“ONE MAN’S ROAD”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21544, 16 January 1932, Page 4

“ONE MAN’S ROAD”

LIFE IN A PASSING GENERATION " One Man’s Road; Being a Picture of Life In a Passing Generation.” By Arthur Waugh. Illustrated. London: Chapman - and Hall (18s net). . Mr Arthur Waugh was the managing director of the publishing firm of Messrs Chapman and Hall for nearly thirty years, and by virtue of that association with authors is well equipped to write a literary autobiography. In addition, he is himself, as readers of the Fortnightly Review and other English journals, and of bis history of the firm, will know, a pleasant, reflective author, critic, and essayist in his own right, and moreover he is the father of one of the most popular contemporary English novelists, Alec Waugh, and of one of the most precociously precious, Evelyn Waugh. His “ One , Man’s Road ” is a “ full-dress ” autobiography. Mr Waugh commences his story, not with his introduction to literary circles when he went to a London publishing house as a young man, but at the beginning of his own life, with his birth in a Somerset village in 18(16. His early years were spent in a typically Victorian atmosphere in the frugallyconducted establishment of his father, a doctor who was a friend and servant to the villagers and did not grow rich on the rewards of a hard-working existence. His first school was a “ Victorian_ dame school,” run by women entirely, with no organised games, And a sufficiency of birching. The pupils were so secluded from the knowledge that is the central fact in the life of the schoolboy to-day that when the Oxford-Cambridge boat race resulted in a dead heat none of them knew what the term meant. A dull sort of school, and a depressing atmosphere in which to rear boys, it would seem, yet Mr Waugh shows that this throwing of the pupils on their own resources so far as outdoor enterprise and exercise were concerned had the effect of stimulating their inventive and imaginative faculties, for their games were resourceful and not unduly gentle. It was a proud and sentimental age, when young men would admit to anything sooner than poverty, and the songs that were popularly sung were all of hardship and death in this world, to be followed by riches and joy on another planet: “ Sentiment, sentiment, and sentiment!. Yet out of this nettle sentiment we of our ripe Dickensian generation plucked, somehow or other, after our own fashion, the flowers of loyalty and love.”

Alec and Sherbourne Mr Waugh went afterwards to Sherbourne, at a time when it had “ an atmosphere of vigour, vitality, and driving power not easily to be surpassed in any rival.” His life there was successively “ sad, solitary, purposeless, and rebellious,” and his real enjoyment of the public school existence dawned only when, after having started a magazine in opposition to the Shirburman, he was “bought oif” with the editorship of that journal. Alec, as most people are aware, wrote “The Loom of Youth” just after leaving Sherbourne, and the history of its reception by the school, and by old Shirburnians, is touched on by his father. The book “crackled and blazed through the common rooms of the public schools,” and masters “of uncertain age, chafing under irritating scruples, turned upon it as a counter-irritant, and denounced it for disloyalties which its author had never imagined ” Alec was in Passchendaele, a soldier on active service, when he heard that the story was being denounced as an attack on his old school, and wrote to the Shirburniau a letter of protest. “No doubt,” Mr Waugh writes, “it was not a very conciliatory letter; and Sherbourne had good cause in any case to feel herself wounded in the house of her friends. But when I heard that our own old school paper of so many happy associations had refused to print my son’s defence; that, by was; of response, he had been invited to resign from the Old Boys’ Society; and that, upon his declining to do so, his name had been officially removed from the roll, I felt that my own devotion to the school had been strained to the breaking point.”

Kipling's London Venture Mr Waugh’s career in London began after he left Oxford (where he won the Newdigate Prize and lost £lO by wagering that he would not win it), and became the employee, at a pound a week, of Wolcott Balestier, "one of the most remarkable young men of his time.” Balestier had gone to London to facilitate the publics-, tion of English books in the United States, At 28 he had met Kipling, had arranged with him for the ' publication of an American edition of some of his stories, and had collaborated with _ him in the writing of a novel. He died aged 30, on the eve of undertaking a scheme for issuing on the Continent cheap _ editions of American and English books in which he had hoped to rival Baron Tauchnitz. A year after his_ death Kipling married his sister, Caroline. Of Kipling’s first appearance as author in London Mr Waugh writes:— No less astonishing in its own way was the sudden, exciting, almost overwhelming advent of Mr Rudyard Kipling in the field of fiction. It was towards the close of 1889 that he arrived in London, bringing with him a volume of satirical poems, and a series of something like _ a hundred stories, already published in India in a grey, paper-covered “ Railway Library, ’_ a library whose volumes had been steadily finding, their way to England under the introduction of Anglo-Indian exiles, who wanted to know whether this amazingly precocious youth was not something different from all the other “ writing fellows.” “Shockingly precocious,” was Henry James’s phrase for but at the same time “serenely wise.’ He was not yet 24 years old, but he seemed to know everything.

A Wronged Lady Mr Waugh came into contact with most of the authors of the nineties, as with those of the present century, and his autobiography is scattered with personal notes concerning them. For a journal to which he contributed he wrote, on one occasion, “ a handful of rather frivolous remarks ” about the mysterious Fiona Macleod, and later received a letter, written in a large, round, girlish hand, in which the subject of the article protested at the cruel- account of herself, which was full of the very worst untruths. She was, she said, a delicate girl, only just recovering from a severe illness, and the shock of the article had caused a relapse. Mr Waugh was stricken with, remorse for the harm his fatuous flippancy ” was reported to have done, and wrote apologising. He knew William Sharp quite well at the time, but not until his death dffi he learn of his dual identity. “He had, in fact,” Mr TCaugh adds, “ been practising a subtle deception, which was designed, not only to take in the public, as many authors have done without private wrong, but even to mislead his friends and confidants. Others, who knew him more intimately, would have more to say on this point. For myself, I am content to remember the wholesome lesson I learnt from the episode. It mattered comparatively little there was no Fiona, if one man had been taught manners in the course ; of her Pucklike transit across his path.” “ One Man’s Road ” is an interesting book, from the point of view_ either or the reader who enjoys a well-written autobiography for its own merits, or him wno is ever anxious to obtain new glimpses of literary personalities. Mr Waugh s own story occupies the bulk of its pages, but he has a literary claim on our interest—he was, by the way, a contributor to the first number of the Yellow Book —and his judgments on other men in London’s literary world are fair and kindly. The volume is fully illustrated with portraits of the author and his family. ‘ “•

Australia’s Book Week The Australian Literature Society may congratulate itself upon the success of Australia’s Book Week. It -was inaugurated (states a London correspondent) by Mr A. P. Herbert, of Punch, and Mr J. C. Squire, and it has already attracted hundreds of book lovers to Australia House. The exhibition hall on the ground _ floor has been converted into a vast display library, devoted to books of Australian origin. But this is only the beginning of the valuable work. Every publisher, bookseller, and critic in Britain has had his attention directed to the fact that there is a body of Australian literature comparable with the painting and sculpture which have come from Australia. Editors of the literary weeklies and monthlies are tumbling over one another for authoritative articles upon Australian books and authors, and every great daily newspaper has published some account of the opening ceremoms,