by Alec Waugh
Eldred would be unlikely to reach his bathroom before ten. His bath and shaving would take an hour. I had often watched his routine in the West Indies. He proceeded at the rate of a slow motion film. Because he had no work to do, he took an hour doing what most men do in fifteen minutes. He had reddish hair, thick with a wave in it; he gave it prolonged attention. He would take the bank notes that he had scattered the previous evening on his dressing-table. He would smooth out each note, carefully removing every wrinkle, before he transferred it to his pocket book. He did not want to be dressed and ready before eleven, and he was resolved not to be. His job was to get the maximum amount of fun out of his annuity. In the same way he knew that there were only twenty-four hours in the day. They must be used to suit his whims. What was the point of getting bathed, shaved and dressed in half-an-hour, then finding himself with half-an-hour on his hands. It was too early to start reading. When he read, he liked an uninterrupted couple of hours’ session.
He refused to be hurried. In the West Indies, on our arrival at Guadeloupe, we found that the launch to shore was to leave the ship half an hour earlier than we had expected. I hastened to our cabin. ‘Eldred, the launch will be leaving in quarter of an hour. You’ll have to get a move on.’
He shook his head. ‘I can’t be ready in less than half an hour.’
He had already breakfasted. He had only to shave, shower and dress. But mentally and emotionally he needed that half an hour to get himself adjusted to the day. If he did not start the day at the tempo to which he was accustomed the day was spoilt. ‘If we don’t get that launch, we’ll have to hire one ourselves. That’ll be expensive.’
‘All right. I’ll pay for it.’
I did not argue with him and I let him pay. Guadaloupe was our first port of call. I learnt my lesson there. He must not be hurried. It was the kind of trait that made him a very congenial companion. Selfish people usually are – by which I mean people who know their own minds and do not mean to do anything they do not want. The person who always says ‘what would you like to do’ can be exasperating. By the time the trip was over, I knew Eldred very well, in that and many other ways.
The country is happy that has no history and few incidents; only three in fact stand out from those two happy weeks. The first was our seeing at the local cinema of René Clair’s film Le Million. We had heard nothing about it. We went there expecting nothing in particular. Suddenly we realised that we were watching a masterpiece: or we felt we were. We looked at each other, questioningly: was it really as funny as we were finding it? Eldred was dead sober; I had drunk only a half bottle of wine at dinner. We watched, eagerly expectant. When the struggle for the coat that contained the ticket suddenly became a football match, we lost all doubt. Yes, it was a masterpiece. We relaxed into our enjoyment. It was for me in terms of the cinema a unique experience. Always before and always since when I have seen a film of supreme excellence, I have been prepared for it by advance publicity. It has not, as Le Million did, hit a virginity of sense.
During my stay at the Villa Marina, I received from Cassell’s my author’s copies of a collection of short stories called Most Women. After the title page was printed ‘to Elinor Sherwin for a great many reasons’. I read that with mixed feelings.
When I had met Elinor the previous May, she had made so considerable an impression on me that, on my return to England, I had wondered whether my intentions might not become what was then called ‘honourable’, and three weeks before I sailed for New York I rang her up from London to give her the date of my return. The transatlantic telephone was then a novelty. It was the first time that I had used it. It was probably the first time that she had been called by it. It was a bad connection. I could hardly hear what she said. Her voice did not seem her voice. But it was dramatic all the same. And the talk did inspire her to write me a letter. The first that I had had from her. I had clearly made an impression.
I should have been wise to leave it there. But the telephone services, to whom I had complained of the bad connection, rang up to say that they were very sorry, but sometimes the static was worse than others. They were anxious that I should not be discouraged from using the transatlantic telephone; they would be happy this one time to give me a complimentary call to New York on a date and at a time of my own choosing.
It was unwise of me to accept their offer. But my Scottish instincts would not let me pass up a free transatlantic call – a very much more expensive operation then than it is now. I opted for my last night in London. I was giving a small dinner party in my flat and I confess that I felt rather grand when my housekeeper summoned me from the table to take a New York call. But it was a mistake, an anticlimax; the ‘doing savoured of disrelish’. The call had been booked five days before. The atmosphere of the ‘impromptu’ had been lost. The first time Elinor had had no idea what was happening; she must have been excited when she was told out of the blue that London wanted her that afternoon at five; ‘What on earth can this be about?’ she must have thought. It was an altogether different matter to be asked on a Friday, if she could take a call on the following Wednesday at half past five. Anything during five days might turn up that she would rather do at that time. It would be a weight round her neck; an obligation in a city where people lived from day to day. It would be a nuisance. She would cease to think of me as an erratic unaccountable adventurer but a tiresome, pernickety consultant of the calendar. Moreover this time I had nothing particular to say. The first time my approach had been ‘Hullo, there, why haven’t I heard from you. I’m getting worried.’ That call was a spontaneous outburst. The second a stereotyped reminder that I was due in New York on November 17th, a fact that she already knew – a purposeless performance; it must have cost me at least fifty per cent of the credit I had gained by the first call, and of course it turned out that the connection this time was perfect: I heard every word she said.
The second call had been typical of a frustrated courtship. I was soon to discover that Elinor was involved with a married man from whom she was not ready yet to break. The only effective role for me was a waiting one. The dedication seemed to me now as typical as the second call had been of a consistent doing of the right thing at the wrong time.
The dedication had been a gesture to myself as well as to Elinor. Three years back, on my return from Tahiti, I had written a novel Nor Many Waters especially for Ruth. It was published on August 15th, 1928, her birthday and Napoleon’s, and I had dedicated it to her ‘as a birthday present’. I wrote in a covering letter ‘till I can inscribe a book to you as “my wife” I will not dedicate another of my books,,’ Three books of mine, including Hot Countries, which I would dearly have loved to dedicate to Eldred, appeared indedicate upon the market. ‘The course of human events’ had absolved me from that promise, but I wondered now whether there was not a fatality about dedications. I recalled that P. G. Wodehouse, in one of his dedications, had written: ‘I hope that our friendship will survive this.’ Looking back at my own dedications, it seemed to me that they had been not so much the cement in a friendship as the climax of one. Was that what this dedication was to prove?
Luckily this time it did not turn out that way. Elinor was to become one of my dearest friends, also one of my most important. Two years later she was to marry Wolcott Gibbs, and through her I was to meet many of my best New Yorker friends, John O’Hara, James Thurber, Charles Addams, Nathaniel Benchley, S. N. Behrman, St Clair McKelway, Geoffrey Hellman, Philip Hamberger, Hobart Weekes. It was through her indirectly that I became a member of the Coffee House, the Club where I feel most at home. No one has brought more happiness into my life than she has, but I could not foresee that, as I sat at Eldred Curwen’s desk signing copies of Most Women and reflecting that possibly the trouble about dedications is that they are too public an endorsement at a personal relationship. The recipient is embarrassed by a public avowal of affection. ‘I knew the old boy liked me, but I did not know that he did that much.’ It makes him feel awkward. Is t
here not a parallel between the number of happy love affairs that are spoilt by marriage? I then and there made a vow never to dedicate another book. I would not run the risk of imperilling a friendship.
To that vow I have been roughly faithful. I have dedicated books to the memories of friends, and now and again to ladies once dear to me, whose lives have become divided from my own. My dedications are indeed the tombstones in a cemetery. Even the graveyard has not always brought immunity. A recent novel A Spy in the Family is sub-titled ‘an erotic comedy’, and as I was writing it I kept thinking how much it would have amused a friend who had died a few months earlier. So after the title page I wrote ‘To the memory of a deeply missed friend, this indelicate story that contains no indelicate words.’ One of the purposes served by a dedication is that it can give a reader an indication of the kind of book that he is being invited to read. I thought that ‘indelicate story that contains no indelicate words’ would give the reader precisely the warning that was needed. My surprise could not have been more complete when my publishers received from his widow through a solicitor, an indignant complaint that ‘the novel though no doubt amusing, contained several descriptions of abnormal sexual activities’ and that ‘the dedication of such a book to her husband might be taken as implying that he was a devotee of such or similar practices.’ As I agreed to have the dedication removed from the paperback edition, I thought gratefully of the number of my books that had gone out into the world indedicate. I was very glad that in the summer of 1931 I had come to that decision in Eldred Curwen’s drawing-room.
I have been equally resolute in my refusal to let my friends dedicate their books to me. It was a shock, therefore, a few years back, to read my name after the title page of a fellow Tangerine’s book on Port. He had not sent me a copy of it, nor had he asked my permission to dedicate it to me; a permission I should not have given. ‘That’s too bad’ I thought. I was, and am fond of the chap. I respect his talent as a writer. ‘This time I’ll do my best to beat that jinx’ I vowed.
But it was no good. At that time I had in Tangier a house next to his. His gardener appropriated my top soil – an unneighbourly act surely. I held him responsible, perhaps mistakenly. The coolness has been now dissolved. But I pray that no one else will ever dedicate a book to me.
The third memorable incident during my stay in the Villa Marina was the news from St John’s Wood that I had been elected to MCC. I had known that I should be shortly, as I had played the last of my qualifying matches in the previous summer, and I had learnt that complimentary reports upon my play had been sent in to Lord’s, but even so the official announcement did represent a genuine achievement. To-day it is relatively simple to get elected to MCC. A candidate cannot be entered under the age of fourteen, by which time it can be seen whether or not he has a natural interest in or aptitude for the game. The seating accommodation has been so enlarged that there is room for a much larger number of members; moreover the cost of the new stands has enforced the need for a larger membership. There are at the moment 15,000. My sons took less than ten years to get elected with no strings being pulled on their behalf. But in the 1920s the waiting list was very long. In those days a male could have his name entered at birth and that was what every far-seeing father did for his son. My father was not far-seeing. He never planned his life in advance. He made instantaneous decisions whenever a new issue arose. Evelyn refers to this trait in him in A Little Learning. He speaks of his father’s ‘deleterious speed’. At Oxford in spite of his love of acting, he never joined the OUDS. He thought it would be too expensive. Actually he could easily have afforded it. Later in London he joined the Savile Club instead of the Garrick. The Savile was at that time in Piccadilly where the Park Lane Hotel now stands – twenty minutes away by bus or tube from his office in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. The Garrick on the other hand lay between his office and the tube station at Leicester Square, from which he travelled back and forth to his home in Golders Green. The Garrick would have been much more convenient; moreover, he would have found the company there more congenial as it was patronised by prominent actors and producers. At the outbreak of war he resigned from the Savile, as an economy, because he so seldom went there. He did not join another club when the war ended. Had he joined the Garrick in the first place, I do not think he would have resigned in 1914. Through not looking ahead, he deprived himself of many opportunities for conviviality.
As regards cricket, he was an enthusiastic follower of the game; he started and nourished my love of it, but he did not enter my name for MCC until 1914; this meant that my contemporaries had a sixteen-year start of me, and I could scarcely hope to be elected until I was over fifty.
During the 1920s, however, there was devised a means by which candidates with reasonable club cricket qualifications could get their election accelerated as playing members. This involved the pulling of certain preliminary strings in order to get one’s name on the list of probationary candidates. Then, to justify one’s presence there, one had to play in twelve trial games for MCC in which the match manager reported on one’s qualities and behaviour. It took me several years even with the backing of P. F. Warner to get on that list. Then I had to play my dozen games. It will be appreciated with what excitement, with what pride I read the announcement of my election. I could now walk into the pavilion not only for Middlesex matches – I was already a member of the county club – but for Test matches, for the Oxford and Cambridge, for the Eton and Harrow matches; I could take a guest in with me. What a pleasure to be able to take my father there. There is no comparison between the view of the play that you get when you are watching behind the bowler’s arm and when you are in the members’ guests enclosure, the mound or square in the grandstand. It was for this reason that in recent years my father and I had gone more often to the Oval where I was a member. But we both preferred Lord’s – the centre and the home of cricket.
As a member of MCC I should be entitled to Rovers’ tickets for Test matches, which would allow my friends a choice of seats in the various guests’ enclosures. What a valued present that would make. I had known that I should be elected in the spring, but the tangible proof of my election warmed my heart.
I wrote to Peters and asked him to send me out an MCC scarf and tie. The red and yellow in their pristine vividness looked very garish in the Mediterranean sunlight. Eldred viewed it with disfavour. ‘Never wear that,’ he said ‘except upon the cricket field.’ He belonged to a generation that held it to be bad form to wear an old Etonian or a Brigade tie except when you were visiting your old school or attending a reunion dinner. I could see his point. I never thought it good form for debutantes who had been presented at Court to go on to supper at the Ritz with their feathers in their hair, or for men on their way back from Ascot to wear in their button-holes a Royal Enclosure badge. It was as though the wearers of these insignia were saying ‘I may be supping in the same restaurant as you, or walking down the same stretch of pavement, but I am, you will observe, a person belonging to a superior world.’
MCC took a different view of its red and yellow. In the following summer, needing a new blazer, I ordered an MCC one. I was soon made to realise that I had committed a gross solecism and the captain of the side, not in private, but before the other members, warned me that I should cause grave offence to certain veterans who had worn Marylebone blazers in the days of W. G. Grace.
‘The old school tie’ is the subject of much genial satire. I have been told that the MCC colours came into disrepute because any man whose name was entered at birth could become a member without being a cricketer; and that real cricketers did not like to see ‘rabbits’ wearing the same colours as themselves. A man of seventy-five wearing a faded MCC blazer could suggest that he had been a member half a century before, in the homeric days of the great doctor.
This snobbery of colours would have made an amusing essay for Max Beerbohm. In the 1930s there was a cartoon in Punch by Fougasse, showing an athlete in various forms
of sartorial array. ‘If you are playing for the old Crundonians’ the caption ran, ‘you may wear a Forester scarf, an Incog blazer, an 1Z sweater, a Nondescript belt, but the one thing you must not wear is anything Old Crundonian.’
A few years ago in the University match at Lord’s, a number of Oxonians went in to bat wearing club and county caps. They were vigorously reproved in The Daily Telegraph by E. W. Swanton.
At any rate I did not wear my MCC blazer again upon the cricket field. I took it around with me on cruises and on beaches: in the Riviera and the Caribbean. It was a familiar sight in St Thomas in the 1950s when it was surmounted by a wide-brimmed cha-cha hat. I used it as a writing coat, and several press interviews recorded my wearing of it at my desk in the Algonquin. Finally it fell to pieces in the Macdowell Colony in the early 60s. It embarrassed me on the cricket field, but it was a good friend, the companion of many contented hours.
VII
After two weeks at the Villa Marina, since Eldred was expecting a cousin from England I had to look for a new perch. With the Welcome closed, I decided on the Colombe d’Or at St Paul de-Vence. Of all the lovely villages crowding that lovely coast, I question if there is any lovelier. High on a hill, it is complete and self-contained. The same walls that guarded it against Saracen invasions surround it still. The ground falls down sharply on every side. There is no development outside its walls. There it stands with its bastions, its tower and its spire, unchanged through the centuries. Two roads lead past it on the way to Vence. Either way you look at it across the valley it seems ‘to breathe the enchantment of the Middle Ages.’
