Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  My daughter Teresa has returned from Massachusetts very lean and spotty. I had envisaged a card:

  The Earl & Countess of Onslow

  &

  Mr & Mrs Waugh

  Request the pleasure of your company

  At the marriages of their daughters

  Teresa

  To Mr A. Waugh and Mr J. D'Arms respectively

  But, alas, it seems T. Onslow will not become Catholic so she and Bron would not be admitted to the sanctuary but would have to stand outside the rails. This would cause offence to Lady Onslow. Both weddings fill me with gloom.

  Immediately after the D'Arms wedding Evelyn retired, bilious, to the library and composed there a short recessional:

  The tumult and the shouting dies; The D'Armses and the Waughs depart; Still stands the mound of dough and ice – Vain product of the baker's art. The wedding-cake is with us yet, Lest we forget; lest we forget.

  Bron wrote to reassure Evelyn that the cake contained a mountain of healthy, sustaining ingredients and he should tuck into it with relish. He was aware that his father was wondering how he could get out of coming to his own wedding: Evelyn's record for turning up at his son's events was poor. I have already recorded that he and Laura were the only parents not to attend ‘passing out’ at Mons. They also ducked Bron's twentieth birthday party, fearing press photographers, and Evelyn flatly refused to attend his twenty-first. This was a lavish affair at the Hyde Park Hotel paid for by Chapman and Hall out of their profits on The Foxglove Saga. The party was crowded with important people – the Prime Minister, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Sir Isaiah Berlin and many of Evelyn's closest and oldest friends – but Evelyn and Laura stayed at home. He had written to Bron a fortnight before: ‘Your publicity has been such that no cocktail party could enhance it.’ Bron (in handwriting that suggests he might have been drunk) wrote back to both parents: ‘I am awfully sorry you can neither come to the party. People will say. And lots of really quite nice people are coming. Still. I have so much news but no time. I keep buying Christmas presents for Papa, but none for anybody else.’

  Evelyn got it into his head that the Onslows had invited four hundred farm labourers to the wedding, none of whom had been in their employ for more than a year. At first he announced that he would be staying at home, but Laura protested. His next plan of escape was to attend a rival society wedding that was due to take place on the same day. Viscount Encombe was marrying the absurdly named Countess Claudine Maria Olga Columba Fidelis von Mountjoye-Vaufrey et de la Roche of Vienna. Uncle Auberon chose this event over his nephew's. Laura forbade Evelyn from attending the Encombe gig and Bron wrote a week before the ceremony to make sure: ‘I look forward to seeing you on Saturday. I hope you will have the fortitude to remain throughout the reception – at any rate until the handshaking and photographing are over.’ But Evelyn saw another opportunity of escape when Meg announced that she had a tummyache. Two days before the wedding Evelyn sent a postcard to Bron at Clarges Street: ‘Your cousin Antonia has sent what she thinks is a paper-knife but I think it is a skewer. It is of white metal, possibly silver, certainly not modern. Your sister Margaret has the grippe. I may have to stay and nurse her while your mother attends your nuptials.’

  Laura acted with uncharacteristic resolution in hauling Evelyn by car up to London, but on the morning of the wedding he refused to get out of bed. She had to drag him out and forcibly dress him. July 1, 1961, was the hottest day for years, and Evelyn was sweltering, crusty and uncomfortable. When he saw the wedding photographs in the next day's newspapers he was horrified by his own obesity and started immediately on a purgatorial diet. But nothing could save him now. He had started on a long, declining slide; a deep, painful and unbudgeable depression that would hound him to an early grave.

  Alec made nibbling attempts with his younger son, Peter, to reproduce something of the old father-son bond that he had enjoyed with Arthur, but his efforts were dilatory. He simply wasn't around often enough. If Peter was Alec's favourite child he failed to notice it until he read his father's last memoir, published in 1978: ‘My father was no longer there,’ Alec wrote in The Best Wine Last, ‘and Peter was; Peter who would later fill the role of copain in my life, was to take in a sense my father's place of confidant and companion.’ But how was Peter expected to fill this role of copain? Alec saw his children only for a few weeks of the year. For most of the time he was flitting like a brightly coloured butterfly in striped cricket blazer and broad brimmed cha-cha hat between New York, the Mediterranean, the West Indies, the Seychelles and the South China Seas.

  More interesting to Alec than his family were his writing, his hankering for fresh experience on which to base novels and the rejuvenescence he experienced during copulation. In 1954 he fell in love with a divorced forty-year-old American mother of two. Virginia Sorenson enjoyed a brief period of fame in America as the author of children's books and novels about her traumatic Mormon upbringing but now, I believe, her reputation has extinguished. By 1963 she was agitating for marriage with Alec. The idea of settling down with Virginia appalled him; besides, he had his ‘pipelines’ – girlfriends – in other places, one in France, one in Tangier, another in England. He liked it that way. But Virginia was persistent: if he wouldn't marry her she would leave him. Alec wrote despondently to Evelyn in mid-August:

  Almost certainly during the next month I shall be going through a form of legal marriage with Virginia Sorenson – an American writer – with whom I have been cohabiting intermittently for the last nine years. It is my hope that this covenant will not have any effect on my present way of life; I don't plan to put down roots anywhere. I am for the first time in my life doing something which I know is wrong. Please say a prayer for my imperilled soul.

  But before he could marry Virginia Alec had a redoubtable hurdle to jump in the shape of his former wife and the mother of his children. Joan told him that if he married Ms Sorenson she would throw his cricket kit, his books and all the rest of his possessions out of Edrington and he would never be welcome there again. In the interests of peace, and to maintain the slender thread of his relationship with his three children, Alec postponed his plans.

  In the spring of 1969, he was in Washington when a telephone call came through from England to say that he was urgently needed at Joan's bedside. She was dying. She told him she was leaving the house to her elder son. Alec asked Peter to sell his library of several thousand books on a 20 per cent commission. What pictures and furniture he owned he gave to Andrew. His papers, he decided, would be sold to the University of Texas. Two years earlier he had presented Sherborne School with the manuscript of The Loom of Youth and a bound volume containing all the correspondence concerning the novel's great controversy – letters from Arthur Waugh, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and many others.

  Immediately after Joan's funeral, Alec set out possessionless with a new spring in his step for Alexandria where, by arrangement, Virginia was waiting to greet him and to insist, once again, that they be married. This time he bowed to the inevitable, accepting patiently her little Mormon hand.

  This was the end of many things for me [he wrote], of my marriage, of my home, of my life in England. In a way too of my fatherhood. I remembered how when my mother had died I had lost touch with a whole group of family friends of whom she had written to me. The same thing would happen now with Andrew, Peter and Veronica. They would be on their own. They had come into their inheritance. I had no place any longer in the direction of their lives.

  Neither before nor during his marriage to Virginia did Alec let up in his quest for sexual experience. I suspect he was driven by a morbid fear of failing potency. One of my uncles remembers him in Tangier slapping his maid's bottom each time she passed him. ‘This way I keep my powers à point,’ he said. In his sixties he took medical advice on sexual stamina and boasted to his brother that he had found the perfect cure for impotence. ‘My brother Alec,’ Evelyn wrote to Ann Fleming, ‘has fallen victim to the conti
nental regime of aphrodisiac injections and is leading a life that is not seemly at his age.’ The treatment may have had a warping effect on his mind for, as time went on, the sexual content of his novels increased. His first big book after Island in the Sun, entitled Fuel for the Flame, was loaded to breaking point. He sent a copy to Evelyn, who wrote back to congratulate him: ‘It was extremely kind of you to send me your new novel. I have so far read only fifty pages but there have been five fucks already. I look forward to many more.’ Evelyn did not live to read Alec's later novels. In one called The Fatal Gift (1973) an aunt canes her twelve-year-old nephew during the school holidays. The boy enjoys this so much that the very thought of his next visit inspires an erection. His aunt is especially talented at thwacking a particular area of his bottom that is erogenous – a zone that his housemaster always misses. After each beating she holds a damp flannel over his cock to achieve detumescence. ‘I shan't be using this flannel again,’ she said to him, after his third stay. ‘Next holiday you will be too old for it. I'll show you what to do instead.’ I have often wondered if this form of seduction is not based on a real life experience that Alec had had with one, or more, of his maiden aunts at Midsomer Norton. Connie? Elsie? Trissie? We shall never know.

  There is a popular game in which children entangle themselves, giggling, on a plastic mat. An adult version may be attempted by re-enacting a lesbian love scene from Alec's 1970 novel Spy in the Family, although I think it may be impossible.

  At one moment they had swung into reverse, their knees drawn close under their chins. Lying on their right sides, Myra's left foot pressed against Anna's shoulder-blade; Anna, her left leg drawn under Myra's, pressed her foot under Myra's arm; her left hand, from beneath her leg, was clasped around the small of Myra's back. Myra's own left hand was curved between Anna's thighs. Their breasts were held apart by a confusion of knees and elbows, but each was completely, intimately exposed to the other's darting tongue.

  On the back of the book's dustjacket – it is subtitled ‘an erotic comedy’ – a large photograph of the simian roué in his mid-seventies grins benevolently. His waist has spread, he wears a striped shirt and an MCC blazer and, round his neck, a silk foulard scarf. What had become of Alec? Where had the bright-eyed eager Sherborne youth gone? The boy who had immersed himself in Swinburne, Turgenev and Byron, and once hoped, with his father, that he would become a great English poet? From 1955 all he desired was to have one more literary success on the scale of Island in the Sun – just one. His attempts to achieve this goal were craven and it was not to be. In his last years his literary judgement waned but he was far from giving up, obstinately producing two thousand handwritten words a day until, in September 1981, he suffered a series of strokes and shortly afterwards died at the grand old age of eighty-three. His last years, spent cooped up with Virginia at 717 Bungalow Terrace, Tampa, Florida, were not his happiest. But, for all the roaming spirit of his lifetime, he expressed a wish to be cremated and for his ashes to be interred in the same grave as his father and mother in the Hampstead churchyard near to Underhill.

  When they bring back that thing that once was me

  And lay it in some quiet grave to rest,

  Say that a weary river, long distrest

  With aimless wanderings winds at length to sea.

  How prophetic ‘The Exile’, a poem he had written as a sixteen-year-old at Sherborne, turned out to be. Alec was a less than aver-agely attendant father yet his children and a phenomenally wide circle of friends were shocked and saddened by his death. ‘I have not seen nearly as much of my children as I would have liked,’ he wrote at the end of his life. ‘I have been a casual father. But their company has immeasurably enriched my life. I hope I have not been a nuisance to them.’

  Shortly after his death, his wife Virginia wrote to Bron: ‘Alec loved you so very much and often said he felt closer to you in certain ways than to any of his own children.’

  As a writer Alec had a special sympathy with Bron that was absent from his relationship with his own sons – but he had never encouraged them to write and consequently neither did. Andrew went into the Navy and later into Lloyds Insurance; Peter pioneered an innovative photographic technique called photoaquatint, then retired to a hermetic life of clocks and pedigrees in an ancient mill house near Reading. Veronica is a furniture restorer.

  My father was no great champion of Uncle Alec's novels, but he admired his fluent prose and was inordinately fond of the man. Alec's last letter to him from Tampa is dated a few months before his death: ‘I am doubtful if I shall ever return to England. I am rather feeble on my pins and only have one real meal a day. But I do not repine. We are well content here and we rely on seeing you one day very soon, your devoted Uncle Alec.’ They never met again.

  In his obituary essay for the Spectator my father wrote a moving tribute:

  In old age Alec resembled nothing so much as a tortoise – toothless, slow-moving, unaggressive, benign, with a little piping voice so soft as to be almost indistinguishable. Like a tortoise, his natural equipment was designed more for survival than for battle and conquest. But he was a Waugh and I find myself inexpressibly bereaved.

  There is no point in pretending (nor did Alec try to pretend) that he was anything but a minor writer, yet he took a certain pride in his craft and at their best his books are eminently readable. He was genuinely proud of his younger brother's success: ‘Evelyn's fame has inflated my stock upon the literary bourse,’ he used to say. In 1955 he supported Evelyn in a libel action against the Daily Express newspaper, travelling from Tangier to London to testify that his brother's books were far better than his, far more popular and sold in greater numbers. The loyalty, affection and pride with which he regarded his complicated younger brother were all remarkable and it is in these spheres that I detect in my Great Uncle Alec flashes – no, glimmers perhaps – of greatness.

  The years between Bron's marriage and Evelyn's death were of happy association for father and son. ‘In his later years my father had lost all terror,’ Bron wrote in his autobiography, ‘becoming bland and benevolent, and genuinely pleased to see his eldest son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren… Where before he had been gloomy, bad tempered and on occasions aggressive, he became benign and affectionate.’ He attributed Evelyn's change of attitude to a dental operation in which he had all of his teeth removed without anaesthetic. Arthur Waugh had his extracted in the same way, and Evelyn had been impressed by his father's fortitude. I think it was for this reason that he declined the dentist's painkillers.

  Bron and Evelyn's lately happy relationship might have been terminated prematurely in 1962 if Evelyn had discovered that his son had talked about him to a journalist on the Sunday Telegraph. The story, simply told, was that Evelyn had turned down an invitation to lunch with the Prime Minister because he felt that it was being offered as a sop in lieu of a knighthood. At the time Bron was working at the Telegraph and shuddered to see an angry letter from his father sitting on a colleague's desk. ‘Dear Papa,’ he wrote, ‘I have just read your letter to the Sunday Telegraph. They are delighted with it. It was not I who sold you to them, although I had a theory as to who did.’

  By a stroke of good fortune Evelyn happened to have told the story to Pamela Berry, an old friend of his and the wife of Lord Hartwell, the Telegraph's proprietor, and thus it was she, not Bron, whom Evelyn was convinced had betrayed him.

  Dear Bron,

  Of course I never suspected you of betraying me to the Sunday Telegraph. The culprit was Pam who is now known alternatively as ‘Little Miss Judas Sneakhostess’ and ‘Lady Randolph Grubstreet’. Alas pressure from the Prime Minister obliged me to withdraw my letter – or rather compassion for his secretary P. de Zulueta, a decent young man, who got into very hot water with the P.M. for instigating me to write.

  There used in my youth to be much indignation and contempt for ‘sneak guests’ – impecunious young men who sold gossip to the papers. ‘Sneak hostesses’ of ample means and no
motive but malice are a new development.

  I have contented myself with warning Lord Hartwell against his butler who as the only other person in the room besides Pam must be in illicit communication with one of his editors.

  The breach between myself and Pam is final. I do not think this will affect your position in any way. You got the job without my assistance.

  It is, of course, possible that Evelyn suspected it was Bron all along, but he had other reasons to be annoyed with Pamela. She was trying to bully him into letting her have a picture of his that she coveted – a Fleet Street scene by Atkinson Grimshaw. Eventually he gave it to her but, in the meantime, he enjoyed telling his friends that he would never speak to her again.

  Throughout the slow, dispiriting decline of his last years Evelyn continued to take a moderate interest in Bron's career. He abhorred the Sun, the Mirror, the News of the World and the Sketch, to which Bron had contributed in his early days, but was filled with pride and admiration when, in February 1963, he started a discursive column in the Catholic Herald. Within weeks the letters page was jammed with correspondence from those wanting Auberon Waugh sacked versus those wishing to compliment the editor on hiring such a bright new columnist.

  Evelyn wrote often to compliment Bron on his pieces and followed every controversy with keen interest, occasionally chipping in himself under the nom de plume Mrs Teresa Pinfold. ‘Some lunatic this week suggests you were brought up in affluence. Little does he know… I hope you are keeping a scrap book of the cream of your columns and of the controversy … It is rumoured that the Catholic Herald is up for sale. You should be represented as its chief asset – as indeed you are.’ But Bron was attracting not just angry letters to the paper but libel actions as well. One came from the author and academic C. P. Snow, who objected to the accusation that he had ambitions to ‘take over the reins of government’, and another from the philosopher Bertrand Russell for a slur on his moral integrity. ‘If ever a philosopher has deserved his cup of hemlock, Lord Russell has,’ the article stated. Russell, through his solicitors, pursued the Herald for a retraction and damages, claiming that Bron's article had insinuated that he was ‘guilty of the conscious and sustained corruption of youth to serve the international ends of communism’. Evelyn wrote to comfort Bron: ‘Don't worry about Bertrand Russell. There is no chance of a jury supporting him on any subject. Anyway the law courts are so congested that he will be dead before the case is called.’