The way of the Waughs
Literary brilliance, and an uneasy father-son rapport, link four generations of male writers
Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family
By Alexander Waugh
Doubleday, 472 pp., illustrated, $27.50
It's taken a while for this richly interesting book to reach these shores (it was published in the United Kingdom in 2004), but the wait was worth it. Alexander Waugh, son of Auberon and grandson of Evelyn (just to stop there) , has inherited from his forebears the curse of humor with which the tribe of Waugh was endowed. His aim, well achieved in this book, is to tell the story of four generations of the family beginning with his great-great - grandfather Dr. Alexander Waugh, otherwise known as the Brute. He traces in particular detail the complicated relations between the Brute's son , Arthur, and Arthur's two sons, Alec and Evelyn. The present Alexander Waugh, author of this book, is a music critic and composer who has previously written books on the largest impossible subjects: time and God. His decision to write about his father and grandfather comes out of a feeling that " this whole Waugh thing needed sorting" ; in his homely English idiom, if Evelyn and Auberon had "left their clobber in my path it would have to be cleared out of the way." Clear it he does, in a splendidly flamboyant fashion of which his progenitors would have approved -- on the condition that they not have to read about themselves.
Although he was surely not the most gifted of the fathers and sons who fill this book, Arthur Waugh is perhaps the most appealing and pathetic. His father, the "disagreeable Dr. Waugh, with a sadistic attitude to his sons," alternated cruelty with lighter moments in which he would shout, when dinner was about to be served, "Puddin'! Puddin'! Puddin'! / Gi' me plenty o'puddin', / So pass me plate , / And don't be late, / And pile it up wi' puddin.' " Arthur survived the Brute, deciding when he was in boarding school at Sherborne and against his father's wishes to pursue a literary career. At Oxford he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry with a "long, flowery epic" about General Charles Gordon, of Khartoum fame, but graduated with a third-class degree (the author notes that all Waughs did poorly at Oxford). Undeterred, Arthur turned himself into the consummate London literary man of letters, the managing director of the publishing house Chapman and Hall (his son Evelyn would refer to him scornfully as either "Chapman" or "Chapman and Hall"). He provided volumes of biographies, essays, and memoirs, but is remembered by those of modernist persuasion for his derogation of Eliot's "The Waste Land."
Arthur invested all his paternal feelings in the career of his first son, Alec , at Sherborne . By 1912 their relationship "had become so intense that it was not long before those who cared for Arthur began to worry for his sanity." At Chapman and Hall members of the staff would call out to Arthur, with sarcasm, "And how is Master Alec this morning, sir?" When Alec was expelled from the school for some boy-to-boy kissing and "whipping other boys' bare bottoms with a wet towel" (imagine!), Arthur was heartbroken, having counted on Alec to excel at cricket and win a double-first degree. In an outpouring from one of his letters, Arthur tells him , "Without blasphemy I can truly say that I have nailed my own soul to your cross." The crucifixion that transpired was Arthur's rather than his son's, who in record time published his first novel, "The Loom of Youth," full of details about single-sex goings - on at the old school, just what was to be expected from -- in the words of its headmaster -- that "dirty little beast."
Alec went on to write many novels and become a champion womanizer, although he nursed no delusions that he was remotely in his brother's class as a writer. Evelyn, five years his junior, was excluded from the "two-man gang" of Arthur and Alec, and because "The Loom of Youth" had muddied the waters at Sherborne, Evelyn was sent to Lancing, an inferior school . Evelyn's degree at Oxford was a very poor third, due to what the biographer calls "a cocktail of drunkenness, lassitude, and raw, adolescent rebellion." His early crushes on men are passed over by Alexander Waugh, who in the delightfully informal, indeed flippant, tone he affects toward certain matters tells us he will not "be pokin' m'nose into his intimate friendships." After graduation Evelyn returned frequently to Oxford for further debauches , which eventually saw print in his diaries, published after his death .
After a few years Evelyn took himself in hand, publishing in 1927 an excellent monograph on the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, then following it the next year with his brilliant first novel, "Decline and Fall," an eminently rereadable comic masterpiece. From there on his career as a writer never faltered, and after an unfortunate but brief marriage to Evelyn Gardner (known as "she-Evelyn"), he married Laura Herbert, with whom he had six children. The biographer says, in what must be a massive understatement, that Evelyn "did not have a natural gift with children " and indeed could consider them only as "defective adults." One of the many memorable formulations in his letters concerns his favorite, Meg: " My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. I now dislike them all equally."
Alexander Waugh points out how relentlessly Evelyn pursued his father in his novels, suggesting for example that Arthur's love of Dickens and of reading aloud to his children was the inspiration for Mr. Todd, who, in "A Handful of Dust," imprisons the hero, Tony Last, and forces him to endlessly read and reread aloud Dickens's novels. Evelyn's eldest child, Auberon, was much kinder and more admiring of his father, even though Auberon possessed the sharpest, most wicked tongue operating in Britain in the last decades of the last century. (Full disclosure: Auberon Waugh once reviewed something I wrote and referred to it as " this idiotic little book.") But Auberon spoke very much to the point about how he and his siblings must have felt toward their father -- that even when they misbehaved "it was disconcerting nonetheless, to be met by cool statements of total repudiation."
Perhaps the most noteworthy of many things about Auberon was that Moammar Khadafy declared him his favorite author. Auberon died in 2001 with -- in words his son imagines people using about him -- the reputation of a "rude, abrasive, and opinionated journalist." Alexander Waugh nevertheless ends with a tribute to his father, attesting to the fact that "behind the hot words and bandied rebukes, there always throbbed, as far as I could tell, the steady beat of a warm heart." It is a generous way to end this portrait of a not-soon-to-be-forgotten group of fathers and sons at their most extravagant.
William H. Pritchard is professor of English at Amherst College. His most recent book is "Updike: America's Man of Letters." 