Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  The Doctor drew from his pocket a handkerchief of crêpe de Chine, blew his nose with every accent of emotion, and resumed:

  ‘He is not the son-in-law I should readily have chosen. I could have forgiven him his slavish poverty, his moral turpitude, and his abominable features: I could even have forgiven him his incredible vocabulary, if only he had been a gentleman. I hope you do not think me a snob. You may have discerned in me a certain prejudice against the lower orders. It is quite true. I do feel deeply on the subject … I do not think that any daughter of mine could fall so low. But she is, for some reason, uncontrollably eager to be married to somebody fairly soon.’

  No one who has been reading this book with half an eye to detail could fail to recognise in the character of Decline and Fall's Mr Prendergast certain resemblances to the author's father, Mr Arthur Waugh. Prendergast is an ex-clergyman who has lost his faith and become a school-master. Paul Pennyfeather's first meeting with him re-creates the recurring problem at Underhill: whose turn is it to use the bathroom?

  After breakfast Paul went up to the Common Room. Mr Prendergast was there polishing his pipes, one by one, with a chamois leather. He looked reproachfully at Paul.

  ‘We must come to some arrangement about the bathroom,’

  he said. ‘Grimes, very rarely, has a bath. I have one before breakfast.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Paul defiantly.

  ‘Then I suppose I shall have to find some other time,’ said Mr Prendergast and he gave a deep sigh as he returned to his pipes. ‘After ten years too,’ he added. ‘But everything's like that. I might have known you'd want a bath.’

  Later on, Pennyfeather invites Prendergast to dinner at a local hotel; his emotional reaction is reminiscent of Arthur's response to Alec's birthday present of August 1915:

  ‘Really, Pennyfeather,’ he said, ‘I think that's uncommonly kind of you. I hardly know what to say. Of course, I should love it. I can't remember when I dined at an hotel last. Certainly not since the war. It will be a treat. My dear boy, I'm overcome.’

  And, much to Paul's embarrassment, a tear welled up in each of Mr Prendergast's eyes and coursed down his cheeks.

  When at last Pennyfeather and Prendergast are seated at the restaurant table of the Hotel Metropole Evelyn cannot resist poking fun at his father's table habits:

  Mr Prendergast ate a grape-fruit with some difficulty. ‘What a big orange!’ he said when he had finished it. ‘They do things on a large scale here.’… More food was brought them. Mr Prendergast ate with a hearty appetite … ‘I wonder,’ said Mr Prendergast, ‘I wonder if I could have just a little more of this very excellent pheasant.’… Mr Prendergast ate two pêches Melba undisturbed.

  In a twist that reversed Arthur's long chastisement of Evelyn for drinking, Evelyn allows Mr Prendergast to inebriate himself at the school sports where he accidentally shoots a boy in the foot with a starting pistol. The spectacle of Mr Prendergast drunk moves one of the characters to say, ‘I hope he's none the worse for this. You know I feel quite fatherly towards old Prendy.’ During the event itself Prendergast, deliriously intoxicated, repeats over and over one of Arthur's favourite phrases:

  ‘Well run, sir!’ shouted Colonel Sidebotham. ‘Jolly good race.’

  ‘Capital,’ said Mr Prendergast, and dropping his end of the tape, he sauntered over to the Colonel. ‘I can see you are a fine judge of race, sir. So was I once. So's Grimes. A capital fellow, Grimes; a bounder you know, but a capital fellow. Bounders can be capital fellows; don't you agree, Colonel Slidebottom? In fact, I'd go further and say that capital fellows are bounders. What do you say? I wish you'd stop pulling my arm, Pennyfeather. Colonel Shybotham and I were just having a most interesting conversation about bounders.’

  The silver band struck up again, and Mr Prendergast began a little jig, saying: ‘Capital fellow! Capital fellow!’ and snapping his fingers. Paul led him to the refreshment tent.

  ‘Dingy wants you to help her in there,’ he said firmly, ‘and, for God's sake, don't come out until you feel better.’

  ‘I never felt better in my life,’ said Mr Prendergast indignantly. ‘Capital fellow! Capital fellow!’

  Arthur was as offended by these small teases as he was appalled by Prendergast's demise. Throughout his life, Evelyn advised aspiring young novelists never to kill their characters. With a few exceptions he stuck to the rule himself, keeping his own alive, often moving them from book to book. It is odd, I think, that of the small handful of Evelyn Waugh characters that are murdered, two should have been recognisably based upon his father.4 The manner of Mr Prendergast's death must have been especially galling to Arthur: his head is sawn off by a madman who wants to be a carpenter.

  Needless to say, Evelyn Waugh's marriage to Evelyn Gardner was a failure. Perhaps the only joy in it for either of them had been the escape from their parents to a small, neat, rented flat in Islington. Lady Burghclere was not informed of the marriage until three weeks after the ceremony had taken place. Of course she was furious, but little did she know as she stamped her bossy foot on her drawing-room floor that the marriage had only thirteen months left in it. For most of the time either She-Evelyn was ill in bed, or He-Evelyn was absenting himself to write books.

  By June 1929, She-Evelyn had fallen in love with, and become the lover of, a ‘ramshackle oaf from the BBC. At the beginning of July Evelyn was working on his second novel at a quiet pub in Beckley when he received a short letter from his wife informing him that she was having an affair with John Heygate5 and wished to end their marriage. He returned immediately to London but she was already gone. Deeply humiliated, he wrote to a close friend: ‘I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live.’ The Islington flat was in She-Evelyn's name and he had to leave it, but there was nowhere for him to go except back to ruddy Underhill. He asked Alec to break the sorry news to his parents and six days later, on 11 August 1929, followed up with a letter.

  Dear Mother and Father,

  I asked Alec to tell you the sad, and to me radically shocking news that Evelyn has gone to live with a man called Heygate.6 I am accordingly filing a petition for divorce.

  I am afraid that this will be a blow to you but I assure you not nearly as severe a blow as it is to me… May I come and live with you sometimes?

  Love Evelyn

  P.S. Evelyns defection was preceded by no kind of quarrel or estrangement. So far as I knew we were both serenely happy. It must be some hereditary tic. Poor Baroness.

  All of Evelyn's possessions arrived back at Underhill on 4 September. Arthur told his son that he never wished to speak to She-Evelyn again. K, however, blamed Evelyn for having left She-Evelyn alone for so much of the time. Most people sided with him, but the support of his friends was cold comfort as he was back where he longed not to be, in his father's house. He and Arthur were locked together once more and, in the words of a friend, ‘sniffing at one another other like dogs’.

  At the same time, as Arthur had forewarned, Alec's passion for the flame-haired American temptress Ruth Morris was headed nowhere; but still she dragged her hapless lover over mountain, sea and desert storm for illicit meetings that usually ended in tears. Besides her husband and Alec she had other lovers; one of them was a sailor to whom she always referred as ‘the lad’. When Alec found out about him, Ruth was far from contrite: ‘Don't you see?’ she told him. ‘I love my husband, I'm in love with you, and I'm fascinated by “the lad”.’ Alec, heartbroken as he was, pursued her for three wretched years until he finally had to admit to himself that it was time to let go. I do not think that he was ever, before or afterwards, so in love with anyone else as he had been with Ruth. In 1931 he wrote a poignant novel about their affair (So Lovers Dream), and when his library was sold in the 1960s it was the only one of his manuscripts that he kept back.

  During his three years of travel in pursuit of the elusive Ruth, Alec never forgot about his father. They corresponded regularly and, unlike Evelyn, he was proud to consider Unde
rhill a base of sorts. Although he was innately selfish he felt remorse at having abandoned his father to the baying dogs of the board room at Chapman and Hall. His apology, so to speak, was a 280-page love letter to Arthur in the form of a novel about fathers and sons, entitled Three Score and Ten. As novels go it is pretty feeble, and in later life he struck it off his bibliography. Alec's main weakness as a novelist was his incapacity to see beyond his own experience so that any father-son relationship in his fiction (and there are several) could do little more than mirror his own with Arthur. Three Score and Ten covers three generations but the relationship between the grandfather and the father is precisely the same as that between the father and the son, both drawn from Alec's own bizarre experience of Arthur. In the book the grandfather is Christopher Cardew, his son Hilary and his grandson Geoffrey but, for the sake of clarity, let us call these fictitious characters respectively ‘Fake-Brute’, ‘Fake-Arthur’ and ‘Fake-Alec’.

  In the first part of the book we are treated to a long description of Fake-Brute's relationship with his son Fake-Arthur. We learn that Fake-Brute recites his son's letters by heart and that he ‘simply and unaffectedly lives in and for his son’. Just like Arthur and Alec. ‘Fake-Brute's life was lit by a purpose. His absorption in Fake-Arthur gave a meaning to the most commonplace incidents of his day.’ This goes on for 130 pages until Fake-Arthur is himself grown up, following in his father's profession (they are all lawyers), and with a son of his own (Fake-Alec) with whom (surprise, surprise) he is inordinately obsessed. All the incidents of real Alec's life are there: Fake-Alec is forced to swallow his own vomit at prep school, learns to play toy cricket with his father in the nursery and is read aloud to in the book-room. Fake-Arthur rejuvenates himself by watching his son play cricket, and when the boy gets into the first eleven, his father cries for joy: ‘That is the best news we've had this century!’ Their relationship is spiritual; mother doesn't geddit. Then Fake-Alec goes to war, comes back, gets married and (yes, you've guessed it) has a son and (yes, you've guessed it again) absorbs himself in him. Fake-Alec wonders aloud about how the little critter – still in his pram – will turn out in twenty years’ time:

  In silence Fake-Arthur listened. There it was, the old talk again. The father losing interest in himself, centring his ambitions in his son… And whatever happened the outcome would be the same. There would be the first years of happy intimacy; then there would be the drifting apart, the misunderstandings, the bitterness, and ultimately consolingly, indifference.

  The closing pages go way beyond the sentimental to something that is, in my opinion, almost sinister in its saccharine tartiness:

  The old talk, the old belief; Fake-Arthur wished he could feel ironical and bitter. He could not though. The subject did not seem fitted to irony or bitterness. And he would have turned away but at that moment he felt Fake-Alec's hand upon his arm, just as he had in the old days, when they had walked round the slopes at Fernhurst. And in his son's eyes was that old look of confiding friendliness; and in his voice the warm note he had not heard for seven years.

  ‘Well, if I'm half the father to him that you have been to me, he won't have much to grumble over.’

  Those words, coming suddenly after those frozen months, were more than Fake-Arthur could stand.

  ‘My dear boy,’ he said, but his voice choked he could not speak. If Fake-Alec really did feel that – if he had meant what he had said; and there had been that look in the eyes, that warmth in the voice. Surely he had meant them; anyhow they had been said. But he could not speak. He turned away, and the garden was misty before his eyes. The sounds of the garden were blurred upon his ears, so that he could not hear the harsh rhythm of the fox-trot, so unlike the dream-waltzes of his youth; so that he could not see the green grass and the flowered borders, and the young people, their faces bright with an unreasoning faith and courage, and the sunlight shining down on them.

  Three Score and Ten, which was published by Chapman and Hall in 1929, may have healed the rift between father and son caused by Alec's desertion, but it did nothing for the reputation of its author. The novel was eviscerated by the critics, who discarded it as a shoddy, sub-sentimental piece of unrealistic nonsense. ‘It is surprising how much of an air of immaturity seems to cling to everything that Mr Alec Waugh writes.’ Little did they realise that the novel was in fact based upon a real relationship, but how could they? It all seemed so improbable. One sharp critic, for the New Statesman, derided any father who would be so feeble as to sublimate his own career in the interests of his son. Arthur must have been wounded when he read this:

  Fake-Arthur, in Mr Waugh's book, ends as a failure, as a second rate barrister who has never dared to take silk, with no achievements of any sort to his name, simply because he was not strong enough and had not a broad enough view of life to take the bringing up of his son in his stride. A man of full intelligence and of full appetite for living would regard this duty as only one, even if the main one, in a career which should have many interests. It would have been better for both Fake-Arthur and Fake-Alec if Fake-Arthur could have done this. It is no great fun for a son to be the apple of his father's eye, nor a very good preparation for his own individual existence. If Mr Waugh had shown Fake-Arthur's career as the tragedy created by unavoidable surrender to a weakness of character, he might have written a more interesting novel than he has done.

  Worse was to come. Three Score and Ten had, like so many of Alec's previous books (The Loom ofYouth, 1917; Pleasure, 1921; The Lonely Unicorn, 1922; and Public School Life, 1922), dealt with the issue of public school and homosexuality. The writer Wyndham Lewis noticed this obsession and in his book The Doom of Youth devoted a whole chapter to ‘the strange case’ of Mr Alec Waugh: ‘I do not believe that anyone dipping into Three Score and Ten would fail to detect something rather odd at once. The characters Mr Waugh creates are feminized, as it were, to an obsessional extent.’

  Wyndham Lewis was on to something. He developed the theory that Alec's relentless interest in little boys, with their ‘clean ties and collars, pockets bulging out of shape with letters, knives, chestnuts, compasses’, revealed that the author had the instincts of a woman and that the fathers’ attitudes towards their sons in Three Score and Ten, were not fatherly, in the normal sense, but motherly.

  Mr Waugh must have the soul of a nannie more or less for he can go on like this for pages. Indeed if I had to say what I thought of the strange case of Mr Waugh, I should say that all the feminine, maternal attributes were excessively developed in him, and of course (Mr Waugh being a man) were thwarted. They relieve themselves, no doubt, by means of these incessant literary compositions about small boys with sooty faces and bulging pockets. One feels that the outlet is critically necessary … I do not wish to be offensive to Mr Waugh, but I think it is fair to say that there is something of an obsessional nature at work; and I do think that psycho-analysis would reveal the fact that motherhood in its most opulent form was what Mr Waugh had been destined for by nature, and that a cruel fate had in some way interfered, and so unhappily he became a man.

  Alec was stung by Lewis's attack and avoided the public-school theme in his novels thereafter. When The Doom of Youth first appeared Arthur encouraged him to join with another author in suing Lewis for libel. The charge – not that Lewis had accused Alec of being a mummy-manqué but that he had implied that he was homosexual. The inference of homosexuality was drawn by comparing Lewis's comments on Alec being a woman with remarks about homosexuals elsewhere in the book: ‘The homosexual is, of course, an imitation woman’; and, ‘The traditional feminine obsession with youthfulness is not amongst the least of the female characteristics taken over, and exaggerated, by the homosexual.’ Lewis hotly denied that he had accused Alec of being a homosexual and refused to give an inch to Alec's lawyers. As the case came closer to court Alec started to lose his nerve, imagining a tough cross-examination: ‘Why exactly did you leave Sherborne, Mr Waugh? Why do so many of your books appear to condon
e homosexuality? Are you a poof, Mr Waugh?’ What Alec did not know was that Wyndham Lewis was skint and burdened by four other cases of litigation against him. He, too, was edgy.

  After a protracted show of brinkmanship, Lewis eventually capitulated, agreeing to have all unsold copies of his book pulped on the condition that Alec withdrew the charge.

  Evelyn was less pleased that so many copies of The Doom of Youth had been destroyed: in it Lewis had described him as ‘very intelligent and a great wit. He has written two or three books that are far funnier than those of anybody in England… his posthumous fame is assured.’

  Shortly after the publications of Three Score and Ten and Decline and Fall Arthur decided that he had had enough of Chapman and Hall. He was sixty-four and had been trudging to and from that office every day for twenty-six years. Unfortunately he had failed to save for a pension. Perhaps it is a reflection of his usefulness to the company and his popularity with the staff and shareholders that he resigned as managing director, yet continued as a reader, consultant and company chairman from home on almost full salary. He started his retirement working harder than ever. Besides his duties for the ‘old firm’ he continued as chief book reviewer to the Daily Telegraph, president of the local amateur dramatic association, president of the Dickens Fellowship, and chairman of the Publishers’ Circle. On top of that he wrote two books in quick succession: a history of Chapman and Hall and his autobiography, One Man's Road.

  In 1930 both of Arthur's sons had their big successes. Alec published The Coloured Countries about his travels to Tahiti which, under the title of Hot Countries, sold eighty thousand copies in America and was chosen as the Literary Guild's Book of the Month. Evelyn published a travel memoir, Labels, with Duckworth and a novel, Vile Bodies, with Chapman and Hall. For the rest of his life Evelyn's novels went to ‘the old firm’ and his travel books to Duckworth. Vile Bodies was an instant hit with the public and its success quickly established Decline and Fall as a bestseller too. From here on Evelyn never looked back. He was a famous writer in great demand, standing at the forefront of modern English letters, and remained so to the end of his life. Meanwhile Alec was realising, without a hint of jealousy, that he should sow his future career as a writer in the fertile soil of America. After a few years, the Algonquin Hotel in New York, where he kept in the basement a few pictures, cocktail glasses and a framed picture of Arthur, had established itself in his heart as his second home.