My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (42 page)

In 1917
The Loom of Youth
had been published in the same week that I went to France as a machine-gun subaltern; so that my head did not get turned with flattery and parties. Now in 1956, the postman had knocked a second time. I was protected by my age and tastes from establishing a changed way of living that I could not maintain.

Had I been told in the summer of 1954 that a novel of mine was going to enjoy such an astonishing success as
Island
did, I should have imagined that my whole life would be reorientated. It is surprising how little difference it has made in the long run. Early in November 1964, I went down to Nice to write the last half of a novel whose back I had broken in the MacDowell Colony in the preceding spring. I hoped to finish it by the middle of January when I planned to return to England. I should be following precisely the same routine that I had eleyen years earlier when I was writing the first half of
Island
. I was not staying in the same hotel, the Escurial, but the Windsor in the Rue Dalpozzo was in the same area, and I passed the Escurial every morning on my way to the same Brasserie for breakfast. The Brasserie de Lyons in the Avenue de la Victoire had now become the Grande Café de Lyons, but several of the same waiters were at work. It was smarter, but I looked out on precisely the same view, as I drank my morning coffee over the
Nice-Matin
.

My routine was still the same with one of my two main meals a picnic in my austere hotel bedroom. There would be the same afternoon siesta with the day's work finished and the sunset stroll along the Promenade des Anglais before the arrival of the London papers and the reading of them in Café Monnot over a coffee, where there was music and singing in the afternoon; and now, as then, would be the problem of the two hours to be filled in between six and eight, when shops and offices were closing, and men and women, boys and girls, were hurrying back to their homes and families; and loneliness would descend, and I would combat the impulse to sit in a café over a beer, by spending two hours in a cinema. It was all exactly as it had been eleven years before. Nice looked the same, in spite of all the new apartment
buildings along the road to Cimiez and the Promenade des Anglais. The football that I watched every Sunday, with the same Australian painter, looked just the same although Nice had temporarily slipped from the first into the second division, and I felt the same, although I was eleven years older.

There was only one difference: my retirement from the literary arena, which could not be many months distant now, was protected behind a bastion of blue chips; and that did make a difference.

^*
Sir Evan Charteris's reference to this incident does not altogether endorse the story as I had it from my father. This is one of the points where I write with hesitation.

^†
Gosse's mother was an American and he had a natural affinity for the country.
or to be fetched from books and pamphlets not always at hand.'

^*
Sir Evan Charteris's reference to this incident does not altogether endorse the story as I had it from my father. This is one of the points where I write with hesitation.

^†
Gosse's mother was an American and he had a natural affinity for the country.
or to be fetched from books and pamphlets not always at hand.'

ⁱ
The story of their involved relationship has been entertainingly and fully told by Douglas Goldring in
South Lodge.

ⁱ
Robin Maugham's account in
Somerset and all the Maughams
is slightly different.

^*
Myself, I agree with Cyril Connolly in preferring six, since that gives opportunities for duologues as well as general conversation.

^*
Michael Arlen died in the summer of 1956.

^*
Michael John Arlen has, at the time of writing, a column in the
New Yorker
.

To the memory of my brother Evelyn in homage and with love

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

Copyright © Alec Waugh 1967

The moral right of author has been asserted

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ISBN: 9781448201181
eISBN: 9781448202508

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