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Three books inscribed by Evelyn Waugh to Graham Greene, documenting one of the compelling relationships in 20th-century English literature. 

Their initial relationship was cordial at best. The two overlapped at Oxford in 1922, but did not meet until 1937 when Greene, the editor of the upscale literary publication Night and Day, hired the perpetually impecunious Waugh to produce a weekly book page. Waugh kvetched – “the pay is rather disappointing but I am getting spliced & want as many regular jobs as I can get” – and asked that at the very least the books he was to review be sent directly to his home to enhance his library.

As their friendship developed, Waugh would return the favor but sending Greene inscribed first editions of his own works, such as these three volumes: The Loved One (1948), Black Mischief (1932), and Helena (1950). When the magazine went under, Greene asked his writers to excuse his commissions; Waugh would have none of it: “I received your telegram this morning after the enclosed article had been written. As it had been definitely commissioned... I am afraid I must hold you to your offer, whether you print it or not.”

Despite this rocky start, the two became close. Waugh reviewed Greene’s The Heart of the Matter: “...of Mr. Graham Greene alone among contemporary writers one can say without affectations that his breaking silence with a new serious novel is a literary “event”... [He] is a story-teller of genius.” Greene, pleased, sent a note of thanks: “You’ve made me very conceited – thank you very much. There’s no other living writer whom I would rather receive praise (or criticism) from.” And the two did exchange a fair amount of criticism over the years, frequently sourcing from politics and religion. Waugh was a staunch aristocrat, and Greene, a loyal socialist. Both were converts to Catholicism, but Greene did not believe in Hell and, given the number of affairs he had while married with married women, clearly did not consider the institution of marriage a sacred one. 

This copy of The Loved One, Waugh’s send-up of Los Angelean culture inspired by a brief stay in the summer of 1947, during which he worked in Hollywood on the film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited for MGM. The book is one of 250 numbered copies signed by both Waugh and the illustrator, Stuart Boyle. The story, set in Forest Lawn Cemetery – a west coast spot to which Waugh was compulsively drawn – grew from a series of articles on “California burial customs” he wrote after his return to London. It satirically follows a young English poet who moves to Los Angeles to find success in Hollywood only to get mixed up in a love triangle with funeral cosmetician Aimee Thanatogenos and the sinister embalmer "Mr. Joyboy." Waugh inscribed this copy: Mr. Graham Greene’s copy.

Waugh inscribed Helena – the novel he considered his greatest literary achievement: For Graham love Evelyn Oct. 1st 1950. His readers regarded it as an career embarrassment. Waugh intended to write a new sort of biography of a saint, while narrating the story of Christianity’s origins. Unschooled in Jewish history broadly or in the life of Helena specifically, he was undaunted. He framed the narrative around the story of a girl, and branded it a reverentially religious text, though it’s clearly punctuated with a 20th-century sexual awareness. Reviewers recoiled, then attacked, with one comparing Waugh unfavorably with Greene: “Waugh has done nothing in this book that he has not done as well or better elsewhere... While Graham Greene’s characters make the frontal approach to Catholicism – undergoing the betrayal on the pier or the Pascalian agony in the shrubbery – Waugh’s converts generally get to Heaven the back way through having the right kind of nanny” (John Raymond in the New Statesman). All things considered, it would be difficult to overstate the poignancy of Waugh’s loving inscription to Greene in this copy. 

Clearly Greene, an avid, life-long book-hunter, acquired his copy of Black Mischief second-hand – it bears the Book Society bookplate of one E.E. Cretchley, who also signed the book – and then solicited the inscription from Waugh, who obliged, Not for Crutchley [sic] / but for Graham / from / Evelyn. Black Mischief, falling between Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and the masterful A Handful of Dust, is often given short shrift in critical dialogues. In it,  Waugh fictionalized his voyage to Abyssinia as recounted in Remote People (1931). It is his first novel set outside of London and Oxford, and the creation of the Kingdom of Azania and Emperor Seth forced Waugh to rely heavily on his powers of invention. Titled Accession in manuscript, it was changed at the request of Waugh’s American publisher John Farrar who pointed out that “accession as such means practically nothing in America.” Waugh, resigned, resplied, “Tell these troublesome yanks that the novel will be called Black Mischief and will be ready for them in about 3 weeks. It is extremely good.”

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These letters are part of a larger collection of correspondence between Mailer and critic John Aldridge between 1952-1983.

In total, thirty-two letters from Mailer illustrate their early relationship, spurned by a particularly heated, if epistolary, argument about Aldridge’s inexcusably vicious (according to Mailer) critique of the first draft of The Deer Park, three years before it was published; and trace their relationship over the course of three decades.

Pictured above are two early letters from the collection. Mailer initially mentions The Deer Park to Aldridge in the first letter, dated June 18, 1952, reporting that he has completed sixty pages. He describes the book as if it has a life of its own: “The book staggers me with its cheekiness; it’s fantastically ambitious, half as ambitious let us say as a Remembrance of Things Past, and since I’ve given no evidence so far of greater talent or more equipment, the result is merely that I rewrite and rewrite, strait-jacketed by more severe critical standards and no more on the ball.”

Toward the end of 1952, Mailer’s publisher John Selby approached Aldridge to review the book, hoping he would provide his “opinion on matters of taste, construction and similar considerations,” (December 11, 1952). Selby considers this a “great favor” and notes that Aldridge would be compensated. Aldridge agreed, and penned a harsh analysis. In his carbon letter to Selby explaining his reaction to the novel, Aldridge writes, “I think the trouble with The Deer Park is that…it has no morality at all, neither as great fiction nor as pornography” (January 4, 1953; p.1); “Mailer’s weakness of attitude in the material that is given is responsible, I believe, for  large part of the purely technical failure of the book” (p. 3); and “In structure, the book badly needs going over, if, indeed you feel that there is anything left to salvage” (p.3).

Mailer’s vehement response to Aldridge’s review begins, “Sometimes you really and truly act like an idiot” (January 12, 1952 [ie 1953]). He proceeds to accuse Aldridge of writing “a whole set of gratuitous insults” which should have been addressed directly to him, and not his publishers. Mailer writes that Aldridge’s “long, condescending” analysis was no help to him; and that Aldridge did not act like a friend in writing it.

Aldridge responded in distress; Mailer asked Aldridge to drop the matter (February 6, 1953). The correspondence picks up in 1959, when Aldridge praises Advertisements for Myself (1959), and Mailer compliments Aldridge on “the particular lucidity of [his] critical style” (December 1, 1959).  

In the mid-1960s, the correspondence continues in a markedly friendly tone, with each sending updates about their work and their families, indulging in mild literary gossip, and making arrangements to see each other.  

In a postscript to his December 18, 1965 letter, Mailer responds to Aldridge’s suggestion that he write Mailer’s biography: “…of course we can talk about it, and seriously….I honestly don’t know at this instant whether I feel most honored, most delighted, or most aghast” (December 18, 1965). There are a number of exchanges on this subject; in one, Mailer responds to a suggestion Aldridge made about a “depository” for his archive:

One’s papers are worth a lot after one’s death, and so perhaps should be sold to the highest bidder, so the kids can afford to go to college in Cadillacs. I don’t know, these are all legal matters and business matters, and I don’t think we should get caught up in them, nor long correspondences. What I propose instead is that you get S&S or some publisher to bankroll a trip to New York or Provincetown for you and come to visit for a couple of days and we’ll really sit down and go into all the difficulties and get them out of the way. (September 26, 1966)

By 1968, Mailer and Aldridge had agreed to a five year time frame in which Aldridge would write the book. Mailer explains,  “I’m willing to cooperate along the lines you suggested.  I won’t open my files to any other author, nor do I cooperate with them in interviewing my friends. On this general premise I see no reason why we can’t proceed” (May 10, 1968). By 1975, however, Aldridge suggested that Robert Lucid would be a better candidate to prepare a Mailer-centered literary history (see carbon from June 22, 1975).

Mailer responds, “I didn’t see any reason why you couldn’t do a biography but always thought your main strength has always been for the collision of forces and values in the literary world, and God knows no one else can really do that” (July 31, 1975).

In 1983, Mailer and Aldridge discuss reviews of Mailer’s Ancient Evenings; Mailer describes his reaction to them: “The only trouble of course, is that the early reviews, while leaving my soul intact, certainly scourged my wallet, since the only hope to ever get  any more from this book than the huge sums Little, Brown has already paid me was for it to become a runaway best-seller, and that won’t happen” (May 2, 1983). Mailer closes this letter expressing how he would like to talk to Aldridge further about the book. Mailer’s final letter is a testament to his respect of Aldridge as a writer, and is a touching coda to their correspondence from thirty years earlier. Aldridge had written Mailer, informing him that he thought that The Naked and the Dead, Armies of the Night, and An American Dream were all out of print, in every edition. Mailer responded that he would be in touch with his publisher, and “If it turns out that any of them are indeed out of print, and there’s thought of a new introduction, who better than you could to write it? I’ll ask him to keep that very much in mind” (February 20, 1987).  

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Malcolm Lowry’s heavily annotated working typescript of his most complete articulation of his life’s work: his plan for an epic that would rival in scope the great literary undertakings of the 20th century of Proust, Joyce, and Pound. It is the immediate precursor – with substantial variations – to a foundational document of Lowry scholarship housed in the Lowry Archive at University of British Columbia.

Lowry envisioned The Voyage That Never Ends as his magnum opus: an epic cycle encompassing his existing novels and stories as well as projected works, with Under the Volcano as its centerpiece. This outline, typed on the verso of a partial typescript of Margerie Lowry’s unfinished novel The Castle of Malatesta, along with one typed draft leaf of Lowry’s short story "Elephant and Colosseum," opens with a three-page overview, to which 26 pages of individual treatments of the project’s component works and their significance to the whole are appended. The pages are copiously annotated, with Lowry’s lengthy manuscript additions and cancellations, and an additional five autograph leaves interpolated throughout.

The idea of The Voyage That Never Ends evolved over several years. Lowry first mentioned it by title in a 1946 letter to publisher Jonathan Cape, where he described it as a trilogy of novels paralleling the Divine Comedy, with Volcano occupying the position of the Inferno. His vision had enlarged substantially by November of 1951, when he had a 34 page “adumbration” of the Voyage (revised considerably from our working draft) sent to his longtime friend and editor, Albert Erskine. Lowry wrote to Erskine: “It’s hellish near impossible to make a précis of my plan…but I’ve tried to give you an idea, a frame. I myself can hear — almost — the whole thing; that is to say I can already project myself into a given section, no matter how remote, and feel, hear, sense more or less how it must be” (November 23, 1951).

In outlining his plans Lowry hoped for a large advance, being, as he was so often throughout his life, quite broke. He wrote to his agent Harold Matson on the same day he wrote to Erskine: “I am convinced that The Voyage that Never Ends will be a great book if it is found I deserve grace to finish it. The trouble, naturally, at the moment, is cash…I hope to God this can be pushed through and that I may in some sort receive an advance on it before the wolf and the winter storms break the door down. Damn this urgency to hell…” (November 23, 1951)

Lowry’s suit proved successful. As Sherrill Grace notes, “it was largely on the strength of this document that he got his long-term contract with Albert Erskine and Random House” (SursumCorda, II, 453 n.1).

Though Lowry would continue to mold the project until his death, The Voyage that Never Ends was never completed.

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The image shows the pair on a 1909 excursion to Studland in Dorset, where Virginia sports rented swimwear of which she wrote, “I hired a gentlemans or ladies – it was bisexual – bathing dress, and swam far out … a drifting sea anemone” [sic]. Her memories of the holiday also included her sister and young nephew: “Julian rushes straight into the sea, and falls flat on his face. Nessa tucks her skirts up, and wades about with him. Clive meanwhile dives from a boat, in a tight black suit.” Though the photographer is unknown, the camera was likely in the hands of one of their inner circle – perhaps Vanessa Stephen herself. 

With the photo is a four-page letter written by Virginia, signed with a pseudonym, “Eleanor Hadyng,” to Clive but addressed to “James.” The letter is docketed on the verso in pencil by, we believe, Duncan Grant – who would father Vanessa’s third child: “This was part of a game – a novel in letters – V, Vanessa, Lytton, Saxon, I, and I believe Walter Lamb were to participate. It didn’t go far.”  

In her letter, Woolf discusses letter writing, friendly gossip about mutual friends, education and contemporary society, the writing life, and more. A few highlights: 

Why is it that women of 18 and young men of 21 have less to say to each other than any other of God’s creatures? They terrify me; I know, as I have sometimes been terrified by the critical gaze of your son Peter [Julian], who can’t talk yet, and is so innocent. … I should like to turn Oxford into a Cathedral city and people it with Deans and widow ladies. The profession of learning should be carried on in a manufacturing town. Perhaps in your 18th century they managed things better, I detest the modern way of it. I detest pale scholars with their questioning about life, and the message of the classics, and the bearing of Greek thought upon modern problems… I dined with my publisher [Bruce Richmond], and felt like a cannibal because the dinner was so good, and I knew what went to make it – the blood of respectable young men and women like myself and my neighbour. I am afraid that one can’t believe nowadays in starving genius, frozen in a garret. We were a dreadful set of harpies; middle aged writers of mild distinction are singularly unpleasant to my taste. They remind me of those balf-necked vultures at the zoo, with their drooping blood-shot eyes, who are always on the look out for a lump of raw meat. You should have heard the chattering and squabbling that went on among them, and the soft complacent coo of those that had been fed. That great goose Lady G[regory?] was the loudest in her squawking; the rest of us sat round and twittered, half in envy and half in derision….

At Cambridge University, Clive Bell was best friend to the older of Virginia and Vanessa’s two brothers, Thoby Stephen. After Bell wed Vanessa in 1907, he had a flirtation with Virginia around the time this photo was taken, before she married Leonard in 1912. Soon after, Clive began a series of full-blown affairs. Late in 1910, Vanessa began a relationship with Roger Fry, whom she left after a few years to live with Duncan Grant with whom she had her daughter, Angelica, who was raised as Clive’s child. She later adopted a tolerant, affectionate, and slightly condescending attitude toward Clive and his lady friends. For his part, Clive became more of a visitor than a proprietor at the homes of his wife and family. 

Part of an important Virginia Woolf collection available en bloc. For more information, please email sarah@glennhorowiz.com.

An early typescript poem composed as song lyrics by an 18-year-old Plath, to be sung at commencement by her class as they graduated from Wellesley High School on June 7, 1950, in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

The typed heading identifies “Words by S. Plath” and “Music by R. Blakesley” – Plath’s classmate Robert Blakesley. Plath was first in her class and one of twenty-three members of the National Honor Society, but despite her academic success she felt a tension with her childhood and upbringing. Docketed by Plath’s mother Aurelia, with whom she had a challenging relationship, on the verso: “Wellesley High Graduation Song (1950) by Sylvia,” and on the recto, “keep” – “Love Poems.”

price available upon request, sarah@glennhorowitz.com