by Alec Waugh
‘I’ll have to do a good deal of thinking during the next eight months. I’ve got to make up my mind about what I’m going to do. I’ve not really given it a thought till now. There was no reason why I should. No one’s ever bothered about me. Our family life was built round my brother. He would come into the title, he would inherit the house. Everything was going to be his. Our father lived in him. He had no career of his own; the Peronnes have an inherited reluctance to enter public life: a need for peace after those religious wars; he sat and voted in the House but he hardly ever made a speech. An occasional question, that was all. My brother’s place in form, his cricket, his batting average: that’s what mattered to him. I believe I became a wet bob simply so as not to be in competition with my brother’s memory.
‘I liked my brother. He was seven years older; as you know there were two sisters in between. With that disparity of age, we couldn’t be very close. But he was generous: he never patronised me. He had a glamour of his own, particularly when the war began. He was in uniform within a month, a Grenadier. He was in France soon after Christmas and before Easter he was back with a purple and white ribbon on his tunic, and military crosses weren’t dished, out with the rations. Then there was Loos, and he got wounded there. With his arm in a sling, he had an added dash of glamour.
‘He got engaged to be married; she was a pretty little thing, only eighteen. But I am sure that at any other time my father would have raised some highly effective opposition. As it was, I suppose it was the subconscious knowledge that the betting was against his son’s survival, the need for a grandson . . . It was a very short engagement. Within a few months he was fit again for active service. They were married on his last leave; that was in April, 1916. The last letter he got before he went into the Somme offensive brought the news that she was pregnant. It seems unkind to say it, but I believe that when the news of my brother’s death came through, heart-broken though he was, my father’s chief anxiety was whether that child would be a boy.’
His voice had taken on a different, a deeper tone. It was the first time that I had heard him talk about himself. I had never seen him serious before. Sitting upright in his chair, with Judy’s head against his knees, he could not see her face. But I, sitting opposite, could; and as his voice changed so did her expression. Puzzled at the start, it softened, became tenderer. She, too, was seeing him now in a new light. She had fallen in love with him,, almost at first sight. He was someone altogether new to her. With his looks, his name, his prestige, it was natural that he should dazzle her. But he had been outside her experience, he had seemed immune from the problems that harassed the world into which she had been born. He had appeared privileged and unique. Now she recognised that he had his problems too. That made him more personal for her, humanised him, yet at the time they were so exclusively his own, so unlike the problems that other young men confided in her, that he lost nothing of his strangeness for her. On the contrary, they accentuated his uniqueness.
Neither she nor I felt the least wish to interrupt. ‘It was a strange time for me. I was then just twelve. In the top form at Summerfields. My headmaster broke the news to me in a formal, stereotyped way. He had had to break that kind of news so often. But one of the masters did appreciate my particular position. “If your brother’s child should turn out to be a girl, you’ll be a Lord.” I nodded. Yes, I had realised that.
‘Realised it without taking it in. I had never thought of myself as being my father’s heir. I had always thought of myself as a second son. I had been perfectly content with what I was. I was fortunate to be so well placed. I had been born under a lucky star. Yet at the same time it would be exciting to be a peer, to take my seat in the House, to make speeches, to be caricatured in the press, to wear regal robes, to attend the coronation, all that kind of thing. Yes, it would be fun, but I don’t think I was in the least disappointed when my brother’s child was a boy. I shared in the thanksgiving, my father was so delighted; there were such festivities at Charminster. My father forgot that he was in mourning. He started to rearrange the house in terms of having his favourite son’s son as his heir. The succession had not been interrupted.
‘My nephew had been born in late November. Christmas was given over to these rearrangements. My sister-in-law— Margaret—had been staying with her parents. He soon had all that altered. “Of course she has to live here,” he said. “This is going to be her son’s home. He must get adjusted to its being his home as soon as he’s aware of anything.” He discussed it with me at length.
‘“We’ll give her your mother’s old room. Then the boy, as soon as he’s old enough, can have that little room beside her, the same that Adrian had. We must make it up to him in every way we can. He’ll soon know what he’s lost through not having a father, but we’ll have to diminish it as much as possible. We owe that to Adrian.”
‘I’m not at all sure that my father wasn’t, in his heart, rather relieved that he was a widower, so that he could make the house over to Margaret. He could never have done that when my mother was alive. She wouldn’t have stood for that. Nor, I guess, would Margaret. My father had another reason for wanting to make Margaret as comfortable as possible— he didn’t want her to re-marry. He didn’t want his grandson to be brought up by a step-father. Margaret was under twenty. She was pretty enough. My brother left her quite a little money. If she’d been left alone in London, she’d soon have been snapped up, she’d have wanted to be snapped up. But she’d think twice about leaving a house like Charminster.
‘My father’s been very tactful with her. He’s given her all the freedom that she wants—trips abroad, that kind of thing. If she wants to have an affair, and I presume she does, nothing could be easier. My father always assumes in his conversation that she’ll be leaving some day. “Of course I’ll be sad when you do have to leave me, and I know you will —this is no life for a young girl like you. I’ll be delighted for your sake when you find the man who’s right for you, but till that day comes we must see that you have as good a time as possible. You must ask young people down here. It’ll stir me up. I need enlivening.”
‘He never questions her about her friends. I’m sure that several of the men who’ve come have been her lovers. She’s having it, not both ways, but several ways at once. Why should she want to marry, when she’s already got all the substantial emoluments of marriage, and why should any man want to marry her when he can get all he wants without the responsibilities of marriage? I’ll bet that there’s quite a number of men waiting for their turn; and why not, after all, the best of luck to her; but you can see, can’t you, why I don’t want to spend too much time there.’
‘You don’t like her very much ?’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t dislike her, but, after all, she’s taking my brother’s and my mother’s place. I can’t think of Charminster as my home: any more than my father thinks of it as being mine. I don’t belong there.’
He paused, half interrogatively, as though he were expecting one of us to speak. We neither did, at first. But the pause continued.
‘Where do you feel you do belong?’ I asked.
‘That’s what I’ve been asking myself during those two long drives. As I’ve already said, I’ve never thought much about myself till now, but now … well, I’ve got to come to some decision now—and there’s one way in which you can be a help.’
‘I’ll be delighted.’
‘Wait till you know what I’m asking. You wouldn’t believe it, but what do you think I’ve been doing in my spare time, this last few weeks ? Writing a novel.’
I was not surprised. I have met very few people who have not at some point in their lives at least started on a novel. And those who have not, usually have a locked drawer in their desk that contains, not love letters but unpublished and unpublishable sonnets. As always in such a situation, I expressed appropriately surprised enthusiasm.
‘Fine, how far has it got?’ I asked.
‘Quite a long way. I’ll
show you.’ He got out of the chair. Beside the coat which he had flung over a chair was a large buff-coloured envelope. He handed it across to me. It contained over a hundred and fifty pages of typescript, double-spaced. It was a neat job of work, with alterations.
‘How much of a novel’s there?’ he asked.
‘About half of a short novel.’
‘I expect it’ll be a long novel then.’
‘Publishers don’t mind that; if it’s good, they’ll want it.’
‘Would you be able to tell from that amount whether it’s the kind of book they would want?’
‘I ought to be.’
‘How long would it take you to read it?’
‘Half a day.’
‘Then would you lunch with me on Wednesday and tell me what you think ?’
‘Delighted.’
‘Simpson’s, then. Simpson’s in the Strand at one-fifteen.’
I was a minute or two early, but he was waiting in the hall. He had not brought Judy with him, I was relieved to see. He went to the point straight away, the moment after he had ordered a large dry sherry for us both. ‘Well, what’s the verdict?’
I had thought out carefully what I had to say. I wanted to encourage him, yet I did not want him to feel that he was in any imminent danger of immortality. This was the spring of 1924. In the previous summer Michael Arlen had published These Charming People, Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay had been the most discussed novel of the autumn, D. H. Lawrence was emerging from the shadow of The Rainbow’s prosecution and the obscurity of having to publish Women in Love in the USA alone, and in a limited edition. Compton Mackenzie, who in the spring of 1914 had been selected by Henry James in a couple of authoritative articles on the modern novel in The Times Literary Supplement as one of the brightest hopes of the rising generation, had in the course of an ecclesiastical trilogy explaining how an Anglican parson became a Roman Catholic, lost his hold on Bloomsbury, but Sinister Street was essential reading for every undergraduate.
Raymond’s novel The Ungainly Wise—a title taken from Rupert Brooke’s Mamua, was cast in the cradle-to-grave technique, but with colour tones from Huxley, Arlen and Lawrence.
It was autobiographical, but with certain key alterations to throw the reader off the scent. The hero was the son of a general who had been knighted. He had nothing, therefore, to inherit. He was the eldest son, but a second child. His mother’s love was concentrated upon her daughter. As an army officer his father had no fixed home. He had, according to the demands and exigencies of the service, taken a succession of furnished houses near the place where his Regiment or the staff to which he was attached was stationed. The hero had never felt that he belonged anywhere. His father had been generous and affectionate, but had been too interested in his own career to take a personal interest in his son, particularly when he had come to realise that his son would not follow in his steps.
His mother, on the other hand, had been absorbed in her elder daughter. She wanted her to lead the life she had not led herself; a West Country girl, daughter of a local squire who had seen nothing of London life, she had fallen in love with the handsome young captain she had met at her first Hunt Ball and had married before she was eighteen because his regiment was sailing right away for the Boer War. Her daughter must have everything that she had missed, a finishing year in Paris, a London season, balls and beaux, and then, when she had had a full look at the world, marriage when she was twenty-three to someone rather grand.
No one had made the hero feel that he was anyone of the least importance. It did not worry him at all. He was not jealous. He did not develop a chip on his shoulder. He would not inherit a title or position, but he would one day have the use of a comfortably dimensioned sum of money. His health was good. He had a sunny nature. He considered himself a fate-favoured mortal.
The hero’s situation was the equivalent of his own. The story had carried him to the age of fifteen. His youngest sister, a ten-year-old, had just been accorded an attractive Swedish governess. I suspected that her rôlexs in the hero’s life was to be similar to that of Raymond’s aunt in his.
The narrative moved briskly. It was told with humour. The hero was simpatico. ‘I’ve handed it to my father,’ I said. ‘I’ve recommended that we should make an offer for it.’
He grinned. His face expressed relief. ‘That’s fine, that’s what I wanted to know. I’m going down to Charminster this afternoon. It’ll be a useful card to play when I discuss things. Is your father likely to agree ?’
‘He usually follows my suggestions on a point like that.’
‘In that case there’s no more for us to say. Let’s talk about something else.’ But in point of fact there wasn’t anything else to talk about, and there was still a lot more that needed saying. ‘The usual terms for a first novel,’ I said, ‘are ten per cent on the first two thousand copies, twelve and a half on the next three thousand, fifteen up to ten thousand, then twenty per cent; and there’s an advance on publication of a hundred pounds.’
‘Fine, fine.’
‘How long do you think it’ll take to finish it?’
‘I started this during the long vac., in August. I’ll have more leisure now. Not more than six months, I’d say.’
‘How long will it be?’
‘About as much again.’
‘How do you plan to finish it, or rather where do you plan to finish it?’
‘At the end of his first year at Oxford.’
The age, in fact, that he had reached himself.
‘Will it work to anything, will there be any final scene? Any kind of showdown ?’
He shook his head. ‘No, no, the novel with a plot’s old-fashioned. I’ll go on till I reach a suitable point for a mental summing up.’
It would, that is to say, stop, not finish. Well, that was in the mode right then.
I did not want to give him the impression that he was launched on a career of affluence. ‘First novels don’t often make much money,’ I warned him.
‘Some do, surely?’
‘They have to be rather special.’
‘And you don’t think this is?’
‘I didn’t quite mean that. I meant that for a novel to be very successful it has to have a news value. It has to be sensational, or controversial, or scandalous. Something that gets talked about.’
‘A lot of novels that don’t fit that description seem to do very well.’
‘But not first novels. It takes quite a while to build up a public. A first book attracts critical attention. “This is a writer to be watched” they say. Then there’s a second, and they say, “Mr So-and-so is fulfilling the promise of that excellent first book.” And his sales go up. Then there’s a third and a fourth. The reviews may not be as good. Arnold Bennett said that it’s harder to get good reviews for a fifth novel than a first. But the sales keep mounting. Then, suddenly, and no one can tell why or how it happens, there’s a breakthrough and the novelist who has just been doing rather nicely becomes a best-seller overnight.’
‘That’s what you prophesy for me ?’
‘That’s what I hope for you.’
He shook his head. ‘Can you see me settling down industriously, turning out a novel a year ?’
I couldn’t. But I answered him indirectly.
‘I’ve never thought of you as a novelist.’
‘Neither have I. Turning out a novel a year. No, that’s not my game. When should I find time to live? And what should I find to write about if I did no living? No, no, that’s not my line at all. But to write a novel now and then, write five or six novels altogether, that could be an adjunct to a career. Disraeli wrote novels, after all. They were an adjunct to him.’
‘Doesn’t it depend on what career you pick?’
‘Of course.’
‘And what career do you plan to pick?’
‘That’s what I’ve got to decide during the next seven months. But I can’t imagine any career that won’t be helped by my having a novel to
my credit. That’s what I’ll tell my father. I’m going down there this afternoon. I haven’t heard from him yet, but I’m not expecting fierce reactions. He takes things calmly, and your verdict about my novel is just what’s needed as a softener. When will you know what your father’s verdict is ?’
‘He works fast. He makes up his mind quickly. There’s a board meeting on Friday afternoon.’
‘Could you telephone me after it: at about five o’clock?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m coming up on the Saturday to see Judy. Couldn’t we meet over the weekend ?’
‘What about the two of you lunching with me on the Sunday?’
‘A very happy idea. Now I must be off. Pray for me this evening. Zero hour’s about six o’clock.’
Before lunching with Raymond, I had handed my father The Ungainly Wise.
‘This is only the first half,’ I said, ‘but I think you can get a good idea of it. I think it’ll do.’
I was dining at Underhill that evening and we went home together. I had planned to talk to him about Raymond, but to my surprise I found that he had already read the book.
‘I’ve read a great many novels exactly like it,’ was his first comment. ‘Sinister Street in modern dress.’
‘Don’t most young writers start that way, imitating someone they admire?’
‘Perhaps they do, but I’d prefer to back someone who has something of his own he wants to say, even if he doesn’t quite know what it is, even if he is muddled and confused. This fellow is quite well off, you say?’
‘He will be very soon.’
My father shook his head. ‘The camel and the eye of a needle. How much do you know about him?’
I told him as much as I knew. By now we were within a few feet of Leicester Square tube station. In those days John Wisden, the cricket outfitters and the publishers of the Almanack, had their shop in the same street as the station. ‘Only three months to cricket,’ my father said.
It was rush hour on the tube. My father got a seat and I did not. I could not read my Evening Standard carrying an umbrella and swingingfrom a strap. I reviewed the arguments with which I could plead Raymond’s case. He was, I would point out, a prominent Oxford personality. His book would attract attention there. It would introduce Chapman & Hall to Oxford as a go-ahead firm, interested in the young idea. There must be someone up at Oxford now who would develop into a prominent writer; though that one might not be Raymond Peronne himself, by publishing Raymond we might lure that exception to our list. That was a prize worth aiming at.