My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (26 page)

Arthur Waugh.

As I said at the beginning of this chapter, the historian of the future will present the English of the late 1930s as anxious and apprehensive: shaken by crisis after crisis; the Spanish War, the Abdication, the trade recession, the Anschluss, Munich; a gradual drifting to disaster, but
actually, as regards the individual, life went on for many very much the same. Arnold Bennett has told in his preface to
The Old Wives' Tale
that he realized as he was approaching the middle of his book that Sophie would have been in Paris during the siege of 1870. To acquire local colour he made enquiries of his concierge as to what he remembered of the siege. Bennett was surprised to find that he remembered very little: that the landmarks of his life were the death of a parent, marriage, the loss in accident of a child, this christening and that funeral. The details of the siege were as fugitive as the headlines of last week's paper.

It was that way with my father. From the year 1934 onwards, he was able to enjoy his leisure. He woke early and on fine mornings took a short stroll before breakfast. He could read his letters quietly and think out his answers to them. He had not to sandwich his replies between telephone calls and office interruptions. He would read a manuscript, then he would take another walk; if it was a cold day he might go to the Institute to read the weeklies. He had fallen into the modern habit of taking before lunch a glass of sherry and a biscuit; very often he had company. After lunch there was the crossword puzzle, till he dozed off in his chair. There was then a manuscript to finish, or perhaps a report to draft. He was in daily touch with Henrietta Street. As often as not someone came to tea: or else there would be a visitor between tea and dinner. His friends knew that they would always find him in. By staying in one place you can see more people than by rushing round in circles. He let life come to him. When I read his diaries I was surprised to find how much he had found to do, how many people he had met during his years of retirement. At no time in his life did he go in for organized entertaining. He did not give lunch or dinner parties, but there was a constant coming
and going: a continuous informal hospitality. The spare room was in use most weeks.

In 1932 I married, in 1937 Evelyn married. My father was delighted with his daughters-in-law: he was proud of being a grandfather.

Not many Englishmen of his age were happier than he was on the first of January in that year of unlucky omen 1939. Nor would I say that he was in a very different mood, two years later, when the worst had happened, when for so many the future was completely black. Evelyn was under orders for the Middle East, my wife, who had been brought up in Australia, had taken our children there. But I had been posted to London as a staff captain in the Ministry of Mines.

I had a flat in Buckingham Street, Adelphi, but I spent every week-end at Highgate. My mother would lunch with me in London and we would go to a film afterwards, returning to Hampstead Lane by six o'clock. They were happy times. We did not talk much about the actual war, we gossiped of what our different friends were doing, of the difficulties of war-time publishing, of how one writer's stock was going up while another's was going down, talking as we had ten years before, assuming that we should be talking in just that way in 1950; never letting the thought intrude that in ten years' time England would be a very different place, that there might indeed no longer exist an England that we would recognize as England.

At a War Intelligence course at Swanage that I had attended early in the year we had been set problems beginning, ‘It is the year 1943, we have invaded the continent of Europe.…' As my syndicate sat down to work out its solution, I would say to myself, ‘What with?' Many must have been thinking the same thing, but they said nothing, nor did I. There were certain
possibilities we declined to look at. That is one of the advantages of not being a logical race. The French were too logical. They added up the score and then packed up.

Did my father ever wonder what would happen to himself, his home and his wife if England were invaded? He never did out loud. In peace-time he had been apprehensive, worrying in September about what would happen in April at the shareholders' meeting. But in wartime he went on quietly with his routine, writing to his friends, having friends in for tea or sherry, reading manuscripts and preparing reports on them, discussing the manuscripts with authors, taking out the poodle on the Heath, telephoning the office daily, reading the weekly papers at the Hampstead Institute, in the summer watching the school cricket matches at the Highgate Ground and talking with the groundsman, the old England cricketer A. E. Knight.

From the business point of view he had little to worry over. Books invariably do well in war-time, they did particularly well in this last war when the quota of paper was strictly rationed and every book sold out, irrespective of its quality. Publishers were able to dispose of old stock that had not moved for years and had been written off as valueless. A large part of Chapman & Hall's stock was burnt and they received in compensation £18,000. Normally they would have been delighted at such a deal, but in 1941 they would have got even more for it from the public. It was a puzzling time for authors. They had no idea how many copies would have been sold if the demand could have been met. They could not tell how they stood. It was cruel luck on those authors who published their best books during the war.

Publishers had their problems but they were very different from those which had harassed them in peacetime. They had not to worry about selling books but about
producing them. They were fretted by government controls, by delays in printing and in binding, by the crippling demands of income-tax. But my father was spared such worries. His post as reader and adviser had never been so simple. He had no longer the two-pronged problem, was a book good, was it the kind of book to sell; now he had only to decide if it was good. It could not fail to sell.

One major change took place at this time in Henrietta Street. In 1938 Inman had taken over the chairmanship of Methuen. The firm was in difficulties and on E. V. Lucas's death, Lloyds Bank had invited him to take Lucas's place. He soon found that he had created an awkward situation for himself. In his autobiography
No Going Back
he said, ‘When manuscripts of new books were sent to me personally, as they often were, it fell to me to decide to which of the two firms they should be given. I found myself in a clash of loyalties.…' It was finally agreed that a solution of the problem would be for Methuen's to purchase the share capital of Chapman & Hall. The arrangement worked satisfactorily for all sides until September 1939.

Inman then found that his official war-time commitments were too heavy for him to remain in publishing and asked Lloyds Bank to release him from his contract. During the distractions of 1940 the interior economy of a publishing firm did not seem as involved as it would have done at another time. Directors were ready to accept compromises. The amalgamation of Methuen and Chapman & Hall took place without dissension and my father resumed his chairmanship of Chapman & Hall. My prophecy for the firm's future had been fulfilled, in the happiest possible way, without any member of the staff being forced into unemployment.

The flourishing condition of the two firms today is ample testimony to the debt that they owe to Inman.

I was posted overseas to Spears Mission (Syria) in September 1941. One does not look ahead in war-time and I did not ask myself whether I was seeing my father for the last time, nor did he make any of the remarks that had come so easily to his grandfather: he did not dramatize the occasion. I had been away so many times on so many voyages. A few months earlier Evelyn had sailed with his Commando for the Middle East and he was already back, to join a new formation. I, too, might be home within a year. Nine months was the longest I had ever been away.

Evelyn had landed at Plymouth a few days before I sailed, and his first week-end in London was my last. I was leaving on the Saturday night and Evelyn came out to lunch that day at Highgate. It was a cosy lunch, the four of us together. I gave a small good-bye cocktail party in my flat and Evelyn came for the first hour before leaving to write for
Life
the article on Commandos which caused so much confusion with the censorship authorities when it appeared later in the
Evening Standard
. From the restaurant where I dined after the party, I rang up my parents to say good-bye and tell them how the party had gone; just as I had done so often in the past on the eve of a sailing for New York or the West Indies.

It was not till four days later when the convoy left that I realized how different this sailing was. The first night on board, the O.C. ship addressed us. The journey round the Cape, he told us, would take eight weeks.

I remembered his talk when I saw the great massing of ships at Gourock. Eight weeks and all these men and ships and all these preparations. The War Office would not send us on an eight weeks' journey unless it was going to keep us there for a long time. This was not like those other sailings.

My father died on 26 June 1943, three and a half months before the golden wedding day to which he had so looked forward. He died suddenly and very peacefully, on a Saturday morning. He had been in bed only two days, and the previous Saturday he had spent the whole afternoon on the school ground watching a cricket match.

During those twenty months he and I were closer than we had been since the winters of 1915-17. We wrote every four or five days to one another, first by airgraph, later when they became generally available, by letter card. He was a wonderful letter writer. I knew exactly what he was doing, thinking, feeling. He had wanted to die in harness and his wish was granted him.

He had two special protégés on Chapman & Hall's list, Alex Comfort and Elizabeth Myers. He had met Comfort as a schoolboy. Comfort had caught his hand in a machine, mangling it badly. His father, to help him recover from the shock, took him on a long sea voyage to Central and South America. Comfort's account of his trip seemed so remarkable that the school authorities showed it to my father. He published it under the title
The Silver River
.

I only saw Comfort a few times, when he was still at school: he was shy and awkward then, very conscious of his injured hand which he wrapped round in his school cap. But I felt that I knew him well. I heard so much about him in my father's letters, about his career at Cambridge, his marriage and the various discussions of his first novel. I was happy that my father in his last years should have sponsored so vital a talent.

My father's last letters were very occupied with Elizabeth Myers whose
A Well Full of Leaves
was then in the press; he unfortunately did not live long enough to see it published. I only met her once, several years later, a few months before her death, but I could well understand
how magnetic and instantaneous a fascination she exerted on her friends. She was tubercular, with a frail look, but she had immense energy. She was lit with a bright inner flame: one was conscious in her of a spiritual quality, the same poetic quality that shone through
A Well Full of Leaves
.

She was a frequent visitor to Hampstead Lane during 1942. My father's encouragement and belief in her work and future sustained her when she was worried by ill health and lack of money. Indirectly he was responsible for the happy and comfortable conditions in which the last years of her life were spent. She had never been to Sherborne: she was anxious to visit it and he gave her a letter of introduction to Littleton Powys, the one conformist of the Powys brotherhood, who had been in charge of the prep, for many years. Powys was a widower, and within a short time he and Elizabeth married. The one time I saw her was in their house at Sherborne. Powys's care and love made her last years her happiest.

My father kept a diary from the day he gave up the managing directorship of Chapman & Hall. He wrote it in a large Boots's diary, sixteen inches long, with ten lines to every day. He was most punctilious about its upkeep. In one sense it is of no public interest since it is a day-to-day, hour-by-hour record of everything that he did and everyone he saw. He made no attempt to spotlight events that might become important twenty years later. Yet it has so many references to books and writers that I have given it to the Boston University Library in the hope that it may be of value to the research student. In a case like this for instance: an entry that is typical of the way in which he intermingled events of permanent and trivial interest, putting things down in the order in which they occurred.

Alexander Woollcott shortly before his death wrote to Mrs Belloc Lowndes that, ‘one of the good things I got out of my last trip to London was a talk with Arthur Waugh about Wolcott Balestier.' The entry in my father's diary reads:

1941 Nov. 4. Woke at 6.50. Another dark, cold day, raining as well. Once more could not go out all day and felt very bronchial. Heard from Haynes about an entry in his notebooks which he wished me to read, from Beazley a very interesting letter about Oxford in wartime, and from Mrs Wingate sister of Eustace Heriz-Smith, who wanted advice for her boy now serving in the Navy, with regard to the chance of getting into a publishing house. Wrote a report on the American novel by Fannie Cook and K [
my mother
] did it up for post with proofs of ‘Botany Bay'. Wrote a card to Haynes and a long letter to Joan [
my wife
]. At 10.30 Alexander Woollcott of N.Y. called in a super saloon car to talk to me about Wolcott Balestier. I found that he knew ‘The Road' [
his autobiography
‘One Man's Road'] quite well, so the best I could do was to lend him Edmund Gosse's little brochure from The Century and answer any questions. He proved a genial fellow and the hour went all too soon. In the p.m. Nannie [
my children's former nurse
] came to tea and stayed 2
hrs talking much about Florence Desmond and a row they had had. When she had gone I tackled the crossword and did it all, K making two successful shots. Listened in to Alexander Woollcott on Benedict Arnold, so it was certainly Woollcott's day. Again very bronchial at bedtime, but again had a good night with only a short interval for tea at 2.45.