Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  Meanwhile, unknown to his father, Alec had been hoping to escape from his duties at Chapman and Hall. None of his books had been successful since The Loom of Youth. His original publishers, Grant Richards, had gone bust and, much to his regret, all of his books were now being published in small quantities under his father's imprint. Then, in 1925, his scintillating novel about a kept woman – its elegant dustjacket designed by Evelyn – unexpectedly sold six thousand copies. Kept was not strictly a ‘bestseller’ but its comparative success was enough to draw Alec to wider attention. One thing led to another. Soon he was in popular demand for magazine short stories and articles. An American magazine bought the rights to another of his romances, Love In These Days, and Alec sensed he might be able to cut free and set himself up as freelance writer. But his spirits were low and his professional successes were not enough to buck him. He felt that his life was a succession of meaningless events that needed to be jolted into focus.

  With this in mind, at the beginning of June 1925, he sold the contents of his flat in Kensington and bought himself a year-long round-the-world cruise ticket from the Messageries Maritimes. Of course, Arthur did everything in his power to dissuade him from leaving but his imprecations fell on deaf ears. By the middle of June Alec was gaily drifting around the Mediterranean. He had resigned his salaried position at Chapman and Hall but, in deference to Arthur's interferences, agreed to remain on the company's board.

  Alec's journey took him through the Suez Canal to Ceylon, Malaya, Thailand, Laos, Singapore and Tahiti, where he had an affair with a ‘comely Tahitian damsel’ who ‘bounded about the place like a Newfoundland puppy’. After a while he found her company tedious – she seemed more interested in securing work as a cleaner at the hotel than in her relationship with him – but, at the start, her sexual techniques made Alec very happy. ‘It was the greatest fun making love to her,’ he wrote, many years later. ‘Polynesians, as hula dancers, acquire an astonishing mobility between the knees and navel.’

  Back in England, Arthur was missing his eldest son terribly but he was also irritated and disappointed with him for having left. When Alec telegraphed Chapman and Hall from Singapore, in desperate need of thirty pounds, Arthur ungraciously refused to send it. Perhaps he hoped that if Alec ran out of money he would have no choice but to return to England and to his job at Henrietta Street. But if that was Arthur's plan it backfired sorely. When Alec was forced to borrow the money from a friend he resolved to announce his resignation from the board as soon as he returned to England.

  When poverty didn't bring Alec home, Arthur resorted to another scheme – telegraphing his son in Tahiti to announce that K was desperately ill and needed him by her side at once. Her condition was not pleasant, but neither was it serious. Alec made arrangements to return to London.

  On the journey, he met and fell in love with a wild, bad-tempered, red-headed married woman called Ruth Morris. She had had an interesting life: one of the first Americans to fly an aeroplane and, during the First World War, one of only a handful of American women to be given an army commission. As Ruth Wightman, she had written scripts for Hollywood films and trained as a bullfighter in Spain. In her youth she had been raped by the American novelist Jack London. Her husband, Gouverneur Morris, was a well-known novelist and short-story writer from the immensely rich Morris family that for generations had owned vast tracts of real estate in New York City and, I believe, the Philip Morris tobacco company. Gouverneur was twenty-five years older than his wife and an amiable drunk. Charlie Chaplin had begged her to sort him out. After a short series of illicit shipboard meetings which do not need itemising here, Alec had fallen head over heels in love.

  By the time he arrived in London, Alec knew that his mother was better. He did not announce his return in order to savour his father's dramatic surprise. Instead he sent a telegram purporting to be from the sleazy Terence Greenidge: ‘Dear, dear Mrs Waugh please can I spend the night at Underhill.’ When he appeared at the house, he was greeted with pomp and cheer by Arthur, who had spent all day in a tedious board meeting:

  My dear boy I cannot tell you how glad I am to have you back. At the board meeting today I was wondering how I could go on. It will all be so different now. Some of the board members are good loyal fellows, I know that, but

  we do not speak the same language. It will make all the difference now that you are here.

  But Alec was far from happy. He was still bitter that his father had refused him thirty pounds and had drawn up plans for another Tahitian rendezvous with Ruth in a few months’ time. He had come to tell his father that he wished to resign his directorship at Chapman and Hall. In a bowl by the door, a cable awaited him from Ruth: ‘San Francisco is desolate without you.’ He telegraphed back immediately: ‘Arrived tonight in a London that might as well be empty.’

  Alec found it painful explaining to his father that he did not wish to return to Chapman and Hall and Arthur's heartbreak saddened him. ‘But my dear boy, you can't. Leaving me all alone.’

  But the son was determined. So, too, was the father. All that night conversation turned in circles over Alec's future. ‘It can't come to anything,’ Arthur kept repeating. ‘How can it? She's married. She's an American. She won't want to be transplanted, nor will you. Her husband is rich and prominent. She won't want to break that up. In a year's time you will both have realised that.’ He told Alec that, with a bit of persuasion, the board might give him further leave, but that he must not, on any account, resign.

  Alec's resolve was adamantine. As he revealed to Evelyn, many years later, ‘I was never happy at No. 11 Henrietta Street.’ Within a month he was sailing, once again, away from England, waving sweetly from the taff-rail of the good ship Louqsor, headed for Tahiti and for Ruth.

  Alec's departure left Arthur feeling miserable, deserted and betrayed. He was growing to hate his work at Chapman and Hall and resented Alec for leaving him to fight the board and the shareholders alone. Before each meeting he imagined himself standing up at the end and saying in a clear actorish voice to the men before him, ‘And now, gentlemen, there is one final thing. I must ask you to accept my resignation.’ But he was not rich enough to do that. He had never saved any money, nor did he own any shares in the company. He was chained to the business for as long as they would employ him.

  Alec's escape from London was felicitous. He adored travelling, sunshine, the sea, making new friends, casual sexual relationships. For the rest of his life he would never have a permanent base again. He was a sojourner and that was how he liked it. But despite the sense of liberation that attended his movements abroad, Alec's happiness was partially marred by feelings of guilt at having abandoned his father:

  I did feel sad on my father's count… My heart often bled for him during those years, and he looked reproachfully at me sometimes when he talked over his troubles. He felt that he should not be facing them alone. But if I had been on the board, my own anxiety about the firm's future would have increased the tension for him… My only regret was that my own books were still published by Chapman and Hall. I wished that I had no occasion to discuss business with my father.

  Back in England Arthur's second son's fortunes were tumbling ever deeper into the depths. Evelyn had a few friends who were prepared to swear that he was a ‘genius’ but he had nothing to show for it and lacked the confidence to produce. He started work on a novel about black magic called The Temple of Thatch but was not sure if it was any good. He completed another called Noah, about nakedness and drunkenness, and sent it to several of the publishers with whom Arthur had connections – it was rejected by all. A long short story about a man wishing to commit suicide also elicited rejections. Meanwhile many of his less talented acquaintances were forging careers and moving on in the world. Having flunked out of Heatherley's Art School in December 1924, after four months of idling and truancy, Evelyn found himself a job at the Daily Express, but after only three months in Fleet Street he had contributed nothing publishable and was sac
ked. Reluctantly he took a teaching post at a Welsh private school. The job depressed him. During his second term The Temple of Thatch was returned to him in the post by a trusted friend, with a letter stating that he had not in the least enjoyed it. Evelyn consigned the manuscript to the flames of the school boiler.

  The burning of his novel was a depressing moment but within weeks Evelyn saw a ray of hope. Alec told him to expect the offer of a job in Italy as secretary to a famous translator of Proust. Delighted at the chance to escape teaching, Evelyn handed in his notice. ‘I even approached kindly feeling towards my father and contracted with him to surrender my allowance in exchange for my debts.’ But within days news came that the job was off. It was at about this time that he tried to commit suicide. In A Little Learning he described a desultory attempt to drown himself, thwarted by a swarm of stinging jellyfish, somewhere off the Welsh coast. The book ends with him paddling back to shore, cold and humiliated; ‘Then I climbed the sharp hill that led to all the years ahead.’

  I suspect this to have been a literary contrivance, a comic and dramatic dénouement to the memoir of his early years: the jellyfish incident is not recorded in his diaries; neither did he mention it to any of his intimate friends. More likely, I think, is that his ‘suicide attempt’ took a different form. In his first novel, Decline and Fall, Evelyn describes an eccentric school teacher, Captain Grimes, who fakes his suicide by pretending to drown. Earlier Grimes discusses another attempt with a pistol: ‘Well, I sat there for some time looking at that revolver. I put it to my head twice, but each time I brought it down again. “Public-school men don't end like this,” I said to myself.’ Two months before Evelyn lost the Italian job he had confided to his diary: ‘I debate the simple paradoxes of suicide and achievement, work out the scheme for a new book, and negotiate with the man Young to buy a revolver from him.’ When term ended and Evelyn was back at Underhill K discovered the revolver while unpacking his suitcase. He told her that he had bought it from Dick Young with the intention of killing himself because he was worried about his debts. She had a small capital of about two hundred pounds: she sold it and gave Evelyn the proceeds on the condition that the gun be thrown away.

  Unfortunately no record has survived of Arthur's reaction to these events, but I don't doubt that they added to his exasperation. At this time Evelyn was bitter. He complained frequently to his friends of his empty life and railed against his parents, insisting that he was ‘an unwanted child’. I do not know if Evelyn ever called his father an ‘arsehole’, or shoved him physically across a room, but I very much doubt it. Their mutual disregard manifested itself not in physical violence or even in words so much as a pernicious, simmering atmosphere – although Evelyn once jokingly wrote to a friend: ‘I am staying with my father. At present it is all dignity and peace but I expect we shall soon have a quarrel & black each other's eyes & tear our hair and flog each other with hunting crops.’ I have no doubt that, with his friends, Evelyn accused Arthur of the foulest deeds in his imagination, just as Alastair had accused his mother of every kind of sexual depravity. The saintly Christopher Hollis (who is quoted in the tractor masturbating episode above) wrote about this time in Evelyn's life fifty years later: ‘As a matter of fact, as between him and his admirable father Evelyn was much more sinning than sinned against. Unpardonable things were all too often on his lips in the period as he afterwards most fully recognised.’

  After the disappearance of the Italian opportunity, Evelyn dragged himself back into teaching, this time to a school at Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. After only five terms there he was sacked for trying to seduce the matron but told his father that it was for inebriation. Next he took a part-time job at a school in Golders Green but that, too, was a failure, and soon he decided that what he most desired was to lead the life of a simple country craftsman. Arthur paid a deposit for him to join a printing school, but no sooner had the cheque been cashed than Evelyn changed his mind and enlisted at a training workshop for cabinet-makers in Southampton Row.

  As if all this was not enough for the long-suffering Arthur, towards the end of 1924 Evelyn had fallen in love with a girl of whom his father deeply disapproved. She was intellectual, but she was also argumentative, a social snob, a sex maniac, a sado-masochist, a depressive and a drunk. Although she had slept with many men – Paul Robeson and the painter Stephen Toulmin among them – she would not indulge Evelyn on the grounds that she did not find him physically attractive, yet was angry with him if he turned his attentions to anyone else. Arthur made her the scapegoat for Evelyn's failures. She had been, after all, involved in both the bouncing cheque and the Bow Street police incidents and, as far as he was concerned, was the primary cause of his son's depression, drunkenness and apparent lack of ambition.

  Arthur's tolerance of all these things was nothing short of miraculous – but tolerance was not, of itself, enough to repair the damaged relationship. Evelyn wanted, maybe needed, his father to kick him in the pants. I have already shown how encouraged he was by Arthur's robust stand over his late-night promenades at Lancing, but his father's behaviour on that occasion had been uncharacteristic. For the most part Evelyn despised his father's tolerance and the uncertain atmosphere it created.

  A sterner father would have packed me off to the colonies. Mine was not stern, but he could not conceal the despair with which he regarded me as a permanent encumbrance to his declining years.

  All emotions of pleasure and pain found immediate and vivid expression in him. It was apparent that I came home only when destitute. That did not make my appearances at Underhill more welcome. I had the grace to feel a certain shame; it certainly never occurred to me, as it does to many unsatisfactory sons, to blame my shortcomings on him; but that did not make my company more agreeable. Our meetings became almost entirely melancholy.

  That Evelyn could envisage no means of escaping from home was a piercing problem for him. He had no money, no wife, nowhere to live but Underhill, and the place with all its associations looked set to be his base indefinitely. How he must have envied Alec's freedom to roam the world, paying for hotels, women and adventure from the royalties of his books. For four years this sense of entrapment brewed into harsh feelings of hatred and resentment:

  How I detest Underhill and how ill I feel in it. The whole place volleys and thunders with traffic. I can't sleep or work. Mother is away at Midsomer Norton where Aunt Trissie is

  dying. The telephone bell is continually ringing, my father scampering up and down stairs, dog barking, the gardener rolling the gravel under the window and all the time traffic. Another week of this will drive me mad.

  When asked by a television interviewer in middle age what he thought to be his greatest fault Evelyn answered, without hesitation, ‘Irritability.’ At home during the years of his dissipation he found his father oppressively irritating. He was irritated by Arthur's heavy theatrical sighs, loud enough to ‘carry to the back of the gallery at Drury Lane’, by his showing off, by his pipe smoking. He hated Arthur's gobbling at table, his hurry to have a second helping before anyone else had finished their first plate. He confided to his diary his irritation with Arthur's ostentatious asthma attacks: ‘This morning I received communion with my parents at St Albans Church; there was much flustering and retching by my father before the ceremony’; with his quaint and affected use of language: ‘Chapman and Hall has a “quinsy”’; and with his anecdotal wit: ‘Chapman and Hall had friends to dinner last night including a woman called Ruth with whom he is in love. He entertained them by making jokes which hardly amused me at all. Indeed they made me most uncomfortable.’ In August 1924 Evelyn was intensely irritated by Arthur's ‘tiresome toy’, ‘father's new electrical machine’, ‘a horrible wireless apparatus’. He particularly resented the suggestion that they should all huddle round it and ‘listen in’ after dinner en famille. ‘Every evening I return wishing to do nothing except eat a prodigious dinner and go to bed early after an evening of desultory conversation or, less prof
itably still, in “listening in” to Chapman and Hall's horrible wireless.’

  By February 1927 Evelyn was well aware that he had to pull himself together. It was nearly three years since he had left university and he had achieved little. It was time to stop frittering his talent and prove to his friends that he really was as brilliant as they thought. ‘Today I have been trying to do something about getting a job and am tired and discouraged,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It is all an infernal nuisance. It seems to me the time has arrived to set about being a man of letters.’

  Alastair Graham had privately printed an essay by Evelyn about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It was intelligently written but Graham's production was incompetent – full of typographical errors. In writing about the Pre-Raphaelites Evelyn was entering into the world of Arthur's enthusiasm. Two of Arthur's Waugh cousins had, in succession, married William Holman Hunt; he owned a high-backed oak armchair that had once belonged to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and held pride of place in the book-room. Arthur read Evelyn's essay and ‘approved it’. At the same time Alec, in a gesture of goodwill before leaving for Tahiti, published one of Evelyn's short stories in an anthology he was editing for Chapman and Hall. It was not a brilliant piece of work, and only one reviewer noticed it. Neither the story nor the essay was recognisably a work of genius but each led to other things: the story to a commission for another from the New Decameron; and the essay to a commission for a biography of Rossetti from the publishing firm Duckworth, whose offices were situated three doors along Henrietta Street from the offices of Chapman and Hall. The man at Duckworth gave Evelyn a fifty-pound advance – twenty pounds on signature of the contract, the rest on delivery of the manuscript. The twenty pounds was spent within a week.