Sometimes he would content himself with sighing, sometimes he would say outright that he had heard the particular story his father was telling before – not once but many times. Then it was the turn of Arthur to assume an air of meek martyrdom, an air calculated to bring out the worst in Evelyn, and the atmosphere round the table would become sulphurous.
In the company of friends Evelyn yawned with boredom, clicked his tongue and rolled his eyes to the heavens whenever Arthur held forth. One of his schoolfriends recalled Arthur turning to him and asking, ‘How is it, Evelyn, that you are so charming to your friends and so unkind to your father?’
‘Because,’ replied his son, ‘I can choose my friends, but I cannot choose my father.’
Alec's school and army friends were also dragged into close relationships with Arthur. Often this was successful. When one came to stay at Underhill Arthur read aloud a second-rate poem by Austin Dobson, ‘Molly Trefusis’. Two years later, the friend wrote to Arthur: ‘“Molly Trefusis” is not an especially good poem but it is almost sacred to me now. It means you and Alec, and the first time you read to us, as Alec and I sat on different halves of the old chintz armchair in front of the fire. I shan't ever forget that evening. I felt too happy to live. I was to have gone the next day; but I told Alec I couldn't. I must stay.’
Alec was not always pleased when Arthur moved in on his friends. When Claude Hamilton came to stay at Midsomer Norton in the summer of 1915 he was careful to ensure that his father did not dominate the proceedings. While he and Claude cavorted about the house spouting ‘ideas’ at each other, Arthur was left to talk with his maiden sisters. It nearly broke his heart. He complained that Alec's spirit had ‘stiffened’, that all of his ‘old tenderness’ had gone. ‘I suffered a lot those weeks,’ he afterwards recalled, in a letter to Alec, ‘while you and Hamilton were thundering against one another: the couple of you seemed so arrogantly certain of yourselves, so contemptuous of the voice of experience.’ This was Arthur's worst nightmare: youth spurning age.
In August 1915 Alec had a poem accepted for publication by the Chronicle. This was followed by more verses in Poetry Review and a controversial article on ‘The Public School in Wartime’ for the Evening Standard. By now he was convinced that he could make his mark as a writer or a man of letters in the manner of his father, but the army was a bleak impediment to his progress. The prospect of war made him moody and depressed. At Berkhamsted he was given leave for one weekend each fortnight. His fellow cadets spent a proportion of theirs in nightclubs and bars, but Alec never did: he and his father lived for each other. ‘I doubt if father and son could have been closer than we were during those months,’ he wrote. ‘I never needed any company but his. All I wanted was to be alone with my father and talk of poetry and of writers he had known as a young man.’ Arthur's memories of that time were similarly rose-tinted: ‘The remembrance of those days is so poignant as to be almost intolerable,’ he wrote, ‘but, seeing that they were among the most significant in all the course of one man's road, their record cannot honestly be shirked or mitigated.’
The fear that Alec might be dead in a year's time made them even hungrier for each other's company. Arthur would meet Alec off the train at Euston station and together they would make their way to a cinema, usually to see a Charlie Chaplin film, then chatter excitedly all the way home. ‘In the evening we read poetry together, as though we had made an unspoken alliance to share all the interests possible before it might be too late,’ Arthur recalled, ‘and every Sunday evening father and son went back to Euston, and talked at the barrier until the last moment before the train was off.’
Although in their autobiographies, both Arthur and Alec remembered discussing poetry and literature on these occasions, the surviving correspondence suggests that they also talked a great deal about Sherborne – a subject that Arthur simply could not drop. The other main topic was Alec's state of mind. He had declared that life was pointless, and this disturbed Arthur greatly. Having geared his whole life around his son's career, having created and afforded him opportunities that had never been available to himself at that age, Arthur despaired at his son's black moods.
For the first time it dawned on him that he might have spoiled his golden boy by allowing him to become too self-absorbed. Perhaps the headmaster at Sherborne had been right all along:
Dear Boy, what you really must take to your soul is the truth that no man can live to himself alone. Your dreams of life have hitherto been too self-centred. I blame myself greatly. I have lived entirely in your career, feeding my fatherly pride. I should have been much wiser, no doubt, not to let all the world know – and you among them – how engrossed I am in you. But I can only love one way, and I have to pay for it. But the punishment will be too hard – harder surely than I deserve – if, at seventeen, with life before you (as we hope), you throw up the struggle and protest that you have lost confidence in life.
All the world is in fetters now and you have at least for consolation the entire devotion of your father. But for all of us who are worthy of the name of man, the road must wind uphill all the way, the crown of roses must be thrown aside, and the crown of thorns must tear the brow. ‘Is it nothing to you all ye that pass by? Behold and see, if there be any sorrow, like unto my sorrow.’… For the world can only be conquered by love, by submission, by discipline. Some of that discipline you are getting now, in bitter form enough, but it may be the golden time for you if only you
will not turn aside from the voice of Wisdom and close your ears to good advice. Be confident; be courageous; be steadfast. I see already a great change in you for the better… You seem to have softened again and, what is more, to have changed to a better man than you ever were before. You are once more the beloved son who walked the Sherborne slopes with me, before the coming of evil, happy, expectant, confident in life, filling me every morning with thanksgiving that I should be alive and the father of such a son. Here I believe is a proof that the discipline of life, however bitter, is what every nature needs: here I see the messenger of love, bringing its own in its hand.
Do not for a moment lose confidence in life. ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him.’ It is a pagan confession of faith, but I have often said it to myself in hours of suffering and doubt. ‘Though he slay me…’ but if he let me live, then after all these tribulations my life, my art, my everything I love shall be devoted to the cause of gratitude… ‘Thank God for life! Thank God for you!’
Ever, Dearest Boy,
In hope infallible, Your devoted Father
But, despite Arthur's most fervent efforts Alec could not be easily bucked. His days remained dreary and miserable – for all he knew his whole life would be over in twelve months’ time before he had had a chance to fulfil his dream of becoming a famous poet. Arthur tried every argument he could contrive to rally his son's flagging spirits. He begged him to stop worrying about things that may happen: ‘You may not be hit. You may be hit slightly and come home like Lumley. Many many things may happen.’ He pointed out that the chances of Alec earning his living as a poet were slim. Wordsworth had been a controller of stamps and Matthew Arnold toiled all his life in the Education Office. He urged him to reflect on the noble life of a soldier, on the value of dying for one's country and, above all, not to brood, not to be ungrateful for the life God had given him: ‘I want you to be hopeful. Yes, I want that more than anything just now and I pray for it all the time.’ He tried to paint a picture of the future that would contrast optimistically with Alec's doom-laden vision of death in the trenches. He imagined him married to a caring wife, who
I am sure will be very proud of your poetry, and just a bit fond of talking it over with your old Daddy, when he drops in to tea on Saturday afternoons. At your age I had never thought at all of the future. Think not too much, beloved, however bitter the path today. I live in such dreams as these – the war over, your character strengthened by discipline, your way clear before your feet. And your old father, sittin
g by you and yours in the sunset happily murmuring his Nunc Dimittis.
In those far-off days the relationship between father and son was at the peak of its intensity. To the objective eye their behaviour might have resembled a pair of star-crossed teenage lovers. ‘I simply go about thinking of your love for me all the time,’ wrote Arthur, ‘and I think the devotion is deeper since it no longer feeds itself with form-places, scores or achievements, but is just a matter of our own souls and their sweet companionship.’ And all the time there was a brooding awareness that the war might snatch it all away: ‘If you fall in this war, I have nothing more to do than creep into my narrow bed, and the sooner sleep comes, the sooner shall I be released from suffering.’ Arthur's need for Alec's company was hot, clammy and compulsive. No sooner had he returned home from Euston station on Sunday night than he would sit down to write a letter full of sweet or hurt memories – ‘I want to see you again badly, even if you do think all my ideas the lumber of the scrap heap, and all my gods the idols of a twilight day!’ and again the following morning:
Nothing will ever dim my memory of the happy hours of yesterday. It was a truly golden time and the happiest thought to me is that you are still the same old Billy, always glad to see me and full of interest and confidence.
I see other people sitting about with their sons and seeming to be happy: but nobody seems to have a son so thoroughly in sympathy and loyalty as I have. Surely if God still holds his own in heaven, he will not let so true a tie be broken. But even death could not do that. You will always live for me in every place we have visited together and every high thought and hope that we have shared. God bless you most dear Billy. There is no one like you to your ever devoted father.
Alec's letters to Arthur are far less passionate than the ones he received. They show a lively interest in Arthur's journalism, in books, cricket, Sherborne news and training-camp gossip, but where Arthur could happily fill his epistles with ruminations on the state of their extraordinary bond Alec always replied in sanguine, down-to-earth terms: ‘I have left my sponge and toothpaste as well as my pen at home, love to all, Billy.’ The letters he sent to friends at this same time are far more cheerful and robust. They seldom mention Arthur.
During his time in military training Alec thought romantically and often about Sherborne. His father frequently reminded him of how the events of June 1915 had left him feeling broken and old and this made him brood on the injustice of his departure from the school with increasing resentment. He honoured the promise to Arthur that he would keep the details of his disgrace from Evelyn and his friends, but he felt a burning need to explain and justify himself.
For several months he had been sending Arthur his poems, which Arthur would either return to him corrected or forward to friends in the press for publication, but now it was time for the precocious young soldier to turn his talents to something on a grander scale – to write a novel. By dragging himself out of bed at half past four in the morning and returning to the manuscript at night after his day's parades, the seventeen-year-old cadet succeeded, in just seven and a half weeks, in completing a novel of 115,000 words. In later years Alec was to describe The Loom of Youth as his ‘love letter to Sherborne’, but that was not how Sherborne saw it when it came to be published a year later.
In his autobiography Alec claimed of The Loom of Youth: ‘I did not offer it to Chapman and Hall because I did not want the world to say that I had only got it published because I was my father's son. Nor did I ask my father to recommend it to his friends in the trade. I wanted to do this on my own.’ This was not strictly true. Arthur was in fact asked by his son to publish it but refused to recommend it to the board. In One Man's Road he wrote, ‘My own position in the matter was not an easy one. From the day when he sent me the first chapter I felt that I could not publish the book, seeing that I knew so many of the people involved.’ This is nearer to the truth. What he had written to Alec on seeing the first draft of the first part in January 1916 was this:
Dear Billy,
I have now read the manuscript. It is absorbingly interesting to me but I do not see how it could be published. Neither you nor I could ever go to Sherborne again if this book appeared… The portraits of your contemporaries are too candid to be tolerated by them. So far there seems to me to be hardly any fiction in it at all. Only fact. As a spiritual diary of your life it is of the utmost interest and value… but if it were printed you would make enemies everywhere and that would be sheer folly. I can recognise nearly everyone. So I think the portraits must be very good, but that is just the damnation of the book. All the world would rise against you and Sherborne would be wronged…
I think you will agree with me about the prudence of publicity; but I hope you will preserve the record and go on with it. Perhaps in years to come it might be touched up and brought out when these old feuds are forgotten and the heart is colder in remembrance. So do go on with it. It helps me to understand you a little better, if that is possible, than I did before.
Years later Alec stuck this letter into a scrapbook of items concerning The Loom of Youth and next to it wrote, ‘I must confess I smiled to myself when I read this letter. Does he really imagine that I am going to write an entire novel so that he can understand me better?’
Arthur must have been relieved as publisher after publisher rejected The Loom of Youth – Secker, Constable, Hutchinson, Methuen, and Chatto and Windus all turned it down. ‘I must confess that I was surprised to read some of the letters which accompanied the refusals of one after another of my colleagues and rivals to have anything to say to my son's first novel,’ he wrote in One Man's Road, ‘Once or twice I was sorely tempted to change my mind, and recommend the book to my own board… but without a little editing, my conscience could not shoulder the burden.’
As Arthur stubbornly continued in his refusal to help, Alec grew bitter trying every ruse he could think up to make his father relent: ‘The thing is clearly unmarketable,’ he expostulated, ‘it had better be put away and forgotten.’ But still Arthur would not budge. Twelve years later Alec wrote another novel called Three Score and Ten about an intimate relationship between a father and son closely based on his own with Arthur. In this book the fictional father and son are both lawyers. The father ‘lived in and for his son… His life was lit by a purpose – his absorption in his son gave a meaning to the most commonplace incidents of his day’, but when it comes to helping his son in his legal career, the father is too afraid of accusations of nepotism to act:
Not only would he not help his son to work through his own offices, but he would not make use of the quite considerable influence he possessed. Hilary had the sudden feeling of being rudderless in life.
‘He's done nothing for me; he never will do anything for me,’ he thought. ‘I've got to run my own show. Well, and I will, since he insists on it.’ In a belligerent mood he came to that decision and set himself to its fulfilment.
Alec tried to win his father's support by despatching the manuscript to him in sections, chapter by chapter. Arthur returned each batch with suggestions and corrections, all the while praying that the book would get no further than Alec's bottom drawer, but a year later, as Alec was admitting to his friends that he was desperate and would ‘gladly accept any contract’, he received an offer from an enterprising new publishing house, Grant Richards. On 31 January 1917 Alec, knowing how much his father was opposed to publication. wrote to him: ‘Grant Richards has accepted The Loom, offering terms which seem to me as good as I could expect … I doubt if this will cause unqualified satisfaction at Underhill but I am afraid I am too much of an egoist to feel anything but an enormous elation.’
Arthur was petrified when he heard the news and tried helplessly to hide his emotions in his reply of 1 February:
Of course, dear Boy, I am very proud that The Loom over which we spent so many happy hours last year is to see the light of day and I congratulate you with all my heart. You know that no one has been from the first more d
eeply concerned in its fortunes than your dear old Daddy.
… Of course this means the end of your brother as a Shirburnian, but I have always been very uncertain about the advisability of sending Evelyn there…
Dear Billy, I hope you quite understand how pleased I am for your sake but just for the moment the situation bewilders me a little: but I will not ‘panic’ and I feel sure that things will turn out all right. But I know you will go through it finally from the point of view of taste and judgement. Remember: before it appears you may be in the thick of it in France: you may even be – God knows where – let it remain as a worthy memorial to your time at Sherborne, stripped of any petty reprisal, clear eyed and eager hearted, as you used to look as you came down the Digby Road to meet me in the morning sunlight in the days which I grow surer every month were the happiest my life is ever going to see.
And God bless you dear, dear boy in everything you do.
Your devoted old Daddy
If there was any bitterness between father and son over the publication of The Loom it was soon buried with Alec's tender-hearted dedication of the book to his father. Composed in the same effusive open-letter style that Arthur had used in dedicating his own book, Reticence in Literature, to Alec two years earlier, it was a very public declaration of filial love. In Reticence Arthur had indulged his passion for Alec over two meandering pages, ending:
The Sherborne days are drawing to a close now… But whatever lies ahead of us the past will always be our own. ‘The gods themselves cannot recall their gifts’; and among the best gifts which life has brought me have been the comradeship, the sympathy, and the unclouded devotion, which you have given with such full hands to your equally devoted Father, ARTHUR WAUGH.
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