Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  … Your account at Barclays, Oxford, is guaranteed by me. If you run short of money do not borrow from Auberon. Make him cash a cheque for you. It will be honoured. The Inspector of Taxes has sent you £2.8/–.

  This letter seems to be all about money. An absorbing topic in old age.

  When I visited Bologna there was a dead saint, dressed as a nun, sitting in an armchair. One could shake hands with her. Can one still? She is called Catherine and died in the 15th century.

  Your affec. papa, EW

  Bron made an effort to find St Catherine although probably not as large an effort as he maintained in his letter:

  Dear Papa,

  Thank you for your letter and for your nice settlements… I have searched high and low in Bologna for St Catherine; I went to the Central Tourist Office and produced my passport and demanded to be allowed to shake her hand but they seemed puzzled and a little shocked. I have approached begging friars and one-eyed guides, but they all claim ignorance of her. The best they could do was show us the body of a Cardinal Rocca which was not nearly so good. I think that she must have rather retired from social life since the good old days.

  ‘Money,’ Bron wrote, ‘is also a fairly absorbing topic in extreme youth.’ Please, he begged, could his father send thirty pounds on to Portofino and to Bologna: ‘Two five pound notes in separate envelopes – my criminal acquaintances tell me that you should wrap the notes in carbon-paper to elude a device employed by the Excise man to detect the Lavery line in bank-notes.’ In his autobiography Bron suggested that Evelyn had deliberately ignored his request for money but this was not true. His father did immediately as asked but, for some reason, the money failed to arrive. After a short wait Bron wrote again, complaining that he was at Death's door and would expire if the money was delayed a day longer. He may have pretended not to have received it. He was still very duplicitous in those days. In any case, by the time he received Evelyn's postcard he was already safely ensconced at Alta Chiara, his uncle's castello in Portofino:

  Dear Bron,

  I am distressed to learn of your starvation and the loss of the notes I sent. Each in a separate envelope, wrapped in carbon-paper. One included a card from myself so I shall no doubt be subject to criminal proceedings unless, as I hope, your servant in Bologna stole them.

  Between school and university I spent eight months in Paris telling my father that all I needed for the whole period was two hundred pounds: I could earn the rest when I got there. ‘No chance,’ he said. ‘You'll be begging me for money within a month.’ Did I detect a sneer? I think so. In Paris I succeeded in living from hand to mouth by teaching English and the violin to children of rich parents, but nobody warned me of the half-term break when every Parisian child of the middle class evacuates the city for the pleasures of la campagne. For three days I stared at my last ten francs wondering whether to exchange them for a Camembert or a packet of cigarettes. In the end I decided the fags would be a greater comfort. For seven days I ate nothing at all, filling my belly with water in the hope of relieving the hunger, but was determined not to ring my father or to give him an ounce of I-told-you-so satisfaction.2 On the eighth day I gave a violin lesson to a six-year-old. ‘Oui, très bon,’ I said hazily, as the boy scraped his way through ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ with a green bogey stuck to his left index fingernail. As soon as the money was in my hands I staggered to a burger bar called O'Kitch, ordered a large O'Kitch et Jiites s'il vous plaît and vomited the first two mouthfuls over the floor of the restaurant – a Pyrrhic victory against my father. I don't think he ever noticed that I had not asked him for money and I was too well-mannered to point it out.

  Money continued to be an absorbing topic for father and son while Bron was studying at Oxford University. He tried but failed to live within his means. Evelyn was not ungenerous and bailed him out several times, sent him bottles of sherry and lent him several grand pictures to adorn his rooms, but Bron set his heart on better rooms for which he would need even grander pictures:

  Thank you for your post-card. Do please come and see my rooms at any time, but I am afraid you will see nothing new. The room is simply a white cube, and the only saving features are your own Solomons and the drawing of the Vatican. If I manage to get the room upstairs I shall need many more pictures – things like King George III – in order to preserve its dignity – what happened to Queen Charlotte? If she's still around she would do… Have you bottled any more sherry? If so can I come and pick it up on Friday? I shall telephone on Thursday to confirm it. I would very much like to bring a few people to show off the pictures to, and Papa, and the cows, and the works. They would be very nice, need nothing to eat (perhaps a little drink)… They would need no reparations, would break nothing, drop no matches. Is the thought more than you can bear? It would be the greatest pleasure to me and them.

  At Combe Florey Evelyn was welcoming to all Bron's friends, though he enjoyed teasing them as Charles Ryder's father in Brideshead Revisited had teased Charles Ryder's guests. One of Bron's university friends was asked: ‘Pray, what would you care to drink?’ ‘A glass of sherry, please Mr Waugh.’ ‘Turtle soup? I fear we have no turtle soup.’

  Everyone appeared to be afraid of Evelyn – except Laura, who stamped on his feet when he was being recalcitrant, Meg, who brazenly admonished him for drinking too much, and Bron, who barracked and joshed him as though he were one of his own raffish student contemporaries. As Bron later put it:

  At about this time I began to be quite fond of my father, never having liked him much in childhood or early youth. As I prepared to leave home and set up my own establishments elsewhere he became more tolerant of my various failings, and in the last five years of his life we enjoyed a distinct cordiality.

  At Oxford Bron made many friends. In the first few weeks he was ecstatically happy, writing to his father, ‘Oxford is the most tremendous fun but it cannot possibly last. Either we shall all get a lot nastier or we shall all be sent down very soon I fear. There are more nice people than I realised existed in the country or the world.’ As he predicted, his joy could not last for ever. The novel he had written in Bologna was he decided NBG – No Bloody Good. He put it away in a drawer and started another, a feeble rant about adolescent sexual frustrations that was never published. He spent too much money, as all students do, fell in love with the wrong girl and did no work.

  Within a month of his joining the university he was involved in a car smash that nearly killed him. Once again Evelyn was reluctant to attend his hospital bedside. Writing to his eldest daughter Teresa, he informed her:

  I am sorry to tell you that your brother, Bron, is again in hospital. On Thursday night a car full of undergraduates on their way to a party in Hampshire ran headfirst into a lorry. Bron was not driving, I am glad to say, but he is the worst injured. He has cracked his skull and will be laid up a long time… he is conscious, in great pain, drowsy and forgetful. His life is not in danger but it will be a setback to his university career. Your mother is going to see him

  on Tuesday. We have had no report of the accident but I presume the undergraduates were at fault. The driver, young Lennox-Boyd, is reported to be dangerous on the roads. If you do not hear to the contrary you may assume that Bron is making a satisfactory recovery. We shall know more after your mother has been to Winchester. I presume he will have another Christmas in hospital.

  On a second visit Laura took Evelyn to Winchester with her, but he did not go into the hospital, preferring to visit his donnish friend John Sparrow, instead.

  During his convalescence Bron decided to take another look at The Foxglove Saga, the novel he had written in Bologna and, much to his surprise, found it brilliant. He particularly chortled at the inventiveness of his dénouement, a savage and surreal episode in which a hairy-legged baby (Tarquin) scratches out the eyes of his adopted mother (a pious, cold-hearted do-gooder called Lady Foxglove) as she attempts to kiss him on the lips. Without telling his father or showing him the manuscript, Bron spent the C
hristmas holidays at Combe Florey furtively perfecting it in his bedroom. When it was ready, he had the manuscript typed and, in mid-January 1960, sent directly to Jack MacDougall, managing director of Chapman and Hall. Perhaps he should have sent it elsewhere, or even, as his father had suggested, anonymously to the agent A. D. Peters, but he needed money badly and Chapman and Hall, who had a sixty-year association with the Waugh family, seemed an expedient choice. Mr MacDougall telegraphed him by return:

  ACCEPT FOXGLOVE WITH PLEASURE HORROR AND DEEP ADMIRATION STOP MANY CONGRATULATIONS = JACK

  In his follow-up letter he wrote, ‘I suppose you were born with a first-rate prose style, for I cannot think how you could have acquired it so soon: there are no signs of the beginner in the writing of this book… Have you shown it to your parents or to anyone else?’ Of course Bron had not shown it to anyone. Evelyn was overjoyed at the news that his son's book was going to be published but Bron would not let him read it until the proofs were ready at the end of February. Evelyn wrote to his son at Oxford on 7 March:

  Dear Bron,

  Your sister Margaret and I returned on Thursday night from an instructive visit to Rome and Athens. We are in good health and found your mother in the same condition. I fell upon Foxglove Saga and read it with great delight. I congratulate you. It is original, lively and well written; far better than I or your uncle Alec wrote at your age. I particularly enjoyed the army episodes. I am confident that you will get encouraging reviews. I don't think you can hope for great financial success but it will be proof of ability and promise which will ensure respectful attention when you come to apply for employment. I urge you, however, not to abandon the idea of taking your degree. To go down without one is not a deep disgrace but it is a minor disadvantage. When you come to seek a job the lack of a degree will be a slight bias against you in most occupations. You are at your ease in Oxford. It is a place with numberless opportunities for enjoyment. Your difficulties, you say, are financial. These, I think, must be the result of gluttony. The world is full of much more expensive restaurants than can be found in Oxford. You will not solve your problem by changing your address. Do not count on any great gain except in prestige from your book. Prestige is more enjoyable at Oxford than in Paris, London, New York or Bologna. Make the most of it.

  The copy of Foxglove I have read is, I know, uncorrected. I enclose a list of some errata. Note especially: the more fantastic the incidents of the book, the more important to preserve plausibility in detail. There is no point in setting your school in N Ireland where it could not exist and from which a sick monk would not be transported to a London hospital. If Lady F. was Lady Julia Something she would

  still be Lady Julia when married to a knight; not Lady F. You suggest that young Foxglove has a long career in the army and then sharply curtail it. I think it is a great mistake to call your characters (in the narrative, not in the dialogue) sometimes by their surnames and sometimes by their Christian names. I think (and this is purely a matter of taste) that it is a mistake for the author to lapse into slang when the book is not written in the first person. But, perhaps, you have changed all this in your revision. It is a mistake to use the name ‘Smith-Bingham’, a small identifiable family. You have great ingenuity in inventing names. I think you introduce the position of O'Connor père as editor too late. The hospital scenes at the beginning are admirable. I especially enjoyed the incident in which Foxglove gets the credit for laying a false scent for O'Connor. The book is full of excellent jokes. Too much stealing perhaps? Theft should be an outrage not a normal form of conduct if it is to be funny. ‘Hen ‘Ken admirable joke. As many others.

  … Try living as I do on one square meal a day. It was enough for Petronicus and too much for Byron.

  The Guinness Family has opened a hotel in Venice. Suck up to Lennox-Boyd and point out, if you are sent down, that his reckless driving is responsible for your failure and perhaps he will find you employment there. It is called Cipriani's.3

  Don't get bored with your book before publication. Keep revising until the last moment…

  Yours affec. E.W.

  In the month before publication Bron attended a string of balls and parties in and around Oxford. A surviving letter to Evelyn describes a long list of them in heady, inebriate detail and ends:

  Last night I was at a very pleasant dance given in Sussex at which there was a room entirely given over to middle-aged love and all the little debutantes stared wide-eyed through the windows at the gross figures sprawled over sofas. My examinations start tomorrow and so I am spending a quiet evening with my books. I should be disagreeably surprised if I do not distinguish myself.

  He knew he had not done nearly enough work to pass, let alone distinguish himself. In truth he was confident of failure. No miracle could save him but he needed money from his father for a holiday in Rhodes. By the time the results were published Bron would be safely abroad. In his autobiography Will This Do? he claimed to have artfully wheedled the money from his father; Evelyn, in a letter to a friend, put it the other way round: ‘Bron said I looked corpulent. He has come down and I am trying to bribe him to go abroad. He shows a painful affection for home life.’ Bron was still in Rhodes when an open postcard from Oxford University arrived at Combe Florey with ‘FAILED’ stamped in red ink on one side.

  On his return he was presented with a stark choice by the university: resit or get out. Sensing the first flowers of literary success with Foxglove he decided on the latter but declared, to his dying day, that his ejection from Oxford was the biggest single humiliation of his life. Evelyn did not seem to mind too much: he said it was ‘foolish’ of Bron to be sent down but blamed the university's draconian rules of matriculation for his leaving. That week he wrote to inform Bron's old Downside master Aelred Watkin:

  Brons failure in schools was a great surprise to him but he is not cast down because at the moment he is flush of money, having received ample advances on his book and having not yet understood that he will have to pay tax on them. I have set him to read Cyril Connollys Enemies of Promise as a warning of the hazards of literature as a profession and I think he would like to find employment.

  He made a lot of friends at Oxford but he was never captivated by the university as I was. Perhaps it is less captivating these days. He might just as well have been

  living in barracks at Windsor for all the part he took in real Oxford life.

  There are indications that his novel is going to have a success. Not perhaps the best thing for the formation of his character but very convenient for my pocket.

  Yours affec. E.W.

  In the run-up to the publication of Foxglove Bron had sent proof copies to many of his father's literary friends. Most were genuinely impressed. Graham Greene wrote to him, ‘You are going to suffer a lot of irritation when reviewers compare you to Evelyn, but The Foxglove Saga has only one parent and stands magnificently alone.’ John Betjeman described Bron as a ‘born novelist’ and Malcolm Muggeridge thought Foxglove ‘the most brilliant work by a young author’ that he had read in years. But some of Evelyn's more prudish Catholic friends were disgusted. One of them, Douglas Woodruff, wrote both to Bron and to Evelyn urging them to withdraw ‘this revolting, callous and filthy book’. Evelyn wrote back:

  Dear Douglas,

  Bron is away at the moment. I am sure that he will receive your criticism with proper respect but I do not think he or the publishers will think it feasible to stop the book appearing in its present form.

  I read it with relief that it was neither blasphemous nor salacious and, to my taste, ‘the coldness’ of the cruelty made it inoffensive and fantastic. I hope you are wrong in supposing it will do him or anyone else any harm.

  Shortly before The Foxglove Saga was published, Bron took a job as copy editor at a magazine called Queen. When the novel came out it was an instant success. Most of the critics praised the work for its freshness and originality. John Davenport, in the Observer, hailed Bron as ‘the new voice of the decade’
, while the most offensive review came from Quentin Crewe, a wheel charioteer, who resented the attention the book was getting at a time when no one was showing the slightest interest in his own recent treatise on the Japanese. ‘Only the son of one of the literary establishment would have got this book published with so much publicity,’ he wailed, in the Sunday Express. ‘I can say without doubt that it is one of the most heartless disagreeable books I have ever read. Contempt reeks from every page… For what? For nothing but the hope of a joke. A joke which never comes. No sadistic, perverted, vulgar trick is missed. No object achieved.’ Strangely, at the time he wrote that review, Crewe was Bron's boss at Queen. Evelyn disliked the magazine. ‘Bron,’ he wrote, ‘has become involved in a very common paper called Queen. Not, as you'd think, about buggery. A sort of whining Tatler’

  He urged his son to resign as soon as the review appeared. ‘Do not be deflected from destroying Crewe,’ Evelyn wrote to him. ‘Take the line “and this is the man who dares set himself up as a critic”.’ Bron, obedient to his laws, pursued Crewe with merciless onslaughts for the next forty years but he needn't have bothered. Crewe's sneering made no impact: by November the book had sold fourteen thousand copies in hardback and was reprinting. Bron's small advance of £150 from Chapman and Hall had been supplemented by £1500 in serialisation rights from the Daily Express and $2000 from the American publishers Simon and Schuster. By the end of July he had found a new job as a sub-editor on the Daily Telegraph, the same paper to which his grandfather, Arthur Waugh, had for thirty years, contributed a weekly book review.