My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (40 page)

I got the idea of the book in a flash as I was pacing the decks of the
Ile de France
, but the idea was the sudden fusing of four different plots that had been turning ineffectively in my mind. Shortly after the end of the war I had begun a novel about a woman who had killed a man by mistake—in the course of an argument she struck at him; in stepping back he slipped on a rug and as he fell, hit his head against the edge of a table. She decided not to tell the police; she was later blackmailed. I set the plot in Baghdad and called it ‘Murder at the Alwiyah Club'. I wrote 25,000 words and then broke down.

I also had had the idea for a short story turning on colour. A young American from the South falls in love with the daughter of a West Indian planter. She discovers that she has coloured blood through her father; she feels that she has no right to marry a Southerner; their children will be outcasts. Her mother puts her mind at rest by telling her that she is not her father's daughter.

I had another embryo plot. I got it from the highly respectable and punctilious wife of a neighbouring vicar. She said that when her husband went to preach in another parish and spent the night away from home, she raised the seat of the downstairs lavatory so that if a burglar broke in he would believe that there was a man in the house and would not come upstairs. I thought that a raised lavatory seat could fan a husband's jealousy. He could return home to recognize the smell of an unusual cigarette. The lavatory seat was raised. A strange man must have been in the house.

In 1948, the Labour Government appointed Lord Baldwin to the governorship of the Leeward Islands. They wanted a Socialist and a peer, a man who had ample private means, and would not be made pusillanimous by the career-official's resolve to avoid trouble at the end of his career and finish up as a knight. Baldwin's appointment was the subject of fierce criticism in the House of Commons, and his conduct in the Islands was melodramatic. I wondered what kind of dramatic commotion would have arisen had a Conservative Government appointed a peer who was a first-class cricketer: I had Lionel Tennyson in mind.

For these four different ideas, a fifth new idea acted as a catalyst. A planter of the old school, in order to discredit a young coloured rabble-rouser and the democratic, in his eyes subversive, ideas that the rabble-rouser stood for, incites a riot in which he himself is killed; a riot which will convince the authorities in England that the West Indians are not yet ready for self-rule. With these various themes at work on my imagination, I set off early in March for Nice to get the back of the book broken.

Of course I did not. It has been my invariable experience to open a novel with enthusiasm, to write at a steady pace for three weeks or a month, and then suddenly run
dry. I have to wait at least a month, usually longer, before I can get started again. This time I wrote solidly for a month. I took a month's holiday in England, then set out again for Nice. On the way down, by air, I read the typescript of the first section. I realized that it would not do at all. Something was badly wrong.

During the next month I came to realize what that something was.

The novel in this first draft opened with a husband—the old-time planter—returning to his house shortly before lunch to detect the smell of an unusual cigarette. He does not smoke himself and as a result is particularly sensitive to the smell of smoke. He goes into the lavatory. The smell is stronger there. The seat is raised. A man has been smoking that cigarette. At lunch his wife makes no reference to a visitor. He gives her an opportunity to describe her morning. She does not refer to any visitor. His suspicions are roused. It is a quick six-page scene.

The second scene described a cocktail party at Government House. It is a long forty-page scene; it introduces all the chief characters and sets out the main problems of their lives. It was a very intricate piece of writing. I thought I had got it right, but the narrative dragged. At last I realized why it did. The reader had not been sufficiently alerted by the opening scene to feel inquisitive about the various people who were going to influence the course of the action that had opened in that first scene. And they had not been sufficiently alerted because the husband and wife were in their middle fifties. A middle-aged husband married to a young wife could be acutely, physically jealous. But he would not be jealous in that way about the companion of thirty years who has borne him three children. He might be worried and concerned, largely on her account, feeling that she was on the brink of a great mistake; he might be distressed on his own
account because the security of his home and family were imperilled; there are a number of emotions that he might experience, but there was one very certainly that he would not feel: the wild uncontrollable jealousy that Othello felt for Desdemona. And that was the kind of jealousy that was needed to keep the reader on his toes during a forty-page description of a cocktail party. It had to be a young husband who was uncertain of his wife. So I made it the son of the old-time planter who returned to the smell of an unusual cigarette. The reader's curiosity was set alight.

I worked on the novel intermittently through the summer. Then in September I went to Nice, to ‘the small hotel bedroom' that has solved so many problems for the novelist. By Christmas half the novel was finished—about 120,000 words. After Christmas I went to New York. Carl Brandt was very anxious to see what I had written. But I declined. I felt that there was something wrong with the book, but I wanted to find out what it was myself. I was afraid of being side-tracked. Carl would sense that there was something wrong. He might prescribe, I will not say the wrong medicine, but a medicine that was not the one most in tune with my own subconscious conception of the plot. A novelist always knows inside himself what his story needs. If he gives himself time he will find out for himself. And luckily I had time, thanks to my Hollywood dollars.

I had an invitation to spend two weeks in Duarte and I spotted my mistake. One of my characters, the son of the Governor, and a future peer, was, in a sense, the hero. He was the man for whom the reader was expected to be ‘rooting'. He was a thoroughly sound, wholesome fellow and it is very hard not to make that kind of character a prig. Yet if one tries to humanize him, by putting into his mind, or by expressing in a subjunctive soliloquy, devious intentions, the reader is put off. ‘That's wrong
for him.' It was essential that I should get him right. But how to do it?

The device I chose may seem a very simple one, but it is one that would only occur to an experienced novelist unless, by chance, he had got it right from the beginning. After writing twenty novels, one knows the various techniques and I realized that to make this character, Euan, a sympathetic, warm human being, I must never let the action appear through his eyes. He must always be presented to the reader through the eyes of other characters. He must be described and talked about; but his own thoughts must never be put on paper except in as far as they emerged in conversation; in the way, in fact, that Galsworthy presented Irene Forsyte. I left Duarte knowing that I had solved my problem.

I finished the novel at the end of July, and in August I took the typescript down with me to Villefranche to revise. I was accompanied by my second son, Peter, then a schoolboy in his sixteenth year. I would join him on the beach shortly before lunch, with three hours' work behind me. He told me afterwards that he had never seen so much excitement on a face before. ‘I think it's all right, Peter,' I would say, and my eyes were glowing. I had no doubt about the book at all. I was confident that it was good. I was wondering how good. My surprise and consternation could not have been more complete than when I received, four weeks later, a chilling reception from my London agent.

It was in his opinion much too long. Pruning was not enough; it needed a major operation. He suggested the removal of the murder which was the backbone of the book. Even if I retained the murder, the funeral scene that followed it must go. The chief character did not convince him. He made a number of additional objections. He found nothing to praise, though he concluded his
letter with the hope that he had not discouraged me. ‘There is a good book here,' he wrote. He invited me to call and discuss it with him.

It was the biggest shock that I had received not only in my professional career, but in my personal life. Virginia Sorensen has kept the letter that I wrote her the next day. ‘If this man's right,' I said, ‘I do not know where I go from here.' I put myself in the confessional. I was fifty-six years old; I had been writing for nearly forty years. That was a long time. I might have lost my critical capacity. I had already lost the knack of the short story, which needed conciseness and taut treatment; within the broad limits of the novel I might have become garrulous and flabby. I did not, however, lose my head. ‘You may be right,' I told my agent. ‘But before I hear what you have to say, I want to re-read the book, in the light of your letter.' I was bound for Copenhagen. I took the MS. with me.

I read it slowly. It was nine hundred pages long. It held no surprises for me. When I had sent off the revised script, I had thought, ‘I shan't ever have to read that again. I'll only glance through it in covers.' Yet, even so, I did not find the re-reading tiresome. The narrative moved fast. It was easy reading. The murder came half-way through the book. It was an extension of the original ‘Murder at the Alwiyah Club'. It was melodramatic certainly, but most long novels need violence at a certain point. The novelist arranges a setting of normal people leading their customary lives, then something unusual happens. You recognize their true natures by seeing how they behave under unusual circumstances. That is an axiom of the craft of the fiction. The murder in my novel fulfilled a necessary function, as did the funeral scene to which my agent had objected.

In most detective novels, certainly in Agatha Christie's,
there is a scene about half-way through where the detective recapitulates the evidence so as to remind the reader of what has passed and put him in full possession of all the facts before the second lap begins. That was what the funeral scene did here. It gave each character a chance to indulge in a subjective soliloquy. It was a gathering up of all the previous threads. It was an essential scene, but it was four pages too long. My agent, because he had been bored, thought the whole scene should go. Not being a novelist himself, he did not realize how much difference can be made by the cutting of four pages. With those pages removed, the funeral scene played its part effectively in the development of the drama. I felt as confident about it now as I had in Villefranche, but I thought I would take a second opinion.

Virginia Sorensen, whom I had met the previous summer in MacDowell, had come to Copenhagen on a Guggenheim. It was, indeed, her presence there that was responsible for my desertion of Nice. I asked her if she would read it. She did not see my agent's letter. I did not want her to start with a preconceived idea. I only told her that he had thought it overlong, that he had told one of his staff that I had bitten off more than I could chew. She herself tended to write too lengthily at the beginning of her novels. The drama did not develop for a hundred pages or so. She had usually had to cut her opening chapters; and I imagine that she began to read it with the thought, ‘How can I explain to him most tactfully that, excellent though this is, in the interests of the whole it should be cut?' But on the contrary she, as its first reader, was its first enthusiast. That decided me. I instructed ‘my man in London' to send at once one copy to Cassell's, and another to Carl Brandt in America.

He replied, ‘So be it. No one will be more pleased than I if Carl approves of it,' rather in the tone of the
headmaster who says, ‘No one will be more pleased than I, Waugh, if you have passed your exam,' knowing full well that you have not. Luckily, however, Carl Brandt did approve. He wrote:

Your novel got here and I had myself a fine time with it. I read every word although I was rather sure from the first hundred or so pages that magazine use would be very unlikely. The reasons for this I am sure are as clear to you as they are to me.

Not only the colour question but the frankness of some of the relations of sex. I am, however, letting Hugh Kahler of Ladies' Home Journal see it. Miracles do happen!

But I want to tell you that to me, this is your best novel. I could give you a list of reasons but I'll spare you. Primarily I'm for it because of your characters and their interplay.

The story is brilliantly steered through its intricacies of plot. Your balances of interest are always even. It seems to march inexorably to its goal.

And the characters! H. E., Archer, the Police Chief (what a ducky he is!), the man who got murdered, H. E.'s son, the American reporter. The women—Olivia, Sylvia, the brazen hussy who was made into a woman by the negro Attorney General, the mother—the whole works! iooo congratulations. If the book does not sell, I'll not know what's wrong with the public.

No book is a best-seller unless it has a lot of luck and the fairy godmother in the case of
Island in the Sun
was unquestionably Carl Brandt. It owed everything to him. If he had reacted as my London agent had, I doubt if Farrar and Straus would have bothered to read it. They would have wondered how best they could cut their losses on it. Roger Straus is, indeed, fond of telling of the dismay with which he viewed the bulk of this new MS. He had been losing money on me steadily for seven years. This seemed the last straw. At Christmas a Press reporter in Copenhagen had photographed me holding between both hands my bulky manuscript. I sent the photograph to John Farrar. I wrote, ‘Look what Santa Claus is sending you for Christmas.' John did not think it funny. He made no reply. Roger Straus had the manuscript sitting on his
desk for ten days, trying to work up the courage to tackle it. It was only Carl Brandt's incessant badgering that forced him eventually to take it home with him. Once he had started reading, he went on reading. ‘This, clearly,' he wrote to Carl, ‘is the book we have been waiting for. We will print a first edition of ten thousand copies.'