In England, Evelyn became, almost overnight, the kind of literary celebrity over whom, thirty years earlier, Arthur had drooled at the polished, Sunday afternoon tables of his cousin, Sir Edmund Gosse. In the early thirties Evelyn had achieved heights of fame and literary recognition that, in his youth, Arthur could only have dreamed about. The tight-knit bond between Alec and Arthur, which had controlled Underhill with its mutual admiration, telepathetic love and high-falutin’ praise of poetry and literature, now found itself sidelined by the little boy who Alec used to call ‘It’, the unimportant figure, the quiet onlooker, the younger brother who had never been invited to join the team.
But there is another irony to Evelyn's success at this time that is sharper than the rest. For most of his working life Arthur had worried about the future of Chapman and Hall after the lapse of its most precious asset – the Charles Dickens copyrights. There were times when he had been seriously afraid that the company would have to cease publishing fiction altogether. Reprieve came in the form of his second, less favoured son. In twenty-six months Evelyn achieved at Chapman and Hall what his father had been struggling to achieve for over twenty-six years: he made the fiction list secure and profitable. Yet he did not wish to be published by Chapman and Hall and his father did not admire his novels. By February 1930 Evelyn's Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall were each selling more copies by the week than Alec's novels sold in a lifetime. ‘O cruel Fate! What hurly-burly throw'st thou at me?’
But if 1930 was a year of success in the careers of Arthur's two sons it was also a year of bitter failure where his relationship with Evelyn was concerned. The day-nursery at Underhill, the peaceful first-floor room with a balcony looking out over the garden that had once been Evelyn and Barbara's Cubist ‘studio’, then Alec and Barbara's ‘sitting-room’, was now used by Arthur as his study and it was here that he finished writing One Man's Road. It was here, also, that Evelyn kept the books he had recently removed from Islington, including, neatly arranged on the shelf above Arthur's desk, two unguarded, morocco-bound volumes of his diary.
Naturally Arthur's curiosity got the better of him – and the effect upon him was shattering. Most of all, he was wounded by negative references to himself, ‘immensely humiliated and distressed’, as Alec, many years later, put it in a letter: ‘My mother [K] told me that he never really got over it, that he kept harking back to it.’ At the time he complained to Alec that Evelyn had criticised his style of reading aloud – one of his favourite pastimes – and referred in particular to Evelyn's sneer, ‘a good lecture but incorrigibly theatrical as usual’. In 1914 Arthur had given a speech to the Sherborne School Literary Society in which he had read extracts from Dickens ‘very dramatically’, according to Alec, and afterwards a sixth-former had asked him if he had ever been an actor. Arthur had been as delighted by the compliment as he was now diminished by Evelyn's criticism. After that he hesitated to read aloud to anyone except his closest friends.
What hurt him most, though, was the passage in which Evelyn described him as ‘ineffably silly’ and despised by K, who must have married him only because ‘he needed her most’. And we can only imagine how any father would feel after reading his son's lurid confessions to sadism, sexual incontinence and drunken debauch. Evelyn's description of his visit to a homosexual brothel in Paris between Christmas and New Year 1925 will suffice as a single example of the sort of diary incident to which Arthur must have taken the gravest exception:
They howled and squealed and danced and pointed to their genitalia. A boy dressed as an Egyptian woman sat himself beside me and pretended to understand my French. He admired my check trousers and made that an opportunity to squeeze my legs and then without more ado he put his arms round me and started to kiss me. I thought him attractive but
had better uses for the 300 francs which the patron demanded for his enjoyment … I arranged a tableau by which my boy should be enjoyed by a large negro who was there but at the last minute, after we had ascended to a squalid divan at the top of the house and he was lying waiting for the negro's advances, the price proved prohibitive … I took a taxi home and to bed in chastity. I think I do not regret it.
Within a few short months of reading this filth, Arthur was in for another shock, perhaps a greater one even than the first. On 29 September 1930 Evelyn was received into the Roman Catholic Church. It is hard to imagine how much an old-fashioned Englishman detested the Church of Rome. To Arthur, whose whole family was steeped in the traditions of the Church of England, Evelyn's pugnacious Catholicism must have been far more offensive than Alec's agnosticism. Contemptuously he referred to Evelyn's conversion as his ‘perversion to Rome’. Arthur's worst nightmare had come true. Years earlier, when Evelyn was nine, he had given him a copy of Mary Macgregor's classical history The Story of Rome, inscribed with a warning against the lures of Catholicism:
All roads, they tell us, lead to Rome;
Yet, Evelyn, stay a while at home!
Or, if the Roman road invites
To doughty deeds and fearful fights,
Remember England still is best –
Her heart, her soul, her Faith, her Rest!
How prophetic Arthur's inscription turned out to have been. In A Little Learning Evelyn, by then a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic, wrote dismissively of Arthur's attitude to religion:
My father liked church-going with a preference for colourful and ceremonious services, usually attending whatever place was nearest, irrespective of its theological complexion … In my childhood my father read family prayers every morning. In August 1914 he abandoned this practice on the very curious
grounds that it was ‘no longer any good’. His complaint against Catholics was their clarity of dogma and I doubt whether he had a genuine intellectual conviction about any element of his creed. He would muse in vaguely platonic terms about the possibilities of immortality.
This flip picture of his father's spiritual outlook is far from accurate. I do not suppose that Arthur would have agreed with a word of it. Behind this passage lies, of course, Evelyn's conviction of the superiority of Catholicism over his father's Anglicanism. But Evelyn knew that Arthur was a deeply religious man. When he designed a bookplate for him in the 1920s he drew, in a position of prominence just above Arthur Waugh's name, a large crucifix, signifying the importance that religion played in his father's life.
We do not need to go into all the reasons for Evelyn's secession here. As I have already suggested, his childhood enthusiasm for playing priests was spurred by the need to gain his father's love and admiration. After that and until 1930 he was not especially religious. Twice he suggested to Arthur that he wished to become a clergyman, then considered a respectable gentleman's job for the younger sons of a certain class. He went for a single interview that came to nothing.
Arthur did not take any of this seriously but in 1930 he took Evelyn's ‘perversion’ very seriously indeed: he saw it as an act of treachery against the tried and trusted traditions of his family, and, in a typical act of ‘transference’ (I think that is what psychologists call it), he wrote in his diary for 27 September 1930: ‘K very, very sad over news of Evelyn's conversion to Rome.’ But on the same day K wrote dispassionately: ‘Evelyn to Lambs for weekend. He told me he was being received into Roman Church next week. Shopped with Janet.’ When Arthur told Alec about Evelyn's conversion all he could say was ‘Your poor mother, your poor, poor mother.’ But K was not especially religious: all she cared about was that the move was right for Evelyn. Later Arthur wrote to a friend that Evelyn was travelling in Africa ‘fortified with the blessing of the Pope. He is welcome to any comfort he can derive from such benedictions. I prithee have me excused.’
* * *
The main effect of Evelyn's religious conversion on his relationship with Arthur was to create an alienating and irreparable chasm between the two. That he was still based at Underhill did not help. Father and son went to great efforts to avoid one another around the house. Many entries in Ar
thur's diary make clear the extent to which Evelyn, with the help of his mother, kept away from him during the day: ‘Evelyn and K went to Hampstead shopping, so I went out alone’; ‘Evelyn came back to dinner and sat with K in the book-room so I spent the evening alone upstairs’; ‘K and Evelyn went to the cinema leaving me alone’; ‘K and Evelyn again went out together – this time to the Hippodrome – and left me all alone.’
In April 1931 Evelyn came home with a temperature of 101°F and a mouthful of ulcers, having swallowed some offensive watercress at a nearby hotel. Soon afterwards Arthur fell ill of an unrelated complaint which Evelyn explained, much to his father's horror, was an attack of jealousy brought on by his own illness and K's tender nursing of her younger son. As Alec wrote in one of his many memoirs, ‘My father wanted to have all the attention, always: particularly from his wife, particularly when he was ill.’ When they had both recovered Evelyn apologised to Arthur with a dozen quarter bottles of champagne but Arthur complained that the champagne made him liverish.
It was during these years that Evelyn, in his eagerness to stay away from home as much as possible, discovered the delights of the large country house. Several critics have accused him of snobbery in this regard. I shall deal with this charge later but for the moment restrict myself only to the observation that no one except a fool or a Philistine would have preferred the drear, draughty lifestyle at Underhill to the glories of Madresfield, Mells, Biddesdon or any of the other great country houses to which he was a regular and welcome guest during the 1930s.
I do not believe that Arthur's relationship with Evelyn was confrontational at this time, yet the pair had never been so distant and communications between them had never seemed so hollow. Evelyn had always been allowed to do as he liked. He was a spoiled boy, and yet he was unloved by his father – a strange combination.
Without ever having the satisfaction of a blazing row Evelyn continued to tease and insult his father through his books. Labels, his Mediterranean travel journal, was written at the same time as Arthur was working on his autobiography and takes a swipe at him in the opening four lines: ‘I did not really know where I was going, so, when anyone asked me I said to Russia. Thus my trip started, like an autobiography, upon a rather nicely qualified basis of falsehood and self-glorification.’ Soon afterwards Vile Bodies was published. Here Arthur again saw, paraded before the public in the character of the eccentric Colonel Blount, many of his own worst characteristics and affectations. Like Arthur, who in 1924 had lent Underhill as the setting of Evelyn's student film, wishing desperately that he might be given a role in it, so in Vile Bodies, Colonel Blount lends his house, Doubting Hall, to a Hollywood producer, Mr Isaacs, on the condition that he may appear as an extra. During the filming Colonel Blount has ‘never been so happy in his life’:
‘All right,’ said one of the men with megaphones. ‘You can beat it. We'll shoot the duel now. I shall want two supers to carry the body. The rest of you are through for the afternoon.’
A man in leather apron, worsted stockings and flaxen wig emerged from the retreating worshippers.
‘Oh please, Mr Isaacs,’ he said,‘please may Icarry the body?’
‘All right, Colonel, if you want to. Run in and tell them in the wardrobe to give you a smock and a pitchfork.’
‘Thank you so much,’ said Colonel Blount, trotting off towards his house. Then he stopped. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘I suppose it wouldn't be better for me to carry a sword?’
‘No, pitchfork, and hurry up about it or I shan't let you carry the body at all; someone go and find Miss La Touche.’
Vile Bodies also resurrects Arthur's banner for Alec ‘Welcome home the heir to Underhill’ and introduces the readers to Mr Rampole. This ‘benign old gentleman’, who reappears ten years later in Evelyn's novel Put Out More Flags, is a director of the small publishing firm, Rampole and Bentley, based (like Chapman and Hall) in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. He lives in a ‘small but substantial’ house in Hampstead, goes to board meetings once a week and his ‘chief interest in the business was confined to the progress of a little book of his own about bee-keeping, which they had published twenty years ago and, though he did not know it, allowed long ago to drop out of print’. Rampole has ‘an ingenious way of explaining over advances and over-head charges and stock in hand in such a way that seemed to prove that obvious failures had indeed succeeded’. His attitude to authors is parsimonious. He does not like giving them advances, and issues as ‘standard’ a miserly contract: ‘No royalty on the first two thousand, then a royalty of two and half per cent, rising to five on the tenth thousand. We retain serial, cinema, dramatic, American, colonial, and translation rights, of course. And, of course, an option on your next twelve books on the same terms.’
Arthur hit back, in a submissive sort of way, in his own book, One Hundred Years in Publishing, a history of Chapman and Hall. In this portentous tome the author devotes two pages to Alec Waugh who ‘lived in the world of youth’, and praises ‘that honest and revealing story’ The Loom of Youth (not published by Chapman and Hall), which set the ‘world ablaze’, and that ‘equally honest record’ The Prisoners of Mainz:
A son's success is naturally a father's pride; but, better than all the tales of swelling loyalty, even in a publisher's office, is the steady advance of a sincere and self-respecting talent, widening as experience widens, and ripening as judgement matures. That first critic on the hearth, to whom were confided the earliest manuscripts of an eager schoolboy, has surely his peculiar right to hail the firm and confident workmanship of a novel such as Three Score and Ten, with its intimate study of the relationship of father and son, or the swift observation and comprehensive sympathy which render The Coloured Countries so acutely personal in its appeal. To see one's dreams come true in the achievement of the younger generation, is always a more satisfying recompense than to have realised them for oneself.
To Arthur ‘the steady advance of a sincere and self-respecting talent’ was preferable in every respect to the meteoric rise of his publicity-hungry younger son, who is mentioned only once, en passant, in a short sub-clause to a long sentence about other authors:
Sir Denison Ross, that most learned and genial Orientalist, has been responsible for a library of ancient fiction, called the Treasure House of Eastern Story, and among the long regiment of novelists is yet another Waugh (Evelyn) – whose Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies have developed an original and highly entertaining vein of half-cynical, half-appreciative satire which has so thoroughly caught the public taste that both books have been reckoned with the best-sellers of consecutive years – while names as diverse in appeal as Gertrude Atherton, Rosemary Rees, Countess Barcynska, Ianthe Jerrold, Barbara Goolden, Constance Holme, Winifred James, Ruth Brockington, Mrs A. M. Williamson, Karen Bramson, etc., etc.…
Alec claimed this as a warm tribute but Evelyn disagreed, viewing as a snub his inclusion on a literary list that looked more like a roll-call of runners-up in the Hampstead and Highgate annual flower-arranging competition. He retaliated with a short story, ‘Too Much Tolerance’, about a man, remarkably like Arthur, who believes that most people are ‘jolly good fellows’, who rejects his own stiff Victorian upbringing to encourage everyone to do exactly what they want and is consequently shafted by all. The story ends:
As I watched, he finished his business and strode off towards the town – a jaunty, tragic little figure, cheated out of his patrimony by his partner, battened on by an obviously worthless son, deserted by his wife, an irrepressible, bewildered figure, striding off under his bobbing hat, cheerfully butting his way into a whole continent of rapacious and ruthless jolly good fellows.
Arthur detested Evelyn's manipulation of the press and what he saw as his vulgar hunger for publicity – ‘Publicity breeds an irresistible itch for vulgar display,’ he used to say. In 1930, at the time of Evelyn's phenomenal success with Vile Bodies, he wrote:
Nobody seems content to do his work nowadays without blowing a
horn to call attention to his proficiency. Nor is it his work alone, nor even his work principally, that is proclaimed to the world. The orgy of publicity follows him into the restaurants and parties, which now take the place of home; the social-gossiper hangs at the tail-coat of the public character, reporting next afternoon, the food which he ate over night, the eyes into which he smiled, and the degree of sobriety which enabled him to find his way home.
When Evelyn was sent to Abyssinia to report on the Italian war Arthur wrote to his friend McMaster: ‘If any of you see that abominable rag the Daily Mail, you will know that Evelyn has gone to Abyssinia as its War Correspondent to the great discomfort of his parents. To-day's Mail is all over him. I never saw such flaming publicity.’ It is true that Evelyn was an adroit self-publicist – he calculatedly set himself up as Fleet Street's ‘voice of youth’ and, after the success of Vile Bodies, ensured that as many as possible of his witty, iconoclastic opinions were quoted every week in the gossip columns of the British press. Arthur retaliated by starving Evelyn of the oxygen of publicity in his own small way: he omitted any mention of his career in One Man's Road. His last allusion to Evelyn concerns the play he wrote at Lancing in 1917, called Conversion. He praises Evelyn's teachers for ‘allowing its reproduction in the Big School’ and at the end of the same paragraph extols a Lancing teacher who had been pleased that ‘success as a dramatist had not prevented the young man from carrying off the senior History Scholarship at Oxford’. After that, nothing. No mention of Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Labels or the extraordinary fame and success his younger son had achieved in the two years before the final proofs of One Man's Road were sent to the printers. Alec, desperate in later years to portray Arthur and Evelyn's relationship as continuously blissful, excused the omission on the grounds that Evelyn's collapsed marriage and conversion to the Roman Catholic faith had somehow made reference to his successful career impossible. ‘The whole story in the spring of 1931 when my father was at work on One Man's Road was too close for its emotion to be recollected in tranquillity. Better not attempt it.’ Odd.
Fathers and Sons Page 24