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The Waugh at Home

Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, Alexander Waugh, Nan A. Talese, 472 pages

They f- -k you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with faults they had,
And add some extra, just for you.
—Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse”

Auberon Waugh came home Easter Sunday 1966 to find a policeman waiting for him. His father, the great novelist Evelyn Waugh, had died. That came as a relief—Auberon at first feared something had happened to his children. He made his way to his father’s house. By the time he got there, the body was gone but not his father’s last remains. “On arrival,” Auberon later recalled, “I found a small pile of excrement on the carpet outside the downstairs lavatory” where Evelyn died. “Others must have noticed it too, but, being Waughs, they all pretended not to have done so until the daily help arrived, when it vanished without anything being said.”

Other Waughs kept their peace; Auberon put the story in his autobiography. His son Alexander always wondered why he did it. To dump on his father’s memory? To show the clan’s indifference to “dung, death and other worldly horrors”? In Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, Alexander speculates that his father appreciated the symbolism of Evelyn’s death—that it came on Easter, appropriate for a devout Catholic, and that he left behind something obscene, befitting a comic novelist.

Whatever the case, this episode—and a half dozen like it involving deaths, weddings, wars, and bananas—illustrates the ambiguous relations between the Waugh fathers and sons. Alexander revered his father, but he was the exception: Evelyn resented his father for the favoritism he showed his other son, Alec; Auberon, for his part, warmed up to Evelyn in adulthood, but earlier they were not close. Evelyn did not hide his feeling that his children were bores—“Of children as of procreation,” he wrote Nancy Mitford, “the pleasure is momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.”

Four generations of Waugh boys—from Evelyn’s father Arthur, born 1866, to Alexander, born 1963—have grown up to be writers. Between them, Arthur’s descendents—daughters, too—have produced 180 books of all kinds: biographies, novels, journalism, poetry, even treatises entitled Time and God. The last two are among Alexander’s previous works: warm-ups for tackling the Waughs, one might say.

Alexander begins with the last of the nonliterary Waugh patriarchs, his great-great-grandfather and namesake Alexander, known to posterity as “the Brute.” (The author claims he was not named after the Brute but an earlier Alexander, “the Great and Good,” first of the English Waughs. The family name itself is of Scottish origin, and good evidence suggests it is the singular of Wales.) The Brute read the Bible, Shakespeare, and Wisden’s Cricketing Almanac, but not much else. His old-fashioned ideas of child rearing involved sticking son Arthur high up in a tree and firing off a shotgun near his ears to cure his nerves. Arthur, a boy of his time, was dutifully eager to please his father, but the only interests they shared were cricket and amateur theatricals.

Arthur turned out to have a literary streak: at Oxford he won the Newdigate Prize—past winners included John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde—for “Gordon in Africa,” a poem celebrating the British general decapitated at Khartoum. The poem impressed the Brute. Four years later, Arthur published a life of Alfred Lord Tennyson and was on his way to minor fame as a biographer of eminent Victorians. He fondly wished to be one himself, affecting Dickensian mannerisms and an outmoded style of dress that would later grate on his younger son, Evelyn.

It took a while for Arthur to catch on to that; his attention was fixed on his elder son, Alec. Reacting against the hard ways of the Brute, Arthur doted on Alec—“the son of my soul,” he called him—and when Alec was kicked out of boarding school for homosexual activity, Arthur was crestfallen but stood by his boy. In disgrace and out of school, the only path open to Alec was His Majesty’s army, then fighting the First World War.

Alec wanted to enlist; like other young men, he expected the war to be short and glorious. He was soon disabused. “What is there fine and noble in young men carrying boxes up the line, suddenly hearing a shell and dropping everything and falling flat in a ditch?” he wrote home, “Knight and Jackson were two of the best fellows you could meet—blown to bits.” His disgust came out in a poem called “Cannon-Fodder.” The title was a concession to his shocked father—originally, it had been called “Carrion.” It told of vermin eating away at the leftovers of some mother’s son, a young man mourned at home but unburied where he fell, “uncared for in the unowned place / that you fought so hard to keep.”

Alec wrote his first novel as a 17-year-old soldier before leaving for France. The Loom of Youth was an autobiographical account of boarding school life, including the bits that had got him in trouble. It was a succès de scandale. Later novels and nonfiction would often be as scandalous but rarely so successful, although one, 1955’s Island in the Sun, about interracial adultery on Grenada, was a hit in America and spawned a film, a song by Harry Belafonte, and even the name of Island Records. By then Alec had long since discovered his heterosexual side. The war, or at least the French brothels, helped straighten him out, and he became a prodigious womanizer. By the time Evelyn went to Oxford, he was calling his chrome-domed brother “the Bald-Headed Lecher,” not without admiration.

What Evelyn did not admire was the way their father treasured Alec. But all that paternal esteem, as Alexander shows, did not make Alec a better father himself: after missing his children’s early years due to World War II, Alec nonetheless continued to travel, picking up mistresses wherever he went. Though he loved his children, he rarely saw them. Evelyn, who thought himself “lacking in love” from his parents, played a larger role in the lives of his own six children, however reluctantly.

Not only Arthur’s favoritism but his theatricality—expressed in hammy performances whilst reading aloud—and his sentimentality repulsed Evelyn, who whetted an already sharp wit against his hard contempt for those qualities. Arthur is much abused in Evelyn’s stories, as characters based upon him die violent deaths. One is decapitated by a mad carpenter, a vocation Evelyn had once tried. The titular “Man who Liked Dickens” is a sadistic lunatic who forces a victim to spend his life reading Dickens to him aloud. Evelyn even lampooned his father’s apparent fetish for young ladies on bicycles. Alexander likes to exculpate Evelyn, but readers of Fathers and Sons might rather agree with Evelyn’s Oxford friend who said that where Arthur was concerned, Evelyn was more sinning than sinned against.

How far short of an ideal father Evelyn himself fell might be gauged by an episode Auberon recalled in his autobiography. Bananas were a great rarity in England during the Second World War. Auberon and his siblings had never tasted one. At the war’s end, the British government, which maintained banana rationing through 1954, issued coupons so that every child in the land could have one banana. But the Waugh children never got theirs—Evelyn took all three of their bananas and devoured them himself. “It would be absurd to say that I never forgave him,” Auberon wrote, “but he was permanently marked down in my estimation from that moment.”

Alexander defends his grandfather: Auberon, he points out, had behaved as badly not long before when he stuffed his trousers with jam tarts while the household was distracted in greeting Evelyn, just back from military duty. Auberon, his son says, “like Evelyn, could not control his greed.” A fair point—except that Auberon was about 5 when he stole the tarts. Evelyn was in his early 40s when he hogged the bananas.

“The most terrifying aspect of Evelyn Waugh as a parent,” according to Auberon, “was that he reserved the right not just to deny affection to his children but to advertise an acute and unqualified dislike of them.” The terror dissipated as Auberon grew older, though their relationship still had its hiccoughs. In Cyprus for a stint of mandatory national service, Auberon accidentally shot himself with a turret-mounted machine gun. He lost ribs, a lung, a finger, and his spleen, but survived. His mother flew from England to be by his side. His father stayed home and did not write. Auberon did not hold this against him; while in the hospital fearing for his life, he wrote a note to be sent to Evelyn in the event of his death. “Dear Papa,” it began, “Just a line to tell you what for some reason I was never able to show you in my lifetime, that I admire, revere and love you more than any other man in the world.”

(For his part, Evelyn also eventually came to appreciate Arthur—by emulating him. Alexander notes that after Arthur’s death, Evelyn became a more sentimental writer himself and started dressing more like a fuddy-duddy)

Auberon recovered. He tried his hand at novels for a while, but really made his mark in journalism, particularly with the satirical diary he wrote for Private Eye, a work some critics, V.S. Naipaul and A.N. Wilson among them, rank alongside or above his father’s oeuvre. Satire might be too hygienic a word for the diaries, which are really a collection of uproarious lies about public figures, giving play to Auberon’s anarchist streak—a trait he shared with his father. Geoffrey Wheatcroft has aptly applied to Auberon what Auberon once wrote of Evelyn: both were unconventional libertarians, “far closer to the Manchester School anarchists than to the Conservative right wing.” Auberon inherited some of that from his mother’s side, too: his ancestor and namesake Auberon Herbert was a 19th-century individualist anarchist.

Auberon’s public philosophy was of a piece with his personal conduct. “I was seldom if ever disciplined by him,” Alexander remembers. “He believed that good manners were taught by example and could never be learned from orders and instructions, or from any system of contrived or spontaneous punishment.” The tempests that punctuated the filial relations of earlier Waughs did not trouble Alexander and his father. That makes the last section of Fathers and Sons the least interesting. But then, what could an admiring son say about a man whom even Britain’s gutter press—which Auberon mercilessly lambasted in his lifetime—hailed as a saint?

Fathers and Sons, taken as a whole, is comment enough. “I suppose,” Alexander muses, “that all of us Waughs only became writers to impress our fathers.” Time had already impressed Auberon before he died in 2001. There is every reason to think this book would have impressed him even more.

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