by Alec Waugh
So Lovers dream a rich and rare delight
And get a winter seeming summer’s night.
I had met her once or twice, but this was the first time I had had a chance of a real talk with her. This trip was the start of a friendship that I was to value greatly. I wonder if any of her books are still in print? I question it. Old books have to make way for new ones. I recently asked Desmond Flower how many of Arnold Bennett’s books, in addition to The Old Wives’ Tale were still in print. ‘Only two, Riceyman Steps and Imperial Palace. It would probably pay us to reissue at least Lord Raingo, but even as big a firm as ours can only handle a certain amount of titles, and we have to give new writers the best chance we can.’
Naturally readers prefer contemporary stories, with which they can identify themselves. Problems of love are different today when you can hop a plane and ‘find out what the hell’s the matter’, from what they were in 1930 when a business executive could not take the time off to cross the Atlantic and sort out a personal issue; as happened for instance in Marcia Davenport’s Her Constant Image. Sylvia Thompson’s novels might well seem dated now. But they had very real qualities. One of the chief being the sense you had, that the author herself was someone very likeable.
I never saw her after the war. She ceased writing early, and I have wondered why. Between 1937 and 1939 under Carl Brandt’s guidance and encouragement, she concentrated upon short stories. She did a number of excellent ones, which sold to high paying magazines. Did she find it difficult to work for the American market, with the uncrossable Atlantic in between? Did she take on war work of some kind and find herself unable to get back to writing afterwards? She became a Roman Catholic. Did this change of faith make her feel that writing for magazines was trivial? I kept meaning to try to get in touch with her. But somehow communications were difficult in the England of the 50s, and as a foreign resident I was in England less than three months a year. I felt guilt as well as regret when I read of her death in 1965. She was a rich rare person.
There must have been festivities of some kind on New Year’s Eve, but I took no part in them. Dinner in the second class was early. The clock had gone back an hour and midnight was one o’clock to me. I was asleep by ten o’clock. No doubt over a solitary nightcap, I took an inventory of the year that was about to end. No doubt, I thought, gratefully that it had been pretty good all things considered – not a great deal on the debit side of the ledger. But I should have been very surprised could I have known that in forty-three years’ time I should be writing about it as, ‘the year I would soonest relive.’
The leader writer of The Times was describing it as ‘a black year in the history of the world’ though he added the consolation that ‘for Great Britain and the Empire as for the U.S.A. it has been a year of awakening’.
In Hampstead my father was writing the last entry in his diary. ‘So ended my second year from the office of which let me remember chiefly its blessings. Much kindness at home and abroad. Particularly from K and Alec. A happy month at Villefranche which probably saved my life and an unexpectedly good reception for my book. The last two months have been full of kind letters about it which have done much to comfort me in anxieties of business and finance. And K and I have been very happy together, although I hate to see her slave so hard in the house. If only we could sell Underhill in the spring, the future would not look so dark. At any rate we must keep up our hearts. We have endured worse things.’
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 © 1975 Alec Waugh
First published by W. H. Allen & Co Ltd
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ISBN: 9781448201273
eISBN: 9781448202591
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