Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  My Lord,

  Your generosity, your letter and your foie gras concept have lifted me from a state of pancake-eating decrepitude into one of smiling evangelical good will. I now find myself winking at taxi-drivers, licking clean the scars of the infirm and at times blessing the very devil. That you, Sir, should have been the catalyst for such a turn-around fills me with filial pride and not a small amount of desire. For to my eternal shame I cannot always distinguish between these twin feelings of kinship and lust that slumber within me.

  The news about the flat is particularly exciting, although I know better than to get over-quinnied in view of the calamities that life invariably throws at us. Have I done right, Father?

  Yesterday I was chased round the cathedral district of Santa Ana by an enormous reptile the size of a fattened

  Dobermann and was later told that the monster was an asexual herbivore – yet it clearly wanted something from me.

  Lots of love Tonino

  At games Papa was fiercely competitive. Though no athlete (I never saw him run) he put so much of his heart into matches of croquet, bridge, ping-pong and a foreign dice game called Perudo that his opponents often felt it would be cruel or rude not to let him win. He cheated without qualm. I once abandoned a bridge table because he was cheating too much – telling his partner exactly what cards were in his hand as she was bidding – and he went around for weeks telling everyone I was priggish. At croquet I know I could have beaten him many times, but he loved the game unrestrainedly and believed himself a champion at it. There seemed no point in spoiling the occasion and I deliberately missed hoops and posts to let him win. I can hear to this day his gloating squeals of delight each time I missed, unaware that I had done it on purpose, that I had missed the hoop for his sake. It is strange how sons feel guilty if they beat their fathers at games. Septimus told me that Evelyn, fed up with his sighing, had said to him, ‘If I hear you sigh one more time I shall kick you.’ When the next sigh fell on the silent air Evelyn duly leaped to his feet: ‘Right, I am now going to kick you.’ Septimus set off round the kitchen table with his father in sweaty pursuit. After a couple of circumnavigations he realised that something was wrong. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he thought. ‘I could carry on running round this table all day. Papa is far too fat and slow to catch me ever.’ Out of mixed feelings of guilt, compassion and shame, Septimus stopped running to allow his father to catch up and kick him.

  At ping-pong Papa won plaudits for his ferocious darting backhand, but none of his other shots worked. Occasionally, when he lost to dinner guests, he would wake me in the night with pleas to come downstairs and restore the family honour. I put on games shorts over my pyjamas so that my penis would not loll out during the match. Once he woke me to defeat a homosexual friend who had claimed to be ping-pong champion of southern England: ‘You won't be needing those,’ he said, as he saw me, bleary-eyed, reaching for my shorts.

  Papa never kicked me; nor did he ever raise a hand against me. Only once did I suffer a physical assault from him. My crime was breaking free of my au pair's hand and jumping in front of moving cars on my way to and from the village primary school at Chilton Foliat. It was an exciting game while it lasted and I, only six years old, was intoxicated by the effect that my small presence had on fast-moving traffic. I could stop cars, buses, ambulances – bring walloping great juggernauts to a screeching halt simply by leaping in front of them and waving. When news of my antics reached my father he resolved to stamp them out by any means. My sister and I used to clap and shout, ‘Hooray,’ when he returned home from London – which was exactly what we did on this occasion. He ignored Sophia and rushed straight at me, like an angry beast at the Plaza del Toros, and hurled me on to the floor. I was too startled to cry, but Sophia became almost suicidal with grief on my behalf. As I lay, slightly dazed, on the carpet, Papa delivered a brisk, rehearsed speech in a high staccato tone (to which I did not attend) before sweeping from the room like a princess in a huff. He was acting, of course – and badly at that – but it had its effect and I never played Jump-in-Front-of-the-Bus again.

  My decision to join the ‘family business’ and earn a living as a writer was not taken lightly. Of course, I knew from the moment I left university that I would probably end up writing but put it off for as long as possible, hoping pathetically to earn enough money at other things to avoid my literary conscription. But it was not to be. For nearly ten years I frenzied away producing records, composing music, drawing cartoons, setting up a publishing company – for a while I acted as a concert agent and a classical impresario – but to whatever trade I turned my hand I invariably found myself losing money, or interest or both.

  Papa was not enthusiastic about any of my careers in music and maybe a little ashamed of some. In the manuscript of his autobiography he wrote of my mother being pregnant in 1963 ‘with a second child later to emerge as our son Alexander, the musician’.

  At some stage in the proofing he must have thought better of this and changed the sentence to: ‘The child which turned into my elder son, Alexander, has been a source of growing pride and pleasure ever since.’ I won important prizes for my records, but when one of them was nominated for a Grammy Award and Papa looked blank and bored when I told him, I resolved, in a petulant, adolescent way, never to inform him of any of my successes again. He was much more enthusiastic when Nat and I scooped the 12th Vivian Ellis Award for Best New Musical with a black comedy farce called Bon Voyage!. It took three years to get the thing staged and in that time, as he danced around the kitchen listening to a demo-tape of the music we had composed, there was a spark in his eye that seemed to say: ‘Look here, you bloody fools, you're going to end up with egg on your faces.’

  Papa was genuinely delighted when I returned from a trip to Sri Lanka to announce my engagement to Eliza. His notice of it in Will This Do? – if read by a crackling book-room fire with a glass of gin in the hand and a sentimental smile on the lip – might even pass for a nocturnal emission of Arthur Waugh: ‘Nine months later my son Alexander announced his engagement to Eliza Chancellor, beautiful, clever, warm-natured elder daughter of our friends Susie and Alexander. For the moment, at any rate, the cup of happiness seemed to be full.’ He adored Eliza and I think his love for her made him fonder of me than he would have been had I married anyone else. Our copy of his autobiography is inscribed: ‘For Alexander and Eliza with fondest love from their proud parent, Bron.’

  In April 1998, after the births of two beautiful, exciting and unusual daughters, Eliza and I had a son. He was Papa's sixth grandchild and his first grandson. We decided to call him Auberon but had forgotten to ask Papa in advance if he minded. As soon as the boy was born I telephoned Papa who was overjoyed and rang my sister.

  ‘Good news! Eliza and Alexander have had a son.’

  ‘Hooray. What is he to be called?’

  ‘Oh, I am so glad you have asked me that,’ he said, puffing with pride. ‘They are going to call him Papa.’

  Two years later the handsome boy with golden putto curls pulled a glass lamp down on his face amputating his right cheek. His parents were beside themselves with worry as he was rushed off by ambulance to hospital in Taunton. Two days later, bruised, bloodied and stitched, the boy was presented to his grandfather. Papa admired his wounds in silence before declaring: ‘A definite improvement.’

  In my reluctance to become a writer I ought to confess to an element of intergenerational competitiveness. Had I not been a Waugh perhaps I would have sprung to my duties sooner but, as it happened, other members of my family seemed to be dominating the court. In journalism I sensed that whatever talents I possessed were probably best suited to some sort of fantasy comment column on current affairs, but Papa was the king of that sphere and I could see no possibility of entering it while he continued to rule. As for novels, well, would you write a novel if your grandfather were Evelyn Waugh? The only feasible possibilities seemed to lie in the direction of non-fiction books and classical-music cri
ticism. At least in these two I might be free to welter and groan, to experiment and make my own mistakes outside the long reach of my ancestors’ peerless precedent.

  So it was in 1991, when all else had either failed or bored me, that I entered a bizarre competition, which led to my appointment as opera critic on the Mail on Sunday. Within less than a year I followed the editor, Stewart Steven, to the more dignified and influential post of opera critic at the Evening Standard. ‘Congratulations,’ Papa said. ‘You have the job that every middle-aged pooftah in London is dying for, and you have it for life.’ These words diminished me as I had no wish to be stuck for ever in a room with such a low ceiling; neither did I get much pleasure from depriving ‘every middle aged pooftah in London’ of his heart's desire. So I resolved to give it up in five years.

  Whenever furious letters poured into the paper objecting to my reviews, Mr Steven offered me a pay rise, and when he told my father, some time later, that never, in all his forty years of journalism, had he encountered such a monumental effort to dislodge a journalist from his spot, Papa was so proud that he gave me a magnum of 1966 Château Le Gay, Pomerol, to celebrate. But my resolution to stick with the Standard for five years turned out to be pointless for after only four Mr Steven retired as editor and was replaced by a pasty-titted war-and-blood-sports man called Max Hastings who, for at least a decade, had been my father's editor at the Daily Telegraph. Hastings, under pressure, hired a novice to run the arts pages. All the old hissings and snarls that, for four years, had succeeded only in raising my salary suddenly found fresh hope in the waxy ears of Hastings's impressionable minion. My contract was not renewed. Hastings wrote me a letter of dismissal, which reads like something between a craven plea for forgiveness and a schoolgirl Valentine card: ‘On a personal level, I shall regret the change because like all your family you have always seemed the most charming and sympathetic of companions…’

  Papa's fierce loyalty swelled to console me. ‘Hastings is no good any more,’ he declared, in a lugubrious tone. A few years later, as he lay in a bewildered state only weeks from death he asked: ‘Remind me. Why do I hate Max Hastings?’

  ‘Because he sacked me, Papa?’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. What a twerp!’

  For all his loyalty at that time, I think, in his heart, he still regarded opera criticism as a pooftah's profession and thought me well out of it.4 I can date the moment when he ceased to regard me as a maverick or loose cannon fairly precisely. It was in the last week of May 2000, less than a year before his death, when he read my book called Time at Shrublands health emporium in Suffolk. It had been published a full nine months earlier and had been selling well, both in England and America, due to feverish public demand for explanations of the phenomenon in the great champagne run-up to the new millennium. Since I had not heard a squeak from him concerning it, I assumed he had dipped in and found it wanting. In fact, I think he was delaying the fearful hour in the hope of finding press reviews that would reassure him it was all right. But none came so he had to start without them. The first I knew about it was when I opened the Telegraph on 31 May:

  … And so I turned to a study of Time, the unusual treatise by Alexander Waugh which has just been published in America amid scenes of what can only be described as hysteria. The book, which is a masterpiece, sold more than 10,000 hardback copies in this country despite receiving only two or three notices. The reason why the English literary establishment ignored the book is only in part because literary folk tend to be timid and jealous and only quite intelligent. The main reason is that Time is an extraordinary book, unlike any which has been written before or since. It cleverly produced huge amounts of information in a witty monologue which is also highly enjoyable.

  Since the death of the novel and the discrediting of poetry, this type of prose, using irony and wit to impart condensed information, may become the new literary art form. A pity if they say the Americans thought of it first.

  I cannot describe how happy and grateful I was when I read these words. It didn't matter that people would inevitably say, ‘He only wrote that because he was your dad.’ I didn't care. Others may read it as they wish. As far as I was concerned it was a rare and personal message – after a lifetime of doubting and quavering confidence, a final thumbs-up to his elder son. At last I was doing something he understood, and it wasn't music.

  I suppose, when I think of it, that all of us Waughs only became writers to impress our fathers.

  Six months later the stage musical that my brother and I had been labouring over for goodness knows how long at last went into rehearsal in Notting Hill Gate. Papa was immensely enthusiastic but he knew his time was running out. ‘If I should die in the middle of the run, you will carry on, won't you?’ he asked. He was relieved to make it to the second performance and came once more before his final collapse.

  I intimated at the start that when he said to me on his deathbed, ‘Everything's going to be dandy,’ I was irritated at the vanity of his words, but now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think I know what he meant. Perhaps it is too quaint to suggest that he held on just long enough to see Bon Voyage! but I happen to believe that to be the case. It was no matter of chance that his last published words should have been a short warm vote of confidence in his two sons. It was published under the title ‘Hope for the Country’ in his Way of the World column on 16 December 2000 just a month before he died. I believe he planned it that way.

  It would be absurd for English parents to suppose they have given birth to a modern Shakespeare, although I am afraid this may be quite a frequent delusion, and it helps to explain all the slim volumes of ‘poetry’ that continue to appear 14 years after the death of Betjeman.

  Not so many people will be tempted to indulge the hope that they have somehow produced a new version of Gilbert and Sullivan, but I must admit that I confronted the possibility when I went to see Bon Voyage! on Wednesday evening… In the spirit of the times, it may be found slightly rougher than anything that would have been encouraged at the old Savoy Theatre under D'Oyly Carte, but the same humour is there, the memorable, even breathtaking tunes and above all the same assurance that there is an intelligent, sceptical England surviving under all the rubbish we see on television. Bon Voyage! is a delight and a joy, and I am proud to have fathered the two geniuses responsible for it.

  I know that A. N. Wilson and V. S. Naipaul are not alone among serious writers in believing Papa to have been greater in stature than his father. I am not inclined either to agree or to disagree with them but am proud of both and believe that the legacy of each complements the other. Papa was philosophically far more stable than his father, his writing less arch. I also think he was a nicer man. Like Evelyn, he believed this world to be a ‘vale of tears’ but his constitution was stronger than Evelyn's and he saw no reason to relapse because of it into blank depression, drunkenness or rage. Despite his unique cleverness, originality and humour he was, at heart, a man of simple convictions: ‘I would be surprised,’ he once wrote, ‘if there is any greater happiness than that provided by a game of croquet played on an English lawn through a summer's afternoon, after a good luncheon and with a reasonable prospect of a good dinner ahead.’

  I am grateful to him for many things, not least that he broke with the otiose propensity to favouritism that had characterised the Waugh line for at least five generations. He provided a more stable upbringing to his four children than he himself had ever received, and left more goodwill towards the name than he had inherited from his father. Papa was the most impressive man I have ever met. He was a loyal, generous father and a brilliant writer.

  I am honoured to be his pale shadow.

  72The adjective ‘Wavian’ meaning ‘of or pertaining to Evelyn Waugh or his family’ was coined by the Jewish mimic and railway enthusiast John Sutro in the 1950s as a counterpart to the word Shavian, which describes things to do with Bernard Shaw. Some dictionaries offer the alternative Waughian but this is ugly and incorrect. I w
ould have called this book Waviana if I had thought anybody would understand.

  73Asolo is a possibility.

  74‘It is forbidden under the Decree of 6 February 1932 (Article 56) to throw into the river or leave on its banks dead animals (including poultry) and rubbish.’

  75When Papa used the word ‘pooftah’ he did not necessarily intend the meaning ‘homosexual’. I think he employed the word in the much same way as Evelyn had used ‘pansy’. The best explanation to all this can be found in a letter Papa wrote to The Times editor Harold Evans in September 1976: ‘My father used the term “pansy” to describe anyone connected with the Arts, or who, in conversation, demonstrated greater knowledge of the arts than seemed normal or proper to him – i.e. more than he himself possessed. It was also used as a description of expertise: children's damage to furniture would be judged by whether it could be mended by a carpenter, or would require a pansy to come from London to restore the damage.’

  To Auberon Augustus Ichabod Waugh A letter of explanation

  Dear Bron,

  Have you read Fathers and Sons? Of course you haven't: you are only six. If you do and are wondering what to make of it all, I should explain:

  You were named Auberon in honour of my father – I wish you had known him better. The name Augustus means ‘magnificent’ (which you are). You were not given it in order to be reminded of the bisexual, flame-eyed triumvir of Ancient Rome. Ichabod in Hebrew means ‘the glory is departed’. Strange? Well, should you ever feel that you have let down the line, which I sincerely hope you won't, you can blame it on your parents for having given you such an unpropitious tag.