Fathers and Sons Read online

  Evening meal:7 fish fingers; 3/4 pt tomato ketchup; 2 btles cherry-flavoured Panda pop; 9 digestive biscuits; frozen peas.

  TV snacks:17 Mars bars; 2 pkts Birdseye cake mix; 1 pkt raspberry jelly cubes; 1 old rubber balloon; 3 cigarette ends; 2oz (approx) dog shit; 1 tube toothpaste; 1 can Pepsi-Cola; 1 elastic band.

  Needless to say, there is nothing wrong with this diet which contains everything a growing child needs. It is watching television advertisements which causes the trouble. That is what makes these National Health Council advertisements the only effective piece of satire which television has yet produced.

  We had entered the church in bright January sunshine and left it in a blizzard. Banks of press and paparazzi had formed outside. A police officer at the church gate asked me if I would like them all forcibly removed. He was champing a little and foaming round the edges of his lips. It occurred to me that nothing would have given Papa greater pleasure than the prospect of a riot at his funeral, the policeman clearly wanted it also, but I was dazed, not thinking straight, and told him not to bother.

  As anyone who has experienced a bereavement will remember, the months after a funeral are generally more difficult than the numb and busy week running into it so I was lucky to have had a distraction – a book to finish, which was a biography of God. When Papa died it was almost done, but a fortnight later, over eighty thousand words were scrambled into an impossible computer puzzle and inadvertently copied in that condition on to all of my back-up files. If God seriously thought He could prevent publication of His biography by killing my father and scrambling my work, He was in error. All He succeeded in doing was to set my heart against His ways so that I produced a portrait which, in the end, was far less flattering to Him than it might otherwise have been.

  Unscrambling God was a fret and an effort that retarded my bereavement by several months. When at last it was done and the manuscript safely delivered to the publishers, I set about reading anything I could find that my father had written. The exercise was therapeutic, or ‘cathartic’, as some people prefer. I could hear his voice in every sentence, which was a comfort. As I went along I copied down quotations and filed them under headings: Bossiness, Interesting Observations, Sound Advice, the Royal Family, etc. Then I read through twenty years of his Spectator articles – how many hundreds of thousands of words was that? – indexing every point he had made on any subject, then started the process all over again, in the same grimly tunnel-visioned vein, with sixteen years’ worth of his Private Eye diaries. What was I doing it all for? Was it homage, filial piety, or a dementia that needed checking? I do not remember what was going through my head at the time: when I should have been working, earning money to feed the chicks and pay the mortgage, I was instead leading my family on a pointless journey of impoverishment. I was becoming what in England is defined, with contempt, as an Anorak – sad.

  In September I was asked to make a speech at a ceremony in London, an annual prize-giving at which my father had officiated every year for the past decade. Afterwards a lady came up to me and stroked my cheek with her soft prelate's hand3: ‘Oh, that was so wonderful, to hear you speaking – just as though your father were alive again.’ She meant well but made me morose. I could not carry on in this way, poring over his writing and giving cheap-jack imitations for those of his friends and fans who missed him. If the Boswellian labour of indexing all his works had failed to prick my conscience, this lady's passing remark had at last done the trick. I had to get a life!

  And so, with paternal obsessions wilfully swept to one side, I started to plan books about other things – big things: the world and how it works, the meaning of life, the riddle of the universe. A mood of renewed hope set in. Then the telephone rang. A frosty voice from the newspaper that was planning to run extracts of God said: ‘Actually, we've been having a think about this, and what we really want is an article by you on your family, you know, something about your father and your grandfather but mixing it in with a bit of stuff from your book, yeah?’ Red rag to a bull. It had been the same when I published my previous book – a history of Time – but God as well? ‘Surely God is of greater interest to your readers than Auberon or Evelyn Waugh?’ I demanded. A long, chilly silence emanated from the other end of the line. So I was wrong.

  The effect of that irritating telephone conversation was catalytic. How could I write interesting or amusing things about the world if they all had to be passed through the Evelyn–Auberon masher before I could publicise them? If I accepted this newspaper's rotten offer, would I be clutching crudely at the coat-tails of my illustrious ancestors to draw attention to my own work? These issues troubled me. So did an annoying point Ben Jonson once made: ‘Greatness of name in the father oftentimes overwhelms the son; they stand too near one another. The shadow kills the growth.’ This whole Waugh thing needed sorting. If Papa and Grandpapa had left their clobber in my path it would have to be cleared out of the way. But time was ticking and I was unsure how to set about it. I could adopt my younger sister's wilful stance and refuse to answer any questions about my ancestors in connection with my books – or I could retrench, return to the navel-gazing Papa obsession from which I had recently extricated myself and blow the whole thing out in one almighty atchoo. My instinct was to go for the sneeze. Of course, there were other factors.

  The critical reception for God, published exactly a year after my father's death, was, for the most part, as I had hoped it would be.

  Those who had understood its simple message were elated; those who hadn't tried at least to pretend that they had. Some were injured at the rough way I had handled this most delicate of subjects. I did not mind which way the critics fell as long as they showed evidence of having concentrated, just a little bit, on the text. The lazy ones invariably hadn't: instead of taking issue with the contents of the book, they chose instead to rabbit on about my family.

  A typical example. One critic, invited to supply his views on God to a national newspaper north of the border, submitted, instead of a conventional review, a long essay on the Waugh family. It started with Evelyn as ‘founder, or at least, reviver of the dynasty’, then moved to my father, describing him, among other things, as a ‘professional snob’. From Papa the piece went to unnamed and non-existent uncles and aunts accusing them of having written ‘tight-lipped, smart-arsed little social comedies of the kind that friendly reviewers call “delightfully astringent”’. Only after several hundred words in this vein did the wretched fellow finally get round to parking his critical bottom on the seat where it was originally commissioned to be: ‘Now we are into the third 20th-century generation of the family firm, the children of Auberon,’ he puffed. ‘Really the kindest one can say of them – and, on this evidence, of Alexander in particular – is that we kent their faithers. Talent, sadly, does not operate upon the homeopathic principle that the greater the dilution, the greater the strength.’

  Now I do not wish to take issue, especially as I have no idea if talent operates homeopathically or not; nor do I recognise the activity embraced by the term ‘we kent their fathers’ – though I suspect it to be something disgusting that Scotch people do to each other in bed. No, the only reason I raise this matter is to identify a tic – one that has persisted now for three generations.

  When my father published his first novel, The Foxglove Saga, in 1960, he was twenty years old. The temptation among critics to compare it with his father's novels proved irresistible. Reviews with titles like ‘Chip Off the Old Block’, ‘Pale Shadow’, ‘Dad Waugh Had Best Move Over’, ‘New Writer on the Waugh Path’, ‘One Waugh Leads to Another’ were ubiquitous. Papa's publishers were partly to blame. The dustjacket blurb, which he had originally drafted to read ‘The Foxglove Saga is Mr Waugh's first novel’, was changed at proof stage by a canny editor into ‘The Foxglove Saga is a first novel by the youngest member of a distinguished family.’ And on the back cover they printed a full-page advertisement for Evelyn Waugh's latest book, Tourist in Africa.
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br />   Most publishers believe that commercial value can be extracted by vaunting these connections, and although they do not insist upon them, it is often hard for the young author to paddle with his pride against the welling drift of their professional opinion.

  When The Foxglove Saga came out in the States, American publishers Simon and Schuster invited direct comparison between father and son by invoking Evelyn Waugh's most successful comic novel on the inside flap of the jacket: ‘Here, in a word, is this decade's Vile Bodies!’ It was a mistake that gave several critics in America, such as the unfortunately named Mollie Panter-Downes of the New Yorker, something solid to push against:

  Since the comparison has been made for us, we may now ask ourselves if the book can really be described as ‘this decade's Vile Bodies,’ and the answer seems to be no… There is no reason for the description to be used. The champ is still the champ, and perhaps it would be a good thing if Auberon Waugh wrote his next book as Arthur Wagstaff.

  My father's next novel, Path of Dalliance, was published in 1963. He did not heed Ms Pants-Down's counsel in naming himself Arthur Wagstaff, but tried another tack. This time the jacket blurb made no mention of Evelyn Waugh, or of his ‘distinguished family’, but brazenly asserted: ‘Auberon Waugh is a born writer and writes like himself and nobody else.’

  ‘That was an attempt to put off the critics dragging in my father,’ he admitted to an interviewer at the time. ‘It is all so pointless – what use is it to say the book isn't as good as Brideshead Revisited?’ But his protestations fell predictably on deaf ears as all the critics continued to compare his books, for the rest of his life, to the novels of Evelyn Waugh. In America, Simon and Schuster put out a series of advertisements that read: ‘Auberon Waugh writes like himself, but as clearly, and in the pleasantest possible way, he also echoes his father, Mr Evelyn Waugh.’

  Even those who had clearly understood the heavy hint contained in the jacket blurb were reluctant to let it drop: ‘Path of Dalliance is Mr Waugh's second novel,’ wrote Isabel Quigly in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘and although he is no doubt tired of comparisons, it does rather vividly recall his father's early novels. Indeed he…’

  The situation had not been significantly different for Evelyn Waugh a generation earlier. His father, Arthur (about whom I shall have a great deal to say in the chapters that follow), was a distinguished man of letters, a publisher, a poet, a critic and biographer; his brother, Alec, became a best-selling novelist while Evelyn was still at school, and Alec's first novel The Loom of Youth created a scandal by implying that homosexuality was normal in most English boys’ public schools and was consequently banned in all of them. When Evelyn was at Lancing anyone caught with a copy of The Loom of Youth hidden under his bed was caned. Being the brother of such a famous rebel made him especially interesting to all his schoolfriends. Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that when he first came to try his own hand at a novel, as an insecure seventeen-year-old schoolboy, he was apprehensive of the adverse effect that his father's reputation and his brother's fame might have on his ambitions. ‘And all this will be brought up against you,’ he wrote in a dedication to himself at the time. ‘ “Just another of these precocious Waughs,” they will say.’

  In reviews of his early books Evelyn was introduced by critics as the ‘son of Arthur and brother of Alec’, which irritated him greatly. After a few years the tables turned and Alec's books were compared unfavourably with Evelyn's. ‘Mr Evelyn Waugh is very intelligent and a great wit,’ wrote one critic, in a review of Alec's eighth novel, Three Score and Ten. ‘He has already written two or three books that are far funnier than those of anybody in England – his posthumous fame is assured… but while the gifted author of Decline and Fall was still in the nursery, his far less intelligent brother was writing Loom of Youth and since that time Mr Alec Waugh has never looked back – or would it be more correct to say, he has never looked forward?’

  ‘I do not repine’– a saying that my grandfather and great-grandfather used frequently. ‘Comparisons are odious’ – that was another.4

  ‘He failed to break from beneath the heavy yoke of his forebears.’ That is what will be said of me when I am gone and I shall not repine for that either. It is inevitable, just as they said of my father, or at least as one of his obituarists (who I think might have been called Gutteridge, or something similar) wrote of him: ‘He never quite escaped the long shadow of his father, Evelyn Waugh. Consciously or unconsciously, he tried to emulate his celebrated parent, one of the 20th century's greatest comic novelists.’ Of course, nobody is free from the influence of those who have brought them up and every son who has whiled his youth at his father's table subconsciously emulates him. Yes, we are all formed by the tastes of our parents. It is surely part of the charm of life that nobody starts from nowhere – but ‘escape’ and ‘shadow’? What hidden emotion lies behind these words! Was Evelyn Waugh's ‘shadow’ (why not call it his ‘radiating light’?) really such a terrible thing that his own son needed to flee it? Is it wise to flee the shadow of ‘one of the 20th century's greatest comic novelists’? Do people ‘consciously emulate’ the shadows they are fleeing? I think not. Back to the drawing-board, Gutteridge.

  Oh, don't the days seem lank and long

  When all goes right and nothing goes wrong,

  And isn't your life extremely flat

  With nothing whatever to grumble at?

  Papa often said that when he died he hoped either to be blown up by an atom bomb or to fade out on his bed at home, surrounded by groups of adoring family and friends. He succeeded in the latter. After a sudden dip in late December he found himself half-conscious on a hospital bed in Taunton. I shed no tears for him when he died because I had exhausted the supply in the run-up to that event. My brother and I had composed a stage musical that was being performed in London during December. ‘If I should go during the run,’ he told us, ‘the show must go on.’ I heard that Leonard Bernstein once lost his footing during a concert in New York, and as he fell backwards from the podium, clasping his baton in both hands, shouted, ‘Carry on, guys!’ to the orchestra. Papa fell seriously ill on the last night of Bon Voyage!. He had warned us and, to be frank, his decline was so rapid and debilitating that I was relieved when it was all over.

  He looked pathetic lying on his hospital bed – a broken reed in stripy silk pyjamas. The man I had looked upon all my life as a fount of wisdom and civility, a pillar of strength, a paragon dad – even, in the last two years, as a friend – lay before me, in those bitter weeks, a thin, depressed, vulnerable shadow, a fragile desperado. His short-term memory had, for some reason to do with his blood circulation, ceased to function, and it was for this reason that he thought he was going mad. He wanted to die.

  I sat by his bed each day, first at the hospital and later in his bedroom at Combe Florey. It was difficult to know what to say to him. I read passages from Sidney Smith, told him the day's news, tried to make a joke or two. He in turn made an enormous effort to show that he was amused and alert, but he wasn't. From the depths of our gloom many false notes were struck: we could put a lift into Combe Florey; he could retire from his work and enjoy drinking his way through the thousands of bottles of wine stored in his cellar; we could play croquet in the summer; find a publisher to produce a smart library edition of his works. ‘Ah,’ he said to that one, ‘you mean build a Waugh factory?’ But it was all hollow hopefulness since we both knew that, at most, only a few months were left to him. He was passing in and out of consciousness each half-hour and time was running thin.

  We had the opportunity in those last solemn weeks to put our final points to each other. It was a chance – enviable to those whose parents die suddenly and without warning – that perhaps I flunked. Our relationship was never perfect, but it was probably better than many; strong enough at any rate, I felt, to allow its embers to extinguish themselves naturally. People assume that the deathbed-side moment provides the perfect arena for exchanging ideas
like ‘I love you’, forgiving ancient wrongs or eliciting from the dying some flattering or memorable quotation. Nothing of this kind occurred to me.

  Like many English sons I had not kissed my father since I was twelve years old and had never said, ‘I love you,’ to him, even as a boy. Nor, for that matter, had he said anything like that to me and neither of us intended to break the taboos of our tribe for this occasion. The closest I came was during a visit to the hospital. When I arrived he was asleep so I scribbled a damp-eyed tribute on a small scrap of paper and dropped it into the mailbox at Reception for him to read when he awoke. His name was not on it and, anyway, I think I put it in the wrong box. Perhaps it was delivered to the perplexed old gaffer with an ingrowing toenail in the ward across the hall. I shall never know.

  As far as I remember we never, in all our time together, had a single serious conversation. He had not trained me for it. In the last week there was a brief moment – not a conversation precisely but a few words of paternal advice: I must always be kind to Eliza (he adored her) and, something I already knew, that I was extremely lucky to have married her. He listed a few possessions that he wanted me to have after his death, but I was too rattled to remember what they were.

  If Papa's autobiographical account is to be trusted, the news of his own father's death, on Easter Sunday 1966, came to him as a relief: ‘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.’ He was actually grateful to his father for going when he did. ‘It is the duty of all good parents to die young,’ he used to tell us. ‘Nobody is completely grown up until both his parents are gone.’ Samuel Butler believed that every son is given a new lease of life on the death of his father.5 This might well be true. In my own case, the new lease took a peculiar form: a search for identity or, to put it in other words, a disconcerting inflation of the egocentric element in my nature. ‘What am I now that I wasn't then?’ ‘Where am I expected to stand in relation to his memory, to his work, to our family, to our surname?’ ‘Am I duty-bound to carry something on? If so, what is it?’ From the mists of all these fatuous, unintelligible questions, a few bleary conclusions eventually showed themselves. Perhaps I had at least found a starting point.