My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (3 page)

Both of these had special and different reasons for making an appeal to me. Temple Thurston because he was the favourite author of a contemporary at Sherborne,
two years senior to myself, in whose eyes I managed to acquire prestige as the son of his favourite's publisher, and I was at pains to return from the holidays each term with gossip-column information about Thurston's plans and movements.

This boy, whose name is Noël Whiting, and who has become one of my closer friends, though I see, alas, little of him nowadays—we rarely find ourselves at the same time in the same place—was one of the most remarkable of my contemporaries; and in retrospect I am surprised that I did not include him among the characters in my school novel; I suppose the reason is that I did not recognize then that he was remarkable. In my eyes he was no more than an agreeable and elegant eccentric. It was not till later that I came to recognize him as an insistent individualist, who got his way by passive resistance, a rebel who did not rebel, a nonconformist who did not challenge the conformity of others.

Graceful and good looking, with a gracious voice, he had the air of an Etonian; but his family had entered him for Winchester, where he failed to pass the College entrance examination, a thing that it was not difficult to do. The educational standard at Winchester has always been exceptionally high; and he had come to Sherborne because our headmaster Nowell Charles Smith was a Wykehamist. He was what was described in those days as well connected. His background was a wealthy one, but he never displayed his ampler means. He never ‘dropped' important names.

He had a contented nature, because he had interior resources. He could be perfectly happy, provided that no one interfered with him. He was resolved to enjoy his five years at Sherborne, in his own way. He was physically strong and became one of the best swimmers in the school, but he did not want to play cricket or Rugby football.
Games were compulsory at Sherborne until a boy had reached the top form, the sixth, but Noël always arranged to do something in the afternoon for which it was permissible to get ‘leave off games'—a music or a drawing lesson, an archaeological expedition or a game of fives. In the end, house captains ceased to post him on cricket and football sides, and he was able to spend a couple of afternoons every week reading in the library.

The O.T.C. (Officers' Training Corps) was technically voluntary, but 95 per cent of the school joined. Noël availed himself of his technical liberty and did not join it; not on pacifist, non-combatant grounds—when the war broke out, he applied immediately for a commission—but because he wanted to use his spare time in other ways. He was not a classical scholar; he never reached the sixth, but he spoke excellent French. The wife of the drawing master was a Frenchwoman, and he used to give weekly tea parties in his study where only French was spoken.

He interfered with no one and no one interfered with him. He wore his hair a little longer than was officially approved, but no one told him he must get it cut. You would have expected that such a boy would have been ragged and bullied in his early days, that there would have been an equivalent for the ‘Shelley Hunts' at Eton; that tough Philistines would have insisted that his duty to the house forced him to the football field: ‘get into the scrum and shove, you little scum'; but they never did. From the start his independence was respected. Many years later, as a result possibly of his experiences in India and Burma during the war, he became a Buddhist. Without knowing it, he had been a Buddhist from the start, adopting a policy of non-aggression.

He had at that time four main objects of enthusiasm—music, painting, Napoleon—the walls of his study were
covered with portraits of the Emperor—and the novels of E. Temple Thurston. I still cannot understand why those particular novels should have held such a strong appeal for him. I can think of so many other novelists with whom he might have been expected to find himself in tune.

Temple Thurston died suddenly, when he was apparently in good health, early in 1933. I do not suppose that any of his books are still in print, but for twenty-five years he was a prominent and successful author. He was one of my father's discoveries. His first novel
The Apple of Eden
recounted a priest's fall from grace; ‘religion and sex is an infallible mixture', my father said. Thurston wrote two kinds of novel: the one powerful and realistic like
The Apple of Eden
, the other sentimentally romantic like
The City of Beautiful Nonsense
—which was a considerable best-seller. He was extremely anxious to succeed on the stage and wrote a number of plays that had little success, but at last, soon after the war, he had a genuine ‘run' for
The Wandering Jew
—a lavish full-scale production at His Majesty's Theatre. He wrote scenarios for the films. He made a reasonable amount of money; he was able to finance his share of matrimonial confusion without excessive strain. He could have looked forward to at least another fifteen years of steady profitable production. Yet he was very far from being a happy man.

It is possible that he was not a very pleasant one, though, personally, I found him companionable, agreeable and encouraging. He was a great egotist, utterly self-centred; never satisfied that his work was receiving the attention that it deserved from publishers and critics. He was not easy to do business with. He published for ten years with Chapman & Hall and dedicated one of his novels to my father, but he was never satisfied with his books' sales. ‘Hodders have offered me an advance of
£700,' he would say. ‘You say that my last novel only earned £500. Perhaps Hodders with their bigger organization could push up my sales to seven hundred.' When eventually he left Chapman & Hall, he changed his publisher several times.

He made considerable demands upon his publisher. He would bring my father the first four chapters of his new novel, then eight weeks later he would arrive with the next four. My father at Underhill that night would press the back of his hand against his forehead. ‘How can I be expected to remember the precise impression that was made on me by four chapters of a novel two months ago. Think of all I've read in between.' I have taken that lesson to heart and been very careful not to submit my work in short instalments. One of Thurston's agents said to me: ‘I know that authors ask me out to lunch because they want to talk about their work, but I wish Thurston would wait till I have finished my first cocktail before he starts telling me the plot of his new novel.'

He was a lone wolf. I do not think that he had many men friends, though he was the kind of man whom you would have expected to have them. He was athletic and played lawn tennis well enough to compete in the opening rounds at Wimbledon. He played cricket at Lord's for the Authors against the Publishers and took three wickets. His last victim jumped out to drive him, missed the ball and was bowled. By a mistake of the scorer, the batsman appeared next morning in
The Times
as stumped. This distressed Thurston. He thought that it would look as though the batsman had held his bowling in such contempt that he had run out of his ground to swipe it.

Tall, dark, lean, photogenic, he looked both as the author of
The Apple of Eden
and
The City of Beautiful Nonsense
could have been expected to look; tough with a tender side. But he had a chip upon his shoulder.

He had not been to a university, nor to one of the recognized public schools.
Who's Who
contains no autobiographical details and that mattered quite a bit in England before World War I. His first wife came from a superior social caste. She wrote a novel,
John Chilcote M.P.
, which was a ‘best-seller' and of which he was so jealous that he persuaded my father to issue one of his novels in minute editions of 250 copies so that he could claim to have sold more editions than she had. Many years later when I was myself published by Chapman & Hall, I followed his example, though for different reasons, and arranged to have one of my novels issued in small editions so that it could be advertised as ‘seventh large printing exhausted before publication'. In 1957 when my brother brought a libel suit against Nancy Spain and I was one of the witnesses, the question arose of how many copies there were in an edition; the judge was highly amused when I told him of this device. ‘Mr Waugh, Mr Waugh,' he admonished me, ‘you are giving the whole show away.'

Thurston evaded military service on the curious medical grounds that he suffered from agrophobia—the fear of open spaces. His nerves, he claimed, would disintegrate on Salisbury Plain or on a battlefield; although, as my father remarked, he could with impunity take a cross-channel steamer to Ireland and France. Perhaps it was a pity that he did not have the opportunity that war provides of mixing in a community. It might have taken him out of himself. Instead he became more ingrown.

Though a member of the Garrick he never seemed to belong anywhere. In a sense that is an advantage for a writer. It is unhealthy for him, in the long run, to belong to a coterie. A clique becomes a
claque
. And when fashions change, a writer goes out of favour with his fellow members. But Thurston was never quite strong enough, quite
good enough to stand alone. He was never given more than respectful attention in the weekly reviews. He was never included in general articles on ‘trends in the modern novel', although even though he was not a major novelist, he had many of the minor qualities of a major novelist. He could construct a story; he had a sense of character and of caricature. He was ambitious and hard working. His trilogy
The Achievement of Richard Furlong
, which was issued in a single volume at no great profit to Chapman & Hall, only just did not ‘come off'. He wrote with feeling. He was a better writer than many of those who were reviewed at length in highbrow columns. His lack of critical acclaim did not, probably, cost him a penny in royalties, and through never having been fashionable, he was spared the chilling experience of finding himself out of fashion. But he himself was perpetually plagued by this lack of recognition. He was so desperately anxious to write ‘a book that mattered'.

It is a common, a familiar plight. An agent was saying to me the other day of a mutual friend, ‘Poor Jackson tortures himself because he can't produce a masterpiece. If only he would be content with the kind of work he does so well and that is in fact very profitable.' Thurston's predicament precisely. But the solution is not as easy as the agent thought. It was only because Thurston was so desperately anxious to write supremely well, that he was able to write as effectively as he did.

Though I heard more talk about Thurston than any other of Chapman & Hall's authors—how well I remember my father's dismay when Thurston wanted to call one of his novels ‘The Love Story of an Ugly Man'; it was an impossible title for Thurston in 1912, but possibly it would be an enticing one in our day of the anti-hero—I did not read one of his novels until I had left school. Much
of Desmond Coke's work, on the other hand, I knew by heart. He wrote school stories that could be appreciated both by a schoolboy and an adult; some of his books indeed were published simultaneously in two separate editions, one after being serialized in
The Captain
, the chief schoolboys' magazine, in a popular boys' series with lurid coloured illustrations, the other by Chapman & Hall in sober hard covers for the parents.

The Bending of a Twig
was published in 1906. It was in part a satire on the conventional school story. A poet suddenly decides to send his son, who has never been away from home, to Shrewsbury, the public school to which Coke went himself. The father in order to equip his son for this new experience provides him with a collection of school stories,
Tom Brown's Schooldays, Eric, or Little by Little, Stalky & Co., The Hill
, and one or two of the cheaper imitations of those classics. The poet's son derives an entirely false impression of school life; and the opening chapters describing his mistakes and his ridiculous search for the school bully are extremely funny.

The first part is satire; the last two-thirds describe with sympathetic realism how the poet's son gradually becomes the conventional school prefect, how the twig is bent in fact. At no point was the system itself criticized; it was a popular conception that was satirized. Yet in retrospect it can be seen that Coke's book was the first step in that debunking of the public school mystique, in which ten years later I was to play my part.

In 1922, in an anonymous article for
The Times
on the public school in fiction I wrote that
The Bending of a Twig
had struck the first note of rebellion. Coke thanked me for the article ‘in which I recognise your Roman hand. I am having my cards changed from “the last of the Victorians” to “the first of the Georgians”.'
But in fact, Coke was anything but a rebel. To him the standards of public-school life were sacrosanct. Indeed he was one of those Englishmen who remain all their lives exactly what they are at nineteen, the school prefect believing that the issues that lie outside his cloistered world will be basically the same, on a larger scale. That is no doubt why I at fifteen felt so much in tune with him. He confirmed the standards to which I was being trained; he did not raise uncomfortable doubts. He was tall, handsome, neat; unobtrusively well dressed; the man who never let down the side. The mildly disapproving letter that he wrote to my father when
The Loom of Youth
was published, is now in the Sherborne school library.

Coke wrote in addition a few unspecialized novels about adult life. One of them occupies a footnote in literary history. In 1910 he published a novel called
Beauty from Ashes
. It made little stir and Somerset Maugham had never heard of it when he planned to call his long autobiographical novel ‘Beauty from Ashes'. When he found that the title had already been used, he switched to
Of Human Bondage
. He was possibly irritated at the time; there was a view then that a positive was preferable to a negative title. When Geoffrey Moss's
Defeat
appeared, W. L. George said, ‘What a pity he couldn't have called it “Victory”.' In terms of his sequence of comedy successes on the stage, Maugham may have thought
Of Human Bondage
too drab, too depressing a title for a popular success; but how well it fitted that majestic, sombre epic. How finicky in comparison is ‘Beauty from Ashes'. Perhaps under that title, the novel would not have been the abiding success it has.