by Alec Waugh
My retreats today are as scattered as my life is. In Duarte, California, the late Rollin Kirby’s daughter, Janet Banning, has a guesthouse across the lawn from her ranch where I can cook my own breakfast and work through the morning until it is time to join her at the swimming pool. I have spent three summers at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where each of the twenty-four colonists has a separate studio in the woods outside whose door a lunch basket is left so that the current of the day’s thought is undisturbed. One winter that excellent regional novelist and one of my dearest friends, Virginia Sorensen, went to Denmark on a Guggenheim. Why not? I thought and half a book was written in Copenhagen, in a room looking on the sound. But, by and large, Nice out of the season has been my most constant perch.
For several years now I have based myself in the Escurial, a second-grade residential hotel which lies half a mile back from the sea, in the Avenue Georges Clemenceau. I have a corner room on the fourth floor. One window faces east and I can see on the skyline Vauban’s fortress towering above Villefranche; the other window faces south and looks down on a side street cut by roads running into the Avenue de la Victoire.
I have never worked in a more congenial room. I like to be high up. I need to see something happening: a sailor painting a boat, a small boy selling newspapers, a farmer ploughing a field. The manuscript on my desk then becomes a part of the manifold activities of man. My corner windows in the Escurial present and explain the heart of Provincial France: teen-age girls hurry with slung satchels to their convent school; servants return from market with long rolls protruding from their baskets; modish young women walk their poodles; retired bureaucrats move stiffly and slowly to the Promenade des Anglais.
Nothing could be more placid than my existence there. I wake between half past five and six. The Brasserie du Lyon opens at seven thirty, but its coffee is not hot till a quarter to eight; that gives me ninety minutes at my desk before I go out to breakfast. On my way to the café I buy a paper from a diminutive and shuffling crone.
Nice-Matin is excellent on foreign news, it recounts local peccadilloes with an engaging Latin levity, and the half-hour I spend over my rolls and coffee is one of the pleasantest of the day. On the way back to the Escurial I do my minor marketing—fruit and cheese and yogurt and the cutlet or the slice of steak that I shall cook on my gas ring.
I write 2000 words a day. I may or may not have reached that point by half past eleven. I do not hurry. I am uninterrupted. There are no room telephones and the difficulty of reaching me via the desk and the maid upon the landing is so great that my friends save time by writing. The post arrives shortly before ten. For one who lives abroad the arrival of the post is the day’s big event, and it is for that reason that I resist the temptation to collect my letters when they arrive. Good news might elate me, bad news might depress me, the waving of a friendly signal might send me into a nostalgic reverie; or there might be no mail at all, which would rob the day of half its savour. Anyhow, the current of composition would be broken, so I wait till I have finished my morning’s work and then take out my letters to a seat on the Promenade des Anglais or in the Jardin Albert Premier, or on inclement days to a table in the Café Monnot.
I have friends in Nice, Mougins, Antibes, and about once a week I go out to lunch or dinner or somebody motors over to take a meal with me. And in Cimiez lives Cecile who once ran a bar in Villefranche and of whom I have written in Where the Clocks Strike Twice. Often in the late afternoon I take the trolley bus up the hill, gossip with her for half an hour and walk back as the lights are waking.
I keep a store of red Burgundy in my cupboard and before I go down to collect my mail I open a bottle, so that the wine may breathe and be ready to welcome my return. I sip it slowly, munching a hard dry cheese, brooding over my story, living with my characters, talking out their speeches. It is the most creative period of my day. An hour becomes ninety minutes and in the street below the noontide siesta is broken by the Vespas and motor-cycles of people going back to work.
By two the bottle is three-quarters finished. I cork it up, tidy away the plates and if I am short of my daily quota I make it up. If I am not, I answer letters till it is time for my siesta.
When I wake it is close on four and by four o’clock the London newspapers will be on the kiosks. The Promenade des Anglais will be crowded and it is very pleasant strolling along the water front in the declining sunlight, when the sea on windless days takes on the glazed mauve sheen that made Homer call it wine-coloured, pausing now and then to read the paper and to watch the passers-by, with the agreeable sense of fatigue and of fulfilment that follows a hard day’s work. Pleasant though it is, however, when the light fades there comes that melancholy which George Moore described in ‘Bring in the Lamp’, the loneliness endemic to those who work alone. Evening is at hand and it is easy to be self-pitying, thinking of all those for whom the recompense of the long day is being paid: work is finished; pleasure and relaxation are opening their doors; the sidewalk tables beckon.
Between six and seven there is a steady parade back and forth down the Avenue de la Victoire. It is pleasant to sit over a Pernod watching it. One Pernod becomes two. And after two Pernods one finds oneself saying to oneself, ‘Why not a proper meal in a restaurant for a change?’ But that would involve wine and after a good dinner in a restaurant it is a temptation to linger over a liqueur, and I know that after a heavy meal and spirits I should not wake so fresh. So I go to a cinema instead.
By the time I come out, evening has given way to night, my mood of melancholy has passed. I return to the Escurial, heat some soup and finish the wine. Maybe I write a letter or two. Maybe I read for half an hour. Usually I am in bed by ten, with The Oxford Book of English Verse: within a quarter-hour, I have switched off the light.
That is my real life and nothing could be less dramatic: you could not make a novel out of the interior problems presented by a routine like that. It is when I am living like that, that I am most myself.
‘The pleasure of writing a tolerably good book.’ Who is to say what is ‘tolerably good’? By what standard is one to judge oneself? By ultimate standards or by the more modest and more human, ‘Well, I don’t think this is too bad for me’? So much highfalutin nonsense was written once about the agonies of composition and the high fever of imagination that it is now fashionable to be low brow, with novelists talking about themselves as, though they were hard-boiled businessmen ‘out to make the most of it’. That is not really the way it is. It may seem presumptuous for a very minor writer to talk of the excitement that his work brings him. It lays him open to the obvious retort: ‘It is a relief to know it excites him. It leaves us calm enough.’ But the best periods of my life have been those when I have been working on a congenial theme.
I have no illusions about my status as a writer. A writer is tried before a high tribunal. Not only the present sits in judgement on him, but the past as well. A field-marshal’s stature is not diminished by the victories of Condé, Marlborough and Napoleon. But a modern novel is made puny by the continuing challenge of War and Peace, David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov.
I started with very high ambitions and if in 1917 I could have foreseen myself as I am in 1955, with so little done, I should have been humiliatingly disappointed. That is a usual experience; it is the common lot. The contrast between the promise of life and its fulfilment is a familiar theme. On the other hand, had I at eighteen foreseen what my personal life was to be I should have been astounded. I had no idea then that life could be so full, so varied, that its gifts could be so abundant. I did not know life had so much for giving. Yet the things that have made my life a continuing adventure—sport and gallantry, soldiering and travel—have been side shows in the last analysis. Though my achievement is so minute, I have always put writing first. I have been most alive seated at a table in a hotel bedroom facing a solitary day.
Writers have their ups and downs and in January 1953, my fortunes had
struck an all-time low. For eighteen months I had been concentrating on short stories, and had sold only one story in America, to Esquire. I had not an idea left. I was wondering where I went from there, and then that one Esquire story was bought by Hollywood.
My first thought, naturally for me, was, ‘I’ll take a long trip, find new subjects, renew myself.’ But on the crossing back to England on the Ile de France I got the idea for a West Indian novel. I did not guess then that it would be a quarter of a million words in length, but I knew that it would be long and I was grateful to Twentieth Century-Fox’s pennies for allowing me to devote my entire energies to it for twenty months.
That was as good a moment as life has given me and I have never been more excited than I was fifteen months later when, with the book half written, I flew up from the West Indies, where I had obtained the final material, to a quiet ten weeks in the MacDowell Colony where, with every facility provided for concentration, I could write the rest of it.
If a genie were to offer me a final wish, it would be this—that I might meet an equivalent excitement once more before the curtain falls.
21
Island in the Sun
In the previous chapter I described how in January 1953 my fortunes sank to an all-time low, how I was reprieved ‘in the nick of time’ by the sale to Twentieth Century-Fox of a short story and how on the journey back to England, I got the idea for a West Indian novel. The writing and publication of a novel is usually undramatic and the biography or autobiography of a novelist which deals with his novels one by one, in detail, is tedious. Yet even so, for those who are interested in authorship and authors, the story of certain books has its fascination. And in my own case two books fill their own small niche in literary history: my first novel, The Loom of Youth, and my eighteenth, Island in the Sun.
I got the idea of the book in a flash as I was pacing the decks of the Ile de France, but the idea was the sudden fusing of four different plots that had been turning ineffectively in my mind. Shortly after the end of the war I had begun a novel about a woman who had killed a man by mistake—in the course of an argument she struck at him; in stepping back he slipped on a rug and as he fell, hit his head against the edge of a table. She decided not to tell the police; she was later blackmailed. I set the plot in Baghdad and called it ‘Murder at the Alwiyah Club’. I wrote 25,000 words and then broke down.
I also had had the idea for a short story turning on colour. A young American from the South falls in love with the daughter of a West Indian planter. She discovers that she has coloured blood through her father; she feels that she has no right to marry a Southerner; their children will be outcasts. Her mother puts her mind at rest by telling her that she is not her father’s daughter.
I had another embryo plot. I got it from the highly respectable and punctilious wife of a neighbouring vicar. She said that when her husband went to preach in another parish and spent the night away from home, she raised the seat of the downstairs lavatory so that if a burglar broke in he would believe that there was a man in the house and would not come upstairs. I thought that a raised lavatory seat could fan a husband’s jealousy. He could return home to recognize the smell of an unusual cigarette. The lavatory seat was raised. A strange man must have been in the house.
In 1948, the Labour Government appointed Lord Baldwin to the governorship of the Leeward Islands. They wanted a Socialist and a peer, a man who had ample private means, and would not be made pusillanimous by the career-official’s resolve to avoid trouble at the end of his career and finish up as a knight. Baldwin’s appointment was the subject of fierce criticism in the House of Commons, and his conduct in the Islands was melodramatic. I wondered what kind of dramatic commotion would have arisen had a Conservative Government appointed a peer who was a first-class cricketer: I had Lionel Tennyson in mind.
For these four different ideas, a fifth new idea acted as a catalyst. A planter of the old school, in order to discredit a young coloured rabble-rouser and the democratic, in his eyes subversive, ideas that the rabble-rouser stood for, incites a riot in which he himself is killed; a riot which will convince the authorities in England that the West Indians are not yet ready for self-rule. With these various themes at work on my imagination, I set off early in March for Nice to get the back of the book broken.
Of course I did not. It has been my invariable experience to open a novel with enthusiasm, to write at a steady pace for three weeks or a month, and then suddenly run dry. I have to wait at least a month, usually longer, before I can get started again. This time I wrote solidly for a month. I took a month’s holiday in England, then set out again for Nice. On the way down, by air, I read the typescript of the first section. I realized that it would not do at all. Something was badly wrong.
During the next month I came to realize what that something was.
The novel in this first draft opened with a husband—the old-time planter—returning to his house shortly before lunch to detect the smell of an unusual cigarette. He does not smoke himself and as a result is particularly sensitive to the smell of smoke. He goes into the lavatory. The smell is stronger there. The seat is raised. A man has been smoking that cigarette. At lunch his wife makes no reference to a visitor. He gives her an opportunity to describe her morning. She does not refer to any visitor. His suspicions are roused. It is a quick six-page scene.
The second scene described a cocktail party at Government House. It is a long forty-page scene; it introduces all the chief characters and sets out the main problems of their lives. It was a very intricate piece of writing. I thought I had got it right, but the narrative dragged. At last I realized why it did. The reader had not been sufficiently alerted by the opening scene to feel inquisitive about the various people who were going to influence the course of the action that had opened in that first scene. And they had not been sufficiently alerted because the husband and wife were in their middle fifties. A middle-aged husband married to a young wife could be acutely, physically jealous. But he would not be jealous in that way about the companion of thirty years who has borne him three children. He might be worried and concerned, largely on her account, feeling that she was on the brink of a great mistake; he might be distressed on his own account because the security of his home and family were imperilled; there are a number of emotions that he might experience, but there was one very certainly that he would not feel: the wild uncontrollable jealousy that Othello felt for Desdemona. And that was the kind of jealousy that was needed to keep the reader on his toes during a forty-page description of a cocktail party. It had to be a young husband who was uncertain of his wife. So I made it the son of the old-time planter who returned to the smell of an unusual cigarette. The reader’s curiosity was set alight.
I worked on the novel intermittently through the summer. Then in September I went to Nice, to ‘the small hotel bedroom’ that has solved so many problems for the novelist. By Christmas half the novel was finished—about 120,000 words. After Christmas I went to New York. Carl Brandt was very anxious to see what I had written. But I declined. I felt that there was something wrong with the book, but I wanted to find out what it was myself. I was afraid of being side-tracked. Carl would sense that there was something wrong. He might prescribe, I will not say the wrong medicine, but a medicine that was not the one most in tune with my own subconscious conception of the plot. A novelist always knows inside himself what his story needs. If he gives himself time he will find out for himself. And luckily I had time, thanks to my Hollywood dollars.
I had an invitation to spend two weeks in Duarte and I spotted my mistake. One of my characters, the son of the Governor, and a future peer, was, in a sense, the hero. He was the man for whom the reader was expected to be ‘rooting’. He was a thoroughly sound, wholesome fellow and it is very hard not to make that kind of character a prig. Yet if one tries to humanize him, by putting into his mind, or by expressing in a subjunctive soliloquy, devious intentions, the reader is put off. ‘That’s wrong for hi
m.’ It was essential that I should get him right. But how to do it?
The device I chose may seem a very simple one, but it is one that would only occur to an experienced novelist unless, by chance, he had got it right from the beginning. After writing twenty novels, one knows the various techniques and I realized that to make this character, Euan, a sympathetic, warm human being, I must never let the action appear through his eyes. He must always be presented to the reader through the eyes of other characters. He must be described and talked about; but his own thoughts must never be put on paper except in as far as they emerged in conversation; in the way, in fact, that Galsworthy presented Irene Forsyte. I left Duarte knowing that I had solved my problem.
I finished the novel at the end of July, and in August I took the typescript down with me to Villefranche to revise. I was accompanied by my second son, Peter, then a schoolboy in his sixteenth year. I would join him on the beach shortly before lunch, with three hours’ work behind me. He told me afterwards that he had never seen so much excitement on a face before. ‘I think it’s all right, Peter,’ I would say, and my eyes were glowing. I had no doubt about the book at all. I was confident that it was good. I was wondering how good. My surprise and consternation could not have been more complete than when I received, four weeks later, a chilling reception from my London agent.
It was in his opinion much too long. Pruning was not enough; it needed a major operation. He suggested the removal of the murder which was the backbone of the book. Even if I retained the murder, the funeral scene that followed it must go. The chief character did not convince him. He made a number of additional objections. He found nothing to praise, though he concluded his letter with the hope that he had not discouraged me. ‘There is a good book here,’ he wrote. He invited me to call and discuss it with him.