Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

Of greater concern than homosexuality to Arthur during Evelyn's time at Oxford were his drinking, his inability to work hard and his constant overspending. Arthur was not a rich man. He earned about £1000 a year, and it was a sacrifice for him, even with Evelyn's £100 annual Hertford scholarship, to keep him there. He agreed to the minimum £220 grant. Arthur was not mean, nor was he extravagant, but he worried excessively. On top of the £220, Evelyn reckoned, with birthdays and impromptu demands, to screw another fifty pounds out of him during the year and to earn a little extra designing bookplates for friends and dustjackets for Chapman and Hall. Even this was not enough. He mixed with people richer than himself and he was lavish in his generosity to them. He liked giving presents and developed an unquenchable thirst for antiquarian books, smart suits, hats, gold watches, walking-sticks, champagne and restaurants. When his bank refused permission for him to withdraw cash, he borrowed recklessly. He sold his books, pawned his watch, his ring and his decorative skull. The only way to stop his tailors and book-dealers foreclosing was by placing more orders with them on account. Several times he furtively approached his mother, who emptied her savings account to bail him out.

  Alec was continuously loyal during this period. He came down to Oxford every term to recruit young authors to the Chapman and Hall list and to check on his younger brother's progress. He lent Evelyn fivers, took him and his friends to dine at the George, commissioned him to draw the dustjackets of his latest novels and to design for him a personalised bookplate. Evelyn duly produced a charming ink-drawing of a cricketer in a top-hat peering round the Waugh coat of arms. In the bottom right-hand corner a plump Cupid sits, concealing its genitals, on a pile of books. The allusions to cricket and books are obvious. Perhaps only the cupid needs explaining. Although Alec was small, not especially handsome due to his overlarge lower jaw and, by 1923, completely bald on top, he had developed a range of remarkably successful seduction techniques3. He was not especially choosy about his girls for he had arrived early at the conclusion that quantity was preferable to quality – some, even he would admit, were hideous.4 From the last months of 1922 until the day he died, Alec led the life of an eager and adroit womaniser. I think he was an erotomaniac. In ‘periods of chastity’ he paid for sex or would find a blue movie. In 1930 Evelyn wrote to his agent: ‘Alec goes to an indecent cinema every day.’ In old age, living in New York, he ventured out each morning in his outsized sable-lined, high collar coat, heading for the old Hudson Theater on West 44th Street to enjoy an hour or two of American hardcore pornography after breakfast.

  When Evelyn was at Oxford he and his friends nicknamed Alec ‘the bald-headed lecher’, and during the holidays they stalked him around London. As soon as he had ingratiated himself with a young woman they jumped from their place of concealment, screaming, ‘Boo to Alec, the bald-headed lecher!’ Once they hid outside the window of his flat and, as the lady he was entertaining leaned back on the sofa and Alec dimmed the lights, they rapped on the window shouting once more: ‘Boo to Alec, the bald-headed lecher!’ When Evelyn missed his train back to Oxford, he invariably headed to Alec's flat. On one occasion, forgetting the number of Alec's apartment, he opened every door in the block shouting at the top of his voice: ‘Is the bald-headed lecher sleeping in here?’ Next day the neighbours joined forces to demand that Alec find himself another home.

  The flat, I should explain, was at 22 Earls Terrace. Had it not been for Alec's lust, I dare say he would have stayed on at Underhill, but he needed a discrete base for his seductions and, in January 1924, he moved all his clobber from his father's house and set himself up as a sexy Kensington bachelor. By this stage his relationship with Arthur had relaxed since the early days of his working at Chapman and Hall and his marriage to Barbara, but no sooner had he pitched his tent in Kensington than he began to realise once again how much his father meant to him and how greatly he missed his company. Even though he was still seeing Arthur on his two days a week at the Chapman and Hall office he made a point of staying every Saturday night at Underhill. Arthur and K were his first guests for dinner at Earls Terrace.

  To Arthur, Alec's removal from Underhill was a bitter blow, another doleful reminder of the passing of generations and the inexorable approach of the Grim Reaper:

  My dear Billy,

  Your departure from Underhill is a real wrench. Hitherto when you have made other homes, one anchor at any rate has always been made fast here. We have had your things about us, hostages for your return. This parting is different; and though I am sure it was inevitable, it means the breaking up of a tradition.

  But whenever you will come to us, everything will be just the same. And I know in years to come, you will often remember the happy little dinner party of last night and your own kindness in counting us to be your first guests.

  It will be written in all our hearts forever.

  If the future is half as good as the past, there are many good days to come. In that hope…

  ‘On to the bound of the waste, On to the City of God.’

  Ever, as of old, your loving ‘Daddy’

  At Oxford Evelyn's relationship with his father deteriorated rapidly: university presented him with a bright new life. Now his father, Underhill and suburbia were ‘quite indescribably dreary’. In the holidays he spent as little time as possible at home, preferring to stay at friends’ houses or to wile away his days and evenings cavorting with them around London, using Underhill only as an occasional place to sleep. Evelyn and his friends referred to Arthur as ‘Chapman and Hall’, sometimes just as ‘Chapman’, always with a sneer. At first Arthur thought this was funny, but after a while he came to hate it.

  Although Evelyn admired, teased, confided in and borrowed from his older brother, Alec's close bond with Arthur cast him, to some extent, into the enemy camp. At Oxford Evelyn had joined the Aesthetes, a self-conscious band of students whose central philosophy was to laud ‘Art’ and deride money. To these attitudinising young men the worst a fellow could do was earn his living from ‘Art’. This, of course, was the sin that both Chapman and the bald-headed lecher had committed. To Evelyn, with all his young idealism, his family was therefore guilty of a gross betrayal of artistic principle. ‘Bald Head makes money out of writing,’ he complained to his friends.

  Nor could he be certain how much of his dissolute life at Oxford Alec might be reporting back to Arthur. He swore Alec to secrecy but knew that, even if he kept his counsel, Arthur had other friends at Oxford who would doubtless relish the opportunity of bringing scandalous news to Underhill. Alec's last Oxford visit, in the summer of 1924, was particularly suspicious – perhaps he had come as Arthur's spying envoy. He stood for a moment in Evelyn's rooms, lecturing him on his profligacy, his drunkenness and the unsatisfactory quality of his friends. Evelyn was irritated by Alec's ‘gamecock maturity’ but not offended and twenty years later satirised the meeting in Brideshead Revisited, in a scene that cast Alec as Charles Ryder's priggish cousin Jasper:

  Towards the end of that summer term I received the last visit and Grand Remonstrance of my cousin Jasper… Duty alone had brought him to my rooms that afternoon at great inconvenience to himself… Jasper would not sit down: this was to be no cosy chat; he stood with his back to the fireplace and, in his own phrase, talked to me ‘like an uncle’.

  Jasper criticises Ryder for idling his time, associating with undesirable people and for grossly overspending on clothes, wine and pointless decorative artifacts for his room, but Ryder remains unrepentant:

  ‘I am sorry, Jasper,’ I said. ‘I know it must be embarrassing for you but I happen to like this bad set. I like getting drunk at luncheon, and though I haven't yet quite spent double my allowance, I undoubtedly shall before the end of term. I usually have a glass of champagne about this time. Will you join me?’

  So my cousin Jasper despaired and, I learned later, wrote to his father on the subject of my excesses who, in his turn, wrote to my father…

  In 1948 Alec sportingly picked this pass
age for inclusion in These Would I Choose, a ‘personal anthology’ of the poetry and prose most connected with his life.

  The ‘Jasper’ meeting was not without effect. Evelyn's words had evidently sunk deep into Bald Head's bald head. They resulted in a curious letter that was written by Alec as though it came from Evelyn's hand. He took Evelyn's points and forged them into a coherent argument for Arthur. There is no record of Arthur's reaction to it. He must have wondered why his younger son had become so detached as to be unable tell him these things in person. Whatever Arthur thought, Alec was pleased enough with the letter to have it published in the Sunday Times under the title ‘Youth's Protest – The Right to Satisfy Oneself – A Letter to a Father’ by Alec Waugh. As well as being a defence of Evelyn's Oxford behaviour, the letter also contains a hint that Alec may have been dissatisfied with the special brand of paternal relationship that had hemmed him in at Sherborne:

  I am very sorry, my dear father, that my career in Oxford is making you unhappy. I have done, you say, extremely little work during the last three terms, and unless I put in at least ten hours’ work a day my chances of getting even a second are most unpromising. Well father I have never attempted to deceive you. I have never pretended that I was working when I was not. I worked extremely hard to get my scholarship because I knew that probably I would not be able to come up without it. I worked fairly hard to pass my history previous because, had I not passed, I should have lost my scholarship. If I had worked harder I would have probably, you say, have got ‘distinction’. I am vain enough to agree with you. I think I should. But I did not want distinction. I only wanted not to lose my scholarship. That was a year ago. Since then I have done practically no work at all. It is most unlikely that I shall get a second, though I shall be surprised if I do not get a third.

  Thirty years ago I would have been told that my behaviour was unfilial, that the least I could do in return for all you had done for me was to get a first. That was the old attitude and perhaps, father, that is the difference between our generations. ‘For twenty years,’ you said, ‘my father has given me a home and worked extremely hard to pay for my education. He has denied himself a great deal so that I might go to a great school. He has the right to ask something of me in return. It would give him immense pleasure if I get a first.’

  That is the way we are told to feel towards our parents,

  but is it a compliment to them if we feel like that? Is it not as good as saying that our career is nothing more than a focus for parental pride; that our parents are asking us to succeed not for our sakes but for theirs, so that they shall be able to say in their clubs: ‘My boy made eighty yesterday against Shrewsbury’ or ‘My boy has got a scholarship’? Is it not as good as saying that our parents send us to schools and colleges so that we may provide them with opportunities of self-laudation? That we are, in fact, to live, not our life there, but theirs; that school and Oxford are not to be the foundation to our careers but the coping-stone of theirs?

  I am not going to be a schoolmaster or a barrister or a civil servant. And I cannot help feeling that outside the learning professions the distinction between first and third is not going to matter much. Not enough, at any rate, for me to think that the gaining of it would compensate for the number of things I would have to lose by working for it. But father, I am throwing my energies into other things. Into the things that appear to me to be more important. I may be wrong of course, but if I am, I shall pay for it. I am prepared for that. It is after all my career and if I fail it will be myself that will have to suffer.

  That, at any rate, father, is the way in which I and my friends look upon things. We are prepared to pay for our mistakes, but we have, we consider, the right to satisfy ourselves that they are indeed mistakes and not, as we think them now, the ways of wisdom.

  At university Evelyn's bumptious behaviour earned him many enemies. The most prominent of these was his history tutor, later the Dean of Hertford, C. R. M. F. Cruttwell. Evelyn's description of him in A Little Learning is memorable:

  He was tall almost loutish, with the face of a petulant baby. He smoked a pipe which was usually attached to his blubber-lips by a thread of slime. As he removed the stem, waving it to emphasis his indistinct speech, this glittering connection,

  extended until finally it broke leaving a dribble on his chin. When he spoke to me I found myself so distracted by the speculation of how far this line could be attenuated that I was often inattentive to his words.

  Cruttwell loathed Evelyn as much as Evelyn loathed Cruttwell. But the student was brighter, sharper and funnier than the tutor and in the long battle that raged between the two it was Evelyn who would eventually emerge as victor. Cruttwell took Evelyn's scholarship away; later he blocked his attempts to get a job, and did his level best to throw a spanner into the works of his first marriage. In retaliation Evelyn outed Cruttwell as a dog sodomist, prancing under his windows with a stuffed whippet in the middle of the night singing at the top of his voice:

  Cruttwell dog, Cruttwell dog, where have you been?

  I've been to Hertford to lie with the Dean. Cruttwell dog,

  Cruttwell dog what did you there?

  I bit off his penis and pubic hair.

  Freudian scholars of Waugh have reached the unanimous conclusion that Cruttwell was innocent of these charges, concurring, to a man, that Evelyn invented the slander in order to deflect attention from his own sexual embarrassments. I cannot agree. Evelyn's rooms were directly beneath the filthy dean's and he heard, with his own ears, night after night, the helpless yelps, snaps and growls of Cruttwell's canine victims as, one after another, they were pinned to his seedy office floor as he forced them down with urgent, lascivious strokes, ramming at them with his fat merciless trunk. Furthermore my father was told by a geography professor from Hertford whom he met years later on Paddington station that the carpet in Cruttwell's room, which had not been changed since the twenties, still carried the irradicable proof of his crime – STAINS! I believe this implicitly. My father was so shaken by these stories in his youth, that he developed a lifelong attachment to Pekineses and a desire to protect all canine species from the baleful effects of human injustice. In the 1979 general election he stood for Parliament in the interests of the Dog Lovers Party, polling nearly eighty votes from like-minded enthusiasts in North Devon.

  Cruttwell died in ignominy and despair at a lunatic asylum in Bristol in 1941. Until that date Evelyn had littered his fiction with twerps called Cruttwell. As each book was published the real Mr Cruttwell shuddered in apprehension of what new character Evelyn might have devised to taunt him. One of his novels has a ‘fluffy-haired’ girl called Gladys Cruttwell; then there is Toby Cruttwell, ‘a very silly’ criminal who pops up in another. General Cruttwell, a conceited ass, makes his appearance in Scoop. They are everywhere these Cruttwells. Evelyn's books are full of them: Cruttwells with fake tans, Cruttwells who are junior shop assistants, Cruttwell the bone-setter, Cruttwell the scoutmaster and even Cruttwell the raving lunatic. And his passion did not die with the real Cruttwell's demise in ’41. After his death the game enriched itself and continued to be passed, like a relay baton, down through the generations. In much the same way as a son of the Italian Mafia class finds himself honour-bound to treat his father's enemies and all their descendants as his own bitterest foes, so the Waughs have soldiered on with their vilification of this horrible man's memory. My father, who was only two years old when Cruttwell died, never missed a chance to harass it: ‘It was from this unfortunate man that the word Cruttwellism was coined to describe the abominable vice of sodomy with a dog,’ he wrote in the Spectator, ‘but if he is remembered at all today, it is usually with pity. Nobody spares a thought for his dogs.’

  Papa took up the theme again in a long review of The Dictionary of National Biography for the specialist magazine Book and Bookmen. On browsing the volume that covered 1941–50, he was disconcerted to find that the dean, whose only possible claim to fame was an inaccur
ate and outdated history of the First World War, should be honoured with an entry in those hallowed pages. Most of all he objected to one sentence: ‘Perhaps the warmth of Cruttwell's nature appeared most attractively in his passion for flowers and for country life: he was never happier than at his country home with a friend and a gun.’

  Loyalty, filial piety, family honour – what was it that bade him expose this sinister whitewash?

  The idle reader might, I suppose, think it curious that no affection for animals is mentioned, or that in place of the usual cliché of a dog and a gun, with which so many people are never happier in the country, Mr Cruttwell would seem to have preferred a friend and a gun. Nor is much clue to the mystery afforded by the one criticism which the DNB does allow: ‘He had his prejudices (although misogyny, of which some suspected him, was not among them)’ – so I suppose I had better blurt out my piece in simple English. Some may have suspected this repulsive man of misogyny – I do not know – but the peculiarity for which he was much more widely suspected was sexual congress with dogs. Whether he was innocent or guilty of this crime it is for this that he is fabled in song and story and now that his history of the Great War has been superseded by newer and better books on the same subject, it is probably the only thing for which he will be remembered at all.

  If we only have the DNB as our guide his evil memory will have receded into this new image of a flower-sniffing country lover, so far removed from any improper relationship with dogs that he even refused to take one out shooting with him, despite the obvious temptation: his passions were reserved for flowers, which are unprotected by law.

  As part of the Evelyn Waugh centenary celebrations in 2003 I was invited to give an after-dinner speech in the dining hall of Hertford College to an audience of two hundred international Waugh scholars. Together they made a glorious spectacle: a Chinese, next to an Indonesian, next to Spaniard, next to an American, next to an Australian, next to a Russian – each a learned professor whose life had been devoted to the study of my grandfather's work. As I stood addressing these good people from a spot directly beneath a pompous boardroom portrait of Cruttwell (cack-handedly executed by his cousin Grace), great waves of family pride engulfed me. That ancient wound needed once more to be reopened. ‘Let us now raise our glasses and drink to C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, that he may for ever be remembered as a dog sodomist and a total shit.’ With V signs to the portrait, our glasses clinked and the two hundred clever professors drank deep.