My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (39 page)

That is the way it is day after day, except that on Sundays I usually motor out into the country for lunch, and I can well imagine a Londoner impatiently demanding what I mean by describing New York as the most dramatic and exciting city in the world. What else is it for you, he will ask, but a round of cocktail parties? Well, perhaps that is a fair complaint if you see New York in terms of London, but that is something which you cannot do. No two cities could be more different.

New York is built on a rock, whereas London is built upon a swamp. That is a basic difference. Where London is spread over a wide area, New York rises fifty storeys high. Everything in New York is very close. A Londoner living in Swiss Cottage meeting at a Bloomsbury lunch party somebody who lives in Kensington might well feel that she lived so far away that it was scarcely worth while following up the acquaintanceship. In New York I am within walking distance of everyone I know.

The tempo is faster in New York because so much more
can happen there. Social life is fluid. Acquaintances ripen quickly into friendships. Many Londoners are shy of ringing up someone they have met the night before. They are inclined to ask their hostess to arrange another meeting some time. New Yorkers have not the time for that. New York is a port. There is a long tradition of welcoming ships and waving them Godspeed. If you want to see somebody again you must move fast; she may be gone tomorrow. In a few days your whole life can be reorientated by one new friend who opens a series of new doors for you.

There is also the climate. London is in a temperate zone. New York swings in a few weeks from arctic cold to tropic heat. These changes acerbate the nerves. There is a quality in the air in spring and autumn that makes it possible for you to do more there than in any other city.

But I think what makes New York so dramatic for many of us, certainly for me, is the immediate importance that one's work acquires there. New York is a market where you buy and sell and, though I do little writing there, I arrive as someone who has just finished a piece of work or is half-way through or about to start one. One's friends are interested in one's work. For a writer who spends so much of his life alone, that is an exciting change of climate. There is challenge there and a spur to victory—a sense of having one's batteries recharged.

I can imagine myself living very happily in London as a retired man, pottering round my clubs, going to galleries and exhibitions, watching cricket in the summer, exchanging gossip with old friends. But I should not care to live in retirement in New York; I should feel out of things. You need to be in the swim.

That is what is essential: being in the swim. New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world and I have heard it said that unless you are spending money fast
you get no fun there. That is true, but as a corollary, not as a principle. For if you are in the swim you are making money in terms of your opposite numbers and that is what matters: being able to meet your opposite numbers on equal terms. If you cannot, then you are the spectre at the feast. You are better off somewhere else.

Perhaps it is the knowledge that I am a sojourner on 44th Street which makes me love New York so dearly. Sooner or later the bell will toll for me, as it has for others; the rat race will become too fierce and I shall look for a quiet harbour in the sun.

As I re-read this last section, I remember my old friend's advice, ‘Never choose a novelist as your hero.' It is a playboy's life that I have described and it would be difficult to show in a novel how those five or six weeks in New York each year are the reward for months of secluded writing, of living alone with my characters and stories. The discovery of retreats where I can do this is one of my chief concerns. Before the war I went to Villefranche and the Easton Court Hotel at Chagford on whose ‘stout tables' Elizabeth Eliot, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Patrick Kinross, C. P. Snow and Evelyn Waugh have written novels, but Villefranche with its row of cafés along the water front has become a
boîte
and I need to spend in London and with my family the few weeks each year that are allotted to me in England as a foreign resident.

My retreats today are as scattered as my life is. In Duarte, California, the late Rollin Kirby's daughter, Janet Banning, has a guesthouse across the lawn from her ranch where I can cook my own breakfast and work through the morning until it is time to join her at the swimming pool. I have spent three summers at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where each of the twenty-four colonists has a separate studio in the woods outside whose door a lunch basket is left so
that the current of the day's thought is undisturbed. One winter that excellent regional novelist and one of my dearest friends, Virginia Sorensen, went to Denmark on a Guggenheim. Why not? I thought and half a book was written in Copenhagen, in a room looking on the sound. But, by and large, Nice out of the season has been my most constant perch.

For several years now I have based myself in the Escurial, a second-grade residential hotel which lies half a mile back from the sea, in the Avenue Georges Clemenceau. I have a corner room on the fourth floor. One window faces east and I can see on the skyline Vauban's fortress towering above Villefranche; the other window faces south and looks down on a side street cut by roads running into the Avenue de la Victoire.

I have never worked in a more congenial room. I like to be high up. I need to see something happening: a sailor painting a boat, a small boy selling newspapers, a farmer ploughing a field. The manuscript on my desk then becomes a part of the manifold activities of man. My corner windows in the Escurial present and explain the heart of Provincial France: teen-age girls hurry with slung satchels to their convent school; servants return from market with long rolls protruding from their baskets; modish young women walk their poodles; retired bureaucrats move stiffly and slowly to the Promenade des Anglais.

Nothing could be more placid than my existence there. I wake between half past five and six. The Brasserie du Lyon opens at seven thirty, but its coffee is not hot till a quarter to eight; that gives me ninety minutes at my desk before I go out to breakfast. On my way to the café I buy a paper from a diminutive and shuffling crone.

Nice-Matin
is excellent on foreign news, it recounts local peccadilloes with an engaging Latin levity, and the half-hour I spend over my rolls and coffee is one of the
pleasantest of the day. On the way back to the Escurial I do my minor marketing—fruit and cheese and yogurt and the cutlet or the slice of steak that I shall cook on my gas ring.

I write 2000 words a day. I may or may not have reached that point by half past eleven. I do not hurry. I am uninterrupted. There are no room telephones and the difficulty of reaching me via the desk and the maid upon the landing is so great that my friends save time by writing. The post arrives shortly before ten. For one who lives abroad the arrival of the post is the day's big event, and it is for that reason that I resist the temptation to collect my letters when they arrive. Good news might elate me, bad news might depress me, the waving of a friendly signal might send me into a nostalgic reverie; or there might be no mail at all, which would rob the day of half its savour. Anyhow, the current of composition would be broken, so I wait till I have finished my morning's work and then take out my letters to a seat on the Promenade des Anglais or in the Jardin Albert Premier, or on inclement days to a table in the Café Monnot.

I have friends in Nice, Mougins, Antibes, and about once a week I go out to lunch or dinner or somebody motors over to take a meal with me. And in Cimiez lives Cecile who once ran a bar in Villefranche and of whom I have written in
Where the Clocks Strike Twice
. Often in the late afternoon I take the trolley bus up the hill, gossip with her for half an hour and walk back as the lights are waking.

I keep a store of red Burgundy in my cupboard and before I go down to collect my mail I open a bottle, so that the wine may breathe and be ready to welcome my return. I sip it slowly, munching a hard dry cheese, brooding over my story, living with my characters, talking out their speeches. It is the most creative period of my
day. An hour becomes ninety minutes and in the street below the noontide siesta is broken by the Vespas and motor-cycles of people going back to work.

By two the bottle is three-quarters finished. I cork it up, tidy away the plates and if I am short of my daily quota I make it up. If I am not, I answer letters till it is time for my siesta.

When I wake it is close on four and by four o'clock the London newspapers will be on the kiosks. The Promenade des Anglais will be crowded and it is very pleasant strolling along the water front in the declining sunlight, when the sea on windless days takes on the glazed mauve sheen that made Homer call it wine-coloured, pausing now and then to read the paper and to watch the passers-by, with the agreeable sense of fatigue and of fulfilment that follows a hard day's work. Pleasant though it is, however, when the light fades there comes that melancholy which George Moore described in ‘Bring in the Lamp', the loneliness endemic to those who work alone. Evening is at hand and it is easy to be self-pitying, thinking of all those for whom the recompense of the long day is being paid: work is finished; pleasure and relaxation are opening their doors; the sidewalk tables beckon.

Between six and seven there is a steady parade back and forth down the Avenue de la Victoire. It is pleasant to sit over a Pernod watching it. One Pernod becomes two. And after two Pernods one finds oneself saying to oneself, ‘Why not a proper meal in a restaurant for a change?' But that would involve wine and after a good dinner in a restaurant it is a temptation to linger over a liqueur, and I know that after a heavy meal and spirits I should not wake so fresh. So I go to a cinema instead.

By the time I come out, evening has given way to night, my mood of melancholy has passed. I return to the Escurial, heat some soup and finish the wine. Maybe I
write a letter or two. Maybe I read for half an hour. Usually I am in bed by ten, with
The Oxford Book of English Verse
: within a quarter-hour, I have switched off the light.

That is my real life and nothing could be less dramatic: you could not make a novel out of the interior problems presented by a routine like that. It is when I am living like that, that I am most myself.

‘The pleasure of writing a tolerably good book.' Who is to say what is ‘tolerably good'? By what standard is one to judge oneself? By ultimate standards or by the more modest and more human, ‘Well, I don't think this is too bad for me'? So much highfalutin nonsense was written once about the agonies of composition and the high fever of imagination that it is now fashionable to be low brow, with novelists talking about themselves as, though they were hard-boiled businessmen ‘out to make the most of it'. That is not really the way it is. It may seem presumptuous for a very minor writer to talk of the excitement that his work brings him. It lays him open to the obvious retort: ‘It is a relief to know it excites
him
. It leaves us calm enough.' But the best periods of my life have been those when I have been working on a congenial theme.

I have no illusions about my status as a writer. A writer is tried before a high tribunal. Not only the present sits in judgement on him, but the past as well. A field-marshal's stature is not diminished by the victories of Condé, Marlborough and Napoleon. But a modern novel is made puny by the continuing challenge of
War and Peace, David Copperfield
and
The Brothers Karamazov
.

I started with very high ambitions and if in 1917 I could have foreseen myself as I am in 1955, with so little done, I should have been humiliatingly disappointed. That is a usual experience; it is the common lot. The
contrast between the promise of life and its fulfilment is a familiar theme. On the other hand, had I at eighteen foreseen what my personal life was to be I should have been astounded. I had no idea then that life could be so full, so varied, that its gifts could be so abundant. I did not know life had so much for giving. Yet the things that have made my life a continuing adventure—sport and gallantry, soldiering and travel—have been side shows in the last analysis. Though my achievement is so minute, I have always put writing first. I have been most alive seated at a table in a hotel bedroom facing a solitary day.

Writers have their ups and downs and in January 1953, my fortunes had struck an all-time low. For eighteen months I had been concentrating on short stories, and had sold only one story in America, to
Esquire
. I had not an idea left. I was wondering where I went from there, and then that one
Esquire
story was bought by Hollywood.

My first thought, naturally for me, was, ‘I'll take a long trip, find new subjects, renew myself.' But on the crossing back to England on the
Ile de France
I got the idea for a West Indian novel. I did not guess then that it would be a quarter of a million words in length, but I knew that it would be long and I was grateful to Twentieth Century-Fox's pennies for allowing me to devote my entire energies to it for twenty months.

That was as good a moment as life has given me and I have never been more excited than I was fifteen months later when, with the book half written, I flew up from the West Indies, where I had obtained the final material, to a quiet ten weeks in the MacDowell Colony where, with every facility provided for concentration, I could write the rest of it.

If a genie were to offer me a final wish, it would be this—that I might meet an equivalent excitement once more before the curtain falls.

In the previous chapter I described how in January 1953 my fortunes sank to an all-time low, how I was reprieved ‘in the nick of time' by the sale to Twentieth Century-Fox of a short story and how on the journey back to England, I got the idea for a West Indian novel. The writing and publication of a novel is usually undramatic and the biography or autobiography of a novelist which deals with his novels one by one, in detail, is tedious. Yet even so, for those who are interested in authorship and authors, the story of certain books has its fascination. And in my own case two books fill their own small niche in literary history: my first novel,
The Loom of Youth
, and my eighteenth,
Island in the Sun
.