A Year to Remember

by Alec Waugh

  Nor does it deceive you once you have passed through its gateway. There are the narrow streets, the courtyard with the fountain; antique shops and galleries, more now than there were then. You can walk right round it along the walls in twenty minutes. The southern tip is pointed like the prow of a ship. Below it is a cemetery.

  I have several times used it in a magazine short story. The hero drives the heroine out from Nice. He lunches her amply on a shaded terrace, then after their coffee, he takes her for a slow stroll round the town. They stand in the pointed apex of the walls. The valleys stretch towards the sea. It is as superb a panorama as the coast has for offering. The cemetery lies below them. He points it out to her. His other arm goes round her shoulders. ‘We’re a long time dead,’ he says.

  It was always at the Colombe d’Or that my hero lunched her; a world renowned restaurant-hotel, housing a fine collection of modern paintings, that lies just outside the walls. Its garden is lined with orange trees, and the square courtyard set with tables. How pleasant it would be, I thought, to sit there after breakfast at work upon a manuscript; and so it was, but I had not recognised the difference between the Colombe d’Or as a two-star restaurant to which you drove out from Nice or Antibes, to an excellent and expensive lunch or dinner, and the Colombe d’Or as a hotel where you lived en pension at 60 Francs a day – the Franc was then at 120 to the pound. In the first place, breakfast was the only meal which a pensionnaire was allowed to take on the terrace. For lunch and dinner he had to eat indoors. The menus which he was offered though ample and adequate were inevitably very different from those with which visitors were being regaled. That you would expect. But it was a little tantalising after you had finished your table d’Hôte meal, served promptly at 7.30 p.m., to watch flaming chafing dishes and high crested souffles being wheeled past you to the terrace. There was no lounge or hall where you could sit and read, out of sight of these self-indulgent revellers. If you wanted to avoid them, you had to go outside and there was nowhere to go except one of the small dark bars inside the walls. There was no sidewalk café where you could loiter over a coffee and a fine and watch life go by. In a small dark bar you tend to finish your fine quickly and order a second. After two fines you are not quite fresh for work next day. I preferred to stay on the hard seat where I had dined, with my book on the table, between my elbows, my head supported on my hands until my eyelids began to close.

  There were other disadvantages. I did not have a car. There were three or four buses running into Nice but that required a half-day excursion. It was not worth going in unless one stayed for lunch – which cut into the day’s work, besides involving me in the cost of missing a lunch that had been paid for. There was no swimming. Nor was there anywhere to walk, except down a very steep hill which meant a strenuous climb back. When I am working, I like to take long walks along the level – the Promenade des Anglaise is ideal – thinking out my stories. In fact I did not have nearly enough exercise. Moreover I was lonely. I lacked company. I had no friends. There was no equivalent for the Garden Bar, nor for the acquaintances that I had made in villas. Gwen Le Gallienne, the painter – whose father Richard had been a good friend of my father’s – had a studio in the ramparts. Sometimes she used to come to the Colombe d’Or for breakfast and we would gossip over her morning cigarette. But she led a very self-contained industrious existence. She avoided bars. The most congenial routine usually contains, somewhere or other, in the course of the day, two hours that are a little difficult to live through. But at St Paul the only really good part of the day was the morning until eleven o’clock when I sat on the terrace, writing, looking out over the valley, with the pigeons fluttering along the wall. At eleven, the preparations for lunch began, and I had to change my table for the one at which I would eat my own lunch later. By the end of the third day I came to realise that I should have to get away. I was unboundedly relieved when I learnt that the Welcome had reopened its bedrooms though not its restaurant. Nothing could have suited me better. To sleep at the Welcome; to wake with the reflections of the water flickering on the ceiling and not to be obligated to eat two pension meals a day.

  I seldom go to the South of France without visiting St Paul and lunching at the Colombe d’Or. My enjoyment of the excellent meal there is heightened by the knowledge that I shall be driving back into Nice in three hours time. St Paul is a ‘must’ for every tourist, but for me in 1951 it was a prison.

  Shortly after my return to Villefranche, I received a letter addressed by hand with a St Jean-Cap Ferrat postmark. It was from the Villa Mauresque. It was signed W. S. Maugham. The writer asked if I would care to come out to lunch on a choice of days in the following week. It enquired if I played tennis. I had only met Maugham once: in 1922 and very briefly at a lunch organised by Arnold Lunn for the contributors to the anthology that he had edited, Georgian Stories. We had scarcely exchanged a word, and I did not believe that W.S.M. would have remembered it. But I had met, when I was staying with Eldred Curwen, a young man who had told me that he was lunching with Maugham the following Friday. I told him how much I admired Maugham and how much I would like to meet him. That was, I presumed, the reason for the invitation.

  I was flattered and excited. My apprenticeship as a novelist was influenced and coloured by four writers: Compton Mackenzie was the first. While I was writing The Loom of Youth I took a week off at the end of the second part, and re-read Sinister Street, vol. 2. This had a marked effect on the style of the second half. In a prisoner of war camp, in Mainz, I was introduced by Hugh Kingsmill to George Moore’s reminiscences, Memoirs of my Dead Life and Hail and Farewell. Under their influence I wrote a book of memoirs called Myself when Young, and made an attempt at short stories told in the first person. In 1922 I read The Forsyte Saga. I learnt from it how to weave a number of characters and lives into a continuous narrative by starting each chapter with a different character as the protagonist. Then in 1925 on a visit to G. B. Stern’s villa in Diano Marina I re-read the The Trembling of a Leaf and The Moon and Sixpence. That spring The Painted Veil came out.

  I have seldom read a novel with more excitement. I was staying at the Savile Club; the book was among those that were on loan from Harrod’s circulating library. I hurried back from dinner parties so that I could go on reading it, and lest another member should take it up to bed with him, I concealed it behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Maugham not only influenced my style of writing, but my ideas and feelings about myself. When I was staying with G. B. Stern, her husband Geoffrey Holdsworth and I had discussed the possibilities of an escape to the South Sea Islands where living was cheap and dusky damsels were accessible. He was married, whereas I was not, so the problem was simpler for me. I fancy that G. B. Stern was afraid that the story of Gauguin might have a dangerous effect on her husband. The Constant Nymph, which had been published the previous autumn, had also made her apprehensive.

  I was in Diano Marina in April. During the previous winter I had written a novel entitled Kept. The central character, a kept woman, was made symbolic of post-war London. I made the raisonneur reflect

  … well and weren’t we all kept really. The whole lot of us one way and another? Weren’t we living all of us in the reflection of a past quality, on the strength of something that had been done for us. There was Vernon Archer, living on his reputation selling because once he had been inspired indifferent work; there was Manon Granta wedded to wealth, because eight generations back some sire of hers had earned a monarch’s favour; with Heritage kept by the industry of a grandfather; and himself for one half-hour’s act of courage, entitled for the rest of his life to maintenance and promotion and respect. They were of a piece really with that poor creature selling matches. He, too, was being kept by what little remained of public gratitude for the men who had stood firm at Mons. Kept, all of them, in their different way.

  The book did rather well, not only in England but in the USA. It was, indeed, the first of my books to evoke any interest there. My stock on the
literary bourse went up. The two novels that I had published since my first, The Loom of Youth, had not been received with any interest. They had not deserved to be. They were presented as contemporary novels but they were not dated. The war was an obstacle. If you wanted to write a story that covered a number of years, and were going to place it before the war, the reader would say to himself, ‘This is happening in 1910. In four years time the convulsion of war will have altered the pattern of every individual life. No matter what the confusion into which the characters have got themselves by June 1914, in six weeks they will have a way out of their problems.’ The writer had in the war an obvious deus ex machina. And because he had, the reader could not take a complete interest in the fates of characters whose fates would not be worked out in terms of a logical process of cause and effect. If, on the other hand the author were to place the beginning of his story in 1919, a ten years’ development would land the narrative in a period that was not yet history. No one knew in 1919 what the world would be like in 1930. Would there be a revolution? There were rumblings below the surface. How many European thrones had not collapsed in the last five years? Might not scientists in their laboratories have achieved discoveries that would alter the condition of mankind? Might not the atom be split? Unless a novel was definitely prophetic, like Brave New World, there was an atmosphere of unreality about it. The only alternative was to place the novel in no particular time. But this is unsatisfactory, too. If you do not know when a sequence of actions is taking place, you do not know to whom it is taking place. Are these post-war or pre-war characters? That was the problem in 1922, but by 1925 everything was easier. The narrator had a space of six years to move in: a post-war character could be an adult. Moreover I had learnt from Galsworthy how to confine the actions and development of a number of characters within the radius of a single summer. Kept was topical; and it told a dramatic story. Critics and readers began to feel that I was not, after all, a one-book writer. Editors took a new interest in me. I started to sell short stories to the ‘glossy’ magazines. The Daily Mirror commissioned me to write a serial. My income trebled. I was twenty-seven and the auguries were good, but I was at war within myself. An inner voice was whispering that I was limiting myself and my potentialities as a writer by letting myself be caught up in a succession of London parties. There was a world elsewhere; a fuller, more dramatic world. Moreover I was tempted by the prospect of those dusky damsels by the palm-fringed beaches of Polynesia and the brown rivers of Malaysia. To my friends it seemed that the ball lay at my feet, but I was without the urge to kick it. In the summer of 1926 I resigned my half-time post as literary adviser to Chapman and Hall, and booked myself a round-the-world ticket, with the Messageries Maritimes. It would be hard for a writer to be more influenced by another than I was by Maugham. I was very excited at the prospect of a visit to the Villa Mauresque.

  It was not a party: only Gerald Haxton, Maugham’s secretary and travelling companion, was there. As it was to turn out, that first meeting was typical of most of our future ones. Usually they were à trois; With Gerald Haxton before the war and with Alan Searle afterwards. I fancy that under those conditions I saw him at his best, at his most relaxed. My book My Brother Evelyn and other portraits contains a long essay upon Maugham. Many people have told me that they felt ill at ease with him. I never did, indeed I had to resist a temptation to be over-confidential. He was, I always felt, the one person in the world who would understand whatever particular problem I might have. He would diagnose the symptoms, as a doctor would, and if there was a remedy he would suggest it. But I never did confide in him. Possibly because I knew what he would say. ‘If that’s your trouble, then you must learn to live with it.’ Which is the answer for most of our emotional ailments, after we are thirty.

  Maugham was at this time fifty-seven, active and healthy, playing golf or tennis every day. He was temperate; he never drank too much. He was too dignified to lose his self-control. Moreover, he wanted to be at his desk with a clear mind next morning. At this period he had himself served after dinner a pleasant potion that tasted like a rum punch, but which, in fact, contained no alcohol. I suspect that what he enjoyed most was his dry martini before lunch. In The Fall of Edward Barnard – his story about the South Seas that more than any other acted on me as a magnet – he made one of his characters, who had served a gaol sentence for fraud, remark: ‘When I had nothing better to do in the penitentiary I used to amuse myself by thinking out new cocktails, but when you come down to brass tacks, there’s nothing to beat a Dry Martini.’ I wish he could have come to Tangier during his last few years so that I could have shown him one of Porte’s martinis which are served in a hock glass with a sliver of lemon peel curved round the inside of the rim.

  Writers, Maugham has often said, have their ups and downs. But there were no downs in his career, not during his last fifty years, after the success of his play Lady Frederick in 1907, until at the very end came the slow downward curve of the parabola as he reached retirement.

  In 1931 his reputation was at its peak. He had made his reputation as a dramatist, and though during the ’20s he continued to enjoy a series of stage successes – East of Suez, Our Betters (written in 1915), The Letter, The Constant Wife – Of Human Bondage was being followed by a series of superb novels and collections of stories: The Moon and Sixpence, The Trembling of a Leaf The Painted Veil, The Casuarina Tree, then in 1930 the hilarious Cakes and Ale which set the literary world chuckling in a way that no other book has done during my lifetime. He was the most discussed writer of the day. He was also the object of a great deal of curiosity and conjecture. He was little seen in London. He had been a familiar Mayfair figure before the war. As Robin Maugham has explained in Somerset and all the Maughams, it was impossible for Gerald Haxton to come to England, so that if, with his marriage broken, Maugham were to have a base, it had to be outside England. He began the reconstruction of the Villa Mauresque in 1927. His A Personal Record gives an account of the changes that he made to it. It was to become a very lovely house, with gardens, terraces, a swimming pool. On its walls was a collection of modern paintings that was to fetch no small part of a fortune at Sotheby’s in the 1960s. Rumours of the house’s lavish opulence were to be part of London’s gossip. No English writer had ever made so much money. He became an object of legend, of a slightly sinister legend because of his association with Gerald Haxton.

  That legend was quickened by the frequent oblique references that he made to himself in Cakes and Ale and in his short stories, many of which were told in the first person. Readers felt they already knew him by his books, to an extent that rarely happens to a writer. One would not get much insight into Arnold Bennett’s personal idiosyncracies from The Old Wives’’ Tale, nor of Joseph Conrad’s from Victory. Readers felt they knew Maugham so well from his books that they were a little disconcerted to find that he was not as like his own picture of himself as they had expected.

  I was on my guard when I met him, knowing his books almost by heart. The ‘I’ of his stories could be often very snubbing. In ‘The Pool’ an expatriate Scotsman talking nostalgically of London, says: ‘And I like the Strand too. What are those lines about God and Charing Cross?’ The T of the narrative quotes them, the expatriate gives a faint sigh. ‘I’ve read “The Hound of Heaven”. It’s a bit of all right.’ ‘It’s generally thought so,’ I murmured. What a drenching of cold water.

  I knew that he did not like to be spoken to about his books. I had read Ashenden more than once. In the story ‘His Excellency’ he makes Ashenden, his alter ego, say of the Ambassador with whom he was dining, ‘He mentioned in passing a character in one of Ashenden’s novels, but did not make any other reference to the fact that his guest was a writer. Ashenden admired his urbanity. He disliked people to talk to him of his books in which indeed once written he took small interest and it made him self-conscious to be praised or blamed to his face. Sir Herbert Wither-spoon flattered his self-esteem by showing that he had read him,
but spared his delicacy by withholding his opinion of what he had read.’

  I went to the Villa Mauresque resolved that I would not mention any of his books. But I felt so much at my ease that I could not resist asking him if he considered Of Human Bondage his best book. ‘I haven’t read it since I corrected the last proofs. I wouldn’t know.’ Afterwards, thinking over the lunch, I wondered whether I should have put that question. I never felt self-conscious when I was with him, but afterwards I would put myself in the confessional. ‘Should I have said that? Was I gauche at that point? Did I miss an opportunity of making a quick repartee?’ And that is a form of masochism to which I do not normally expose myself.

  For the most part we talked about the far countries that we had both visited. Siam, the F.M.S. and the South Seas, Tahiti in particular. I had met one or two of the people that he had. It did not seem to me to be as changed as might have been expected. I mentioned that in Cakes and Ale he had referred to my brother having said in the Evening Standard that it was a mistake to write novels in the first person. Evelyn, I said, had written no such article. He shrugged. I asked him if he had met my brother. ‘Yes and No’, he said. ‘I met him when I was with Godfrey Winn* Godfrey introduced him to me, but not me to him; paying me the compliment of assuming that he would know who I was. Apparently your brother didn’t.’