by Alec Waugh
I did not patronize de luxe hotels. In New York I did not want to live anywhere but at the Algonquin. I took a suite, though, instead of a one-room studio apartment. When I entertained I still went to the Chateaubriand, but I ordered better wines and I entertained more often. In London, by throwing a few parties, I was able to reestablish contact with old friends I had lost touch with.
I was also able to take over a number of expenses connected with my children. I stocked up on my wardrobe. I acquired enough clothes to last me for six years and the Brandt office’s secretary Frieda Lubelle cunningly converted a proportion of my royalties into ‘stocks and bonds’.
From the outside, I continued to live precisely the same life that I had two years before and I had the consoling knowledge that when the inevitable slump arrived the signs of it would not be apparent to my friends; they would scarcely be apparent to me. I should be doing the same things, only on a smaller scale, less frequently. And by then I should be ten years older. I should have less energy. I should be content with less. In The Forsyte Saga Galsworthy refers to Soames’s parents as having ceased to give big parties. They had reached the point when the servants realize that ‘the master and the mistress are no longer up to it’.
In 1917 The Loom of Youth had been published in the same week that I went to France as a machine-gun subaltern; so that my head did not get turned with flattery and parties. Now in 1956, the postman had knocked a second time. I was protected by my age and tastes from establishing a changed way of living that I could not maintain.
Had I been told in the summer of 1954 that a novel of mine was going to enjoy such an astonishing success as Island did, I should have imagined that my whole life would be reorientated. It is surprising how little difference it has made in the long run. Early in November 1964, I went down to Nice to write the last half of a novel whose back I had broken in the MacDowell Colony in the preceding spring. I hoped to finish it by the middle of January when I planned to return to England. I should be following precisely the same routine that I had eleyen years earlier when I was writing the first half of Island. I was not staying in the same hotel, the Escurial, but the Windsor in the Rue Dalpozzo was in the same area, and I passed the Escurial every morning on my way to the same Brasserie for breakfast. The Brasserie de Lyons in the Avenue de la Victoire had now become the Grande Café de Lyons, but several of the same waiters were at work. It was smarter, but I looked out on precisely the same view, as I drank my morning coffee over the Nice-Matin.
My routine was still the same with one of my two main meals a picnic in my austere hotel bedroom. There would be the same afternoon siesta with the day’s work finished and the sunset stroll along the Promenade des Anglais before the arrival of the London papers and the reading of them in Café Monnot over a coffee, where there was music and singing in the afternoon; and now, as then, would be the problem of the two hours to be filled in between six and eight, when shops and offices were closing, and men and women, boys and girls, were hurrying back to their homes and families; and loneliness would descend, and I would combat the impulse to sit in a café over a beer, by spending two hours in a cinema. It was all exactly as it had been eleven years before. Nice looked the same, in spite of all the new apartment buildings along the road to Cimiez and the Promenade des Anglais. The football that I watched every Sunday, with the same Australian painter, looked just the same although Nice had temporarily slipped from the first into the second division, and I felt the same, although I was eleven years older.
There was only one difference: my retirement from the literary arena, which could not be many months distant now, was protected behind a bastion of blue chips; and that did make a difference.
* Sir Evan Charteris’s reference to this incident does not altogether endorse the story as I had it from my father. This is one of the points where I write with hesitation.
† Gosse’s mother was an American and he had a natural affinity for the country. or to be fetched from books and pamphlets not always at hand.’
i The story of their involved relationship has been entertainingly and fully told by Douglas Goldring in South Lodge.
i Robin Maugham’s account in Somerset and all the Maughams is slightly different.
* Myself, I agree with Cyril Connolly in preferring six, since that gives opportunities for duologues as well as general conversation.
* Michael Arlen died in the summer of 1956.
* Michael John Arlen has, at the time of writing, a column in the New Yorker.
To the memory of my brother Evelyn in homage and with love
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © Alec Waugh 1967
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ISBN: 9781448201181
eISBN: 9781448202508
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