuscula have intrinsic merit; are something more than collectors’ items.

  I joined the Sette in 1920, am now its senior member, though as an Emeritus Odde Volume I take no longer an active part in its affairs, and have seen several changes in its atmosphere over fifty years. The members are now a much livelier lot, and the ritual is treated, as the plays of Wilde are acted, as a period piece. The papers are a good deal shorter. Probably the Sette was at its best in the 1930s, when its membership included doctors like Moynihan and Arbuthnot-Lane, jurists like Norman Birkett, Roland Oliver, and Walter Monckton, wine experts such as André Simon, A. J. A. Symons, Maurice Healy, and Vyvyan Holland, while David Low designed its menus. Surprisingly enough, it did not number many authors, Ralph Straus and J. G. Lockhart being the only professional writers besides myself, but it was during this period that the best opuscula were issued. Perhaps some of the best writing is produced when a man of taste and scholarship writes on his own subject, out of direct personal experience.

  I have an idea that our guests were sometimes bored by the ‘ceremonious buffoonery’ of initiation evenings and by the heavy-handed facetiousness with which some of the brethren introduced their wives on Ladies’ Night; I know I was. But an Odde Volumes evening always led to something else and I enjoyed the back-stage politics, the small lunch and dinner parties that members of the Sette gave each other when they were plotting a palace revolution, smoothing out a difficulty or electing the next year’s officers. These parties because they were convened for a purpose created a genuine link between the four or six men who were grouped round a table. We shared a fraternal bond. During the 1930s I became friendly with several men of eminence in the law and medicine whom otherwise I could scarcely have hoped to know as other than chance acquaintances. In particular I am grateful to the Odde Volumes for having converted a pleasant acquaintanceship with Vyvyan Holland into a friendship that has become one of my most dear possessions.

  In 1954 Vyvyan Holland described in The Son of Oscar Wilde how his father’s tragedy affected him. It is a moving story told with restraint, dignity and warmth. It had a large sale on both sides of the Atlantic and I can assume that anyone who reads these pages will have read or have read about it. In it Vyvyan limited himself to his subject, writing about himself only as ‘the son of Oscar Wilde’. He told us nothing about himself apart from that. This restraint gave his book a special unity.

  His book closes in 1914, and it was not till nine years later that I met him in January 1923 on the evening of my election to the Savile Club. It was a friendship of pleasant but slow growth, possibly because he is not a cricketer and I had not yet started to play golf, and it was in the ‘thirties that with the Odde Volumes as a link, we found how much we have in common. We like the same kinds of person, we played the same kind of golf—though he would not confirm this—we each have a collector’s taste in first editions, we enjoy the pleasures of the table. I have had many of my best times with him.

  He is a man of many interests. After leaving Cambridge he was called to the bar and though he never practised, when Roland Oliver became a judge, he travelled with him on circuit, as a Judge’s Marshal. He has worked off and on in publicity with Richard Temple. He has translated a number of books, but except during the Second War when he was employed in the foreign section of the B.B.C. he has never been a man who went to an office after breakfast. He has worked hard, but intermittently, a man of apparent leisure.

  Between the wars when his father’s books and plays were in copyright, he was comfortably off financially. He had married young, but his wife died tragically in a fire while he was in France with the R.F.A. He returned to peace-time with an O.B.E. and the resolve to enjoy himself.

  He did it as thoroughly as anyone that I have known. There was no reason why he should not have. He was in his early thirties, he was popular, witty, unattached, he had money, he had good health, and tastes that it was not difficult to indulge in post-war London, particularly in post-war Chelsea.

  H. G. Wells said that the two essentials for gallantry were leisure and convenient premises. Vyvyan Holland had both. He was a generous and skilful host and he gave every kind of party in his house in Carlyle Square
. I remember a dance there. I remember many luncheon parties. I remember men’s dinners and ladies’ dinners. I remember dinners for those who were especially interested in wines, when you would sit down at a table faced with three or four glasses, each one numbered, and four decanters of red wine that had taken the room’s temperature, so that you could drink one wine against another. And how many evenings elsewhere did not conclude with Vyvyan’s invitation to ‘finish it in Carlyle Square’, On such occasions he would produce from his cellar a sparkling wine which he called ‘Cutie Champagne’: to the discerning he would whisper out of the corner of his mouth ‘I recommend the whisky’; every kind of party except a cocktail party.

  He did everything with grace and elegance. He was always involved in some romance and, as his friend, I have received many confidences from the ladies who were involved with him. I have never heard one say a spiteful or revengeful thing against him, though I heard one say wistfully, ‘It’s too bad really, I think I’d have been right for him, but I’ve known all along that marriage was not his game.’

  He enjoyed the pleasures of the table, but he was temperate in their indulgence. The early ‘twenties was a wild time in Chelsea but he had his own technique. Going to an evening party that began at nine o’clock, he would ‘case the joint’. If the party appeared likely to continue until 4 a.m. and if he saw a girl there who attracted him, but had an escort, he would return unobtrusively to Carlyle Square, go to bed, sleep for five hours, wake up fresh, take a shower and shave and return to the party. More often than not the escort of the girl who had attracted him would be on the verge of passing out, with she herself ready to welcome anyone capable of a practical appreciation of her charms.