Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  At first glance this letter appears to be a deliberate attempt to make Arthur worried; but it was not. It mirrors (sometimes word for word) his diary entry of the same day. All of the points mentioned to his father in the letter are also included in the diary, but the latter contains more – details that Evelyn wisely decided not to pass on to Arthur. According to this version, on the day of that first lesson, he had walked through the rain to get to Crease's house:

  He met me at the door and led me to his bedroom where he lent me dry socks, trousers and shoes … he was most flattering … at half-past four we had tea. It was then that I saw most of his character. He strikes me as being a man who may have a big influence over my Lancing life… He is a great student of character and claims to be able to sum anyone up by intuition at first sight. He has taken a great interest in Roberts … He was most kind to me and I think rather likes me. I could gather practically nothing of his life. He learns all he can without giving anything out. His secretiveness is his only bad quality as far as I can see… He has asked me to bring Fulford over sometime … he has impressed me a lot.

  Memories of Alec's homosexual entanglements at Sherborne five years earlier should have sounded alarm bells for Arthur but he did not seem unduly concerned by Crease's influence over his younger son. He was unwilling to get involved but others proved less afraid. One master at Lancing, J. F. Roxburgh, was every bit as interested in Evelyn as Crease. He, too, was a homosexualist, a theatrical dandy – perhaps not unlike Arthur in some respects – whom Evelyn admired greatly. Early in his school career Evelyn had been invited to tea in Roxburgh's sanctuary and plied with cream buns and sensitive observations about poetry. Roxburgh's rivalry with Crease, whom he sarcastically termed ‘the Sage of Lychpole’, was obvious to all the boys. One day it was decreed that no boy was permitted to visit Lychpole as Crease was not known to the boys’ parents: Evelyn thought he could put this to rights by inviting Crease to Underhill during the school holidays.

  At Evelyn's suggestion, K sent a letter of invitation to Lychpole that Crease was at first reluctant to accept. He had read an article by Arthur Waugh describing the treatment of the young poet, Ian Mackenzie, who had come to stay as a guest at Underhill: ‘He used to start the morning singing; and we made him roar with laughter at the breakfast table as we imitated the strains that accompanied the process of his dressing.’ Crease was pathologically shy: the idea of a household of ear-flapping Waughs listening in on his morning ablutions did not appeal to him at all. Evelyn was furious that his father could have written anything so fatuous. He hated the ‘hail-fellow-well-met’ tone of the piece and resented being dragged into Arthur's ‘we’ of jovial Underhillers. In particular, he was enraged by another passage from the same piece: ‘He loved good acting and was never tired of the theatre. Like ourselves he would rather have a bad show than no show at all.’ This might have been true of Arthur and Alec, perhaps even of K, but it was certainly not so for Evelyn, and Arthur's sweeping statement rankled with him for many years. In 1926 he wrote a short story about a sane man who lives with his lunatic family. The family falsely claims that it is he who is the lunatic. The sane man is taken out by his tutor:

  The first time he went to a revue he was agog with excitement, the theatre, the orchestra, the audience all enthralled him. He insisted on being there ten minutes before time; he insisted on leaving ten minutes before the end of the first act. He thought it vulgar and dull and ugly and there was so much else that he was eager to see. The dreary ‘might-as-well-stay-here-now-we've-paid’ attitude was unintelligible to him.

  When he read this story, Arthur was pained by Evelyn's little dig at him and complained bitterly to Alec.

  Evelyn might not have believed that he was the only sane member of a lunatic family but he told Crease that his people were Philistines and that Arthur had grossly exaggerated the bonhomie of life at Underhill. From that moment he continued to describe his family as ‘the Philistines’, once telling Arthur, ‘Until I met Crease I lived among the Philistines’, which, needless to say, upset the old man greatly. ‘You will regret you ever said that when I am dead and gone and pushing up the daisies.’

  In the end, by special pleading, Evelyn succeeded in persuading Crease to stay at Underhill. Arthur thought Crease was a big joke and subjected him to ‘genial ridicule’. After dinner when Arthur read poetry aloud in the book-room Crease was too shy, or too embarrassed, to remove his hands from his eyes, peeping out only occasionally from the cracks between his fingers. Only K was moved by Crease's fragile pansy qualities and felt an urge to mother him. When, some years later, he was arrested on charges of sexual indecency she allowed him to dry his tears on her lap. Although Crease spent most of the weekend hiding in his bedroom, he told Evelyn afterwards that he had enjoyed himself and had found Arthur ‘charming, entirely charming, and acting all the time’. For Evelyn this was a revelation. ‘My eyes were opened,’ he wrote, ‘and I saw my father, whom I had grown up to accept in complete simplicity, as he always must have appeared to others.’ From that moment (Evelyn was sixteen years old) he could not look at his father without noticing the ham actor within and regarded him as something of a fraud. In his diary Evelyn wrote:

  This has been a wretched week. Father has been ineffably silly the whole holidays. The extraordinary thing is that the more I see through my Father the more I appreciate Mother. She has been like Candida and went to Father, whom she must have despised, because he needed her most. I always think I am discovering some new trait in his character and find that she knew it all along. She is a very wonderful woman.1

  Evelyn had read Bernard Shaw's Candida a few weeks before in his school reading group. If he recognised in the eponymous heroine the finer qualities of his mother he could not have failed equally to have noticed in the role of Morrell (Candida's flaccid windbag of a husband) many of his father's traits. In the play, a young poet, in love with Candida, asks Morrell how it is possible for her to love him: ‘Is it like this for her here always? A woman, with a great soul, craving for reality, truth, freedom; and being fed on metaphors, sermons, stale perorations, mere rhetoric. Do you think a woman's soul can live on your talent for preaching?… It's the gift of the gab, nothing more, nothing less. What has your knack for talking to do with the truth? Oh, it's an old story: you'll find it in the Bible. I imagine King David in his fits of enthusiasm was very like you, “But his wife despised him in her heart”.’

  Before long Evelyn's sharp critical gaze would fall upon his friend Crease who, to his intense irritation, was falling for Arthur's charm and the bogus magic of Underhill. The point of his going there in the first place was so that Evelyn would not be disbarred from visiting Lychpole, but this no longer mattered to Evelyn. Soon Crease, like the others, had become more of a friend to Arthur and K than to Evelyn. Several months after that first visit Evelyn wrote in his diary: ‘Crease is back at Lychpole. The spell is broken. His influence is quite gone. I just see a rather silly, perhaps casually interesting little man.’ Evelyn had fallen under a new spell, another middle-aged man, another father-figure, perhaps: J. F. Roxburgh.2

  When Alec returned from Germany after the 1918 armistice he was treated by his family as a hero. Evelyn, who had previously thought him aloof and priggish, especially during his time as house captain at Sherborne, now viewed his brother in a more glorious light. He was proud of Alec's smart, mature appearance and his handsome face. From that moment Alec, who had not previously bothered much with Evelyn, became his brother's mentor. Not only did Evelyn regard him as the genius behind that ‘awfully clever’ watertight-compartments idea but he accepted him as tutor and guide in sexual matters. Once in France and once in Mainz, just after his release from the citadel, Alec had visited a brothel. He was no longer a virgin (at least in the heterosexual sense of the term), which gave him the confidence to instruct his younger brother in these matters. He persuaded Evelyn to buy himself a copy of Marlowe's Hero and Leander in the Everyman edition – which had given him s
uch a masturbatory thrill at Sherborne. If that did not work Alec's four volumes of Havelock Ellis's Psychology of Sex were made available for Evelyn's perusal. ‘I am reading all the case studies in Havelock Ellis and frigging too much,’ Evelyn wrote to a friend. In 1927 Alec introduced him to the red-light district of Marseille, an episode Evelyn recalled in his first novel Decline and Fall. Alec was not precisely a father-figure to his younger brother but cast himself more in the role of a lubricious uncle. The uncle-nephew relationship between them was jocularly and openly maintained until Evelyn's death in 1966.

  After his return from Germany, Alec found his passion for Barbara had waned. He was still an officer in the regular army but wanted to resign or, at very least, be offered a staff job that would allow him to resume his writing career. Since The Loom of Youth he had published only one slim volume of poetry, which had been badly received. The reviews, which Arthur had posted to him at the prison camp in Mainz, had made both Alec and his father sick. He had also written two novels. Arthur had objected to both of them on moral grounds, so neither was submitted for publication.

  Increasingly Alec believed that The Loom had been a one-off succès de scandale never to be repeated. His star had shone brightly two years earlier; now it was all but extinguished. Supposing that he must do something – no matter what – he forged impetuously ahead with plans for his marriage to Barbara. Like many of the young men returning from the great upheavals of war, Alec craved stability, and Barbara, he believed, was the quickest way to attain it. Arthur, however, remained convinced that Alec's marriage plans were ill-fated and, in the most tactful words he could muster, wrote to ‘My dearest Billy’ urging him to hold off:

  As to the marriage I am sure you know that your happiness is the very first consideration of my life. To that I postpone every other interest and nothing would delight me more than to see you happily settled at the earliest possible date. My only anxiety is to be sure that the foundations are laid for a really happy state of things. Marriage is a great deal more than a Romeo and Juliet consummation of love's rites, it is inextricably intermingled with all sorts of exasperating material considerations.

  There are some girls who have the independence and devil-may-caredom to go anywhere with a man; into digs, into camp almost and to rough it through chop and change… Barbara of course is not like that. She has been brought up in great comfort: she has been used to have everything done for her: and though she may believe now that she would be quite happy roughing it in a wild Welsh cottage, I very much doubt how she would feel about things when she had to leave her warm bed to light a kitchen fire.

  Barbara, as I understand her, is in no great haste herself. That is generally the woman's view and quite naturally so. She has a lot to give up and things lie ahead of her of which she has only the most shadowy premonition. So, if you feel things can be left till the prospect is clearer I am absolutely certain in my own mind that you will be doing what is wisest and surest for the future. I see you growing in strength and wisdom every week. That is my one comfort and inspiration. I live in it and for it all my days.

  Ever most dear Billy, Your devoted Daddy.

  If by ‘things lie ahead of her of which she has only the most shadowy premonition’ Arthur meant sexual intercourse, events were to prove him wrong. Alec was unwilling to heed his father's counsel and four months after that letter was written, in July 1919, he and Barbara were married. But the marriage was never consummated. I do not entirely understand how this problem manifested itself in their particular case and suppose it would be indelicate to guess – out aloud as it were – here. Trying to get to the bottom of this old family mystery in 1981, my father explained to readers of the Spectator that Alec ‘couldn't get into her, achieve penetration or whatever’ – a coarse phraseology that resulted in the sternest of rebukes from the descendants of Barbara's third marriage. Still, it left a mystery. Why could Alec, whose motto on the sports field was ‘Hard, High and Often’, not translate this simple dictat to his bed? In his autobiography he put it blithely: ‘I had no idea of the amount of tact and skilful patience that is required to initiate an inexperienced girl into the intimacies of sex … I had been nicknamed Tank at Sandhurst, yet I could not make my wife a woman. I was too ashamed of myself to consult a doctor. By the time we did in the following summer it was too late. Mental inhibitions had been created.’

  Barbara and Alec kept a dog in their bedroom, which may have accounted for a proportion of the problem. I have often heard of dogs objecting (sometimes violently) to the copulation of their masters or mistresses and happen to know that this particular animal was possessed of an evil nature. When W W Jacobs came to stay he awoke Alec and Barbara in the middle of the night to complain that the dog had been trying to turn on the gas to asphyxiate them in their sleep. Alec got out of bed and put a tumbler over the gas tap to prevent the murderous mutt having its wicked way.

  So should we blame the dog for the young couple's difficulties and leave it at that? Or shall I go on? Well, Papa always suspected that the failure was Alec's – a malfunction of erectile tissue due to invisible emanations from a silver cup inscribed from W W Jacobs, which was kept, for some unclear reason, next to the newly-weds’ bed. Another possibility is that Alec had not entirely rid himself of his homosexual interests. Perhaps he never did. One of his sons told me that he remembered Alec in his old age sitting outside a café in Tangier watching a handsome Arab stroll by: ‘Just think of the firm dusky limbs quivering beneath that fella's djellaba,’ he sighed.

  During his marriage to Barbara Alec wrote two books that painted homosexuality in finer brushstrokes than those he had used for the gayest moments of The Loom of Youth. Public School Life might, in places, be read as a handbook on the art of homosexual seduction. ‘If a senior boy is casually attracted by the appearance of a smaller boy, he asks a friend lower down in the house to make enquiries as to the morals of the small boy. If the “go-between” discovers that the small boy is “straight” the elder boy lets the matter fall from his mind.’ In Pleasure, published in 1921, a soldier cadet meets up with a homosexual flame from his old school and reminisces wistfully on their previous encounters:

  There was no need for words between them, who had shared so many things.

  ‘I say, what's the time, Geoffrey, we mustn't miss the train.’

  ‘Oh that's alright, another minute or two.’

  Tenderly Geoffrey gazed at the features that during the last months had stamped themselves so indelibly upon his heart.

  How well he knew each shadow of that loved face, the long, slow line of the throat, the weak almost girlish chin.

  Arthur was uneasy at his son's continual harping on this theme and accused him of being ‘coarse and risky’. But Alec, though desperate not to upset his father, believed himself in the right. ‘It seems absurd,’ he wrote to him from Mainz, ‘that one may not deal with a natural and often beautiful emotion that was felt by Socrates himself: but that anyone can deal with the most perverted forms of sexual bestiality – as long as there is a woman in it. For in our delightful country Sapphism may be practised if not discussed with perfect freedom, and then women talk of inequality of the sex laws.’ A third book written in the period of Alec's marriage to Barbara reveals some of his thoughts about women – thoughts guaranteed to raise Barbara's feminist ire: ‘The best seller is written for women, usually by women,’ he remarked in Myself When Young. ‘And it is by a masculine intelligence that the masterpieces of prose literature have been produced… Art is the fine raiment in which the civilised man arrays himself before a woman. And it is, perhaps, because women have need of no such artifice that their contributions to the museum of the world's art have been so casual and so imponderable.’

  Barbara was not a fan of Alec's writing at the best of times. ‘That silly book’ is how she described The Loom of Youth. Before he went to France he had bound a copy in expensive calf and presented it to her with a loving inscription:

  Four years of
wandering more or less,

  Of struggling ignorant why I strove,

  The odyssey of selfishness,

  And yet the prelude to our love.

  Barbara was as unimpressed by this as she was by his disappearance in the Ludendorff offensive, but when Arthur saw this inscription he burst into tears.

  Alec and Barbara's marriage broke down quickly. It was all over within thirty fretful months. Arthur was appalled and blamed Barbara entirely for the fiasco. She, he insisted, had impugned his son's honour by denying him ‘love's rites’. He talked openly with the young Fleming girls about the failure of consummation: ‘How could it happen? How could it happen?’ he gasped, twixt asthmatic wheezes. K was more forgiving. She became the repository for many of Alec and Evelyn's discarded friends, and although the brothers never saw Barbara after the break-up of that marriage in January 1922, K kept in touch for the rest of her life.

  At the time of their wedding in July 1919 Alec had already succeeded in extricating himself from the army and had taken a job as a reader at his father's firm in Covent Garden. At first he and Barbara lived at Underhill. They converted the day nursery into a library-sitting room to give them a modicum of privacy but they dined always with Arthur and K. Soon the burden of working and living with his parents, added to the harrowing failures of the bedroom, started to weigh heavily on Alec. At the time Evelyn's friend Dudley Carew wrote in his diary:

  Got to the Waughs about 7 o'clock… they were all very kind but Alec has an extraordinarily chilling and repressing influence. Directly he comes in Arthur stops making jokes, Evelyn stops being clever and only Mrs W is left undisturbed. He has gimlety eyes, a baleful glare which, unlike Evelyn's, is quite unconscious and a big dome-like forehead and a rather quick almost nervous way of speaking. A personality.