by Alec Waugh
My father, too, had thought out the matter. As we turned to the left, past the Golders Green Hippodrome, up the North End Road, he said, ‘There are two kinds of undergraduate writer. There’s the one who wants to write and the one who wants to have written. When we’re dealing with someone like your young friend, who already has a position in the world, there’s a danger that it’s only the idea of being a writer that appeals to him.’
That was a point I was ready to concede. But I brought forward my arguments as persuasively as I could. Then I said, ‘It’s well enough done, isn’t it? It’s well written, it would bring credit to our list.’
‘It wouldn’t discredit it.’
‘And even if it doesn’t do anything spectacular, we can’t lose a lot. Any Chapman & Hall novel subscribes seven hundred to the libraries and bookshops. We shall get publicity for it through his name. It would make a subject for “leaderettes”—“Is this how young Oxford feels?” We’ll break even if we sell twelve hundred. And we should do that.’
‘I suppose we should.’
My father disliked discussions. To him argument was a synonym for quarrel. When he recognised that I was really resolute upon a project—provided that it was reasonably reasonable, he let me have my way.
I then brought up my final proposition, and this, I knew, was the tricky one. The question of the advance. ‘It’s very rare for one of our novels not to earn fifty pounds in royalties; if one’s worth doing at all it’s really worth a hundred, and even if in this case he doesn’t earn it, we can write down the over-advance as advertising, as a lure to the young idea at Oxford.’
I paused: this, I was well aware, set a dangerous precedent. It was not an argument I could use very often. The use of it now was a cutting into capital. I could not use it again for at least six months.
It was dark and only when we were actually under a street lamp could I see the expression on his face. It was a steep ten minutes’ pull up the hill. My father’s pace had slackened. He seemed to be leaning more heavily on his umbrella. He looked very tired. I had a twinge of guilt. I should not harry him in this way. Why couldn’t I let him have things the way he wanted ? He had run his firm well enough for fifteen years.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘that’s settled. I’ll bring it up at Friday’s board meeting.’ He said that at the very moment that we reached Underhill. As he fitted his key in the lock, he left behind him all the problems of Henrietta Street. No manuscript under his arm. No ‘shop’ to be discussed at dinner. He could enjoy his home. Never again, I vowed, never again. Though even as I vowed it, I knew that sooner or later another similar situation would arise, and a sense of duty would force me to present my point of view as forcefully as I could.
At the same time Raymond, as he was to tell me later, was breaking the news at Charminster. His father was in the library reading a detective story. He looked up with a smile of uncommitted welcome. ‘Come in, dear boy, you’ll find some sherry over there. On a night like this I’d recommend the dark rather than the pale. But you know which you’d prefer. Now draw up your chair and tell me what it’s all about. I gather it’s not very serious ?’
Raymond explained what had happened. ‘I see, I see, nothing serious. A bit of a nuisance now, but in five years’ time it’ll be as unimportant as an attack of chickenpox. Several men during my time were sent down, quite a lot were rusticated. Didn’t make the slightest difference to them afterwards. The only question is how you are going to put in the next few months.’
Raymond told him about his novel. ‘Now, that’s a surprise. You’ll be the first Peronne to write a novel, A novelist in the family; well, well, well.’
At dinner, he had his butler open a bottle of champagne. ‘Margaret, we must drink a health to this,’ he said. He raised his glass as a sign to his daughter-in-law that it was a jovial occasion. There was no suggestion that Raymond was in disgrace; but later, when he had returned to his library, to his thriller, Margaret treated the matter more seriously. ‘I hope that you’re not too worried about this,’ she said. ‘We seem to be taking it for granted, but it must be a blow to you.’
He was touched that she should be concerned on his account. He had been relieved that his father had not regarded his escapade as serious, but he recognised that his father’s tranquil acceptance of the situation was due to a basic and deep indifference to his son’s concerns. His son could do what he liked as long as he did not disgrace the family. But Margaret was worried on his account. She was about the first person who had been since his mother died.
‘We must make the best of a bad job,’ she said. ‘We must have as much fun as we can. We must have amusing parties. Your father will be very cooperative. He’s always telling me to bring my friends. “I like young people round me.” He’d rather have parties here than me going up to London, leaving him alone. The trouble is that I don’t know enough young people. I never had a chance of meeting them. I never had a London season, because of the war. Adrian was the first man I met. At nineteen, when I should have been at a finishing school in Switzerland or Paris, here I was, a widow and a mother, everything settled and sewn up.’
She did not speak bitterly. She had a sunny nature: she was in a way laughing at herself. ‘You must have plenty of amusing friends who’d be glad to come here. I’ll try and find some lively girls. Let’s enjoy ourselves,’ she said.
And they could have had a lively time together, he realised that. For the first time he found himself feeling sorry for her. Her life was not as enviable as he had supposed. Had it been, she would not have welcomed the prospect of his presence so whole-heartedly.
‘It’s silly of me,’ she said, ‘but until this happened, I hadn’t realised that you had grown up. I’d always thought of you as a child.’
He chuckled to himself. He was tempted to say ‘Thank heavens that naughty aunt of mine didn’t.’ But he refrained. Yes, they could have fun all right, but was it the kind of fun he wanted ? He could foresee how it would develop. He would be an alibi for her, and she for him. She would find some girl or girls for him, and he would provide her with a selection of young men from Oxford. A succession of foursomes. It was an obvious-routine, but was it what he wanted with his brother’s widow, with someone who was living under his father’s roof? He liked privacy. He did not want other members of his family to know what he was doing.
Chapman & Hall board meetings took place on a Friday at three o’clock. There were only two other directors who attended regularly, the Chairman, W. L. Courtney, the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, and an Oxford Don. Their meetings were very brief. They were followed by a cup of tea. By half-past four they were usually over. At five o’clock my father rang down to me. This was a little later than usual.
My father looked exhausted.
‘Did anything go wrong?’ I asked.
‘Not really wrong. A little difficulty with our Oxford colleague.’
‘Over what?’
‘He had heard about young Peronne being rusticated. He did not think that his name would bring much credit to our list.’
‘Oh.’
‘“If the book is good enough to stand on its own feet,” he said, “I’m for it. But if we are publishing it in order to attract young Oxford, I think we should find a different magnet.” That put me in a rather difficult position.’
Once again that sense of guilt assailed me. Why should I add to his burdens?
‘They asked me,’ he went on, ‘whether I thought the book was strong enough to stand on its own feet. I said it was, but I’m not sure it is. I do hope the book ends strongly. A lot depends on that. Perhaps he’ll discuss it with you. I hope he does. You could be most helpful to him. It might make all the difference.’
I promised that I would try. I looked forward to working on the hook with Raymond.
Raymond received my news on the telephone without surprise. He expected to have things go right for him.
‘That’s fine. We’ll talk it over on Sunday.
I’ve a new idea for you.’
I had presumed that his idea would be about the book itself. It wasn’t; at least not directly.
‘I’ve realised during this three days that I’ll never be able to write that book at Charminster. Too much is going on; too many interruptions. I don’t associate Charminster with work. I’ve got to get away. After all, I always have gone away to work. I’ve not been a day-boarder who does his prep in the nursery. I read a symposium the other day in which various novelists described how they worked. Some of them took rooms elsewhere and went to them every morning, like a lawyer going to his office. One of them said he went away to a small hotel. That didn’t seem a bad idea, for me. There’s an inn at Dodsbury seven miles away; I could stay there, food found, for eight shillings a day. With drinks and tips fifteen shillings a day would settle it. The trouble is where to get those fifteen shillings. I don’t inherit until October. I ran up debts at Oxford. I could get anything on credit there. I don’t like to ask my father for money. He isn’t stingy, but he expects me to live within my fixed allowance and that is mortgaged—not only up to the next quarter, but to the one after that. He has been so decent about my rustication that I don’t want to fuss him about this, and it would fuss him, I know that. I need fifty pounds for three months in that village inn; in three months I could get that novel finished. Now what I was wondering was this: would Chapman’s pay me half the advance of a hundred pounds on the signing of the agreement ?’
It sounded a simple enough proposition. But I knew my father. One of his strictest rules was ‘No advance without a manuscript.’ On this one issue he was adamant. ‘Authors are always in debt. They only work when there is a reward waiting for them. At heart they are all Micawbers.’
There were a number of battles that I was prepared to join with my father for my friend’s sake, but this I could not. Never take the field unless you have a reasonable chance of winning. I shook my head.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s one of Chapman & Hall’s rigid rules. No advance without a manuscript.’
‘I see.’
He did not seem too crestfallen. He had supreme self-confidence. ‘Then I suppose I had better try and find a publisher who has not got such rigid rules. There must be some who haven’t.’
‘Is this fifty pounds so important?’
‘To me at the moment, yes. In a year’s time it will be chickenfeed. But now, if I’m going to get this novel finished within three months, I need to have three months on my own.’
I could see his point. Some aristocrats have a patrician disregard for ‘filthy lucre’. They feel that the world owes them sustenance. They borrow shamelessly and leave hotel bills unpaid. Others have a noblesse oblige attitude. They borrow from moneylenders, not from friends. Raymond was one of those. I could see his point, too, about needing to get away. I had found it impossible to work under my parents’ roof at Underhill. That spring I had taken, as I have told, a flat in Kensington. But I was finding it difficult to work there, seven feet from a telephone. I could appreciate his predicament.
‘Can you think of any other publisher who if he liked the beginning would be prepared to offer me that fifty pounds ?’
As a matter of fact I could. Gerald Duckworth had taken in as a partner a youngish man, Tom Balston, who was anxious to get in on the ground floor with the younger generation. He had signed up Godfrey Winn and Harold Acton. Later he was to enrol Evelyn and the Sitwells. Anthony Powell was to join the staff as Literary Adviser. Balston was a friend of mine. I thought I could persuade him to take on Raymond. Did I want to, though? Ought I to? I had my duty to Chapman & Hall. I had argued Raymond’s case seriously. Should I let him go to a rival without a struggle? Then there was the issue of Raymond’s own interests. I believed that I could give him the kind of professional encouragement and advice that he could not get at Duckworth’s. I had looked forward to nursing him. Might he not, if he had been already half-paid for the book, lose interest in it, scamp the final draft? So much could depend upon that final draft. I did not flatter myself in believing that my being at his elbow would make the difference between a book that was ‘just all right’ and one that hit the nail upon the head, but I might help. Surely there must be another way of raising fifty pounds?
I hesitated. I looked at him thoughtfully, trying to make up my mind. What ought I to do? What was best for him? What was best for Chapman & Hall ? He was lolling in a deep armchair. Judy was, as usual, on a cushion at his feet. Her head was leant back against his knees. Her face wore an expression of utter peace, of complete fulfilment. She was not in fact more than ordinarily pretty, but this morning, rested and refreshed by love, she was touched by radiance, while he, I had never seen him look more handsome, more elegant, more full of race. He had the supreme good looks that spring from intermarriages over two and a half centuries between men and women who are privileged to make their choices among the most polished, the most attractive courtiers of their day— choices that had now and then been renewed and revitalised by a caprice for a lady of the stage or a foreign adventurer. He was unique. What did it matter whether his novel was any real good or not, to him or to Chapman & Hall or to the world in general? The prizes of the world were his without his having to earn them. Men like myself who were born to nothing, stood or fell by the use we made of our special talent. But Raymond was not in that position. He might make a great deal of his life or, in view of his opportunities, make very little. But he was running in a different race. Why not give him what he wanted now ?
I told him about Duckworth and Tom Balston. ‘I’ll probably be seeing him tonight at the Phoenix show. If I do I’ll have a word with him.’
The Phoenix was a theatre group that in the early twenties produced Elizabethan and Restoration plays on Sunday nights. As a private society, it was immune, like the Stage Society, from the scrutiny of the official censor. It provided scope for a number of actors and actresses, tired of being type-cast, to show themselves in unaccustomed roles. Isabel Jeans for instance, who was usually cast as a dark-haired vamp, appeared in The Country Wife as a light-haired trollop.
It was sponsored by social and literary Bohemia. As I had expected, Tom Balston was there that night. I told him about Raymond’s novel. ‘Hard though it is to be believed,’ I said, ‘he badly needs fifty pounds. You’d give him that, wouldn’t you, if you liked the book ?’
‘While your father wouldn’t.’
‘He has a fixed rule, no advance without a manuscript.’
‘Not a bad rule, either. But it can be broken sometimes.’
‘I’ll have the manuscript sent round tomorrow.’
Next morning I broke the news to my father. ‘I’m afraid that after all we shan’t have to outrage our Don. We’re not getting that Oxford novel.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘He’s declined our generous offer.’
‘But that’s ridiculous.’
‘I told him so. What do you think he wanted?’
‘Not a hundred and fifty, surely?’
‘No. Much worse. Fifty right away.’
‘But that’s impossible.’
‘That’s what I told him.’
‘What’s he going to do?’
‘Offer it somewhere else.’
‘With that same stipulation ?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’ll never get it.’
‘I’m not so sure. I had a word with Tom Balston. He’ll give him fifty if he likes the manuscript. The idea appeals to him.’
A puzzled look on my father’s face was followed by a grin. He chuckled. ‘Poor Gerald, poor old Gerald.’ They were good friends, Gerald Duckworth and himself. They had been contemporaries at Oxford. They were both members of the Savile. Their offices were nine doors apart in Henrietta Street. The chuckle surprised me; I had presumed that my father would be somewhat disconcerted to learn that Duckworth was planning to take over an author for whom he had made an offer. I wondered whether he might not question the wi
sdom of his own iron rule. I was resolved never myself to bring the matter up again, never to remark ‘What a pity it was that we lost Raymond.’ But I hoped The Ungainly Wise would hit the jackpot. In the meantime I hoped that my father would not brood over the situation. The chuckle took me off my guard. I had not realised then what a malicious pleasure elderly men take in the discomfiture of their contemporaries.
Eight years later my father, in his autobiography, as an illustration of the new post-war atmosphere, was to recount the incident of a young manager returning after the armistice to his place of occupation, in the uniform of an infantry officer. His chief, who was also the proprietor of the business, received him in his private room upstairs with an air of genial welcome. But he was hardly prepared for the response. The young man seated himself on the table, took out a cigarette, tapped and lit it, throwing a glance of indulgent patronage around the room. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’m not sorry to be back. Now we’ve got to buck up, all of us, and put a bit of life into this old bus.’ The ex-officer’s employment ended that afternoon. The chief was Gerald Duckworth. The ex-officer was Jonathan Cape.
When I told my father a week later that Duckworth had accepted The Ungainly Wise he chuckled again. ‘Poor old Gerald. He’ll soon be wishing that he’d kept on Cape.’
As a footnote may I add that Tom Balston’s policy paid off very satisfactorily. A year and a half later he offered Evelyn fifty pounds on an unwritten life of Rosetti. The book was delivered, and he was to receive all Evelyn’s travel books. He would have received his novels, too, if in his absence, Gerald Duckworth had not been shocked by Decline and Fall and let it slip through his fingers.