Alec Waugh

“ He envies the gilded persons whom he bears all day long from one scene of revel to another. It is human to envy the conditions of another’s life. The young girl who looks from her bedroom window on to the street below is wooed by its sense of mystery and adventure, and the inspector of omnibus tickets pauses on the top deck to gaze wistfully at the lighted window. It is the hunger for experience, for variety, for a fuller life. We should all like to live a hundred lives, to enter into the heart of every mystery, to feel every human emotion of happiness and sorrow. ”

“ And he will never leave the city: he will be unfaithful to his dream; he will build a chalet on the hills of Majorstuen. And his youth will pass; and one evening he will stand again alone upon the balcony, and remember how thirty years earlier he had stood there, dreaming of a wider city, and the old ache will rise in him and he will wonder if he has been wise to accept the immediate adventure, the adventure that lay to hand. He will ask himself whether he might not have found elsewhere employment for that faith and energy of which the years have robbed him. ”

“ And you have had enough of the film. It is all very amusing, no doubt, to see one’s life lived backwards, to recover one’s old enthusiasms and prejudices and loyalties. But it is rather a cruel business, with the evening coming before dawn; friendships must end at the hour when they begin; the first kiss must always be the last; and you sit in your chair and draw uncomfortable parallels and wonder whether old age is not rather like that: the reversal of the film. ”

“ I felt, after reading it, that I knew Swinburne better than I had before. Routine is, after all, the framework of a man’s life; and it is interesting for a writer to learn how others work; at what time they write; how many words they write a day; whether they work steadily throughout the year, or in short bursts of intense concentration. It may dispel the illusion to watch a play from the wings of a theatre instead of from the stalls. ”

“ VII WE read Wisden in the winter on cold nights before a leaping fire and it brings back to us the sense of new-mown grass, the feel of a cricket ball and the stir of sunlight. It is a substitute for cricket: and the old harassing doubt creeps up again, the doubt whether any literature is anything beyond a substitute, the focus of an unfulfilled desire. We know how old people drug themselves with novels. ”

“ The glimpse through a railway-carriage window of a gabled roof, a square church tower, a particular shade of sunlight on red brick will open the pages of a chapter whose existence we had almost forgotten; will reveal in relief, in perspective—with an objective reality that at the time it did not hold for us—a facet of the past. The obvious, the superficial reflection on such occurrences would be an expression of surprise that so trivial an affair as the taste of cocoa, the smell of wet stone, the glimpse of a square-towered church, should become a window opening on childhood. ”

“ She will not want to spend some of the best years of her life nursing an old man. But she is content that as long as their love lasts he should give her his protection. For a while they are wonderfully happy. In his arms and against his lips she comes into the rich kingdom of her womanhood. Through her he wins back to the lost countries of his youth.
They are happy days. He takes her to restaurants of which she only knows the name, places over which her imagination has spread the high colour of romance. ”

“ Is a love any the less real, less tender, less passionate, less unselfish because it has been inspired by a shallow, trivial, worthless woman? Does it very much matter whence we derive that state of heightened consciousness that we undoubtedly reach through literature, as long as we do reach it? We come the richer from King Lear, from Anna Karenin, from Lycidas, because these books have revealed to us what is eternal in ourselves. ”

“ They don’t even call themselves a club. But they’ll dump a property sandwich down in front of you and serve you, up till midnight, with villainous concocted cognac at half-a-crown a glass. It’s like most of those Soho Bohemian places: a poisonous atmosphere to live in, but amusing and profitable enough to visit now and again. I like to sit quietly in a corner and watch a crowd of people, laughing and quarrelling and drinking—and try to make stories up round each of them, wondering who is in love with whom, and who will be so and so’s successor. ”

“ Cricket was to him an art the technique of which could only be mastered after an elaborate apprenticeship. He distrusted the short cut, and we find him the most bitter opponent of the young idea. He is the eternal Tory of yesterday, of to-day and of to-morrow. And he is very human to us as he stands on the brink of change uttering his solemn warning. For it was towards the end of his career that round-arm bowling was introduced, and it is hard to realise the revolution this caused in the world of sport. ”

“ You can go when you like, and where you like. And you are appalled by the enormity of your liberation, and hastily begin to form other habits, to fling out fresh feelers, to take up golf, or to join dining clubs that meet on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month; to be once again entangled in the pattern of recurring engagements; once again to be the lackey of custom, the creature of use and wont.
There is always cricket, though; and summer weaves of its four short months a surer, clearer pattern than the winter does. There is cricket every day, and there is the county championship. ”

“ It is in the same spirit that the purveyor of cheap fiction finances the publication of his verses.
We are of the same race and the same blood, speaking the same language, having no part in the world’s business, in what is serviceable to the commercial machinery of life. Even if what we produce is a marketable commodity, even if we bring money into the pockets of publishers and promoters and actor managers, we are still the merchants of entertainment. ”

“ That is why the choice of the right restaurant is so important. If we are in the mood for conversation there is our club or the Café Royal; if we are alone and it would amuse us to watch other people dance, or should we wish to add as a flavouring to the music and the dancing the note ever so slightly struck of fugitive romances, there is the balcony of the Elysée Café. ”

“ But if not, if he has saved no money and is at the end of his resources, he is driven to the equivalent of the courtesan’s dreary tramp down Jermyn Street and Piccadilly to hack ill-paid journalism in the columns of the provincial press. And the artist is in exchange offered the same wages. He is offered the opportunity of living to its full the best years of his life. He has money, he is well known. He is not fettered, as his contemporaries are, with office hours. He is free to do what he likes, go where he likes, make love where he likes. ”

“ Eric Walker gazed out fondly at the red glare of the factory as it shone glimmering on the surrounding roofs, then he turned sadly to the water-colours that hung on the walls, soft and delicate, roses and arbours, with a suggestion of Love, fleeting and perilously dear. For him there was no beauty there—only cowardice, weakness and evasion.
That evening Mrs Abbot had a long and serious talk with her husband about her young protégé.
“Something must be done, Harry,” she said. “He’s such a dear boy, and he’s absolutely spoiling his chances. Now I tell you what we must do. ”

“ It may well be that the hours of spent energy are an apprenticeship for the intellectual calm of an afternoon at Lord’s.
Not always calm, though. Cricket, for all its leisure, is in its long-drawn expectation the most emotional of games. It has not, doubtless, any equivalent for the delirium of a try at Twickenham. But then cricket does not aim at that particular sensation. It is drama, not melodrama. Its atmosphere is heavily charged, one’s nerves are geared high, one fidgets awkwardly in one’s seat. The effect is one of continuously suspended action. One is always wondering. ”

“ Galsworthy told the story of mature, devastating passion; he was then at that point of balance of which Shakespeare wrote. But mature love, and the love of middle age for youth had, when he came to complete the Saga, ceased to appeal to him. The love of Jolyon for Irene is never actual to us; but of first love, of Val and Holly, of Jon and Fleur; of the hesitations, the blindness, the enrapturement of dawning love, he writes as few save Turgenev have ever written.
Youth means nothing to us when we are young. It is gold that we spend freely. We push past it towards the future. ”

“ We only play football, I sometimes think, for the sake of that hour of indolence and exhaustion, when we lie back in comfort after a hot bath, stiff and tired, to fight the afternoon’s struggle over again. It is good to get our innings over early and sit in the pavilion with a pint pot at the elbow while we watch our successors battle in the sunlight, and if we happen to have made a few, the world is a very companionable spot. ”

“ And as she stands watching youth ride past her, she would know all that her early lover had known and suffered.
The love of a mature woman for a boy is a theme that has been used often enough, especially in French fiction, but never quite in this way, perhaps, never as a key to unlock the heart of a man’s last love. But then it is a woman’s theme perhaps rather than a man’s; and we must remember always that, with the exception of some dozen books, the masterpieces of prose literature, and indeed of all literature and all art, are the work of a masculine intelligence. ”

“ It is a fine thing to see a man play forward and miss the pitch of it, to watch the ball pass between the bat and leg, to hear the rattle of stumps. Fine and noble things, with life at such moments marvellously rich. ”

“ For, whatever happens, the love of writing stays even with the sorriest of hacks, the man who can afford to write only occasionally the thing he wants to write, who has to produce magazine fiction, and reviews and paragraphs, so that he may buy the leisure in which to write his verses or his unmarketable stories. We stint ourselves in one way so that we may squander ourselves in another. And, here again, we can find an analogy in the courtesan, in the woman who sells part of herself to one man that she may give herself more fully to another. ”

“ He would turn from the balcony with an ache about him, and it might be that in the wide reception-room behind it he would find himself suddenly beside the girl whose image had been never long absent from his thoughts, and there would be comfort for him in the sight of her cool skin and light flaxen hair and pale cornflower blue eyes, eyes that would smile softly into his, that would seem to bid him “take life easy as the grass grows on the weirs.” ”

“ It is of these things that Turgenev speaks—simple things, and he speaks of them simply, through a technique that is miraculously adequate and sure. A man in the middle years finds under two layers of cotton a little garnet cross; three men sitting round a table talk of love; a young man, betrothed and happy, returns at night to his hotel to recapture, in a room filled with the overpowering scent of heliotrope, the buried anguish of an earlier love. A man sits in a garden, and remembers. ”

“ Money and leisure and gratified ambition are prettily coloured toys; but they are flavour, they are decoration; there does not come from them the deep, the sustaining satisfaction of a hard task tackled and carried through. It does not matter whether one writes well or badly: there is the same joy of creation, the same pleasure in watching the blank page fill before one’s eyes, in counting up the number of words that are the outcome of a morning’s work. ”

“ It is not envy of the rich that drives the routine worker to Communism. As long as he is paid an adequate and steady wage he does not mind what money his employer makes or loses. But he knows as long as there is big business, as long as tigers hunt and are hunted in the high jungle of finance, so long will markets rise and fall, and so long will there be slumps and crashes and a cutting of staffs and wages ”

“ He sees her a young woman at the start of her career—fresh, radiant, intoxicated with the sensation of a first success. And he is an ageing man, with the best of life behind him. How can he hope to keep her? She will find herself now the centre of a circle of brilliant and charming persons. She will be invited to houses where, for his good name’s sake, he can hardly accompany her. Now that she is a public figure he must be careful of her reputation and of his. He will not be able to go about with her so much. She will make her own friends. ”

“ For hours on end he had stood beneath the great factory at North Town, while the sunlight cut the wreathing smoke into hard, sharp angles. The noise and glare of machinery enchanted him, and when a discerning teacher had discovered that he could draw, it was only natural that he should try to interpret in terms of line and colour those particular sights and sounds that alone had for him an æsthetic value. ”