Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (89 page)

Alec was their firstling and their darling lamb.
Evelyn Waugh on his brother Alec

Alec Waugh is principally interesting to literary history for the dark shadow he cast, in childhood, on his five-and-a-half-year younger brother. Not that he felt himself the brighter of the two. ‘If I were to pick up the autobiography of Alec Waugh,’ he once said, ‘the first name that I should look for in the index would be Evelyn Waugh.’ Born when he was, Alec enjoyed an Edwardian childhood while Evelyn (b. 1903) suffered a wartime childhood – shops, cinemas, rations and loneliness. Neither of the boys was tall; at five-feet-five they were, in fact, just this side of titchy. Alec, however, did not let lack of inches handicap him. In his four years at Sherborne School, he was a ‘blood’ on the rugby field and a match-winning slogger on the cricket pitch. He also won the school prize for poetry. He was clever in the classroom and comradely outside it. ‘My brother’, wrote Evelyn, dourly, in 1962, ‘was a zestful schoolboy … I was not a zestful schoolboy.’

Arthur Waugh, the paterfamilias, had two great loves in life: his wife ‘K’ came
well down a list topped by Sherborne and his ‘firstborn’. Alec, his father dreamed, would be a great Shiburnian – school captain, at least. When the school broke up for the hols, a banner was raised at the gates of their Golders Green bungalow reading ‘Welcome Home Heir to Hillfield’. Put out more flags, the sardonic Evelyn may have thought. So besotted with his son Alec was he that Arthur’s friends and colleagues seriously feared for his sanity. He fired off daily letters, reproduced in Alexander Waugh’s family biography, which are less those of a Victorian parent than of a passionate lover. He awaited his son’s dutiful replies, we are told, ‘sweatily’. His father’s hopes, and quasi-incestuous lusts, were a heavy burden for any son. None the less, Alec made a good fist of it. There was a small hiccup about his pubescent addiction to self-abuse and the suicidal guilt that accompanied it. (Evelyn, by contrast, ‘frigged’ madly without the slightest juvenile remorse – or, as he reported, pleasure.) Alec, touchingly, brought himself to climax with Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ – a poem that mixes athleticism with romance. Arthur, in a stream of crazily anxious letters, warned that the vice would lead to ‘paralysis and softening of the brain’, rot of the moral fibre, loose women and syphilis. Alec did not stop, but wisely stopped confessing it. Neither did he confess to his father that he was falling in love with a string of pretty heartbreakers at the school. Perhaps his moral fibre
was
rotting. He would grow up to be a shameless womaniser – ‘the bald lecher’ was his nickname on Evelyn’s side of the family.

In 1915 Shirburnians were dying in the trenches faster almost than first-form boys were joining the school. Disaster of a more personal nature struck when Alec’s nocturnal Don Juanism was discovered by the school authorities. Expulsion was automatic (Oscar Wilde was still a raw memory) but Alec was allowed, on Arthur’s tearful pleading, to sit out his last term. But he was proscribed as a ‘dirty little beast’ and boys were warned to keep away from him. It was expertly hushed up: Evelyn, incredibly, did not learn of his brother’s ‘disgrace’ until 1962, if we believe him.

Alec was old enough to answer Kitchener’s call, but at seventeen too young to fight at the Front. During his protracted officer-cadet training at Berkhamsted, he mastered the art of the Vickers machine gun and courted (despite a lingering preference for boys) Barbara Jacobs, the daughter of the famous writer of his father’s era, W. W. Jacobs – still remembered for his spine-chiller ‘The Monkey’s Paw’. Whatever his other moral derelictions, Alec was not, at this period, drunken. He rose every morning two hours before reveille, to write a novel. In seven weeks he had a manuscript of 115,000 words entitled, grandiloquently,
The Loom of Youth
. Privately he called it his ‘love letter to Sherborne’. The work in progress was dispatched to his father for correction and censorship. When eventually published the novel was prefaced with a second love letter, to his father, loftily confessing that ‘whatever altars I
may have raised by the wayside, whatever ephemeral loyalties may have swayed me, my one real lodestar has always been your love’.

The Loom of Youth
(1917) is a work of mind-numbing simplicity. It chronicles Gordon Caruthers’s triumphs on the footer field, cricket pitch and in the classroom during his four years at ‘Fernhurst’ and reads like a guide to public school life for those poor swine (most of England, that is) unlucky enough not to attend one. For example: ‘Breakfast is always rather a scramble, and nowhere more so than at a Public School. The usual Fernhurst breakfast lasted about ten minutes. Hardly anyone spoke, only the ring of forks on plates was heard and an occasional shout of “Tea” from the Sixth Form table.’ When Gordon is himself a sixth-former, the narrative touches delicately on what is going on between him and a lower-form boy when, instead of applying themselves to evening prep, they bathe in ‘the feverish waters of pleasure’.

The novel was circulated to a string of publishers, including his pater’s Chapman and Hall, who thought it too hot to handle – on libel grounds principally, although the recent burning of Lawrence’s
The Rainbow
was also a deterrent. It was eventually taken by Grant Richards, a newly founded house with no reputation to lose. In the intervening months before being old enough for the Front, the newly commissioned Alec continued with his overtures to Barbara, two years younger than he (‘a dumpy muskrat of a girl’, Alec’s biographer calls her). It was her photograph, and his father’s, that he took with him when he was finally posted to France. He survived Passchendaele by a fluke (100,000 of his comrades didn’t) and soon saw war as the horrible thing it was. Disillusionment inspired the fine poem ‘Carrion’, a meditation on a corpse being eaten by rats in no man’s land. ‘I’ve done with warfare,’ Alec wrote after the Somme – but it had not done with him. He surrendered to the Germans in the next big battle. ‘My brother was no hero,’ Evelyn was at pains to point out in later life and there were persistent allegations of a lack of pluck. When the situation was hopeless officers were expected to die, Webley revolver in hand, shouting ‘for King and Country’.

While he saw out the war as a prisoner of war, Alec’s novel was enjoying a wholly unanticipated success, running through five editions in as many months. The author was extravagantly praised. ‘Your son is an astounding young man,’ wrote H. G. Wells to Arthur, who needed no reassurance whatsoever on that score.
The Loom of Youth
was not, however, the source of unalloyed paternal pleasure. Sherborne saw it as ‘a poisoned dagger’ aimed at the school’s heart. Alec’s name was ritually removed, like Dreyfus’s epaulettes, from the roll of Old Shirburnians, and Arthur was obliged himself to resign the same honour. It was the bitterest moment of his life. But it did not extinguish his love for his first-born – nothing could.

On his return in 1919, Alec married his Barbara. It would be a disaster; he was unable to consummate the union and the marriage was annulled two years later. According to Alec, ‘inexperience was entirely to blame’. Girls, he discovered, were rather different from boys when it came to bathing in the feverish waters. He was, however, a quick learner and after this initial setback became a lifelong philanderer. He married twice more. His second wife, an Australian heiress, enabled him to buy his country house, Silchester, shortly before Evelyn acquired Piers Court. Joan Waugh indulged her husband’s love of what he called ‘hot countries’ and hotter women, but the marriage fell apart, having yielded three children. In later life, Alec took American citizenship and a third wife. Engagingly modest, living entirely for sybaritic pleasure, he regarded himself as a ‘very minor writer’ with a genius for a brother.

His father had persuaded him not to publish two novels on homosexual themes while
The Loom of Youth
was still sensational. A small success with a less dangerous novel in the late 1920s, and his wife’s wealth, allowed him to give up the sinecure with Chapman and Hall which Arthur had secured for him. Thereafter, apart from some stints as a creative writing instructor, he never worked again (other than writing). His life subsequently was that of a seedy international playboy. He wrote a lot – publishers were always interested in anything with the name ‘Waugh’ on the title page – and everyone liked him. In 1956 his melodrama about inter-racial love,
Island in the Sun
, enjoyed an unexpectedly huge success. A month or two earlier he had been considering ending it all with prussic acid. The novel and the movie (starring Harry Belafonte, who sang the title song) coincided with the boom in West Indian reggae music and growing civil rights unrest in the US. After the success of
Island in the Sun
Alec, Evelyn sarcastically observed, ‘never drew a sober breath’.

Alec and Evelyn rarely crossed each other’s paths over the years. Oddly it was the younger brother who seems to have been the more envious. In 1957 Evelyn brought a lawsuit against the
Daily Express
, a paper which had never forgiven him for the depiction of Beaverbrook as Lord Copper in
Scoop
. The
Express
columnist, Nancy Spain had claimed, gleefully, that
Island in the Sun
had sold more copies than all Evelyn’s novels combined – so much for satire. The verdict was swung Evelyn’s way by Alec good-naturedly testifying, in person, that Spain’s allegation was untrue. The author of
Brideshead
ended up some £7,000 richer, untaxed. An amusingly spiteful portrait of the writer in old age is given by his nephew, Auberon:

He lived for much of the year in Tangier, Morocco, where an old age pension from the state of New York enabled him to equip a house with cook, butler, and houseboy; at other times, he lived austerely as writer-in-residence at a midwestern university, eating his meals from divided, plastic plates in a room above the
students’ canteen, and emerging from time to time to entertain his friends in London at elegant dinner parties, where he wore immaculately tailored but increasingly eccentric suits.

He died in Florida.

West was about the most thoroughly pessimistic person I have ever known.
Robert M. Coates

West was born Nathan Weinstein, the son of first-generation Russian-Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. In the country they left, and that in which they settled, the Weinsteins were prosperous, secular and assimilationist by lifestyle. Nathan’s father Max, a builder, had arrived in New York in the late 1890s at a period when Manhattan was exploding skywards. Brought up in an English-speaking household on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the future novelist did not regard himself as a Jew at all, but as an ‘American’. Critics like Edmund Wilson (himself snootily WASP) none the less detect in West’s work ‘a kind of Eastern European suffering in common with Gogol … and a sad, quick Jewish humour’.

At high school, Nathan (nicknamed ‘Pep’) was a contemporary of fellow Jew Lionel Trilling, later the most influential literary critic of his age: more influential, indeed, than Edmund Wilson. Unlike the over-achieving Lionel, Pep was defiantly idle – but quite as omnivorous in his private reading as the future King of Columbia University. He also knew his own mind, and from the first developed a distaste for the ‘muddle-class’ realism of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser and a taste for French aesthetes and intellectual dandyism of the Wildean kind.

Nathan enterprisingly falsified his abysmal school transcript to get into Tufts where, after a couple of terms, he again falsified his academic record to transfer to Brown University. He was no model student – arriving, as he did, dripping with a dose of gonorrhoea, the effects of which embarrassed him for life in relations with women. At Brown he formed the most important relationship of his literary life with fellow undergraduate S. J. Perelman – later in life, the Marx Brothers’ scriptwriter. Nathan scraped a degree. He always intended to be a writer and to that end in 1926
he ‘went West’ (as it pleased him to joke) by legally changing his name. It was an act of self-fashioning. At the same period he persuaded his father – who wanted his son to follow him into the family property business – to stump up for a trip to Paris where, for three months, the young would-be writer could lose himself among the Lost Generation.

For years he had been working on his first novel,
The Dream Life of Balso Snell
, a phantasmagorical satire on human delusion. Its concept bit off far more than even an embryonic genius could chew, but the novel’s ‘play on styles’ was a useful apprenticeship. Returning from Paris in January 1927, West went to work as a night manager in a New York residential hotel. This observation post on the passing metropolitan tide suited him, as did the bohemian society of Greenwich Village. He had not the slightest long-term interest in the hotel business, however, and followed his idol, H. L. Mencken, in his maxim ‘my sole interest is my writing’. In March 1929, Perelman introduced him, momentously, to a woman who wrote an agony column for a Brooklyn paper, and who showed him a batch of heart-rending letters. Later West would criminally steam open letters at the hotel he managed to examine the suffering they contained. Thus was born
Miss Lonelyhearts
.

West published his first story in 1929. The world collapsed in October that year, taking the Weinsteins’ prosperity, which had been dwindling for some years, down with it. The Depression radicalised West politically. He would certainly have been hauled up as a ‘Red’ before McCarthy had he lived to be fifty-five. The unluckiest of writers, his debut novel,
Balso Snell
(six years in the writing), was delivered to the world in 1931. It was stillborn as the combined result of the financial collapse of its publisher, its printer, the whole US bookshop network and, with the Wall Street crash, the purchasing power of the American citizen. Had it made the shop windows and libraries of the country,
Balso Snell
’s bitter whimsy was anyway out of key with the mood of the moment.