by Alec Waugh
It was the biggest shock that I had received not only in my professional career, but in my personal life. Virginia Sorensen has kept the letter that I wrote her the next day. ‘If this man’s right,’ I said, ‘I do not know where I go from here.’ I put myself in the confessional. I was fifty-six years old; I had been writing for nearly forty years. That was a long time. I might have lost my critical capacity. I had already lost the knack of the short story, which needed conciseness and taut treatment; within the broad limits of the novel I might have become garrulous and flabby. I did not, however, lose my head. ‘You may be right,’ I told my agent. ‘But before I hear what you have to say, I want to re-read the book, in the light of your letter.’ I was bound for Copenhagen. I took the MS. with me.
I read it slowly. It was nine hundred pages long. It held no surprises for me. When I had sent off the revised script, I had thought, ‘I shan’t ever have to read that again. I’ll only glance through it in covers.’ Yet, even so, I did not find the re-reading tiresome. The narrative moved fast. It was easy reading. The murder came half-way through the book. It was an extension of the original ‘Murder at the Alwiyah Club’. It was melodramatic certainly, but most long novels need violence at a certain point. The novelist arranges a setting of normal people leading their customary lives, then something unusual happens. You recognize their true natures by seeing how they behave under unusual circumstances. That is an axiom of the craft of the fiction. The murder in my novel fulfilled a necessary function, as did the funeral scene to which my agent had objected.
In most detective novels, certainly in Agatha Christie’s, there is a scene about half-way through where the detective recapitulates the evidence so as to remind the reader of what has passed and put him in full possession of all the facts before the second lap begins. That was what the funeral scene did here. It gave each character a chance to indulge in a subjective soliloquy. It was a gathering up of all the previous threads. It was an essential scene, but it was four pages too long. My agent, because he had been bored, thought the whole scene should go. Not being a novelist himself, he did not realize how much difference can be made by the cutting of four pages. With those pages removed, the funeral scene played its part effectively in the development of the drama. I felt as confident about it now as I had in Villefranche, but I thought I would take a second opinion.
Virginia Sorensen, whom I had met the previous summer in MacDowell, had come to Copenhagen on a Guggenheim. It was, indeed, her presence there that was responsible for my desertion of Nice. I asked her if she would read it. She did not see my agent’s letter. I did not want her to start with a preconceived idea. I only told her that he had thought it overlong, that he had told one of his staff that I had bitten off more than I could chew. She herself tended to write too lengthily at the beginning of her novels. The drama did not develop for a hundred pages or so. She had usually had to cut her opening chapters; and I imagine that she began to read it with the thought, ‘How can I explain to him most tactfully that, excellent though this is, in the interests of the whole it should be cut?’ But on the contrary she, as its first reader, was its first enthusiast. That decided me. I instructed ‘my man in London’ to send at once one copy to Cassell’s, and another to Carl Brandt in America.
He replied, ‘So be it. No one will be more pleased than I if Carl approves of it,’ rather in the tone of the headmaster who says, ‘No one will be more pleased than I, Waugh, if you have passed your exam,’ knowing full well that you have not. Luckily, however, Carl Brandt did approve. He wrote:
Your novel got here and I had myself a fine time with it. I read every word although I was rather sure from the first hundred or so pages that magazine use would be very unlikely. The reasons for this I am sure are as clear to you as they are to me.
Not only the colour question but the frankness of some of the relations of sex. I am, however, letting Hugh Kahler of Ladies’ Home Journal see it. Miracles do happen!
But I want to tell you that to me, this is your best novel. I could give you a list of reasons but I’ll spare you. Primarily I’m for it because of your characters and their interplay.
The story is brilliantly steered through its intricacies of plot. Your balances of interest are always even. It seems to march inexorably to its goal.
And the characters! H. E., Archer, the Police Chief (what a ducky he is!), the man who got murdered, H. E.’s son, the American reporter. The women—Olivia, Sylvia, the brazen hussy who was made into a woman by the negro Attorney General, the mother—the whole works! iooo congratulations. If the book does not sell, I’ll not know what’s wrong with the public.
No book is a best-seller unless it has a lot of luck and the fairy godmother in the case of Island in the Sun was unquestionably Carl Brandt. It owed everything to him. If he had reacted as my London agent had, I doubt if Farrar and Straus would have bothered to read it. They would have wondered how best they could cut their losses on it. Roger Straus is, indeed, fond of telling of the dismay with which he viewed the bulk of this new MS. He had been losing money on me steadily for seven years. This seemed the last straw. At Christmas a Press reporter in Copenhagen had photographed me holding between both hands my bulky manuscript. I sent the photograph to John Farrar. I wrote, ‘Look what Santa Claus is sending you for Christmas.’ John did not think it funny. He made no reply. Roger Straus had the manuscript sitting on his desk for ten days, trying to work up the courage to tackle it. It was only Carl Brandt’s incessant badgering that forced him eventually to take it home with him. Once he had started reading, he went on reading. ‘This, clearly,’ he wrote to Carl, ‘is the book we have been waiting for. We will print a first edition of ten thousand copies.’
A copy of this letter was sent to London. I awaited my agent’s comment with curiosity. As I received no letter from him I assumed that he was on a holiday, and when I wrote to him on another matter, a month or so later, I asked him where he had been for his holiday. ‘Why do you think I have been away?’ he wrote. ‘I have been dutifully at my desk since Christmas.’ Neither then nor later did he refer to the different reception the book had received from that which he had anticipated. He did, however, make a contribution to the book’s success. He was responsible for the title. I had originally called it The Sugar Barons. That was a big contribution.
Thirty years earlier, when I had watched the success of novels like If Winter Comes, The Green Hat, Anthony Adverse, I had observed a familiar pattern to the process. A book was published, it received good reviews, it was talked about, then suddenly it ‘caught on’, and the printers could not turn out copies fast enough. Curtis Brown, the agent, once said to me, ‘There is a turning point at which the avalanche begins. It might be the weight of a single copy that turns the scale.’ That is not the way it is today. A book becomes a best-seller eight months before it has been published, before a single copy has been bound, before it has been read by a single critic.
Virginia Sorensen had decided to finish off her Guggenheim with a trip to the South of France. I acted as her guide. We made our base in Nice, at the Hotel Escurial, where I had written the first half of Island in the Sun. It was early April. One afternoon we returned from an excursion in the mountains to find a message that New York had been trying to reach me on the telephone. It was the first time that I had been telephoned from New York. I had a twinge of anxiety. Could anything be wrong? But there was nothing that could be wrong. It was eight months since I had been there. No member of my family was in New York. It had to be good news. My heart was beating as I waited in the telephone box. There was a succession of voices, first French and then American; finally there was a familiar voice, Carl Brandt’s. ‘Ladies’ Home Journal has bought your novel. Twenty-two thousand, five hundred.’
It was completely unexpected. I did not know what was happening. Carl Brandt tells me that I asked if it was dollars or francs and then said, ‘I’m going out to stand a drink to everyone on the Promenade des Anglais.’ But I do not remember;
I was in a daze. I sat on the hotel stairs, my elbows on my knees, my chin supported by my fists. ‘If this has happened,’ I thought, ‘anything can happen.’
I sat there for several minutes. The plump manageress of the hotel walked across the hall. I jumped up. I ran towards her. I flung my arms round her neck and kissed her on both cheeks.
‘If this could happen, anything could happen.’ Three days later there was a cable, saying, ‘Literary Guild Selection January’. The following day there was another cable: ‘Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club’. There was a letter from Roger Straus: ‘I can picture you driving up the Promenade des Anglais in a yellow Jaguar.’ Every day that week we were having celebrations. Eliza Parkinson, one of my best friends, a director of the Museum of Modern Art, was down there, and with her another dear friend of mine, the painter Lily Cushing. It was one party after another.
From Nice Virginia and I were going to Geneva by bus, where our ways were dividing, temporarily. We had to make an early start; as we waited for our taxi on the hotel steps the night porter came up with the news that New York had tried to get me on the telephone last night, but that he had not been able to find me. Virginia and I were celebrating in her room with a final bottle of champagne. We looked at one another. New York on the telephone again. That could only mean one thing: Hollywood. On the way to Grenoble I cabled Brandt the name of the hotel in Geneva where I would be staying. On our first afternoon there, the call came through. ‘20th Century Fox. A hundred and forty thousand dollars.’ Virginia Sorensen tells me that I said, ‘I didn’t know there was so much money in the world.’
In the course of four weeks I had earned nearly a quarter of a million dollars. At the age of fifty-six I had become overnight a different person, with a different future and different problems. Yet the strange thing about this metamorphosis was that to my friends I was exactly the same person. None of my friends in London were aware that anything had happened. When If Winter Comes, The Green Hat and Anthony Adverse were booming, A. S. M. Hutchinson, Michael Arlen and Hervey Allen were obviously the spoiled children of good luck. They did not have to tell anyone how many editions had been exhausted. Everybody knew. But nobody knew that I had hit the New York jackpot. And I could not very well announce it in the sandpit at the Savile. It was a very curious sensation. I had a sense of masquerading, of pretending to be someone that I had ceased to be.
The news of my good luck trickled slowly through. In June I went to the P.E.N. Club Congress in Vienna. Harold Rubinstein’s nephew, who was a partner in Gollancz’s firm, was there. He had heard a rumour and asked me if it was true. Cecil Roberts wrote me a letter from Alassio: ‘I have just heard that you have made 500,000 dollars. I am sure that there must be an extra nought slipped on, but 50,000 is a lot of money. I am delighted.’ At the Authors and Booksellers Cricket Match, Billy Collins congratulated me on my good luck. And in the Savile, Nigel Balchin came across to me with a ‘They’re talking about you in Hollywood these days.’ But otherwise that summer was no different from any other summer except that I had more money. I fancy that Farrar and Straus were holding back the story until nearer publication, which had been fixed for January so as to allow for the serial version to run in the Ladies’ Home Journal. It was not till September that the story broke, with a paragraph in Time.
In the same week, I started out on a trip to Hong Kong, pausing at Aden, Rangoon, Singapore and Borneo. In none of these places could I expect anyone to have heard of Island in the Sun. At Aden a man said to me at dinner, ‘I have read all your brother’s books and your one book.’ I thought to myself, ‘That’s probably the last time I shall have that said to me.’
I returned to England shortly before Christmas to find a number of press cuttings from America. In the New York Times Book Review, Harvey Breit had written:
The story of Evelyn Waugh’s brother Alec—as a writer we mean—is a story to hearten all writers. Five years older than the cigar smoking satirist, he has in a sense lived in the large and provocative shadow of his brother’s renown. Still Mr Waugh—our Mr Waugh—went along publishing his novels and doing quite all right. He seemed to fit the niche of the solid professional who lived in relative comfort. When his new manuscript came along a little while back, we should be willing to bet Farrar Straus and Cudahy were pleased in a routine kind of way. At least that’s how we would have responded, we confess.
But then something happened. We don’t know what exactly. Maybe Mr Waugh put a little extra something into his novel titled ‘Island in the Sun’. Maybe Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, or one of the editors there, found a way to put it over. At any rate Mr Waugh’s newest fiction has gone over with an allergaroo, as they say in college. Instance the Reader’s Digest Book Club has taken it for its mid-winter issue. Instance the Ladies’ Home Journal is serialising it in five instalments. Instance the Literary Guild has made it their January selection. Instance Twentieth-Century Fox has bought it and the film will be produced by Darryl Zanuck.
Mr Straus, we understand, wrote Mr Waugh the tidings and at the end added ‘I suppose you will be shopping for a yellow Jaguar’. Mr Waugh replied no, he didn’t even hold a driver’s licence. Jaguar or not, licence or not, Mr Waugh will roll into New York in time for culminating celebrations January next.
There was a letter from Roger Straus listing some of the parties and publicity that he was planning for my arrival in the week after publication. He himself was giving me an evening party at his house: there was to be a cocktail party on one of the Grace Line ships on the eve of its sailing on a luxury Caribbean cruise. I was to appear on the ‘Today’ show. I was clearly going to be fêted, yet as the day approached I became increasingly apprehensive. It still seemed to be fantastic that a novel should be a best-seller before a single critic had pronounced judgement on it. What an opening it gave for an irritated reviewer. I reminded myself that ‘my man in London’, who had thought so poorly of the book, was an exceptionally sound critic. The failings in the book might well be more marked than its merits. I could imagine a disgruntled envious reviewer writing: ‘The contemporary literary market has reached an all-time low when a novel can gross very nearly half a million dollars before a single qualified critic has given his opinion and before the public has had an opportunity of deciding whether it is to its taste. The arbiters of popular taste are a small panel of interested persons who sit on editorial boards and bookclub committees; a dozen people at the most decide what the public is to read, and dictate the public taste. Let us, therefore, examine at length, carefully and judicially, the book that has been accepted for this fantastic acclamation.’
He would then proceed to pull the book to pieces as ‘my man in London’ had. ‘And this is the book,’ he would conclude, ‘that has been accorded this ridiculous financial accolade, when books of genuine quality sell their few thousand copies and their authors are driven to hack work of various kinds to provide them with the leisure in which to write them. To what a parlous state have the standards of critical taste descended?’
A certain type of critic would be sorely tempted. He would believe himself to be performing a high service to literature. And perhaps he might be. It was, after all, ridiculous that one book should earn so much, when better books earned so little. And it might not be only one ill-tempered critic who wrote in that tone. The majority might well agree with my London agent. I might be made a laughing stock. I tried to console myself with the thought that even if I were, I should have my share of a considerable bulk of bullion stacked away. That was well worth a blush. But all the same, I was apprehensive.
I was due to dock in New York on the first Saturday in January. The book was published on the Tuesday. On that evening I received in mid-Atlantic a cable from Roger Straus congratulating me on my birthday press. The ship stopped at Halifax. I searched the shops for New York papers. I found a copy of the Herald Tribunes Sunday Book Supplement. It contained a long review by Virgilia Petersen. There was hardly a single ‘but’ in a page of praise. I
re-read and re-re-read it. The sentences so imprinted themselves on my mind that I quoted them in my dreams. I woke up repeating them. That showed me how apprehensive I had been. I need not have been. It was roses, roses all the way.
Success is a heady wine. For a man who had never in his most prosperous period earned fifteen thousand dollars in a year, and usually thought himself lucky to get away with ten, the sudden earning in four weeks of more than he had made in forty years, at the age of fifty-six, may well appear a shattering experience. So many things that had been out of reach all my life and that I had ceased to expect to come within it were now accessible. There was a parallel with Jurgen’s recovering of his youth in middle age. Yet actually the very fact that I was fifty-six made the experience unexplosive. I knew that I had only a brief summer to enjoy. I could not at my age, with nearly forty books already written, expect to follow up this success. I had neither the energy nor the material. Moreover, I was a man who had built his life the way he wanted and had no wish to alter it. I liked its rootless, semi-bachelor pattern. I liked living in hotels. I loved the sun, and the grey skies of an English winter saddened me. I loved to travel, to be a part of a dozen different worlds. I was a scattered person. I liked my life the way it was. I had no wish to have it any different. Island in the Sun made it possible for me to continue to lead the same life a little longer, a bit more amply.
Micawber said that to have an annual income of twenty pounds, and spend twenty pounds and sixpence was misery, but to have twenty pounds a year and spend nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence was happiness. Up to the summer of 1955 I had always been slightly, though not dangerously, in the red. Now I was comfortably in the black. I committed no rash extravagances. I travelled more often and I travelled farther. I went round the world. I went to Japan and Brazil for the P.E.N. Club Congresses. I spent a winter in Siam. Once or twice I flew first class by Pan American for the experience, but for the most part I continued to fly tourist. I was on my guard against the humiliation I might feel when I could no longer afford to travel first, and had to confess to my travel agent that I must travel cheaply.