Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  ‘Heaviness may endure for a night: but joy cometh in the morning.’ I cannot express to you the grateful happiness that fills my heart today. Next to New College, I would have chosen Hertford. It is a small but thoroughly good college and the emoluments are the best on the list. Strangely enough it was of Hertford that Young made the famous remark to Coy-Dixon: ‘It is most satisfactory; and a blameless career is crowned by a first class success.’ That word I can repeat to you with a grateful heart. Thank you, my dear Boy, for the honour and happiness you have brought to your home. May the future be worthy of this beginning.

  If Arthur was hoping to fish a few vicarious thrills from Evelyn's Oxford career he was to be sorely disappointed. At Oxford Evelyn did not join the OUDS or act in Hamlet; he did not tour with his college cricket team, nor did he bother to finish his submission for the Newdigate Prize. In fact, he did nothing to excite his father's pride and much to incur his resentment. But before embarking on this sorry part of my tale let me backtrack a month or so to examine a curious item published in the Lancing College Magazine in December 1921. Entitled ‘The Younger Generation’, it was Evelyn's last editorial for the school rag. I shall clip it to the gist:

  During the last few years, a new generation has grown up. What will the young men of 1922 be? What will they stand for and what are they going to do? They will be above all things clear sighted. The youngest generation are going to be very hard and analytical and unsympathetic.

  The young men of the nineties subsisted upon emotion. They poured out their souls like water and their tears with pride; middle-aged observers will find it hard to see the soul in the youngest generation.

  But they will have – and this is their justification – a very full sense of humour. They will watch themselves with probably a greater egotism than did the young men of the nineties, but it will be with a cynical smile and often with a laugh. It is a queer world which the old men have left them and they will have few ideals and illusions to console them when they ‘get to feeling old’. They will not be a happy generation.

  On first inspection what we seem to be reading is Evelyn's declaration of war against his father or, at the very least, a rebellious setting up of barriers between them. Evelyn later dismissed the piece as a ‘preposterous manifesto of disillusionment’, but the references to the older generation ‘subsisting on emotion’ and to the man who ‘pours out his tears with pride’ imply something else. They seem to point an accusing finger not at any non-specific model of that generation but directly through those ‘sunlit casements’ of Underhill at Mr Arthur Waugh. But closer inspection shows that none of the ideas expressed here is especially new. In his Lancing diaries Evelyn made repeated references to the generations. ‘What a ridiculous generation we are. In the last generation people never began to think until they were about nineteen. Time can only show if we are going to be any better for it… We certainly are precocious if that is at all a good sign.’ His school play, subtitled The Tragedy of Youth, demonstrated in three burlesques Alec's point from The Loom of Youth, that the older generation is out of touch with the realities of school life. In making these points Evelyn was being neither observant nor original, for these were the very same views expressed many, many times by his own father.

  To any reader who has kept even half an eye to the whiles of this unfolding saga, Arthur must appear as a man obsessed with generations, with the passing of time and with the matching of youth and age. His empty relationship with his own brutish father, his stifling love for Alec, his ambition to live vicariously through his elder son's school career – all these are signs of a man for whom the subject of generations is uppermost in the mind. The book he dedicated to Evelyn, Tradition and Change, deals at great length with the issue. It was the leitmotif of his conversation. If Arthur and Evelyn's relationship was bad it could be explained – justified, even – by the differences between one generation and another. Alec, too, had caught something of his father's passion for the subject. The Loom of Youth is, after all, chiefly concerned with the difference between school as pupils see it and as it is viewed by an older generation. In his late teens Alec wrote a poem entitled ‘Song’, which might well be read as a conversation between himself and Arthur:

  Saith the sage: youth flieth by,

  As the dawn before the day: Soon the flagon must run dry,

  Soon the rainbow fade away. Store your treasures for old age:

  Saith the sage.

  Saith the rose: one thing is sure,

  Nothing is more sweet than laughter.

  Who can tell what may endure,

  What man knows what follows after? Rake what's certain ere it goes: Saith the rose.

  Saith my heart: life's secret lies

  Not alone in age nor youth, But to both the same voice cries,

  Colours change but not the truth. Only love and never part:

  Saith my heart.

  When Evelyn or Arthur wrote about the generations, as they often did, it is always as though they were writing, first and foremost, about each other. Of course, the Great War divided the generations to some extent. Those, like Evelyn, who were too young to fight felt a greater estrangement from the previous generation than those who had seen action. But that does not alter the fact that the Waughs at Underhill were obsessed with youth and age, and that this obsession was entirely driven by Arthur. After the success of his early novels, Evelyn became the British media's ‘voice of youth’ and the key to his early fame was his self-identification with the younger generation and his repudiation of much for which his father stood. In 1930 he wrote a witty piece for the Daily Herald entitled ‘What I Think of My Elders’:

  I admire their lack of scruple. It takes a great deal to rouse them, but when some feature of their comfort is really threatened they will suddenly plunge into conflict with every artifice their long lives have taught them. I admire their lack of ambition. I admire the resolution with which they hold to their own opinions; their indifference to the traps and pitfalls of logical proof. I admire their sense of humour, those curious jokes which seem to gain lustre and pungency with each repetition… Old people only make themselves ridiculous by pretending to be young.

  Arthur had tried hard to join in with the spirit of the young in a way that his own father would never have contemplated, yet it was painful for him to admit to himself that the experiment was not working; he could not change his own nature, it was cast in immutable form. Inevitably the time would come when the overweight Victorian sentimentalist could no longer keep up with his boys, when he would be left puffing and panting in the ditch as they both sprinted on ahead. He calculated this coming but noticed it far too late. In the closing pages of his autobiography (composed at the same time as Evelyn's piece for the Daily Herald) he wrote, in a mood of deflated self-pity:

  There is no denying that our children have the advantage of our generation in many ways. They will not make our mistakes of impulse and emotion; they are saved from sentimentality, without doing wrong to their hearts; and where we were eager to keep young, they are content to be mature before their time. Perhaps indeed, when the final reckoning is cast, it will be found that the greatest mistake our own generation made lay in its effort to keep on equal terms with its successor, to be brothers and sisters to its boys and girls. We meant so well in the beginning but it was an impossible undertaking. We saw the limitation of the Victorian home; the autocracy of the arm-chair; the lack of confidence between father and son; the insincere covering up of the facts of life; the secret whispers, shrugs and lifted eyebrows. We distrusted it all and we protested that our children should live their lives out after their own fashion and that we would share every yard of the way with them, knowing exactly what they wanted and recognising their right to their own personalities, their own ambitions and goals. We would be young with the young. Alas, vain boast. It cannot be done. It never has been done and never will. Avoiding one pitfall, we stumble into another. Youth and age can never keep on terms together.
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  Fading age deludes itself with the dream that youth enjoys its company, but the young do not really want us. Why should they? They have their own experience to make and must make

  it their own way. Every man has his own road to follow; his own companions to choose; the hardest lesson that age must learn is the knowledge that the time has come to look on at the race, while others run it. That is the great ordeal by change, the final test of character.

  What a curious irony that Evelyn managed to found his early success as Fleet Street's ‘voice of youth’ on his father's wistful waffle, while Arthur's lifelong obsession with youth and age led only to his own crushing defeat. ‘The Great War marked the end of my generation,’ he wrote in One Man's Road. ‘We did not realise it at the time, but it was the end all the same. There was no sudden revolution, no public holocaust of the old standards; but the spirit of change was pervading every side of life, and the traditions for which our age had stood began, slowly, one after another, to wilt and wither.’ Oh dear, oh dear – how sad this story waxes.

  29This passage does not appear in the published diaries. In 1973 Alec sought out the editor of Evelyn Waugh's Diaries, Michael Davie, and bade him excise it at proof stage.

  30In May 1954 Roxburgh fell headlong into his bath while attempting to undo his cravat and drowned, but long before that Evelyn had lost all enthusiasm for him as well. By 1922 he had ‘come to the conclusion that he is thoroughly second rate’.

  VII

  In Arcadia

  Aaughs do not do well at university. Arthur got a third-class degree, so did Evelyn (a poor one at that) and so did I. My father fared even worse by failing his first-year exams and flopping out after only three terms. We all have, or had, our own excuses. There is no common theme. In Evelyn's case it was a cocktail of drunkenness, lassitude, and raw, adolescent rebellion that did it.

  University started off on the wrong foot for Evelyn. Originally it had been agreed that he would spend some time in France, learn the language, then go up to university at the same time as most freshers join, in the autumn term; but Arthur, as ever anxious about money, wanted his son's education to be over and done with as quickly as possible. With minimal reflection, he sent Evelyn to Oxford in January 1922. History was repeating itself. Because Evelyn had entered Lancing in the spring term of 1917 he had found it hard to make friends among those who had already teamed up – another misfortune occasioned by Arthur's impetuosity and his fear of arguments.

  In One Man's Road Arthur complained: ‘I was a week late at my dame-school; at Sherborne I began my time in the summer, instead of in the autumn, when the new generation commonly arrives; and now, at Oxford, I was in the least lucky case of all, for the freshmen of 1885 were already well established in work and friendship before I made my belated appearance and it took me all the length of my first year to recover lost ground.’ For his late entry to Oxford Arthur had blamed his father, who had failed to sign and return the registration papers on time. This irony did not pass Evelyn unnoticed: ‘It is curious,’ he wrote in A Little Learning ‘that, alive as my father was to the disadvantages of his own experience, he should have set me on precisely the same road.’

  Evelyn's three years at Oxford have been amply chronicled in countless biographies and in the lewd memoirs of several of his raffish friends, so I do not intend to examine all the gory details here. I shall not delve into what he did, or did not do, with his tongue at the Hypocrites Club, nor shall I be pokin’ m'nose into his intimate friendships with Richard Pares, Alastair Graham and Hugh Lygon. Academics, scholars and dusty experts from the English faculties of important universities around the world have, for the past forty years, sifted and evaluated the evidence and continue to do so today: ‘Was it Platonic?’ ‘Did they kiss?’ ‘Did they touch below the Mason-Dixon?’ ‘Did the one squirt the other with the fluids of his epididymis?’ These are very, very clever questions for very, very clever people. I do not propose to tackle them here.

  Alec's homosexuality at Sherborne affected his relationship with Arthur. Afterwards, as I have said, he continued to publish his opinions on homosexual love to his father's acute discomfort. I do not know if Arthur suspected Evelyn and his university friends of sexual congress, but I think he probably did. When Alec visited Oxford he sensed a ‘strong homosexual undertone’ among Evelyn's set and Arthur must have noticed it also when Evelyn brought his friends to stay. These things, especially when they develop into love affairs, cannot be easily hidden. Arthur found most of Evelyn's university friends undesirable and the more flamboyant homosexuals among them were not welcome at Underhill. One of these, Terence Greenidge, a dirty and eccentric boy, was sneaked into the house in the middle of the night and remained upstairs until Arthur had left for work. Evelyn once tried to conceal Greenidge in this way for five days at Underhill, but Arthur recognised his smell: ‘Has that dreadful boy been in my house again?’ he asked.

  Many years later Greenidge had most, if not all, of his brain removed in a surgical operation that seemed to have altered his memory of events. Sitting next to my father at dinner on board an express train in November 1963, he claimed that Arthur had particularly admired him from the start. Papa reported back to Evelyn:

  I enjoyed the evening with railway enthusiasts most tremendously, although the motion of the train and the excitement of the conversation had the most deleterious effect on me the next morning, and I felt very ill indeed. Greenidge said: ‘The most extraordinary thing about Arthur Waugh was the way I could tell he took to me immediately. I was most flattered because he did not take to all of Evelyns friends.’ I thought his talk of having a leucotomy was a delusion as he constantly pointed to his forehead like a warrior showing his wounds but there was no mark there. On the other hand he did seem exceptionally placid.

  Evelyn was intensely irritated whenever Arthur ‘took to his friends immediately’ and made sure that the case was straightened in the autobiography he was then writing.

  It may be that Greenidge was more obviously homosexual in his demeanour than some of Evelyn's other friends, but camp behaviour would not in itself have been sufficient to alarm Arthur. Both Dudley Carew and Francis Crease, from Evelyn's Lancing years, were homosexual – Crease particularly and ostentatiously so – yet both were frequent guests at Underhill at Arthur's invitation and in Evelyn's absence. I suspect that he made no link in his mind between camp mannerisms and homosexual activity and, like Evelyn, supposed Crease to be epicene. Had he suspected Crease, or anyone else, of homosexual behaviour I think that Arthur would have disapproved. He flatly refused to shake Oscar Wilde's hand or even to rise from his chair when they last met at a café in Paris in the late 1890s.

  Fathers have always felt uneasy about their sons’ homosexualising.

  Even the ancient Greeks abhorred any form of sodomy that did not conform to the paederastic rite of passage between erastes and eromenos condoned by Athenian convention. Outside it, sons who continued as homosexuals were derided as ‘soft’, radishes were stuffed up their bottoms and they were disinherited. The present-day emotion concerning sons and homosexuality is by no means as straightforward as homophobia, but perhaps it is related – a discrete and less noxious cousin, shall we say? In this regard my family is no exception. When homosexuality was illegal, fathers had to bear – along with the usual anxieties of morality, lifestyle and patri-lineage – the added fear that their sons’ careers would be ruined by exposure to scandal.

  When Alec became a father of two strapping sons he worried himself sick lest they turned out to be er, you know? Andrew, the eldest, did not marry until he was thirty-four: ‘I had begun to worry about him “in that way”,’ wrote Alec, in one of his late reminiscences. ‘In these days it is impossible for parents not to worry about whether their son is going to turn out gay.’ Andrew's marriage was a relief to his father, and his concerns for his younger son dissolved when Peter was at home on leave from the army. Alec's wife thought she might have heard a girl giggling in Peter's bedr
oom. Phew! ‘Nothing queer about Carruthers,’ Alec gloated.1

  Evelyn, who labelled his children indiscriminately, decided that his youngest son, Septimus, was going to be the ‘pansy’ of the family. He was not worried by this, only slightly disappointed.2 My own father, who, as I have said, never had a serious conversation with me in all his life, had been told (I suspect by my mother) that a streak of misogyny had developed in me. She was right. I had recently been chucked by a girlfriend at school and was strutting about the house, vowing to have nothing to do with women for as long as I lived. I was invited into the library (a rare occurrence) to discuss the situation with my father. I knocked and entered apprehensively. He was writing, and looked pained to be reminded of the duty he had elected himself to fulfil. I stood awkwardly in front of his desk and waited for him to speak. ‘My dear boy,’ he pronounced, ‘the anus was designed for the retention and expulsion of faecal matter, not for the reception of foreign organs, however lovingly placed there.’ I left the room in tears of laughter.

  In later life Evelyn told a friend he was anxious that his son – my father – should not discover about his homosexual past. But there are clues to it in many of his books and also in his diaries, which he must have known my father would one day read. In 1954 he wrote to his friend Nancy Mitford: ‘I went to Oxford and visited my first homosexual love, Richard Pares, a don at All Souls.’ He was not secretive about his homosexual youth with others; it only seemed to matter that his son should not find out. Perhaps men with sons will understand this.