A Traveller's Life (17 page)

On my return to London in the autumn of 1956 I had other problems besides thinning hair. I now had to write a book about our travels in Nuristan and keep my family alive while doing so. How I was to do this it was difficult to imagine, as the advance I had received from Secker had already been consumed. A possible source of income might have been the royalties from
The Last Grain Race
, for which I had received the lordly advance of £25 ($56), but as the book had been published only a couple of months previously I had experienced some difficulty in getting my hands on any of them, although I succeeded in doing so after Christmas. So while working on
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
I wrote articles for magazines as diverse as
Vogue
and
Everybody's
(now defunct), and articles and a number of short stories which Charles Wintour, editor of the
Evening Standard
, commissioned at £25 ($70) a time (I once wrote three in a week). Therefore it was fortunate that, at this critical moment in my life, the fortune that has so far never deserted me for long came to my aid when the chairman of Secker & Warburg, Fred Warburg, offered me a job promoting their products, in succession to Norman St John Stevas, who was leaving the firm for other fields (he is an MP and a
former cabinet minister). I worked for Secker & Warburg until 1959 when, in the hope of earning more money, I left them to join the John Lewis Partnership, thus terminating what Fred was kind enough to describe as ‘an hilarious association in publishing' on the flyleaf of my copy of his autobiography.

During these years, and also while I was working for the Partnership, I was able to supplement my earnings, which were pretty frugal, by writing long pieces for
Holiday
, an American travel magazine which had an enormous circulation. Although
Holiday
treated its writers, many of whom were extremely distinguished (one of its most distinguished English contributors was V. S. Pritchett), rather as sultans treated their Circassian slaves, they could pay sums undreamed of in Britain to anyone with the strength and resilience to put up with their foibles.

One example of their rather unbending attitude towards their contributors, even in the face of adversity, will suffice. On one occasion, marooned in a remote hill village in Italy without a motor car and writing a very long article for them with an immutable deadline to meet, the typewriter key controlling the use of the capital letters broke. As there was no other typewriter in the village and no one capable of repairing one, I was forced to type a large part of the piece without employing any capitals at all. When the time came to despatch the article to New York I wrote a letter explaining to the editor in charge the reason why I had been forced to act as I had done. By return I received from him an extended cable rebuking me for having sent him a manuscript in a form that I knew contravened their house rules. After this, wherever I went to work for
Holiday
, I always took two typewriters.

When the time came for
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
to be printed in the United States the publishers, Doubleday, began to suffer from the American equivalent of cold feet, in spite of its
favourable reception in Britain, and they asked me to find some well-known person, preferably an authority on Central Asia, who would write an introduction explaining what the book was about and telling the Americans how good it was. According to them, it threatened to be unintelligible to anyone except a handful of reviewers and readers, not because of the lofty intellectual plane on which it was written but because it was ‘too English', which made one wonder why they had bought it in the first place.

For a while I seriously considered the possibility of inventing a savant and writing the introduction myself, rather than approach some real authority who might not approve of what he might conceivably construe as a send-up of the kind of ‘real' expedition which gets its supplies and funds by canvassing industrialists and such. The sort of man I had in mind would be a British Orientalist with a wartime record of service in some special, secret force; or else he would be older and his last expedition, a highly confidential mission, would have been undertaken at the behest of Lord Curzon while he was Viceroy of India. Neither of these men, for obvious reasons, would be a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a member of the Royal Central Asian Society, or belong to any known club. Both would have refused knighthoods and any other sort of honour except those conferred by foreign universities which enabled either one of them to be referred to as ‘Professor' if necessary; and both, for equally obvious reasons, would have always refused to allow their biographies to appear in
Who's Who
. Such a fabrication would not stand a hope in hell of succeeding in Britain but it might just have a chance of passing muster in the United States.

More sensibly, my thoughts turned to Evelyn Waugh, himself a very considerable and experienced traveller, with whom I had already been in correspondence about the book.

I had never met him. Almost everything I knew about him
stemmed from reading his books. During the war we were often very close to one another: in the fog in Glasgow; in the same convoy in the Atlantic; in Cape Town where he did not find the girls as interesting as I had done; and in Egypt, though he had already left to return to Britain by the time I got there from India and where I frequently used to hear of something outrageous and funny that he had said. ‘I do not propose to alter the habits of a lifetime to suit your temporary convenience,' was a much-quoted remark he was reputed to have made to a senior officer who had rebuked him for having gone on leave without permission. This, and the contents of half a dozen letters or postcards he wrote me from 1958 onwards, is the sum total of my acquaintanceship with Evelyn Waugh.

Our correspondence began when Secker & Warburg sent him an unbound proof copy of
A Short Walk
, in what must have seemed to them the faint hope of eliciting what is known in the trade as a ‘quote' for use on the jacket.

Nothing, I thought, would be more likely to enrage him. But after a few days a meticulously written postcard arrived, addressed to me, with a splendid quote and permission to cut or tinker with it if necessary. There was no need to do so, and anyway neither I nor the publishers would have dared. I wrote him a carefully worded letter of thanks in the legible calligraphic script I was then cultivating in order to set a good example to my children. Almost by return I received a reply.

The letter heading, Combe Florey House, his residence near Taunton, Somerset, was stamped in such grotesque black Gothic lettering that it looked like an invoice from a nineteenth-century undertaker's establishment. He was very kind, confessing that up to then he had confused me with P. H. Newby, ‘whose works I have long relished' and who at that time was Head of the BBC Third Programme and the author of
Picnic at Sakhara
. Then, after
going on about my book in a complimentary way for a bit and noting some slanginess and errors in syntax, he suddenly, with barely disguised malevolence, asked me how I knew that Wilfred Thesiger – the famous explorer whom I had met on his way into Nuristan while I was tottering, half-dead, out of it – was wearing, as I had written, ‘an old tweed jacket of the sort worn by Eton boys' – implying that I could not have been privy to such information unless I had been there myself; and I could almost hear a triumphal snort of the kind that Charles Ryder's father utters in
Brideshead Revisited
when he suggests that his son, who has come down penniless from Oxford for the summer vacation, should attempt to negotiate a loan from the Jews in Jermyn Street to tide him over.

I had not been at Eton, but neither had Waugh. Why had he bothered to find out and how? I did not realize then, not yet having read
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
, that there was a distinct possibility that phantom voices were already accusing him of wishing that he had been at Eton, if not of actually pretending to have been at Eton himself.

I was anxious to propitiate him but reluctant to grovel. I really had seen Eton boys wearing such jackets on the playing-fields. Before replying, to make doubly sure that I had not been mistaken, I got in touch with Thesiger who was spending one of his rare periods in civilization, and asked him about it.

‘Certainly,' Thesiger said. ‘You're quite right. It's my old “change coat” from Billings & Edmonds.' Billings & Edmonds is still a well-known school outfitters in the West End.

Thinking what a gigantically impressive schoolboy Thesiger must have been at Eton if he was still wearing the same coat at the age of forty-five, I wrote to Waugh telling him, among other things, what Thesiger had said about his old ‘change coat' and that I had seen change coats being worn on the playing-fields of
Eton from the top of a bus while travelling from Slough to Windsor, at the same time placing my dilemma about the introduction before him. It was not true – about the bus – but it was the simplest explanation I could think of and, now that Eton High Street has been closed to traffic, it is presumably an impossible feat. In the same letter and with the same kind of suicidal gesture to which Basil Seal, one of his own favourite creations, was particularly prone, I intimated that there was no such wine as the Clos de Bère of 1904, which, in
Brideshead Revisited
, Waugh allows Rex Mottram to give to Charles Ryder when they dine together at Paillard's in Paris. Didn't he mean Clos de Bèze?

I received the following postcard in reply:

Combe Florey House,
Nr. Taunton 1
August 1958

Thanks awfully for Grain Race [
The Last Grain Race
, of which I had sent him a copy] and interesting information about the other Newby. No book needs an introduction less than
Short Walk
, which is self-explanatory, I suppose the Americans want some certificate of bona fides. (When I thought you were the Egyptian don [P. H. Newby] I thought that perhaps the whole work was one of parody on a very high level.) I should get some explorer-mountaineer to introduce you. I cut no ice in America nowadays. Bère is a misprint that follows that book into every edition. But if all explorers fail, I
would
write an introduction.

E.W.

Waugh then wrote the following postcard to A. D. Peters, his literary agent:

Combe Florey House
6 August 1958

Could you kindly make a discreet enquiry for me? A Mr Eric Newby has written an excellent book about a trip to Afghanistan called A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, to be published by Secker & Warburg. He tells me that Doubleday in USA will only publish it if it has an introduction by someone else. If this is true, I am willing to do it, but if he is pulling my leg and merely wanting an extra puff for his book, I won't. Terms don't matter. I should be doing it as a kindness.

E.

A week or so passed and then on 16 August a postcard arrived:

15 August 1958

I have written a short preface to A Short Walk and sent it off. I don't know if it will be what the Americans want. I have lost touch with them for the last ten years. Anyway, I was glad to try.

E.W.

The preface was a splendid piece, spirited but also rather sad, written, as Waugh said, by a man ‘whose travelling days are done'. It was plain that before writing it he had also taken the trouble to read
The Last Grain Race
. How was I to repay this act of kindness? With money? But how much money did you offer someone of the fame and stature of Evelyn Waugh or, worse still, to his agent? It seemed an insoluble problem. Then I thought of the Clos de Bère/Bèze. Why not send him half a dozen bottles, two or three magnums if such existed, of this splendid burgundy – not of course the 1904 which, even if it was still drinkable in
1958, would be beyond my means – with my thanks and a note to the effect that the label, which my wine merchants would either reprint or alter to read Clos de Bère, was a case of nature imitating art?

The wine merchants were not at all enthusiastic about my plan. In fact they were depressingly sycophantic in their attitude to Mr Waugh, even to Mr Waugh
in absentia
. They did not have the pleasure of serving him, they said, implying that they would, however, welcome the opportunity of doing so; and they would certainly not lend their names to the sort of deception I was proposing. In the end I had to content myself with sending him three magnums of Clos de Bèze, correctly labelled. I forget the year. At the time it did not occur to me to alter the spelling on the labels myself or to commission an art student to produce some bogus ones, perhaps because it meant that I would have to pack the bottles up and send them off to Waugh myself.

Combe Florey House,
Combe Florey, Taunton
31 August 1938 [sic]

My dear Newby,

I don't often get presents nowadays. I have seldom ever had one as splendid as the three magnums of burgundy which arrived yesterday.
It is not a wine I have ever tasted
[my italics] but I know enough to realize that there is an enormous pleasure ahead of me – three enormous pleasures.

I have reverently laid the bottles in the cellar and am resolved to leave them there until my 58th, 59th and 60th birthdays, by which time I am confident that you will be solidly established as a writer and justly admired.

Thank you also for the charming verses which I never saw before. I hope that if by any lucky chance you should be in Somerset in late October 1961, –2 or –3 you will drink the wine with me.