Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  Carew did not realise that Alec was miserable, but Evelyn saw him wandering around the house with a gaunt expression, muttering of suicide.

  After a year of this torture, Alec decided to reduce the time he spent at Chapman and Hall from five to two days a week and, in the summer of 1920, he and Barbara moved out of Underhill to a pink-roofed prefab bungalow at Ditchling in Sussex of which they were both sorely ashamed. Arthur came to stay with them most weekends, and Alec started writing again, but the move did nothing to inspire his sex life. When Barbara was at Ditchling, Alec stayed at Underhill; and when he was in the bungalow writing his books, Barbara would visit Evelyn at nearby Lancing or, in the holidays, move back to Underhill without her husband, to be with his younger brother. Before long Barbara and Alec were leading separate lives. Alec stayed from Friday to Monday at Underhill and, mid-week, booked himself into a quiet pub, the White Horse at Shenley, to write his books. By July 1922 he was ‘deeply committed to a sultry tempestuous romance’ with an older woman who taught him heterosexual confidence. Barbara wrote to him requesting an audience. She came to his office and they went for a walk in St James's Park. ‘It's a funny thing to ask one's husband,’ she said, ‘but I want to be married again.’

  ‘Do you think it would work?’ Alec asked, assuming she wanted to ‘give it another go’.

  ‘That's my problem, isn't it?’ She smirked coldly.

  Her second marriage was equally unsuccessful.

  Alec's job at Chapman and Hall was a mistake from the start. Arthur had offered it to him mainly because he wished to be near his son – he still could not let him go. To the board he justified hiring Alec on the grounds that the firm needed a young person who understood the youth book market and would introduce young modern authors to the list. For the first year Alec sat, lugubriously reading manuscripts, in a small shared office three floors above his father. He felt out of it, wanting to be downstairs with Arthur, talking about literature, telling him how to run the company. But his father was always busy – ‘driven’, as he used to call it – and, as we know, he hated discussions. Despite all the time they had spent together yackety-yacking along the Sherborne slopes or across Hampstead Heath, allowing one subject to roll freely into another, Arthur required a different order of communication at work. Alec, who resented having to share his father's time with the office staff, stored up ideas to discuss with Arthur when they got home, but Arthur always made a point of refusing to talk shop at Underhill. Consequently their glorious relationship became fraught and disharmonious – at least as far as Alec was concerned. It must have been the same for Arthur, but I cannot find the evidence to show it. Arthur was a loyal clam. In 1929 he published a centennial history of Chapman and Hall called A Hundred Years of Publishing in which he wrote glowingly of Alec's contribution to the firm: ‘It is said to be a difficult thing for father and son to work together in business; but if there was any difficulty in this particular alliance, it was certainly not felt upon the father's side. Those were years of the happiest association and the firm's programme expanded rapidly under the influence of youth.’ This compares interestingly to the equivalent passage from Alec's Early Years:

  It is perhaps never easy for father and son to work together in business, and the very fact that in all other things we were so close made it the more difficult for us. It placed our relationship on a new basis. My father and I were very different; I was more like my mother. The attraction of opposites brought us the closer, emotionally, but in the conduct of business it made special difficulties. My father's mind worked fast. He liked to make quick decisions. He disliked discussions. Discussions seemed to him a brother to argument

  and cousin to quarrel. I, on the other hand, like talking round a subject.

  Business discussions between father and son were not the only cause of tension between them. Alec's first major book after The Loom of Youth, a record of his German captivity called Prisoners of Mainz, was published by Chapman and Hall in 1919, but he felt that publication by his father's firm restricted his freedom as an author and sought, wherever possible, to place his books elsewhere. This led to dissent among the ranks of Chapman and Hall, who accused Alec of disloyalty. In the office at Henrietta Street Arthur was on his guard against showing favouritism, and when a young man who worked beneath Alec in the firm's hierarchy demanded a place on the board, Arthur would not offer his son a promotion unless Alec presented a written application stating his reasons why he also deserved to sit on the board. For Alec this was both a humiliation and a betrayal. However, he wrote his application and the young men eventually joined the board together.

  During his time at Chapman and Hall Alec persuaded Arthur to employ Evelyn as an illustrator of book jackets. Evelyn's drawings were, if not brilliant, at least lively and arresting – likely, in Alec's professional view, to appeal to young readers. It was a scheme that put money into Evelyn's pockets and brought him kudos among his schoolfriends.

  At Lancing Evelyn was of the loose opinion that he was a ‘genius’. The school was dim and depressing and he was certainly brighter than most of the people in it. He knew that he was funnier than all of his contemporaries, he was better read, better at drawing, better at writing both poetry and prose; he was wittier than his father, more critical than his brother – he had no doubt that he would make his mark on the world. But how? ‘It's rotten when you've got a touch of genius and you don't know how it's going to turn out,’ he complained to a friend.

  Like many people of outstanding talent Evelyn hovered between the opposing forces of arrogance and self-loathing. Dudley Carew had decided early that Evelyn was a genius and collected, during the course of their school friendship, every scrap of paper on which he had jotted. He turned out to be right and many years later, after Evelyn had died, he sold his schoolboy hoard for a considerable sum to the University of Texas.

  For a time Carew attempted to persuade everyone he met of Evelyn's potential greatness. At home he was disbelieved. At Underhill he was listened to with interest. Arthur knew that Evelyn was different, unlovable perhaps, not the sweet daughter he had always wanted, but a distant and brilliant boy. He did not like Evelyn's manner; he detested his sharp tongue, his cynical wit and satirical humour. He felt more comfortable with the flirtatious, confidence-boosting Alec than he did with brittle, complex Evelyn, in whose presence he felt uneasy. But, for all this, he was not blind to his younger son's potential. In response to a notion of Carew's that Evelyn would turn out to be the Max Beerbohm of his age, Arthur is reported to have said, ‘No, he will be greater, for Evelyn is a creator.’ When Arthur was being harried for a debt incurred by Evelyn at a restaurant, Alec apparently said to him: ‘You know, Father, if Evelyn turns out to be a genius, you and I might be made to look very foolish by making a fuss over ten pounds, seventeen and ninepence.’ Arthur's response, according to Alec's recollection, was ‘Would I, would we, that's not much consolation now.’

  At the end of his school career Evelyn wrote a play and sent the script to Underhill for his father's approval. The last such submission, an essay on the subject of Romance, had been dismissed by Arthur as ‘too satirical’. He did not like the play much either. It satirised school life, lampooned The Loom of Youth, and sniggered at the backward opinions of Evelyn's maiden aunts, but Arthur was a keen enough critic to spot that his son had literary talent, even though it was of a type he could never instinctively admire. He wrote to Evelyn at school:

  Dear Dramatist,

  Congratulations on your wit and cynicism. I read your play yesterday with admiring amusement. The glorious nonchalance of your bloods – entirely unlike anything that existed in my generation – seems to me most cleverly

  portrayed, and the turn of the situation at the end – a little Shavian, perhaps – is wonderfully witty. You certainly have a most ingenious brain. You could do much. I do indeed congratulate you on a most excellent piece of work. With such promise I feel you are bound to come off at Oxford. That is precisely the Oxfo
rd wit. You have at 17 what we laboured to get, and couldn't, at 23. Go on and prosper and my heart goes with you.

  After the show, which Arthur did not attend, he received a letter of congratulation from J. F. Roxburgh, lauding Evelyn for his ‘touch of genius’. In his last school report, at Christmas 1921, Roxburgh had written: ‘His work has great merit and is sometimes really brilliant. I think he has quite unusual ability and a real gift for writing. We shall hear of him again.’

  When Evelyn was in his third year at Lancing, Arthur produced a second volume of his collected literary criticism. The first, it may be remembered – Reticence in Literature – had been bound in the blue and gold of the Sherborne colours and dedicated to Alec. Tradition and Change was grudgingly dedicated to Evelyn. Arthur told Alec that he wished he could write another book for him but, all things being fair, this one had to be for his brother. To appear even-handed he wrote an equivalent letter of dedication to Evelyn. It is shorter than the one to Alec and far less amatory, very sentimental and yet, between the lines, it reveals the deep unease that characterised Arthur's fragile relationship with his younger son at this time.

  To Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh

  My dear Evelyn,

  I do not go into the old nursery now so often as I used; it is too full of memories to be altogether comfortable. But I found myself there last night, looking for one of the many pictures you painted there last holidays; and as my eye wandered around the familiar walls, I felt that the

  room might well serve as a sort of treasure-house of our happy home life. I remembered days when it rang with the sound of battle, and all the tea things were broken by a flying dart. I remembered its transformation into a theatre. I saw it decorated with Alec's cricket and football groups upon one wall; and then I turned to the other, which you and Barbara have frescoed with strange Cubist pictures; and I do not forget that it had been renamed the ‘Studio’ – your private temple of the most modern school of art. The room has changed many times since the summer when we built Underhill; but the good sound walls and timbers are still the same, and sometimes, when the house is silent in sleep, they may whisper to one another of many cheerful hours, enshrining the same spirit as of old, although we ourselves have all grown so much older.

  In memory of that room and of all that it has seen, I should like to offer you this book, which is, in its way, only another tribute to the passage of Time, the certainty of Change and the imperishable influence of Tradition. You are born into an era of many changes; and, if I know you at all, you will be swayed and troubled by many of them. But you are not yet so wedded to what is new that you seem likely to despise what is old. You may copy the Cubist in your living room, but an Old Master hangs above your bed. You may accept the new social order of tomorrow, but your hope is still rooted (and long may it remain so!) in the old Faith that is the same yesterday, today and for ever. I wish you nothing better than to change gently, like the old room where we have spent so many happy hours, reflecting the wiser fashions of the passing day, but still looking out, through sunlit casements, upon green grass, a garden of flowers and God's blue sky above you. If that is not the happy life, I do not know where happiness is to be found.

  Your loving Father ARTHUR WAUGH

  Evelyn could not have failed to notice the difference in tone between Arthur's dedication to Alec and this one to himself. The feeble skirting, the ‘if I know you at all’, the ‘in memory of that room’, the piffle about growing older and looking through sunlit casements was a million miles from the heartfelt gush of his brother's dedication four years earlier. Gone are the references to the mutual ‘comradeship’, ‘sympathy’, ‘unclouded devotion’ and the ‘joys that have made our life so pleasant and our companionship so sweet’ that Arthur offered Alec. If he hadn't spotted it already, Evelyn could now easily see, by flitting his eye from one published page to the other, how his relationship with his father compared with that of his brother. Nor could he have failed to notice within that book Arthur's pointed references to youth and age, his attack on wise young men, on literary Cubists and, in particular, on a poem by Orrick Johns which Arthur despised:

  This is the song of youth,

  This the cause of myself;

  I knew my father well and he was a fool,

  Therefore will I have my own foot in the path before I take a step.

  ‘Here surely,’ steamed Arthur, ‘is the reduction to absurdity of that school of literary licence which, beginning with the declaration ‘I knew my father well and he was a fool,’ naturally proceeds to the convenient assumption that everything which seemed wise and true to the father must inevitably be false and foolish to the son.’

  A few months later, during the winter of 1920, Evelyn set to work on his own book, a novel. He was seventeen years old. It was to be ‘a study of a man with two characters by his brother’ and was clearly based on Alec. At first his family showed no interest in the project, but Evelyn was persistent. Eventually Arthur admitted, without much enthusiasm, that he liked it. K worried that Evelyn would be ruined by becoming a public figure before his time, and Alec – if Evelyn's diary account is to be believed – showed apprehension at having a rival. That Evelyn was nettled by a comparison of his father's two book dedications is apparent from his own dedication of his novel, which should be read as a direct attack on Arthur, on Alec, on Arthur's dedicatory letter to Evelyn and on the whole precious, bookish atmosphere of Underhill:

  To myself,

  Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh

  to whose sympathy and appreciation alone it owes its

  being, this book is dedicated.

  Dedicatory letter.

  My dear Evelyn,

  Much has been spoken and written about the lot of the boy with literary aspirations in a philistine family; little can adequately convey his difficulties, when the surroundings, which he has known from childhood, have been entirely literary. It is a sign of victory over these difficulties that this book is chiefly, if at all, worthy of attention.

  Many of your relatives and most of your fathers friends are more or less directly interested in paper and print. Ever since you first left the nursery for meals with your parents downstairs, the conversation, to which you were an insatiable listener, has been of books, their writers and producers; ever since as a sleepy but triumphantly emancipate school boy, you were allowed to sit up with your elders in the ‘book-room’ after dinner, you have heard little but discussion about books. Your home has always been full of them; all new books of any merit, and most of none, seem by one way or another to find their place in the files which have long overflowed the shelves. Among books your whole life has been layed [sic] and you are now rising up in your turn to add one more to the everlasting bonfire of the ephemeral.

  And all this will be brought up against you. Another of these precocious Waughs,’ they will say. So be it. There is always a certain romance, to the author at least, about a

  first novel which no reviewer can quite shatter. Good luck! You have still high hopes and big ambitions and have not yet been crushed in the mill of professionalism. Soon perhaps you will join the ‘wordsmiths’ jostling one another for royalties and contracts, meanwhile you are still very young.

  Yourself Evelyn

  Through lack of confidence and positive encouragement, Evelyn abandoned the novel after only a few thousand words in January 1921. The new year was to prove a bad one for him. For most of it he was listless, hating his school, bored and lonely at home. It did not seem to matter that he had won both the school poetry and literature prizes, that he was head of his house, president of the debating society, that he had written a play, which had been performed with great success to the whole school, or that he was editor of the school magazine. He believed that his aloofness had made him unpopular with masters and boys, and his headmaster's report confirms this: ‘Last term he had begun to grate against his surroundings and the friction was bad for him. He threw out sparks which made little fires in some of the cha
racters about him, partly, no doubt kindling, but partly destructive. For all his brilliance he is curiously young and out of touch with reality.’

  He planned to run away. He also thought about killing himself. Even the frustrations of Underhill were preferable to the stale atmosphere of school and he wrote to Arthur begging to be removed. He would, he assured his father, find himself a decent job in London and contribute towards the costs at Underhill.

  When he received his son's letter, Arthur panicked. Remembering Alec's Sherborne disgrace, he jumped immediately to the conclusion that Evelyn had been caught in a brothel and was being blackmailed into finding an honourable excuse for leaving. Once he had been assured that this was not the case he reluctantly agreed to his leaving at the end of the winter term.

  Despite the embarrassment and ennui that Evelyn sometimes felt in his father's company he was not past wishing to please him. Like Alec, Evelyn's principal pleasure at his own successes was intensified by the happiness that they brought to Arthur. He remembered the joyful day in September 1920 when Arthur had taken him on a tour of Oxford, telling him about the student adventures of past Waughs and their colleges, of his own time at New College, showing off the architecture, the podium from which he had recited his Newdigate prize poem, steeping his son in the history of that beautiful city. Evelyn must have believed that if he won a place at Oxford he might enjoy with his father the same intimacy Alec had enjoyed with him at Sherborne. Alec had decided against university – as an established author and veteran of Passchendaele, Oxford had seemed a backward step to him. Evelyn worked hard for his exams. Arthur wanted him to apply to New College where he had spent his own student years, but Evelyn, noticing that scholarships were worth more elsewhere, put himself down for the less illustrious Hertford College instead. He did this to save his father money. When news of Evelyn's scholarship came through Arthur was overjoyed. No doubt he, too, felt that their relationship might improve once they had the Oxford experience to share. Perhaps he might now enjoy a second shot at staying young, living through the life and career of one of his sons. He wrote to Evelyn quoting from Psalm xxxv: