Men of letters
NEVILLE BRAYBROOKE
My Brother Evelyn and Other Proles Alec Waugh (Cassell 30s) Alec Waugh grew up in a home in which it was considered the most natural thing in the world that a man should adopt the profession of a writer. His brother Evelyn, `by five and a quarter years [his] junior,' once remarked that, though he had not been particularly drawn to writing, the pressure of the family environ- ment had proved too much. Their father was the chairman, of Chapman and Hall, Dickens's original publishers; and almost every evening when he got back to their Hampstead home he would read them poetry aloud. A great deal of the conversation that the two brothers heard concerned 'publishing and the auction- room of letters,' and office problems were regularly discussed before them. These ranged from difficulties with booksellers or agents. to the ways in which one author's reputation would rise while another's fell. The literary see-saw might be one way to describe this set of memoirs. Their tone is gossipy, infofma-: tive and entertaining. - • .
Many who figure in the memoirs were widely celebrated between the wars. The author refers to the respect with which the prolific W. L. George was treated by .critics of the period. Today not a single one of his novels remains in print. Or there is the neglected Desmond Coke, whose Bending of a Twig represents one of the first attempts in fiction to debunk the public-school mystique. Then there is Ernest Rhys, whose name probably suggests to most people no more than the Everythan Library. In Alec Waugh's profile of him, readers 'are re- minded that he wrote also three 'faultless' poems—and it is added: 'If he had not written three hundred negligible poems, he would not have been able to write those three.' Apart from such comments on minor writers of this century, a' fair amount of advice is offered in passing to fellow-professionals.
The star profile, like the book itself, is dedi- cated to Evelyn and covers his early years; his first unhappy marriage; and his reception into the Catholic Church. It stops short there; because as the author explained an a .previouk occasion:' 'I lack' the. key to- Evelyn. I cannot enter imaginatively into the mind of a person for whorri religion is the dominant force in his life.' Yet in compensation he does- provide a key to his brother's early vacillations about a career, when he recalls how Evelyn had ex- claimed with delight after reading' The Diary of a Nobody: 'But Lupin's me.' For like Lupin Footer, Evelyn was a dark hbrse who-was to ..get there in the end. At Oxford the highest achievement had been predicted for him, but he got a third-class degree and 'alone of all his group he seemed headed for nowhere.' He drank overmuch, suffered him depressions, and ran into debt. Nor could he make up his mind whether to be a school- master—or a journalist. When one headthaster asked him to found a new science faculty, he decided that the time had come to move on. Later, he worked for the Daily Express and was fired—though the same editor, after the appearance of Decline and Fall, offered him carte blanche to write on whatever subject he plossed. By the age of twenty-five he had arrived and overtaken his Oxford contem- poraries.
Elsewhere in this book his brother refers to their father discdssing the relucta.nce of cer- tain authors to tone down their manuscripts. When Chapman and Hall first brought, out Decline and Fall in 1928 some toning down down 'been done by one of the editors in the firm. But in the 1962 reprint, Evelyn Waugh restored the original text7-and this meant, amongst other thingS, that boys of tlanabba Castle School smoked cigars 'in the lavatory, not the boiler-room, whilst Captain Grimes, one of their new masters, is definitely shown to be a homosexual. In a prefatory note announcing these 'restorations,' he used the phrase 'turning back the clock.' How much it would have appealed to his sense of irony that Ralph Straus, the editor of those textual 'cuts' and changes, should now be one of the subjects, chosen by his brother, to take his place with hiin in this collection Of Orofiles.
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