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TO EVELYN WAUGH

In his autobiography A Little Learning (1964) Waugh recalled how as a schoolboy he visited the house of W. W. Jacobs (1863–1943), author of ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, in Berkhamsted. Waugh became close friends with Jacobs’s daughter Barbara, who was engaged to his brother Alec. Her elder brother was a student at Berkhamsted School, but none of these early connections led to a meeting with Greene. At Oxford, the two were acquainted but not close, as they would later become, since Greene seemed to look down on his group as ‘childish and ostentatious’ (200). He noted with apparent amusement, that whenever Greene wished to portray an unpleasant character with a pathetic attachment to a minor public school, he made it Waugh’s own school, Lancing (120).

C.6 Albany, | London, W.1. | 10 September 1964

My dear Evelyn,

I was delighted to receive the autobiography which I have been anxiously awaiting. As always I have nothing but admiration for the style and content, though may I make two little personal corrections?

I never knew Jacobs’s son at Berkhamsted as I was a boarder and he was a day-boy and as in so many schools a great gulf divided the two. Probably it was the same at Lancing! Or were you so buried in the depths of the country that you didn’t have any day-boys? I think I began to use Lancing as my symbol of a minor public school after being given the life of one of the headmasters to review in very early days.4There seemed to be so much in common between Lancing and Berkhamsted that I thought I could safely depend on transferring impressions from one school to another!

I was not suffering from any adult superiority at Oxford to explain our paths not crossing, but I belonged to a rather rigorously Balliol group of perhaps boisterous heterosexuals, while your path temporarily took you into the other camp. Also for a considerable period of my time at Oxford I lived in a general haze of drink. I’ve never drunk so much in my life since! There was also in the last two years a would-be Oxford Horizon called the Oxford Outlook to keep me occupied. Harold used to contribute to this and Eddy Sackville-West and Edith Sitwell. Alas I had no chance of printing anything from you.

I’ve just been going through a horrible experience with a play which has determined me never again to write for the stage. In a few days the worst will be over and I depart to the peace of France.

Affectionately,
Graham


Date: 2015-02-03; view: 685


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