My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles

by
ALEC WAUGH

PART ONE

Chapter 1
COUSIN EDMUND—
Sir Edmund Gosse

2
AUTHORS AT UNDERHILL—
E. Temple Thurston, Desmond Coke, Ernest Rhys

3
MY FIRST PUBLISHER—
Grant Richards

4
FRANK SWINNERTON'S
Nocturne

5
THE SOLDIER POETS—
Robert Nichols, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Richard Aldington

6
THE UNIVERSITY OF MAINZ—
Hugh Kingsmill, Gerard Hopkins, Milton Hayes, J. F. Holms

7
RALPH STRAUS

8
W. L. GEORGE

9
THE BAD BOY IN THE GEORGIAN NURSERY—
Gilbert Cannan, W. W. Jacobs

10
THE NAIL IN THE COFFIN—
Hugh Walpole

11
TWO POET CRICKETERS—
Clifford Bax, J. C. Squire

12
MY BROTHER EVELYN

PART TWO

Chapter 13
ARTHUR WAUGH'S LAST YEARS

14
MY SECOND WAR

15
THE LAWYER—
E. S. P. Haynes

16
SON OF OSCAR WILDE—
Vyvyan Holland

17
MICHAEL ARLEN IN RETIREMENT

18
W.S.M.: R.I.P.

19
THE MACDOWELL COLONY

20
SELF-PORTRAIT—NEARING SIXTY

21
ISLAND IN THE SUN

In 1962 I published a partial autobiography, under the title
The Early Tears of Alec Waugh
. I was born in July 1898 and the book took me up to the summer of 1930. It told how I had become the kind of person that I am, restless, rootless, eager for change, avid of the sun, finding his plots between Capricorn and cancer. The year 1930 was a watershed for me. It marked the end of a major love affair, and the success in America of a travel book
Hot Countries
—which was a Literary Guild selection—introduced me to the United States. From that point on, my professional base began to shift from London to New York.

One or two of the reviewers of
The Early Years
were kind enough to express the hope that I should write a sequel. Perhaps I shall, one day. But this is not that book, although it is reminiscent and told in the first person. Its ‘I' is the observer and the commentator, the
raisonneur
. The book is an attempt to present a picture of the English literary world as I have known it, through a series of portraits of some of the men and women who comprised it. Where I have been autobiographical, it is only because certain of my experiences as a writer illustrate my general thesis.

It is in no sense comprehensive. A number of prominent writers have been omitted, even though I may have known them; but I think that each of the portraits will be found to illustrate and interpret one aspect or another of the writer's life. It takes all sorts to make a world, and the literary world with its excitement and its monotony, its sudden changes of fortune; its rich rewards, its bitter
disappointments; its salutations in the market-place, its essential loneliness; its precariousness, its penury; its deep personal satisfaction from doing in one's own time, in one's own way, what one enjoys doing most—presents an infinite scope for drama. I hope that these pages will give the reader some concept of that scope.

Most of these portraits were sketched separately at different times; some of them have appeared in magazines, some were originally intended for inclusion in
The Early Years
, but in the end did not seem to fit satisfactorily into its pattern. For the convenience of the reader one or two of the chapters have been dated.

SIR EDMUND GOSSE

My first novel was published in July 1917, so that I have been part of the literary scene for half a century, but I have been an observer of it for a good deal longer, through my father, Arthur Waugh, who for forty years directed the fortunes of Chapman & Hall, Dickens's original publishers. My father has told his own story in
One Man's Road;
my brother Evelyn has told it in
A Little Learning;
I told it in my
Early Years
.

My paternal grandfather was a west country doctor, who hoped that his son would inherit his practice, but from early days it was obvious that by taste and temperament my father was unfitted for a life of medicine. He had a passion for books, for the library not the laboratory. At the age of twenty-three, having won the Newdigate Prize Poem at Oxford, he went up to London to earn his living with his pen.

He started his adventure without financial backing, but he had what was more valuable than capital, a blood relationship with Edmund Gosse. Gosse is far from forgotten, even now. Critical articles constantly refer to his writings and to his personality. His autobiography
Father and Son
is ‘required reading'. For over forty years he was influential in the world of letters. Nobody could have been better fitted to give a young man like my father his first chances.

The actual degree of cousinship between the Waughs and Gosses is a little distant—my great-grandmother was the first cousin of Edmund's father—but the links
between the families have long been affectionate and close and they go back many years. My father's mother spent part of her childhood in the same melancholy religious atmosphere which Edmund Gosse described in
Father and Son
. ‘The Plymouth Brethren of this circle were,' my father wrote, ‘a desperately sincere but terribly depressing company whose principal interest was a lively and immediate expectation of the second coming.' My grandmother recalled how Philip Henry Gosse would stand in the doorway, austere, solemn, confident, unwinding an interminable worsted scarf from about his neck and saying to her mother, ‘Well, Cousin Anne, still looking daily for the coming of the dear Lord Jesus. Are not all the prophecies indeed fulfilled?' The ominous decision would then go forth that the Lord would accomplish the number of his elect on Saturday afternoon at about three o'clock. When Saturday afternoon came and waned to evening, without the expected event occurring, a new text was found next morning to justify the delay.

The young Edmund was brought at the age of seven, after his mother's death, for a visit to my grandmother's home. He seemed a precocious infant but she, several years his senior, was touched by the eagerness which was one of his greatest charms and used to tell how he knelt excitedly before a case of stuffed birds exclaiming with high pitched enthusiasm, ‘Cousin, you have here a remarkable specimen of the Golden Oriole.'

Max Beerbohm, in his series of cartoons, ‘The young self meets the old self', drew Gosse in his last decade, surrounded by important friends, being startled by the unannounced invasion of that august assembly by a small earnest infant waving a flag and shouting ‘Are you saved?'

To the reader of today, Gosse is remembered in terms of those two selves: the young evangelist of whom he
himself has drawn an unforgettable picture in
Father and Son
, and the doyen of letters whose legend has been enshrined in Osbert Sitwell's
Eminent Presences
, Max Beerbohm's
A Christmas Garland
and the imaginary conversations in
Avowals
with George Moore.

Gosse was the first important writer whom I met, yet it is with hesitation that I write of him. As a schoolboy I asked my father if he had ever met Oscar Wilde. He shook his head. ‘No, and I only saw him twice. Once in London, when he put his head round the door at a party and said, “I have come to tell you I can't come,” secondly in Paris, after the scandal.'

My father was in a café, so he told me, with Sidney Pawling, Heinemann's partner, and Peter Chalmers Mitchell who directed the London Zoo and was subsequently knighted. Wilde came in, looked round him, then went out. Mitchell said, ‘That's Wilde. I'll go and speak to him.' He was away ten minutes. On his return, he said, ‘I don't see why you should cut a man because he's had a scandal. I've no use for fairweather friends who drink a man's wine when he's in favour and look the other way when he's in trouble.' He was so persistent and generally self-righteous that finally Pawling said, ‘What are you making all this fuss about? Waugh doesn't know him. I've scarcely met him. Don't be such an ass, Mitchell, finish up your beer.'

That was the story as my father told it me. Many years later, in his autobiography
My Fill of Days
Mitchell described how he found himself in Paris with ‘two quite nice people, one a stockbroker, the other a partner in a publishing house, both what may be called “men of the world”‘. On Wilde's appearance, so Mitchell said, ‘my friends got up to go. “You can stay if you like,” they said. “He is probably here under a false name. The hotel
should be warned.”‘ Mitchell said that he and Wilde talked for two hours.

Mitchell had the warmest affection for my father. He wrote a few pages later, ‘Arthur Waugh is another of my lifelong friends for whom the years have done nothing worse than to silver his hair. By nature a poet, he is the rare combination of a man of letters and a man of business and has been one of the steady and beneficent forces in the English literature of our time.' He had clearly forgotten that my father was in his company that evening.

My father's account of the incident is far likelier to be correct. He recounted it twenty years before Mitchell wrote his book, his memory was very sound, moreover he was not the kind of man to make a scene in public, and very far from being the man to turn against anyone who was in trouble. It is clear to me that Mitchell confused what might have happened or rather what he would like to have happened with what did happen.

I recall the anecdote here because it exemplifies the danger of accepting even what is known as first-hand evidence. When we look back at our childhood it is impossible to distinguish between what we actually remember and what has been remembered for us; in later life we are often in the same predicament. However clear may be our mental picture of this episode or that personality, we can never be certain that it has been wholly painted by what we have ourselves seen and heard and not in part by what we have heard repeated, and in the case of Edmund Gosse, I am very conscious that my knowledge of him is largely based on what I have heard my father say of him. Yet even so he is as distinct to me as many men whom I have been meeting regularly over years.

As a schoolboy I saw him intermittently, when he and his wife came to lunch on Sunday. Those visits are vivid
memories. My father was an excellent host, but on the eve of any occasion he was invariably nervous lest ‘everything should not go off all right', and he was particularly anxious when the Gosses came. I was myself very conscious that we were receiving a visitor from a larger world, who knew personally men and women with whose faces I was familiar in the Press, Balfour and Asquith and Lord Salisbury, men whom I could not quite believe to be real people with headaches and indigestion like the rest of us.

I remember Gosse describing Queen Alexandra's lengthy visit to his library (would she never leave?) and how at length he had been driven to exclaim, ‘I fear, Ma'am, that I have nothing else to show you that would be worthy of your attention.' I was very proud to have so distinguished a relative.

He had too an imposing presence with his head carried erect above a high collar, whose pointed ends were turned but not folded back. His drooping moustache was tidy; he had retained in full the hair to which Sargent in an early portrait gave a tint of lilac. Maugham described him as the most brilliant talker to whom he had ever listened. Gosse dominated but did not monopolize the talk. With memory's eye I can see him very clearly, sitting bolt upright in a hard-backed chair, clasping firmly against his waistcoat the spine of our grey-blue Persian cat while he stroked its underbelly with both hands. He professed great love of cats, but I was never convinced that our particular cat appreciated his attentions. When I attempted similar endearments, I was scratched. But perhaps his long fingers possessed a mesmeric quality that mine lacked.