Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  The Russell case never came to court but the Herald sacked Bron all the same. Evelyn promptly cancelled his subscription. After that he continued to read Bron's journalism in other papers and comment upon it. In one he found a sentence he disliked, cut it out, stuck it on to a postcard and sent it to his son: ‘Unhappily expressed. E.W.’

  Bron's second novel Path of Dalliance drew heavily on his short experience of Oxford University. He refused to show it to his father until it was published. Evelyn was worried, writing to his daughter, Teresa, in America: ‘Bron is being very secretive about his new novel which appears in ten days’ time. He wrote it with unhealthy speed and I have fears that its reception may disappoint him. Critics are always eager to welcome new talent and then to discourage it.’ When Path of Dalliance was published in November 1963 reviews were mixed. John Betjeman compared it to Dickens and Freya Stark to Shakespeare. Alec wrote to Bron: ‘I think Dalliance has cleared your road; it proved that Foxglove was not an isolated firework display. A genuine career is on the march. Salutations.’ But Evelyn felt the opposite. He regretted that Bron had rushed it. Parts were ‘very funny’ he thought, but others were ‘a bore… He should have taken more trouble over his second book – always a difficult one.’ Path of Dalliance confirmed Evelyn in his opinion that Bron would probably never manage to support himself as a novelist. Six days later he wrote to wish him well for his birthday. My mother was pregnant: I was in utero.

  Dear Bron,

  My best wishes for your birthday. I hope that the coming year will find you the father of a son as worthy of your devotion as you have been of mine. Also that you will be in honourable employment… Teresa tells me you propose to call a daughter Charlotte – very nice. For a son why not Alexander Foxglove Brideshead Pinfold Clandon Forty-Martyrs Dillon?7

  The false teeth that Bron believed to have been the cause of his father's improved demeanour felt uncomfortable in the mouth and resulted in a loss of appetite that precipitated his mental collapse. Changes to the Catholic liturgy, a reluctance to write any further novels, too many contracts for non-fiction books he was not interested in writing, boredom, punitive taxation, gin, paraldehyde, the ‘abominable problem of human relations’ – there were many reasons for Evelyn's decline in the 1960s. However, Bron, unlike Meg, was not someone in whom Evelyn chose to confide, though occasional hints of depression sneak into his letters:

  Dear Bron,

  I was very sorry to have to ask you and Teresa to postpone your visit. The truth is that the house has been too much frequented of late; we have no servants; I have work to do and there is much to be done in securing the house against burglary during our absence. We hope very much you will both come in the Spring.

  Bron replied, ‘I am sorry to hear the house has been too much frequented of late, and would not wish to do anything that might aggravate such a state of affairs.’ A similar outburst of self-pity from Evelyn prompted Bron to offer his parents the dedication to his third novel, Who Are The Violets Now? in 1965. Evelyn had written a stark list of bullet points:

  Dear Bron,

  Thank you for your letter.

  Was M. de Vogue your host at Epernay?

  I look forward to your novel.

  I caught a glimpse of you and Teresa on the platform at Newbury. I was returning from a funeral – the only social functions I now attend.

  I congratulate you on acquiring a Canaletto…

  Your mother-in-law was making a tour of the criminal

  classes of Wessex and kindly included us.

  Neither your mama nor I have been very well lately. My love to Teresa, Sophia, etc.

  EW

  Bron replied:

  I am sorry to hear that you are both unwell. Would the dedication of my new novel to you both be of any comfort? It is a small return indeed for all the education, nourishment etc that I have received from you over the years, but it would give me great pleasure if you were to accept.

  If the idea gives you no pleasure, perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me soon, as the book goes to press on Monday, and there will be no time to alter the page proofs. As it stands, the dedication is simply: ‘For My Parents’.

  I think it is livelier than the last effort. If it fails, I shall dedicate myself to some serious occupation like accountancy, or the prison service.

  Ever your affec. son Bron

  Evelyn was touched by the dedication but in the depth of his depression found himself to be more interested by the behaviour of his peacocks than by anything else:

  Your mother and I are greatly exhilarated at the prospect of your dedication of your novel to us. Thank you very much indeed. It makes us more eager to read the book.

  I am happy to announce that pea-hen has hatched two chicks of indeterminate sex but apparent health. We are going to great trouble to nurse them through their adolescence with various chemicals. It is some consolation to me.

  This time Bron allowed his father to see the proofs in advance of publication. Evelyn replied to him cordially:

  Dear Bron,

  The proofs of your new novel arrived yesterday and I spent a very happy day in reading it. I congratulate you on the best constructed and controlled work you have yet done and am very proud that it should be dedicated to me. I hope it achieves the success it deserves.

  I think the quotation from which the title is derived ought to appear on the title page. It is obscure to those as ill-educated as myself.8

  I find it curious that you should demonstrate intimacy with the underworld of urban lodging-houses and tea shops which surely you have never experienced; but the picture is convincing.

  A few slips: Carlton House was demolished a century before your book. Do you not mean C. H. Terrace (pp 27, 33); Altera persona seems unfamiliar to me (117). Do you not mean alter ego as on p. 189? p. 140, l. 15 delete ‘and’. p. 173, l. 13 delete ‘ex-’ p. 36 insert? after ‘happens’.9

  I greatly admire the continued and varied use of the pet animal motive.

  My love to Teresa, Sophie and Alexander,

  E.W

  Evelyn's last two years were spent in a welter of ascetic boredom and self-loathing. ‘I am low spirited, old and very easily fatigued,’ he wrote to Meg in 1964, ‘and I find all human company increasingly distasteful.’ Even his usual winter escape to foreign sunshine now seemed futile to him: ‘I am seedy and idle and woebegone. It is the time I normally go abroad but there is nowhere now I wish to go.’

  Meg tried everything to alleviate his wretchedness, offering to spend her weeks at Combe Florey or for him to live with her in London. ‘I can't bear thinking of you in despair,’ she wrote. ‘Darling Papa I love you so much – please don't be unhappy.’ But he was not for saving. His depression was fixed.

  At the same time he was suffering bouts of acute paranoia, convinced that a Catholic newspaper had sent spies to Combe Florey to check how often he was going to church. At Mass, believing the ‘True Faith’ to have been destroyed by the stupidity of the modern church he heckled and groaned from the back row as the priest trilled out the new liturgy. ‘I am toothless, deaf, melancholic, shaky on my pins, unable to eat, full of dope, quite idle – a wreck.’ All he wished was for death.

  The end came suddenly in the downstairs lavatory at Combe Florey just before lunch on Easter Sunday 1966. He was only sixty-two when he fell to the floor under the octagonal red light that, a hundred years earlier, had hung in the hall at Midsomer Norton illuminating the Brute as he castigated his servants. A hundred miles away at our rectory home at Chilton Foliat, my sister and I were eating sausage mashed in the French way with petits pois and gizzards, cooked, spiced and served by our crawly monoglot nanny, Lolita. Our parents had abandoned us to share a leg of lamb with a bookmaker called Wyatt and his new Hungarian wife at their house near Devizes.

  Evelyn (who had been jovial all morning) had left the drawing room looking pale but amiable. Half an hour later he failed to appear for lunch. After an episode of gonging in the hall, Septimus
(sixteen) tried the door of the downstairs lavatory. It was locked from the inside. He took a ladder out to the place we call the Crystal Palace and erected it where he could climb up and look in through the high lavatory window. From the top of the ladder he saw his father slumped, motionless – dead, in fact – on the lavatory floor. He called in panic to his older brother James, who clambered in through the window, stepped nimbly on to the cistern and over his father's body to unlock the door from the inside.

  Once it was opened, Evelyn was dragged out into the passageway.

  He had a severe cut on his forehead where he had presumably knocked himself falling against the door handle. Septimus and James went upstairs to get blankets while an eccentric Irish baking lady, called Maureen Regan, attempted to revive the corpse using the old mouth-to-mouth resuscitation formula. Her breath was unavailing but her valiant efforts earned her the title ‘Nurse Regan’, and, in the pride of it, she continued to bake delicious soda bread for a cadet branch of the family until, many decades later, she, too, was gathered, senile and decrepit, to the judgement of her Maker. The doctor pronounced his verdict on Evelyn several hours later. Everyone in the house deflected their grief to the problem of Bron. Where was he? What if he learned of his father's death from the radio? Quick – ring Chilton Foliat. The monoglot couldn't say where Bron had gone so Granny decided to ring the police. My parents returned from their paschal beano with the Wyatts to find a copper rehearsing grave expressions at the front door. If Papa's autobiographical account is to be believed, the news of his father's death came to him as a relief – not least because he feared for a moment that something untoward might have befallen his children. ‘Just as school holidays had been happier and more carefree when my father was away, so his death lifted a great brooding awareness not only from the house but from the whole of existence.’ Bron was grateful to his father for dying early, while Margaret found in her Catholic faith a philosophy for rejoicing and wrote to Evelyn's old friend Diana Cooper to cheer her:

  Don't be too upset about Papa. You know how he longed to die and dying as he did on Easter Sunday, when all the liturgy is about death and resurrection, after a Latin mass and holy communion, would be exactly what he wanted. I am sure he had prayed for death at Mass. I am very, very happy for him.

  After the policeman had returned to his kennel in Hungerford, Papa set off for Combe Florey on his own. When he arrived it was past midnight, everyone except his brother-in-law had gone to bed and Evelyn's body had been removed from the house. A nauseating smell of paraldehyde filled the hall. ‘I noticed a small pile of excrement on the carpet outside the downstairs lavatory,’ he later recalled. ‘Others must have noticed it too, but, being Waughs, they all pretended not to have done so until the daily help arrived, when it vanished, without anything being said.’

  This small observation from his autobiography caused great dismay to many of Evelyn's friends when it was published in 1991. Why so tasteless? Don't all people defecate in death? Was it really necessary to bring this unseemly matter to the public's attention twenty-five years later? Why did you do it, Bron? I never asked him. All I can do is to offer a mixed bag of possibilities and excuses:

  He could not resist a lavatory joke even one that intruded on the sombre reflections of his father's demise.

  He wanted to shit on his father's memory.

  The sight of his father's faeces – the last tangible sign of his living body – subconsciously replaced the catharsis that seeing the corpse might otherwise have afforded him.

  He wished to portray himself and other members of his family as uniquely unimpressed by dung, death and other worldly horrors.

  Perhaps the truth lies in a mélange of all four but I doubt it. I think the answer to the great shit question lies elsewhere:

  Evelyn Waugh's death was a blow, keenly felt by many of his fellow novelists, among them Graham Greene who recalled his shock on hearing the news in a haunting radio commentary. ‘It was Easter Sunday symbolising his religion,’ the great novelist lugubriously intoned, ‘and he died [long pause] on the lavatory [long pause] symbolising his humour.’10

  I suspect Papa would have agreed with Greene's theory about the symbolism of his father's lavatorial exit. Perhaps he would even have stretched the theme a little further. You see, Evelyn Waugh was always performing, always theatrical, always unpredictable. His role at home combined that of the stern Victorian paterfamilias with court jester. He was, of course, supremely witty – ‘he scarcely opened his mouth but to say something extremely funny’ – but he also revelled in the physical buffoonery of a knockabout circus clown. He would clutch his groin with both hands and waddle across the drawing room to explain to his children what ‘syphilis’ meant. He would roar like a lion from the cellars at Piers Court or tumble ostentatiously from his seat, groaning on the floor in exaggerated reaction to a slight or passing remark. He was a master of macabre slapstick, and that pile of shit, if not his funniest, was, at any rate, Evelyn Waugh's final joke: the great saltimbanc's farewell somersault. Papa must have seen it this way and included it in his book for the honourable purpose of giving credit where he felt credit was due. Very filial.

  By some meteorological fluke it was snowing at Evelyn's spring funeral in Somerset and everyone was worried that the hearse might slip off the drive and upturn its load into the green, goose-shit lake below. The ceremony was attended by family and close friends. Evelyn was deeply mourned. Outsiders might have shuddered at the hard external impression of a bully, a bigot and a snob, but despite all his foibles he was adored by a wide circle of intimate friends. The world of literature also bemoaned his passing. To Graham Greene his death was likened to the loss of a commanding officer. John Betjeman wrote to Bron:

  Dear Bron,

  Your father was one of the only great people I ever knew – loyal, secretly very kind, generous, and oh my goodness how piercingly funny. You have his genius and he recognised it. This consoles me a bit. I know we are meant to think leaving this world is a triumph, so it is. All the same there's a sense of emptiness without Evelyn for those of us left

  on earth who knew and loved him and I hope you wont mind my pouring out my sense of loss on you; perhaps sharing it may help me. Even if it adds to your troubles don't let it add to your correspondence. R.I.P. I'll remember you all in my Anglican prayers, Yours

  John B.

  Evelyn was buried in the grounds at Combe Florey. A week after the funeral a Requiem Mass was held at Westminster Cathedral, which coincided with the State Opening of Parliament a quarter of a mile away. Dozens of MPs chose to pay their final respects to the great English novelist rather than to sit through the Queen's speech, and the cathedral was packed.

  My father once said that if an afterlife existed the last person he would wish to meet there would be Evelyn Waugh – he always referred to him as ‘Evelyn Waugh’, seldom ‘Papa’ or ‘my father’. Bron was only twenty-six years old when his father died. I think by the end of his own life he had become muddled between his ‘affec. Papa’ and the public figure – the world famous writer, Evelyn Waugh. After decades of pondering, of contemplating a memoir of his father, of diligently managing the Evelyn Waugh Estate – the public and private Evelyn Waugh seem to have merged in his mind into one obstinate, irreduceable, slightly disagreeable, groan-causing blur. Poor Papa.

  62A. D. Peters, Evelyn's literary agent. Alec had been one of his first clients.

  63I have since been informed that hunger, like any other pain, is easily relieved by aspirin.

  64Lennox-Boyd's mother was a Guinness girl.

  65Evelyn had written to Meg a few months earlier: ‘[Bron] is a moody, nervous boy with, so far as I have seen, no sense of responsibility.’ Bron may have been hinting to his father that he had seen this letter.

  66But she refused to become a Catholic.

  67Unappealing neighbour from Stinchcombe.

  68Alexander, a Waugh family name; Foxglove, Brideshead, Pinfold are all Waugh books; Clandon, the
Onslow family seat; Dillon, Bron's mother-in-law's maiden name; Forty-Martyrs – why not?

  69Shakespeare's Richard II, act V, scene 2. Duchess of York: ‘Welcome my son: who are the violets now that strew the green lap of the new come spring?’

  70None of these corrections was made to the first edition.

  71Graham Greene was convinced that Grandpapa had killed himself by pushing his head down the lavatory and filling his lungs with water, a rumour hotly denied by members of the family.

  XIV

  My Father

  I have read many books written by sons about their fathers and none is particularly happy. I think immediately of the great denunciations – Edmund Gosse's excoriation of his father Philip Henry in Father and Son, Samuel Butler's of Thomas Butler in The Way of All Flesh, and Moritz Thomsen's extraordinary autobiography, My Two Wars, which begins with the memorable first line, ‘This is a book about my involvement with two outrageous catastrophes – the Second World War and my father’ – but it doesn't seem to matter if the author loathed his father or adored him, the relationship is not one that ever seems to work.