by Alec Waugh
There was no such scrutiny when I went there first. Yet the studios were theoretically out of bounds after dinner, and there was an exciting sense of truancy about going there in the dusk and shading one’s fire and one’s candle so that the light should not be reflected on the windows. I do not think that Mrs MacDowell was a prude. She thought gallantry interfered with work. And she had had a wistful example in Edward Arlington Robinson of the deleterious effect of alcohol on poetry. She is reported to have said when a particularly dramatic encounter was brought to her attention, ‘Well, if this is the great love affair of the century, I’ve no right to interfere with it.’ In this case she felt that the purposes of literature were being served.
In Mrs MacDowell’s lifetime, the Colony was only open during the summer, from the middle of May until the end of September, and two months was the maximum period of a single stay. In 1957, however, the experiment of opening a winter Colony was made: all the studios were fitted with electric light, and in a certain number of them oil stoves were installed. During the winter a colonist could remain in residence for four months. From this point on, all my visits were made during the winter, partly because those months were for me the most difficult to fit into my programme. The climate of the South of France was capricious. It could rain a lot in Tangier. The West Indies were at their best, but they were also at their most crowded and expensive. On the other hand, the New Hampshire climate was very pleasant. Four days a week the sun was shining and the sky was blue. Snow would be on the ground. Clean, dry snow. The air would be keen and fresh, like that of Switzerland: for someone bronchial like myself it was as healthy as the dry air of Arizona. There would be a day and a half of blizzard; thirty hours of grey skies, then once again the sun should be shining. I would as soon be in Peterborough between Christmas and the first of April as anywhere. That was the first reason why I went there in the winter.
The other reason was a sense of duty. I was free to go anywhere, at any time. The average colonist was not. He could only come up in the summer. Many of the composers were teachers. Their long summer vacation was their only opportunity in the year to get their own work done. I did not feel that I was justified in applying for a studio when it was badly needed by someone else. As long as I got my two or three clear months, it did not matter when they came.
Only fifteen studios were heated in the winter, and the atmosphere was very different. We were a smaller group and we lived under confined conditions. In the summer, on most evenings there was a cocktail party in one or another of the studios. But in winter no one who had fought his way back through the snow to the central Colony buildings wanted to go out again, after they had tidied up. There was, in consequence, less conviviality. The females in the Eaves had a drawing-room and a fireplace; they also had a refrigerator in their kitchen. They would invite males down before dinner for a drink or cocktail. And their male guests every so often would contribute a fifth of bourbon. It was also the custom for one of the colonists, on an occasion, to put wine upon the table. It was scarcely a practical proposition when there were twenty-six colonists. It was easier when there were a dozen.
There are two bad hours in every day. They come at a different time according to the place and time and one’s own metabolism. I made once a long, slow sea-trip westwards from Marseilles to Tahiti in a second-class French ship. Lunch was at eleven thirty; at twelve twenty, just about the time when the meal was ending, the midday bell would clang, and the minute hand would go back to twelve. That twenty minutes to be lived through again symbolized the dreariness of the long hot afternoon that stretched ahead. I had been up since dawn. I had written three-quarters of my daily stint. I would not start again till the day had cooled. How could I survive till four o’clock?
In the MacDowell Colony in the winter, the bad period for me comes between quarter past seven and nine. For me dinner without wine is something of a purgatory, but if I have a couple of strong bourbons in my room I reach the table in sufficiently high spirits to find the first half-hour tolerable; but the exhilaration subsides, and one by one the colonists drift away to the billiard table, the Scrabble board, the TV set. I find an hour of TV adequate. I like to wait till nine, so that I shall be ready to go straight to bed when the show is over. By ten o’clock I shall be drowsy. But if I watch an early programme, I shall not be sufficiently drowsy by half past eight. There is a bottle of bourbon in my room. It would be a pleasant companion for at least fifty of those hundred minutes, but I do not wake fresh if I take alcohol after dinner. I do not want to read. My eyes have been occupied with print all day. There are the alternatives of pool and Scrabble and desultory conversation. I play out time as best I can till nine o’clock, consoling myself with the knowledge of how good the world will seem when I wake up, fresh at five, with the prospect of a long day’s work ahead.
20
Self-Portrait—Nearing Sixty
(Written in 1955)
The least occurrence when we are nearing sixty launches us on a stream of reverie, and a few weeks ago, when my publishers sent me a questionnaire about my habits, plans, tastes and friends, I found myself looking back to 1930, when I was first importuned with such inquiries, a travel book of mine having been a Literary Guild selection. A great deal has happened in the world in general and to myself in particular during the interval and it surprised me that I should be giving practically the same answers that I had a quarter of a century before.
In 1943, as I organized a section of military intelligence in Baghdad, I told myself that ‘the old world’ had gone forever and that on my eventual return to professional authorship I should have to adjust myself to an entirely new way of living. Yet here I am fourteen years later with my routine fixed within a familiar quadrilateral of travel between London, New York, the Mediterranean, the West Indies—with an occasional trip farther afield to the Seychelles or the China Seas—and the issue regulated by what has become for me, as it has I suspect for many of my colleagues, the basic problem of how I am to organize my routine so that it combines the search for subjects with the leisure and tranquillity in which to write, and how that routine is to be reconciled with the needs of those whose lives are involved with mine and with my own personal feelings in regard to them.
As it was in 1930, so is it in 1955. And if in 1930 I could have been shown a picture of my life as it is today, there would have been little in it to surprise me, in spite of the vast changes that the war is supposed to have wrought in all of us; the essential difference being that I am now nearing sixty whereas then I was in the early thirties. But that was a difference which I had foreseen and, could I have been shown that picture in 1930, my chief surprise would have been in the little difference that twenty-five years have made.
Cyril Connolly was recently asked to contribute to a symposium in the Daily Express on what made life worth living. ‘There are,’ he said, ‘only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party for six, and to be travelling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.’
I could not have been so admirably succinct, but at any point in the last thirty years I would have given the same answer, but with cricket added, and that addition pinpoints the difference between being in the thirties and in the fifties. I watch cricket now instead of playing it. Yet even so cricket means very little less to me as I sit in the top gallery at Lord’s. Bill Hitch, the old England and Surrey cricketer, told me that he had not realized how much there was to cricket till he became an umpire.
Travel is as much an adventure to me as it ever was. I love the South and grey skies sadden me. A liner draws away from the docks, a plane lifts from the ground, a train sets out across a continent and there is a sense of an old self discarded. A little later there is the first sight on the horizon of a shadowy shape. Is it a cloud or an island? I lean against the taffrail, with straining eyes and the sense of a new life beginning.
In Where The Clocks Strike Twice I wrote of m
y first evening in the Seychelles Islands:
‘I sauntered that evening along the water front. It looked like a hundred other places. They are all the same, at a first glance, these tropic islands. The one main shopping thoroughfare; the wooden stores with corrugated-iron roofs; the honking horns, the rattling rickshaws; the natives in their Sunday finery; the government buildings, rectangular, two-storeyed, weatherworn; the mango trees that flank the football field; coconut palms aslant over the lagoon; streets that climb back into the hills, losing themselves in greenery; isolated white-verandahed bungalows; thecrotons and the bougainvillea; the brilliant scarlet of the tulip tree; the mountains towering behind. I had seen it all before, in the Pacific, in the Caribbean, in the China Seas; and yet I knew very well that I was to find something here that I had found nowhere else, something unique and personal to this colony that existed nowhere else. What was it to be? I asked myself. My nerves were alert and quivering; the old excitement was upon me. New places and new people, new ways of thought and living, new landscapes, new friendships: that for me is adventure.’
I had the same feeling five years later when a B.O.A.C. aircraft circled over Aden. Those of us who are bitten by the wanderlust are always fretting to get our trunk packed again.
During the last decade, New York has become increasingly my base. For me it is the most exciting city in the world.
Ford Madox Ford entitled a book New York is Not America. I have seen enough of America to know that that is true, but I have also seen enough of America to know that Boston is not either, nor is Chicago, nor New Orleans, nor even the Western prairies. America is a composite entity to which fifty states, two hundred cities, two thousand townships, and innumerable farms have made their individual contribution so that each man and woman who has put down roots within its frontiers is aware of kinship. To those who assert that New York is not America, I reply that it provides a home for eight million Americans.
Twenty-six years ago Charles Hanson Towne called his reminiscences This New York of Mine. A petulant critic said, ‘It may be his; thank God it isn’t mine.’ It was a foolish complaint for it is the charm of all great cities that its citizens can lead private lives of their own choosing and it is the special charm of New York that it should offer such an infinite variety of choice.
During my first long stay in New York I rented a furnished apartment on 36th and Lexington, but for over twenty years I have been staying at the Algonquin, a hotel that is a home for its old friends. In America, where the rooms are much warmer than in England, I wear unlined coats, and the valet stores four suits for me. ‘Brownie’, the head porter, keeps in the basement a kitbag of books and a trunk with a few pictures, an electric kettle, a tea service and a cocktail set. A few personal possessions convert an impersonal hotel lodging into a home. When I am in funds I take a suite, when I am out of funds, a one-room apartment.
The Algonquin is on 44th Street between Fifth and Sixth. My two clubs, the Century and the Coffee House, lie on 43rd and 45th respectively, a stone’s throw distant. My bank is on Park and 42nd. The office of my agent, Carl Brandt, is on Park and 40th. The New York Public Library is two blocks away. My world has a circumference of half a mile.
It is usually in the autumn or the winter that I am in New York. October and November are my favourite months. I spend about a month each visit. I can never work in cities. Too much is going on. I talk my work over with Carl Brandt and with my editors. I do research in the New York Library. But I regard my visits as holidays.
My morning routine is very simple: getting up around six and writing letters; watching the ‘Today’ programme while I shave, breakfasting at a coffee shop twenty-four doors away; reading the morning papers at the Century while ‘Bridie’, my maid at the Algonquin, does up my room; returning to make a call or two; then settling down to a holiday equivalent of a morning’s work, the revising of a manuscript, a visit to the library; sometimes I take in a cinema.
It is soon time for a pre-lunch walk. Walking is the one way of keeping fit for one who is past squash racquets and I walk at least six miles a day. Often on sunny mornings I lunch in the cafeteria at Central Park Zoo. It is pleasant sitting on the terrace with a hamburger and a glass of beer, watching the seals fed. I am told that during World War II many expatriate Europeans frequented it, imagining themselves in Prague and Paris.
In the afternoon I read and rest. Most evenings I have some engagement: a dinner, a theatre or a cocktail party.
London is a man’s city, New York a woman’s city, but in spite of St James’s and Savile Row I believe that a man has a better time in New York, simply because it is a woman’s city. There is greater immediate warmth and friendliness; there is also greater intimacy. You get to know men quicker in New York, also you get to know them better, because you know their wives. In London I have no idea whether the majority of my friends at the Athenaeum, the Savage and the Beefsteak are married, divorced or involved in an obscure liaison. I do in New York. At the Coffee House there is an admirable system by which, on Saturdays at lunch time, members and their feminine guests sit together for cocktails around the raised octagonal table. Since the war I have made more men friends in New York than I have in London, largely, I feel, because I know the womenfolk who have enriched or complicated their existence.
Cocktail parties in New York have no fixed closing hour. Much nourishment is served and the last group does not leave till ten. On evenings when I have no definite commitment afterward, I buy during the afternoon a single ticket for a theatre. I am thus spared the letdown feeling that can come at a cocktail party around eight o’clock, when you feel that there is no point in staying. When I do feel there is a point, it is not without a sense of gesture that I tear up that stub. On days when I tear up the stub, I am unlikely to get back to the Algonquin before half past one: I bring the Daily Mirror with me and study Li’l Abner, Walter Winchell and Sheilah Graham before I fall asleep.
That is the way it is day after day, except that on Sundays I usually motor out into the country for lunch, and I can well imagine a Londoner impatiently demanding what I mean by describing New York as the most dramatic and exciting city in the world. What else is it for you, he will ask, but a round of cocktail parties? Well, perhaps that is a fair complaint if you see New York in terms of London, but that is something which you cannot do. No two cities could be more different.
New York is built on a rock, whereas London is built upon a swamp. That is a basic difference. Where London is spread over a wide area, New York rises fifty storeys high. Everything in New York is very close. A Londoner living in Swiss Cottage meeting at a Bloomsbury lunch party somebody who lives in Kensington might well feel that she lived so far away that it was scarcely worth while following up the acquaintanceship. In New York I am within walking distance of everyone I know.
The tempo is faster in New York because so much more can happen there. Social life is fluid. Acquaintances ripen quickly into friendships. Many Londoners are shy of ringing up someone they have met the night before. They are inclined to ask their hostess to arrange another meeting some time. New Yorkers have not the time for that. New York is a port. There is a long tradition of welcoming ships and waving them Godspeed. If you want to see somebody again you must move fast; she may be gone tomorrow. In a few days your whole life can be reorientated by one new friend who opens a series of new doors for you.
There is also the climate. London is in a temperate zone. New York swings in a few weeks from arctic cold to tropic heat. These changes acerbate the nerves. There is a quality in the air in spring and autumn that makes it possible for you to do more there than in any other city.
But I think what makes New York so dramatic for many of us, certainly for me, is the immediate importance that one’s work acquires there. New York is a market where you buy and sell and, though I do little writing there, I arrive as someone who has just finished a piece of work or is half-way through or about to start one. One’s friends are interested in on
e’s work. For a writer who spends so much of his life alone, that is an exciting change of climate. There is challenge there and a spur to victory—a sense of having one’s batteries recharged.
I can imagine myself living very happily in London as a retired man, pottering round my clubs, going to galleries and exhibitions, watching cricket in the summer, exchanging gossip with old friends. But I should not care to live in retirement in New York; I should feel out of things. You need to be in the swim.
That is what is essential: being in the swim. New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world and I have heard it said that unless you are spending money fast you get no fun there. That is true, but as a corollary, not as a principle. For if you are in the swim you are making money in terms of your opposite numbers and that is what matters: being able to meet your opposite numbers on equal terms. If you cannot, then you are the spectre at the feast. You are better off somewhere else.
Perhaps it is the knowledge that I am a sojourner on 44th Street which makes me love New York so dearly. Sooner or later the bell will toll for me, as it has for others; the rat race will become too fierce and I shall look for a quiet harbour in the sun.
As I re-read this last section, I remember my old friend’s advice, ‘Never choose a novelist as your hero.’ It is a playboy’s life that I have described and it would be difficult to show in a novel how those five or six weeks in New York each year are the reward for months of secluded writing, of living alone with my characters and stories. The discovery of retreats where I can do this is one of my chief concerns. Before the war I went to Villefranche and the Easton Court Hotel at Chagford on whose ‘stout tables’ Elizabeth Eliot, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Patrick Kinross, C. P. Snow and Evelyn Waugh have written novels, but Villefranche with its row of cafés along the water front has become a boîte and I need to spend in London and with my family the few weeks each year that are allotted to me in England as a foreign resident.