# Alec Waugh

Alexander Raban Waugh (July 8, 1898 – September 3, 1981) was an English novelist, brother of Evelyn Waugh.

## Quotes

* As military regulations state that it is the duty of every prisoner of war to make immediate and strenuous effort to escape, and as every man is at heart an adventurer, it is not surprising that our languid community was from time to time regaled by the rumours of impending sorties.
** "Chapter X. How We Did Not Escape". The Prisoners of Mainz. Chapman & Hall, Ltd. 1919. pp. 152–171. (quote from p. 152)
* To the Victorians as to the Arabs, a sleek, well-fed appearance was something to be proud of, a proof of prosperity and success. It was assumed that any man who could afford to would "do himself well." A thin man was either unhealthy or poor—both of which were crimes in the 1870s.
** The Lipton Story: A Centennial Biography. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2013. ISBN 1448202019. 1st edition. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company. 1950. (See Thomas Lipton.)
* I had reached St. Thomas shortly after breakfast. Letters of introduction had gone ahead of me, and within three hours I was sipping a very dry martini on the balcony of a bungalow situated on the far side of the mountain range that divides the island. A thousand feet below me 'the bright blue meadow a bay' washed in varying shades of green and turquoise against a long white-sanded beach. Beyond it stretched an archipelago of islands, some British, some American, some a bare grazing ground for goats.
** "II. The Caribbean. 1. The U.S. Virgin Islands". Where the Clocks Chime Twice. A&C Black. 2011. ISBN 1448202523. (1st edition 1951 — The phrase ‘the bright blue meadow of a bay’ occurs in J. C. Squire’s 1923 poem To a Roman.)
* Travel books are not a profitable form of writing; their sale is usually small but they have for the author the satisfaction of possessing reference value. They hold their place on library shelves and are consulted by the student and the traveller long after novels that enjoyed a brief bright summer are utterly forgotten, I do not suppose that it would pay a publisher to reissue today Froude's English in the West Indies, Treves's Cradle of the Deep, or Rutter's If Crab No Walk, but those three books provide indispensable research material. It is of value to learn how certain places struck people twenty, fifty, eighty years ago.
** "Foreword". The Sugar Islands: A Collection of Pieces Written About the West Indies Between 1928 and 1953. A&C Black. 2011. ISBN 1448202485. (2nd edition, Cassell & Company, 1958; The Sugar Islands: A Caribbean Travelogue (1st ed.). Farrar, Straus & Company. 1949. )
* I returned to civilian life, agreeing with Henri Murger, that the first duty of a wine was to be red, adding my own corollary that its second duty was to be Burgundy.
** In Praise of Wine (1959). 1st part of quote last part of quote (Sometimes quoted in the form "The first duty of wine is to be red. The second is to be a Burgundy.")
* I am prepared to believe that a dry Martini slightly impairs the palate, but think what it does to the soul.
** In Praise of Wine (1959). p. 265
* ... I am not a very serious person. I am a storyteller and an entertainer, the direct descendant of those wandering minstrels who in the Middle Ages were classified as rogues and vagabonds. The stock of the status of the novelist may have gone up in recent years, and there are a number of novelists who seem to claim a position of a prophet, a leader, an advisor, one of the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, but I think when one comes to the last analysis, that our ancestor is Touchstone rather than Cassandra, ... and I myself certainly think of myself and my brother storytellers not so much as leaders of men into action as the idle singers of an empty day
** A Novelist on Novels. PSU Library Special Collections and University Archives Oregon Public Speakers Collection (March 7, 1960 Portland State College). audio at soundcloud.com
* ... Maugham would not have been the writer he became had his marriage been a success. Nor would Evelyn. He made his first trip to Abyssinia in the autumn of 1930; for six years he was on the move. Until his marriage had been annulled he could not remarry. Those six years of travel gave him the material he needed. He could not have taken a wife upon those travels, certainly not She-Evelyn, who was delicate in health. A novelist to get the material he needs must travel alone or with another man. Had the Evelyns’ marriage been a success, he would, with his absorption in the world of fashion, have concentrated on social satires that might well have become brittle and superficial. Did She-Evelyn subconsciously realize that? Her marriage to John Heygate was short-lived, but she was genuinely in love with him at the beginning. Would she, though, have been prepared to let herself fall in love with him — there is always a point at which one can draw back — had she not felt that since the success of Decline and Fall she was cast in the wrong role? The “he-Evelyn, she- Evelyn, ‘Orphans of the Storm’ Idyll” had been one thing; it was quite another to be the wife, companion, confidante, counselor, and bastion of a great man of letters — the role that Laura Herbert was to fill later, so gladly, so proudly, so lovingly, and with so triumphant a success.
** (June 1967)"My Brother Evelyn". The Atlantic: 53–60. (quote from p. 60)
* My friends used to wonder how I could afford to do so much travelling. But actually travel was an economy for me. I did not have to indulge in costly entertaining. My social life was provided by the ships in which I travelled, and in the islands that I visited I was a guest more often than often than a host. I never during 1951 had a substantial credit balance at my bank more than once I received one of those notes so typical of English banking, 'Your account appears to be £23. 11.6. We shall be glad to received your instructions in this matter.' But I was never insolvent.
** A Year to Remember: A Reminiscence of 1931. A&C Black. 2011. ISBN 1448202590. 1st edition. London: W. H. Allen. 1975. ISBN 049101564X.

## The Loom of Youth (1917)

* There comes some time an end to all things, to the good and to the bad.
** Book I: Warp and Woof. Chapter I: Groping
* ”Only the superficial do not judge by appearances," Wilde had said, mocking at society; and he had been right. Life was a sham, a mass of muddled evolutions; the world was too slack to find out the truth, or perhaps it was afraid to discover it. For the truth was not pleasant. Gordon did not know what it was; all he saw was that life was built of shams, that no one worshipped anything but the god of things that seem. He lay supine, cursing at the darkness.
** Book IV: The Weaving. Chapter VI: The Tapestry Completed (Gordon Caruthers is the adolescent protagonist at the novel’s public school named Fernhurst.)

## The Early Years of Alec Waugh (1962)

* In Russia love was regarded with suspicion as a deterrent to the social obligations of the Soviet citizen.
** The Early Years of Alec Waugh (2nd ed.). Cassell. 1962. p. 42.
* A good deal of fun is involved in the launching of a serial. It is exciting to see one's name placarded all over London; there was a bigger space for posters in the front of buses then. Bus after bus announced my story.
** p. 208, 2nd edition

## Quotes about Alec Waugh

* Although he came to the United States frequently and for several decades lived part of each year at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, Mr. Waugh was not particularly famous in this country, except for the 1956 Island in the Sun. The colorful story of love, murder and political intrigue on the imaginary Caribbean island of Santa Maria was a book-club selection, was condensed in The Reader's Digest and was sold to the movies for a film that starred James Mason, Joan Fontaine, Harry Belafonte, Joan Collins and Dorothy Dandridge.
** Edwin McDowell, (September 4, 1981)"Alec Waugh, Author of 'Island in the Sun'". The New York Times.