A Year to Remember

by Alec Waugh

  This happened forty years ago. Today a woman of twenty-three might claim that her matrimonial prospects had been damaged by the book that presented her, at that age, as a virgin.

  It was cruel luck on Rosalind, and it says a great deal for her character and courage that she was not embittered by this experience. She went on steadily with her career and soon established a genuine reputation for herself.

  The other scandal had greater repercussions because it involved Somerset Maugham. During the previous Spring, Farrar & Rinehart had been highly excited over a manuscript that they were to publish in the Spring called Gin and Bitters. Intended as a reposte to Cakes and Ale, it presented a novelist who was obviously Maugham travelling through the Far East, inveigling planters and officials into confidences that he was later to betray in print. There were reflections on his private life, though no suggestion of devious amatory tastes. But undeniably it held Maugham up ‘to hatred, ridicule, and contempt.’ The book was to be published anonymously, and there was a great deal of conjecture as to its authorship. Proofs of the early chapters were in circulation. It was obviously the work of a practised novelist; it had also been written by someone who had travelled in the Far East and the South Seas. As I was a Farrar & Rinehart author, it was suggested that I might be the author. John Farrar did not discourage the rumour. He wanted, naturally, to get the book talked about. The au revoir telegram that he sent me to the boat said, ‘Who did write Gin and Bitters?’

  When I eventually saw a complete copy of the book, I realised that it could only have been written by Elinor Mordaunt. I knew this because the anti-hero made a journey from Tahiti to Samoa. This was a very unusual journey, because Samoa and Tahiti are a long way apart, and there was no direct service between them; there was no reason why there should be: Tahiti was French, whereas Samoa, that had once been German, was now administered by New Zealand. Elinor Mordaunt had, however, made that trip and had told me about it proudly. It seemed to me most unlikely that any other writer would have made that trip, or that it would have occurred to another writer that such a trip was feasible. I had met Elinor Mordaunt once or twice at Gwen Otter’s house and we had had a good time comparing travel experiences. I was never to see her again, so I had no chance of asking her why she had written Gin and Bitters. I was told that she had felt highly indignant over the portrayal of Thomas Hardy in Cakes and Ale and wanted to expose Maugham, in revenge. Maugham always denied that his Driffield was a portrait of Hardy, indeed there were very few resemblances. The course and conduct of their lives were completely different, yet I cannot believe that Maugham, while he was writing it, did not think ‘some stupid people are going to mistake this for a caricature of Thomas Hardy.’ There was the similarity of longevity, there was also the similarity between the shocked reception of Driffield’s last novel and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure which was reviewed as Jude the Obscene.

  Gin and Bitters came out in the U.S.A. in the early summer. It did not sell very many copies, but it was discussed. Robin Maugham has described in Somerset and All the Maughams the avid curiosity with which it was received at the Villa Mauresque. Hugh Walpole made himself ridiculous – in view of the cruel picture of himself in Cakes and Ale – by delivering himself of a fierce attack on it. This inspired Will Dyson to draw a cartoon entitled ‘The Noble Art of Self-Defence’ which for many years hung in the Farrar & Rinehart office, and which was reproduced in my own My Brother Evelyn and Other Portraits. It showed a small frail woman holding a book before her face to protect herself from the assault of a man twice her size. Her assailant is unmistakably Hugh Walpole. The book in her hand is Gin and Bitters. The caption reads: ‘Now no one can say that Cakes and Ale was meant for me.’ In England the publication was eagerly awaited. It appeared in October under the title Full Circle. But the British enjoyment of its satire was short lived. Somerset Maugham moved in quickly with an injunction. He had no difficulty in persuading the court that the anti-hero was a picture of himself and that he had been held up to ‘hatred, ridicule, and contempt’ – the English definition of libel. The court in this case happened to be his brother, Mr Justice Maugham.

  A day or two earlier John Farrar saw Somerset Maugham supping in the Savoy Grill. John had been one of Maugham’s editors at Doran. He hurried over to him. ‘Good evening Sir.’ Maugham pointed a finger across the room. ‘There is the door,’ he said. And he did not stammer.

  XV

  Writers are often asked, ‘How do you get the idea for a novel? Does it come to you in a flash?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answer, ‘invariably. It is like falling in love at first sight.’ Then I elaborate: I say ‘sometimes a person is in love with love. He feels it is time he fell in love again. He goes to a party, looking for somebody. The result is never satisfactory. Love has to be spontaneous. It is the same with the writing of a novel. If I say to myself, “It is time I wrote a novel, the state of my finances decrees that I should write a novel. What shall I write about?” the book that results from this conscious effort never amounts to much. A novelist who depends on his pen for his livelihood does inevitably have every now and again to force himself to write a novel. And because he is a competent professional, he produces a readable commodity, but the writing of it is a weariness; and the book is soon out of print.’

  When I returned to London shortly before the General Election, I had no working plans. I had two novels and a Benn’s 9d. with publishers. I had also exhausted my store of short story plots. I would lie fallow for a while. But without warning, without willing it, the excitement of the hour germinated an idea. I wanted to express on paper the national enthusiasm that was pervading the entire country. I wanted to make myself, in my small way, the mouthpiece of the hour. I wanted to compare the depression as I had seen it in New York, with the economic crisis as I was living it in England. In the U.S.A. the stock market crash had weakened the American’s faith in his country’s destiny. In England the abandonment of the Gold Standard had restored the Englishman’s belief in his country’s future. From a distance of forty years, it may seem extraordinary that an Englishman should have been thinking that in 1931, but that was the temper of the hour.

  It was a short lived hour. The period of disenchantment was swift to follow – the rising figure of unemployment, the despair that was expressed in the play ‘Love on the Dole’ $ the sense that the economic structure of the capitalist world ‘ailed from its prime foundation’ when at a time that a large section of humanity was under-nourished, coffee was being burnt in Brazil and fish were tossed back into the sea, because they could not be marketed at a profit. Then was to come the pathetic panic-stricken appeasement of the dictators.

  In retrospect the 1930s are seen as a period of shame for Britain. But in spite of that the autumn of 1931 was an hour of exultation. We were spared foreknowledge of what lay ahead, and I was in tune with the spirit of the hour when I devised a way of presenting that hour as the climax of post-war England in a book to be called Thirteen Such Years, which would show the transition of English life from the excitement of the Armistice celebrations to the General Election of 1931.

  It would be told as a success story, a story that ended well, and it would not be difficult to organise. For the purpose of comparisons between London and New York I had the fifteen thousand words that on Eric Gillett’s advice I had cut out of So Lovers Dream. I had moreover developed in earlier books such as Myself When Young a technique acquired from George Moore of weaving into the narrative short stories that were illustrative of a theme. I would, for example, be describing the position of the ex-officer now chained to an office desk and finding that the wife who welcomed his return each evening was a very less romantic object than the companion of his weekend leaves. I would then go on, ‘I can best explain this problem by recounting the story of a certain brother officer of mine,’ extracting from my files an appropriate story. Collections of short stories rarely sell, it is difficult to persuade a publisher to sponsor them, and this was a useful way of getting
stories that I was fond of between covers. I had quite a number from which to take my choice. I should not probably need to write more than twenty-five thousand original words: less than three weeks. It was an occasion clearly for going into the country.

  The obvious solution was a return to Chagford. But Elizabeth Montagu had invited me for a weekend to Beaulieu. I did not want to miss that; Chagford involved a full day’s journey. Two years earlier I had gone to Margate to the Grand Hotel, where G. B. Stern was working on a play. I had enjoyed the comfort of a luxury hotel out of the season. The best rooms were at a minimum rate; there was an air of gilt and splendour about it all, and the air off the sea had a tonic quality. A six-day visit there would break the back of my book, then after the weekend at Beaulieu I could go back to Chagford and finish the book by Christmas.

  The writing went easily at Margate. When the book appeared in the following summer, it had a better critical reception than I had received for quite a while. It was a serious book, and some critics had thought that my more recent novels had a playboy atmosphere. I made such good progress with the book that I felt I would be justified in spending four or five extra days in London before my return to Chagford.

  I had been loath to leave London: it had become a new and exciting city for me. But somehow on my return, its atmosphere had changed. A current had been disconnected. I had during my last week declined a number of invitations. London is a city with a slow deep rhythm. When you once cut your threads, you have to start in all over again and adjust yourself to a new rhythm. I had nothing to do and with time hanging on my hands, I wondered how I would fare here during a bleak chill January. My flat was not centrally heated. It was on the river: damp mists would cling to its windows. I am slightly bronchial. I should have nothing to write. Betty Askwith and Elizabeth Montagu were powerful magnets: but a cautionary instinct counselled delay. I needed an interlude, a pause, to think things out; a January in London with myself at a loose end, no, that I was not ready for.

  How though could I avoid it, when patriotic Britons were being adjured not to spend sterling in foreign countries? Europe and French colonies were out. New York was the best alternative. I should be taking sterling out of the country, but I would be bringing back to spend in England more dollars than I took out pounds. I could present my escape as a patriotic action. My travel agent informed me that the Olympic was due to sail on the 50th of December. I did not usually travel by such an expensive ship, customarily I took a French 9-day ship, the de Grasse or the Lafayette. So I booked myself second class and considered that the decline in my social status was a sacrifice endured for my King and Country. With my conscience clear and a ticket in my pocket, I went down to Chagford to finish Thirteen Such Years. I had not a trouble in the world.

  I left for Chagford on December 12th, and the last days of 1931 were as good as any of those that had preceded them. Miraculously the weather held. The early mists dispersed and pale amber sunlight burnished the last shrivelling leaves. Eldred Curwen joined me; we went riding most afternoons: our feet grew cold in the stirrups; it was good to come back to tea before the fireplace, a tea with scones and Devonshire cream; then I would write for another ninety minutes before it was cocktail hour in Mrs Cobb’s office-bedroom. After dinner we drove out to one or other of the pubs – usually to the Okehampton Arms, a fine sixteenth-century building that was run by a retired Colonel whose hobby it was to collect match boxes – a hobby that Evelyn gave to one of the characters in Brideshead Revisited. By eleven I was asleep, ready for my desk next morning.

  I concluded the book with an imaginary character sketch of an English resident of the South of France: a man on the edge of sixty, who had been gassed in the first war and had carefully cherish his health in a kindly climate. When the country went off gold he considered it his duty to return to England.

  ‘I’ve been thinking it out,’ he said.

  Until this crisis came along I never had. I’d always assumed things were all right. But when there came all that talk about the dole; and how the dole was responsible for the country’s troubles, I began to think that it wasn’t just a number of unemployed workmen who were on the dole; but the whole class of people like myself whom the country supports; because either they themselves or their parents at one time earned their country’s gratitude. There are the retired colonels, and civil servants; and there are the people like myself who draw our incomes from the land because our ancestors earned and defended it. We’re entitled to be supported. In the same way that an unemployed workman is entitled to be supported. But we’re on the dole just the same. And in just the same way that an unemployed workman and a retired civil servant living abroad are a dead loss to their country, so am I. Every year for the last forty years the country has sent me three thousand pounds on which I’ve paid income-tax but which I have spent outside England. If I had died forty years ago the country would be a hundred thousand pounds better off. I had never thought of it in this way before. But when this trouble came I realised that England had too many responsibilities, that it couldn’t afford to keep a whole host of people like myself upon the dole. But if I let my flat, brought back the rent of it and spent it along with the rest of my income here, well then, I should be no loss to my country. So I came back.

  In my story, I made the return to London in November, a greater strain than his gas-weakened lungs could stand. When I read his obituary notice, I reflected he had given his life for his country, every bit as much as those of his contemporaries who fell at Ypres.

  I finished the book on December 22 the day before Eldred and I were due to motor back to London.

  The road led through Sherborne. We reached there shortly after twelve. ‘Why don’t we lunch here?’ Eldred asked. I shook my head. I had still not made my peace with Sherborne. I was not a member of the Old Boys’ Society. If I had gone to the taproom of Old Tom Bowley’s, I might have met one of the masters. ‘What do you think he’d do to you if you did?’ said Eldred. But I was not to be tempted. Not only would it be in the worst of taste, but I regarded it as a privilege that I to whom Sherborne meant so much, should be the one person in the world who could not drive up its main street, stop at the Castle Arms and order a pint of beer. I remembered how Swann had regarded it as a privilege that he could not go to the village where Odette was staying. Everyone else in the world could go there. Indeed the railway company made it easy for anyone to go there by publishing timetables of its trains. He alone could not avail himself of their facilities. So we did not stop at Sherborne and followed the main road to Salisbury.

  We had brought up with us a Christmas Turkey, it was to prove something of what my Norton aunts used to call, a ‘worry-joy’ for it had not been plucked or eviscerated, but by the time it emerged from the oven, it was manifestly a noble beast.

  We had a quiet Christmas. The only other guest was E. V. Lucas’s daughter, Audrey Scott. Her father and mine had been great friends and the tradition had grown up, I do not quite know how, that she should have Christmas dinner with us. Eldred and I had arranged to pick her up. In the afternoon we decided to have a Turkish Bath. Selfridge’s Information Bureau informed us that the Turkish Baths in the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square were open. To our astonishment we found that it was crowded with a group of Jews who came here every Christmas afternoon. They all knew each other. They were having a wonderful time, shouting, joking, smoking cigarettes in the hot rooms. There were twenty of them to one masseur, but Eldred and I had no difficulty in getting proper attention. None of the others seemed to want a massage. They were making a party of it.

  An interviewer asked me once what I most enjoyed about travelling. ‘The arrivals and departures,’ I replied. And I think I enjoy the departures most, particularly the drama of the goodbye party, with the knowledge that one will be on the high seas next day, while all these others will be continuing their habitual routine. I had my goodbye party in my flat. There were Theodora Benson, Betty Askwith, Elizabeth Montagu, a girl friend of El
dred’s; there must have been two other men. I cannot remember who. We had a couple of boxes for a Christmas Pantomime at the Chelsea Palace. It was a pleasant, but not a hilarious party.

  Next morning I caught an 8.00 A.M. train from Waterloo. Both Theodora and Elizabeth came to see me off. I was a little annoyed at seeing Theodora there. I suppose she had come in support of Betty’s interests. I had hoped to have a word with Elizabeth. But perhaps, I reflected, as I took my last look at the Thames, it was as well that Theodora was there. Eight o’clock on a station platform in December is not the time for sentiment. I might be now regretting what I had said or failed to say. Better not to have had a chance of saying anything.

  Three years earlier I had made a winter crossing on the Berengaria. The ship had been crowded, but that was when the stock market was riding high. Today there were only seventy first class passengers, and I had to myself a large cabin with a bath, that in the season was included in the first class accommodation. The second class dining room was only a third full. One table apart from the others was occupied by a dozen elegant men, wearing black coats, stiff white collars and striped trousers. They were the valets – the gentlemen’s gentlemen – of certain exclusive first class passengers. The ship was so empty that among the second class passengers was Captain Knight – the owner of the Golden Eagle – on his way to a lecture tour. He had been travelling on the Berengaria three years ago. But then, like me, he had been travelling first class.

  Another second class passenger who usually I imagine travelled first class, was Sylvia Thompson. She also was going for a lecture tour. She was about to publish a novel called Summer’s Night. Its title had been taken from the same quotation as mine had