My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (22 page)

The secretary had rung up my father: what did he propose to do about it? My father answered that it was none of his business; his son must settle his own problems. The secretary had her reply ready. The matter would have to come up before the committee. The committee included some very prominent literary figures, Arnold Bennett among them. Did Mr Arthur Waugh want the matter of his son's cheque to be brought before Mr Arnold Bennett? Clearly Mr Arthur Waugh did not.

My father was at his most histrionic. I listened with sympathy. ‘You know father,' I said at length, ‘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.' My father raised his hand to heaven. ‘Would I, would we, that's not much consolation now.' It was not an easy period for my father, and as Evelyn admitted in
A Little Learning
, ‘the intermittent but frequent presence of a dissipated and not always respectful son disturbed the tranquillity of the home to which he always looked for refuge.'

At the time, those years seemed marked with a steady retrogression. Evelyn has told how after a few weeks at Heatherley's Art School, he went to Oxford for a hectic week of parties. On his return he felt in no mood to continue as an art student and became a schoolmaster first at the preparatory school in North Wales which he described in
A Little Learning
, then at the school near Aston Clinton for backward young men, which was the model for Dr Fagan's academy in
Decline and Fall
. The two schools were merged into one for the purposes of fiction, Grimes being transferred from North Wales to Buckinghamshire.

At Lancing, Evelyn had kept a diary which he had abandoned at Oxford. He now resumed it. ‘It reveals,' he wrote, ‘a warmer and altogether more likeable character than its predecessor; even though it is a record of continuous failure.' If that is what it reveals, then I would suggest that here the embryo novelist was at work; subconsciously recognizing that the hero, the ‘I' of a narrative must be ‘
sympatico'
, and it should be noted that one of the most marked characteristics of Evelyn's novels is the likeability of all his characters. Even the grisly Mrs Beaver has her own repulsive fascination. One would
be glad to meet her; if not to linger in her company; while with every one of his other characters, one would be happy to spend quite a little time. Of how few novelists can that be said.

It is for that reason, I am very sure, that the E. W. of the 1924–8 diaries is ‘a warmer and altogether more likeable' character than the E. W. of 1920–22. For in point of fact the Evelyn of those four years was very far from being that.

It would have been surprising, if he had not been. At Oxford he had been one of the most prominent of a brilliant group. The highest achievement had been predicted for him, yet he alone of all that group seemed now to be headed nowhere. He must have been conscious of his own latent powers. He must have known that potentially he was more gifted than those who had passed him in the race. Yet at the same time he must have had torturing moments of self-doubt, when he asked himself whether he was so brilliant after all. He explained publicly his failure in schools with the excuse that he had not really tried, but actually he had worked much harder than he had let his friends suspect. It was not surprising that he should have in self-defence disparaged the successes of his contemporaries. What did what they were doing amount to after all? Were they not trivial time-servers, accepting the standards of the market-place? He looked for their weak points and then attacked them. His quick tongue was like a snake's.

Nor should it be forgotten that as a master of dialogue, he was as sensitive to clumsy speech as is a man with an acute sense of smell to odours that the majority of us do not find offensive. The opening of the third chapter of
Black Mischief
is the supreme example of his gift in this direction. The revolution in Azania is being discussed in England by anonymous characters. There are ten or so
short sections of dialogue, the longest of six lines, but you know exactly from what social milieu each group came. You even know the sex. ‘But of course you remember; that madly attractive blackamoor at Balliol,' could only have been said by a young lady of quality.

A man with such an acute ear for language could not help being irritated by phrases like ‘kind of', ‘sort of'. I remember very many years later, using the word ‘you' when I should have said ‘one'. I was referring to the way in which two people are so close that they do not need to explain themselves to one another. ‘You'd say,' I remarked, ‘that they could talk in shorthand.' ‘I wouldn't say anything of the kind,' he snapped. His irritation was due to his being more sensitive than the rest of us; had he not been, he could not have written such superb dialogue. His sudden explosions of irritability were the penalty his friends had to pay for the immense pleasure that he gave them as a novelist.

In 1924, however, he was not giving them that compensating pleasure, and it was unlucky that he should have fallen in love with the last person equipped to restore his self-confidence and self-esteem. Evelyn has written in
A Little Learning
about Olivia Plunket Greene. I only met her a few times. She was pretty, gracious and well-mannered. She was not negative, since on several points she held strong opinions; but she was profoundly indifferent to the forces that activate most creative lives. She was without personal ambition, and could not understand the hold ambition takes on others. She was supremely un-Balzacian. The need ‘to be famous and to be loved' was incomprehensible to her. Many men seek fame in the hope that it will secure them the favours of a woman. But Evelyn must have known that no public success of his would enhance her opinion of him. She was a profound depressant. One values the women who make one feel
better about oneself. Olivia invariably diminished Evelyn's self-esteem, not willingly, not consciously: she was basically good natured, but through her indifference to his problems. He would come up to London from his exile as a schoolmaster especially to lunch with her and would return in heavy gloom. He was loyal to her and chivalrous. ‘Down there at my school I see her as the symbol of everything from which I am cut off,' he said to me. ‘I expect too much; it isn't fair to her.'

Her apathy towards ambition increased his contempt for his friends' complacence over their small successes. They might think themselves terrific figures, but their posturing cut no ice with Olivia Greene. Perhaps in this respect, her indifference was a bond between them. I never saw her after 1927. I have no idea how she reacted to Evelyn's subsequent success. I question if she was much impressed by it. She was consistent.

Evelyn's second school which was the model for Dr Fagan's academy was very much more congenial than the preparatory school in North Wales; it was within reach of London; the pupils were older, it was a training ground for misfits who ordinarily would have been at their public schools; they came, the majority of them, from good families; many of them had charm and intelligence. Evelyn did not feel that he was wasting his time with them. They were capable of appreciating what he had to give. I paid him a couple of visits during the spring and early summer of 1926, staying at the local inn. Once I lectured on the modern novel and found them a responsive audience. He seemed happy enough. He acquired a motor bicycle which made it possible for him to visit friends. But he was headed nowhere. Such a school could only be a dead-end road.

It may surprise many that it was not apparent to himself
and to his friends that a career as a novelist awaited him. But he did not seem at this time to have any inclination to write, and what little he did write, did not seem exceptional. He had not revealed his capacity for satiric comedy. On the other hand his drawings had a very definite individuality. At Oxford he designed book jackets, letter headings and book plates. The illustrations to the first edition of
Decline and Fall
surely show a very special talent. It seemed to all of us that it was in this direction that his true bent lay. It was also what he most liked doing.

Evelyn was, in fact—at any rate until 1945—almost the only writer I know who did not like writing. In those early days he resisted his fate. He was, perhaps, subconsciously aware of the demands that it would make on him. He was reluctant to yield himself. ‘My ambition,' he wrote, ‘was to decorate, design and illustrate. I worked with the brush and was entirely happy in my employment of it, as I was not when reading or writing. Later in this chronicle, I shall note various attempts to escape from my literary destiny into pleasanter but less appropriate work with my hands.'

Yet he was doing some writing. Early in 1926 he wrote a long
avant-garde
short story,
The Balance
which I included in
Georgian Stories 1926
, of which I was the editor. Several writers—G. B. Stern in particular—recognized its originality, and Michael Sadleir asked him to contribute to his symposium the
New Decameron
. I have not read
The Balance
for forty years. Evelyn did not think it worth including in
Mr Loveday's Little Outing
. But I hope that it will appear in the eventual canon of his writings. It gives me pleasure to be able to boast that I was his first editor.

In June 1926, I started on a tour round the world. I
was away nine months; there was no air mail in those days. I made one or two changes of plan. The last letters that I received from England were waiting me in Sydney in December. They had been posted in October. I cannot remember now when I learnt that Evelyn was no longer employed at Dr Fagan's. I never learnt the exact conditions under which he had left. I am not sure that he knew them himself. He had returned late at night on his motor bicycle; the matron had complained and next morning Dr Fagan had reluctantly informed him that he did not consider that a man of his particular qualities was really fitted for an establishment such as his. Dr Fagan did not bear Evelyn the least ill-will. The letter of sympathy that he wrote him four years later, after his divorce, could not have been bettered, even by its recipient.

He reluctantly took Evelyn's side against the matron; an unmarried lady in her middle thirties should have been flattered by nocturnal attentions. But the matron was an essential bulwark in his establishment. To keep her in a good humour, the temporary inconvenience of a young man must be sacrificed. Evelyn had to go.

No doubt my father wrote me a gloomy letter announcing Evelyn's enforced return to Underhill, but I never received it and when I returned to England in mid-March it was to find Evelyn in high spirits. Tom Balston, one of the partners in Duckworth's publishing house, had decided to invest a certain amount of capital in
Young Oxford
. He published Harold Acton's poetry and he gave Evelyn an advance of £50 on an unwritten book about Rossetti. My father, who as a publisher never made an advance without a manuscript, shook his head gloomily. ‘Balston will never see that book. I suppose I'll have to make it good.' But rarely has £50 been invested more profitably. Duckworth not only got the book on Rossetti, but all of Evelyn's subsequent travel books. They would
have got his novels too, had not Duckworth in Balston's absence been scared of the audacities of
Decline and Fall.
Evelyn was very loyal. As Father Caraman pointed out in his Requiem address, he had the same publishers and the same agent all his life.

In addition to this commission to write a book Evelyn had been taken on the staff of the
Daily Express
as a probationary reporter, and he was in funds. ‘I am so glad that you came back now,' he said, ‘when I don't need you: I can welcome you without any thought of self advantage.' London in that early summer of 1927 was very gay. A year earlier the general strike had been defeated. The political climate was encouraging and though there was no equivalent in London for the stock market boom in New York, a lot of money was being made and spent. Florence Mills and her ‘Blackbirds' were being courted by Mayfair and Belgravia hostesses. ‘The Bright Young Things' were news and Evelyn joined the rout. He seemed to be seeing less of Olivia, and more of Evelyn Gardner, a daughter of the late Lord Burghclere.

For him the rout did not last very long. Towards the end of May he invited me to dinner at the Gargoyle Club. He said, when I joined him there, ‘We had better make this a good dinner. It is probably the last one I shall be able to give you for quite a while. I was fired from the
Express
this morning.'

It was at that time the practice of the large dailies to hire university graduates as probationers, at less than union rates. If they retained them after six months, they had to pay them the minimum union salary. It was a satisfactory system for everyone. The newspapers got good work cheap; they might make ‘a discovery'; the young men got valuable experience. Evelyn's period was up. Not one line that he wrote during it was printed. Fifteen months later the same editor who had fired him,
was offering the author of
Decline and Fall
twenty-five guineas a thousand words to write on anything he liked. But at the moment our hero was once again in exceedingly low water.

I was due to catch in mid-June, at Marseilles, a slow French steamer for Tahiti. I was to spend a few days on the way with my parents, who were taking a holiday in Nîmes. I suggested to Evelyn that he should come along with me. On my last evening in London, I gave a goodbye cocktail party. It was composed, as my larger parties tended to be at that time, partly of Bohemians, partly of athletes and their attendant nymphs. Evelyn and I were seen off at Waterloo Station by a group of ‘football hearties'. One of them was to serve later as a partial model for Rex Mottram. In the train afterwards, Evelyn said of him, ‘I feel awkward with men like that; but I wonder whether he wouldn't be right for Olivia. Vulgar but not common.'