Fathers and Sons
Page 13
Now it was Alec's turn to repay the compliment. Arthur later recalled: ‘When I read, in my son's crabbed handwriting, the letter of dedication addressed to myself, I should have been a poor sort of father indeed if I had not felt that the harvest of parentage had come home in golden sheaves.’
As it appears in all printed editions of The Loom of Youth Alec's dedication is by far the most emotional letter that has survived from son to father and is written in the ripe, intimate language of his father's most florid epistolic style:
My Dear Father,
This book, which I am bringing you, is a very small return for all you have given me. In every mood, in every phase of my shifting pilgrimage, I have found you ever the same – loving, sympathetic, wise. You have been with me in my success, and in my happiness, in my failures and in my disappointments,
in the hours when I have followed wandering fires. There has never yet come to me a moment when I did not know that I had but to stretch out my hand to find you at my side. In return for so much, this first book of mine is a very small offering.
But yet I bring it to you, simply because it is my first. For whatever altars I may have raised by the wayside, whatever ephemeral loyalties may have swayed me, my one real lodestar has always been your love, and sympathy, and guidance. And as in life it has always been to you first that I have brought my troubles, my aims, my hopes, so in the world of ideas it is to you that I would bring this, the first-born of my dreams.
Accept it. For it carries with it the very real and very deep love of a most grateful son.
A.W.
Immediately Alec began work on a second novel to be called Iphigenia in London or Mastered Circumstance or Elusive Ardours or Ungainly Wise – the title was never settled – but he finished writing it (seventy thousand words) with breathtaking speed. The Loom of Youth had been posted chapter by chapter to Arthur for his comments and amendments, but that system had caused tension. This time he made sure that Arthur saw the book only when it was finished, reminding him: ‘There's no need to revise this time, I did it myself.’ The manuscript arrived at Underhill with the morning post on 15 January 1917. It was read that day and Alec received a response by the first post of the following morning.
Arthur was distraught. He hated it. Nothing had ever made him so unhappy: ‘The hope of my life is almost hidden in the mist.’ His chief objection was the plot's immorality: it was about a pleasure-seeking artist who married in boredom, had an adulterous affair, then left his wife for a mistress. ‘I don't object to immoral figures in a novel,’ Arthur wrote, ‘but I shiver when I find them proclaiming that evil is their good.’ As managing director of Chapman and Hall he had published many authors of whose morals he did not approve, believing their work of commercial value to the firm. The problem this time was that the author in question was his own son, a guardian of the family name.
Suppose you were sent to the front this year and were killed. My life as you know would be over. That is one thing. Life can still be ‘fastened and fed without the aid of joy’. But behind you you would have left this book recording to those who wanted to know the sort of man you were the impression that you were intensely interested in the vicious side of life… I am bitterly anxious that you should not give the world a false impression of your own character, which I shall always believe to be much nobler, and clearer and purer than you let the world see.
Alec's response was sincere and contrite:
My dear Father, I am really sorry that my book has made you unhappy. Heaven knows that that is the last thing I wanted to do and if my writing is only going to make those I love wretched, then I had better go and buy a barrel organ… I hope you will be all right in a day or two… your loving son, Billy.
The manuscript was put away and never offered to a publisher. Alec decided to collect up some of his best poems and send those to Grant Richards instead.
At Berkhamsted Alec had made friends with the family of W. W. Jacobs, who lived in a comfortable house called Beechcroft not far from his training camp. No longer famous (except perhaps for a much anthologised, ghoulish and atypical horror story called The Monkey's Paw), Jacobs had been England's most successful writer of comic short fiction. Only Kipling could command fees as high as his for a short story in the Strand Magazine. Jacobs and Arthur knew each other but Jacobs, by nature anti-social, found Arthur's garrulous bonhomie unappealing.
In October 1915 Alec thought he might be falling in love again – for the first time with a member of the opposite sex. Barbara was Jacobs's eldest daughter, ‘a soft, drooping girl’, as Evelyn later described her, ‘lethargic but capable of being roused both to strenuous activity and to gaiety’. She had a boyish look, which may have attracted Alec to her: she bobbed her hair and eschewed conventional ladies’ apparel such as high-heeled shoes, hats and gloves. The photograph which Alec took with him in his haversack to the trenches shows a dumpy muskrat of a girl in a white cotton dress hunched apprehensively under a tree. Her mouth is downturned and her eyes narrow. But in these same eyes Alec believed he could see ‘cool waters’ and in her hair ‘plunging cataracts’. He talked of her dark, brooding beauty, admired the cadence of her voice and was seduced by her ‘charming habit’ of shaking hands whenever she agreed with him on any subject. Her aloofness, though, was a challenge. So was her father, who protected his favourite daughter keenly.
Alec decided that the best way to advance his courtship was to conduct it through letters to her deaf mother. She, being an eccentric – who had been to prison for throwing bricks with the Suffragette Movement and eventually committed suicide – responded with twenty-four siders about socialism and modern problems. To some extent the plan may have backfired as Barbara, to her dying day, believed that Alec had fallen in love with her mother. This was not the case. For months Alec kept his infatuation with Barbara a secret from his father, pleading in July 1916 with a friend: ‘Not a word about Barbara. If my small brother knew it would be all around Hampstead in a week.’
Eight months passed before Barbara and Alec were unofficially engaged. Still they had not kissed – they hardly knew each other. Their few unchaperoned conversations had consisted of stilted, showing-off one-liners about art and poetry. Alec had expounded to her his aesthetic ‘ideas’ – that a search for ‘Beauty’ is the purpose of all intelligent life, that a poet's duty is to find this Beauty and to reveal it for the benefit of mankind. Despite his efforts Alec had no experience of heterosexual love and his rare meetings with Barbara were excruciatingly painful: he was not in the least bit sure that she liked him.
Arthur should have been pleased by the Alec–Barbara romance. She was, after all, the daughter of a friend who was a famous writer and, on the face of it, an ideal partner for his son, but she threatened his own relationship with Alec. Of course, when challenged, he strenuously denied it. During a walk after lunch at Beechcroft Barbara told him that she felt ‘a beast’ being the recipient of all Alec's best thoughts and letters. ‘I vehemently begged her to believe (what is perfectly true) that not a shade of jealousy crosses my thoughts of you two and so long as you are happy, I could desire nothing better.’ But at heart Arthur was not sure that he liked Barbara. Their tastes were not the same. She was excited by all things new and faddish, by Cubism and jarring new poetry; she was a feminist, a believer in co-education; she lauded none of Arthur's Victorian idols, and was not especially won over by his twinkly charm and theatrical manner. She, like her father, found him silly. Arthur thought her silly too, but in spite of that and of their extreme youth (Alec was eighteen, she was sixteen) he saw no point in quarrelling with his beloved son in the last weeks or months before he set off to war. Instead he patiently tried to suggest that Alec bide his time, wait until he was sure, till the war was over, and he had found his footing on the professional wheel. But Alec was ready for all those arguments. He did not have much time, he replied. Within months he might be ‘plugged full of lead’. He asked his mother whose side she was on and Arthur, who
hated arguing in teams, was hurt and dropped the subject.
Arthur's early dislike for Barbara may also have been motivated by another issue. He was quietly hoping that Alec might marry another girl, a neighbour from Hampstead, originally Evelyn's close friend called Jean Fleming. Jean was perhaps the first of Arthur's many surrogate daughters, young women, usually in their teens, with whom he enjoyed close, intimate but, according to Evelyn, ‘in no way libidinous’ associations – I hope Grandpapa was right about this. Arthur had a tendency in any gathering to make a beeline for girls of the teen age or younger. Persuading them to call him ‘Uncle’ or ‘Poppa’, he bought them sweets and joked and frolicked with them in a way that nowadays, in our heightened hysteria over paedophilia, might be deemed ‘inappropriate’. With Barbara Jacobs's youngest sister, Olwen, Arthur played ‘tickling games’ in the garden – ‘a form of recreation,’ as he described it, ‘which only her tender age excused from indiscretion’. He sent his surrogate daughters letters, took them to theatres and cinemas, for walks across Hampstead Heath, and showered them with flowers and presents. He gave Jean Fleming a green ostrich fan for Christmas, a slave bangle for her birthday and, throughout the year, generously pressed books upon her. During the Great War he wrote a play called Feed the Brute, in which Jean and her younger sister Philla played wife and mother to the pampered brute – who, of course, was Arthur. This bizarre exhibition was hauled around the convalescent homes of North London during the spring of 1917.
Arthur was highly sexed. During his engagement to K he alarmed her easily by his immodest and demonstrative gropings. In July 1893 he had written to her: ‘I long for you so much, but after being away from you for so long, I can't promise I should be good. So for the sake of your peace of mind, Old Chum, it's just as well we can't meet… don't long for me to come to you for you know I am a brute and that it's better for you that I stay away.’ K was young then. In 1937, when Arthur was over seventy, he employed a ‘dark-eyed, curly-headed, dainty, smiling little fairy of about 23 fair springs’ called Mollie Udale-Smith to massage his bottom. She was supposed to be curing his rheumatism. Arthur described her first visit in a letter to McMaster:
‘Will you take off your trousers, please’ she whispered. Trembling all over, I obeyed and buried my face in the pillow. For twenty minutes she directed infra-red rays to my hinder parts and put me to a perpetual shame. Then I thought she had finished. Not at all. She waved her delicate fingers mystically, and began taking the most reprehensible liberties with my body. For another twenty minutes she persisted in her caresses; and when at last she rested,
I was ashamed to look my wife in the face. Next morning she reappeared and the same saturnalia was repeated. Then she said ‘I think you'll do now,’ smiled a benediction and presented me with a slip of paper announcing that Mr Arthur Waugh owed Miss Mollie Udale-Smith a guinea. It was the cheapest enchantment I have ever undergone, but my conscience has tortured me ever since.
People like Mollie Udale-Smith and her mystical fingers are appealing to many types of men, but in other respects Arthur Waugh was not so typical. I think he indulged in an unusual fetishism concerning young ladies and bicycles. He courted K in the 1890s on long rides through the Somerset lanes. Later he taught his young lady-friends to ride bicycles in a London cul-de-sac, remembering fondly in his autobiography their ‘wild gyrations’ as they attempted to keep their balance. He believed the bicycle to be responsible for exciting improvements in women's clothing, applauding the change it brought from dreary billowing sleeves and long skirts to swishing apron-skirts, gym-knickers and tight-fitting hose. ‘The bicycle,’ he claimed, ‘was the real beginning of woman's emancipation.’ In 1898 he published an anthology of verse called Legends of the Wheel in which concepts of love and bicycling are sensually intertwined. In one of these poems Arthur teaches Lady Godiva how to ride; in another he imagines himself as the bicycle with a ‘deftly-shod’ woman riding atop him:
Swift as the Swift.
Winger of Woman,
Banishing petticoats,
Bringing the female
(Long since irrational)
Rational dress.
Ho! Then, the Park,
And the pleasaunce of Batter sea.
Ho! Then, the hose
Of my deftly-shod womankind.
I, the ubiquitous
Angel of Exercise, I am the ‘Bike’.
During the First World War Arthur took Jean and other young women out on long bicycle rides to the suburbs, which vexed K greatly – especially when Arthur and Jean got caught in the rain. When she was very old Jean was asked by one of my more brazen cousins if Arthur had ever – well, you know. She was indignant at the suggestion, but remembered him always as her ‘particular friend’. He described her as ‘delicious’ – ‘You know, I have always got on better with women than men,’ he once confided to her.
Arthur made no secret of the fact that he wished for Alec to marry Jean and tried subtly to arouse his son's passions for her. His powers of suggestion were contagious. In October 1916, while Alec, unknown to his father, was courting Barbara, Arthur wrote to him: ‘This morning I met Jean looking like a Magdalen lily in the dew.’ A week later Alec wrote to his friend Hugh Mackintosh: ‘Jean Fleming is going to be something, an angel, I think. She is really rather attractive in a way, pale and tall like a Magdalen lily.’ Three months later at a party at the Flemings’ house in Hampstead Alec checked himself on the brink of kissing her. ‘I suppose the warmth and colours of the evening and the scent she was wearing got on my brain, but I never felt so attracted to her before. If we had been alone I feel certain I should have kissed her… God the last thing I want to do is make love to Jean. I should feel bound to her, she is so sensitive, so fragile, so tender and with such depth of feeling. And I must be free, I want Barbara not her.’
Alec was suffering because Barbara was too aloof to show him any affection. He was not at all sure how she felt about him. Her letters were coolly signed ‘yours Barbara’. He read them over and over but still could find no clue as to what was on her mind. Did she care for him at all? Was she simply too shy to express herself? Was she cold, frigid, gauche? In the early part of January 1917 Alec wrote ‘The Poet's Grave’, which reveals not only his turmoil over Barbara but his perception that his ambitions to become a great English poet might be cut short by death in the trenches. The first verse describes a group of people assembled at a poet's grave in praise of his artistic legacy and the poem continues:
‘The body dies, the soul lives on,’ they said. ‘We lay upon his grave not grief but praise. The magic of his music has been shed Over the years unto the end of days.’
Beneath the clay the poet heard and smiled The cynic smile of one who long has mused On broken things, and had not reconciled God with the bitterness that was diffused Throughout his Life…
And the worms heard him say, ‘I sang to find one woman's heart but she Was cold and heeded not and went her way. I do not care what these men think of me.’
Unlike Barbara, Jean Fleming might easily have kissed Alec on the lips had he presented her with such an opportunity – at least, that was what Alec believed. Some seventy summers on, as Mrs Guy Crowden, she remembered, ‘Alec was very sweet. I thought he was wonderful. I must have been keen on him, but we never got beyond holding hands under the tarpaulin on the tops of buses.’
On first hearing of Alec's passion for Barbara, Arthur fretted about Jean being left out, as it were, to dry. To a friend Alec wrote in June 1917:
Father has made himself miserable about it because of Jean. Damn it, I've never encouraged her, not since that Xmas years ago before the war. My father talks a lot of rot about her. She wouldn't suit me. I want someone to help me in life. She's too soft. She wants a good honest fellow who would make her happy. She is an ideal wife, but I am an impossible husband. If I don't get Barbara, I
don't intend to marry, but just drift, seeing life, learning it, if possible interpreting it in books.
Arthur had many reservations about Barbara, not least that she interfered with his plans concerning Jean, but he was not a man to stand against his son. At Alec's insistence Arthur even agreed that Barbara could lodge at Underhill from September 1917 while she attended an art course in London. Barbara was not noticeably artistic. She had a handful of artistic opinions, radical by Arthur's standards, which had all been gleaned from her mother. Above all, she desired to be free of her baleful parents in Berkhamsted. During her time at Underhill, in Alec's absence, she became a close friend of Evelyn. For obvious reasons she was never popular with the Fleming girls. Late in her life Philla remembered Barbara as ‘a horror’. By October Arthur, in typically generous spirit, had told Alec untruthfully what he wanted to hear: that he was fond of Barbara; but still he pushed his point about Jean. Alec tried hard to convince him that Jean was a non-starter, claiming in a letter to his friend Hugh Mackintosh, ‘Father is at last realising that Jean is rather childish after all these days! Not too good a psychologist. The fact is he does not care for people who don't care for him, at first he was beastly about Barbara. Now of course he loves her, but then he couldn't very well help it. She is wonderful.’
Alec was deluded: Arthur never took to Barbara – and she knew it. She also knew that Arthur was obsessed with Jean. At the same time as he was reassuring Alec about Barbara, Arthur wrote a poem for and about Jean inscribing it to her ‘with true love, Arthur Waugh’. He gave a copy to Alec, perhaps in the hope that it might awaken his ardour for the Magdalen lily: