Fathers and Sons Read online

  It is a natural function of the evolutionary process (is it not?) that a man should desire a son in order to duplicate his own finest male qualities, to make a replica of himself that will take up his ideas, his prejudices, his humour, his attractive nose and his neatly curved bottom and pass them on, like a baton in a relay race, to generations of his descendants, as yet unborn. It is also a natural function of the evolutionary process (is it not?) that a boy should inherit (whether by mimicry or by the transfer of genes) many of the traits that are strongest and most useful to the continued fitness of his line.

  As a small girl, my youngest daughter used to lean her head back and flicker her eyelids as she laughed, a distinctive gesture that I had only ever seen before in two people: her great-grandmother and her great-uncle. The great-uncle she had never met, the great-grandmother died before she was born. If she thought she was expressing her individuality by laughing in this unusual way, she was wrong. It made me wonder what evolutionary purpose this quaint mannerism could possibly serve but also if there is any such thing as a genuine expression of individuality.

  I do not wish to diminish the role of mothers, sisters, great-aunts, school-teachers or anyone else with claims to influence the individuals around them, but this book is not about them. It is only about fathers and sons. It is also my specific intention to allow the principal characters to tell the story as much as possible in their own words. As professional writers, they were all gifted with great powers of expression. I can assure you they will not let us down.

  If any other family has preserved such a diverse, comprehensive and intimate archive of material relating to fathers and sons I would be amazed to hear of it, but at present I believe the Waughs to be, in this respect, unique. My story starts in the late 1860s with my great-great-grandfather, a disagreeable Dr Waugh, with a sadistic attitude to his sons. It ends – or, should I say, it is abandoned with a short open letter to my son in the sixth generation: a modest smidgen of fatherly advice.

  Papa surprised me once by describing people who do not wish to know anything about their ancestors as ‘evil’, a strong word for him: ‘incurious’, a little ‘stupid’, perhaps? I have often wondered what he meant by this and why he used such an uncharacteristically violent word.

  When he caught me meditating once on the frailties and strengths of my own personality, Papa shook his fist through the door of my bedroom and accused me from without of ‘wafting odious clouds of self-think’. The opprobrium was well deserved. Both my parents railed often against the dangers of self-think. We were taught, all of us, to despise it. The Delphic oracle that once proclaimed, ‘O Man, know thyself,’ must have been an idiot, for there is no difference between this ancient ‘wisdom’ and the abominable teenage egotism of ‘I need to discover the real me.’ Perhaps ‘O Man, know thine ancestors’ would be a more useful motto for the modern egotist to pin on his puffed lapel. For the key to his identity, if such a thing even exists, will be found to lie not where he instinctively looks for it in the mirror-glass in front, but furtively concealed all about the hedgerows and borders of the long, twisting, dusty road behind.

  1When she read this passage Eliza told me that she had kissed his forehead; a valiant deed that never occurred to me as an option.

  2A reader's letter in the next day's paper: ‘SIR – I wish to protest, in the strongest possible terms, at your decision to devote five pages to an appreciation of Waugh. Anyone with an ounce of decency would expect no fewer than 10.’

  3Germaine Greer, philosopher and feminist.

  4‘Comparisons are odious’ is a simple twisting of Shakespeare's ‘Comparisons are odorous’ from Much Ado About Nothing. My father and grandfather said it often but I have no idea who invented it. ‘I do not repine’ has been identified by Anthony Burgess and others as a personal cliché of Evelyn Waugh. He and his father may have used it often – too often – but they took it from Psmith, an early P. G. Wodehouse character. In 1935 my great-grandfather wrote to Wodehouse: ‘There was a time in Alec's schooldays when we used to read your books together with enormous enjoyment; and, although we are never long enough together nowadays – to read more than a telegram – we have still preserved a sort of freemason's code of Psmithisms, which continually crop up in our letters. Indeed, I can truly say, in emulation of Wolfe, that I would rather have created Psmith than have stormed Quebec.’

  5Of his own father Butler wrote: ‘He never liked me, nor I him; from my earliest recollections I can recall no time when I did not fear and dislike him. Over and over again I relented towards him and said to myself that he was a good fellow after all; but I had hardly done so when he would go for me in some way or other which soured me again.’

  II

  Midsomer Norton

  I am now going to have to introduce a character whose acquaintance you may not wish to make. He was neither as famous as Evelyn Waugh nor as prolific as Alec Waugh; he did not have the dash of Auberon Waugh nor, dare I suggest it?, the wit of one. But if you skip this chapter your understanding of what follows will be diminished, for he was the progenitor, the patriarch who singlehandedly carried his family into the bright world of literature and who was the spur from which all the father-son relationships in this book are derived. His name was Arthur Waugh, my great-grandfather. His sons were Alec and Evelyn.

  To understand how a man behaves as a father it is useful to know how he was treated as a son, but since every father is, or was, himself a son, the process, thoroughly undertaken, would require an investigation right back to the formative origins of fatherhood, all the way to the greedy apple-scoffer of Genesis, or, as Darwinians prefer, to the first protoplasmal, primordial, atomic globule of the paternal line. Vain hope! My male line is not even traceable beyond the seventeenth century. In those days Waughs were farmers at East Gordon on the Scottish Borders. I suspect they ate their porridge with their fingers. I suspect also that they were ponderous about their religion, badly educated (except in Bible matters), shabbily dressed, dirty-faced and bereft of humour. I have no idea how they got on together in their father and son relationships and there is no way of finding out. So I shall begin where the writing Waughs begin: with the story of Arthur.

  Until I went to university Arthur Waugh was little more than a name to me, one of the nondescripts in a long list that my father had inspired me to con by heart:

  Thomas begat Adam; and Adam begat Thomas; and Thomas begat Alexander, famed as the ‘Great and Good’; Alexander begat James and all his brethren; and James begat Alex, the ‘Brute’; the ‘Brute’ begat Arthur; and Arthur begat Evelyn; and Evelyn begat Auberon who (besides better begettings) begat me.1

  Papa used to groan at the mention of his grandfather's name. When I showed him, in draft form, the entry I had written on Arthur Waugh for The New Dictionary of National Biography he pushed it to one side. ‘He doesn't deserve it,’ he said. When my elder sister was pregnant, wanting to call her baby Arthur, he protested: ‘But all Arthurs are rubbish – Arthur Waugh, Arthur Onslow…’2

  ‘What about King Arthur and the Duke of Wellington?’ I asked.

  ‘All rubbish,’ he said.

  At Manchester University, where I read music, I had chosen as the subject for my final-year thesis the symphonic procedure of an obscure English composer called Arnold Bax. When I told this to Papa he said he thought Bax might have been a friend of the Waughs in Hampstead. Together we set off for the library to find a copy of Arthur Waugh's autobiography, One Man's Road, to see if there were any references in it to Arnold Bax. There weren't, but his brother, the poet Clifford Bax, was mentioned, as a passing reference only, in a long passage devoted to Arthur's eldest son's prep-school cricketing record. How unfortunate for Arthur that his great-grandson, on the first occasion of his seeking to know anything about him, should have stumbled at the outset on what must be the feeblest, the most inane and the most irredeemably second-rate paragraph that any man has yet committed to the pages of an autobiography. From that moment Arthur Waugh w
as marked in my mind as a twerp and I was ashamed to be his descendant.

  The passage in question was of no use to my musical researches but I shall reproduce it here as a helpful illustration to that aspect of Arthur's character which his younger son, Evelyn, had previously described in his diary as ‘ineffably silly’, and to give you, my reader, a useful foretaste of two of Arthur's burning obsessions: the game of cricket and his eldest son, Alec:

  Alec's four years at Fernden brought us some pleasant reunions, more especially at the Annual Paters’ Match. At the first of those encounters there were still not enough boys to make up an eleven, and the two masters very notably strengthened the side. But Alec opened the bowling, and caught and bowled a sturdy Major off the first ball of the match. One of the fathers, Mr Gainsford, who had played for the Yorkshire second eleven, came over to me at tea-time and said, ‘That boy of yours is a born bowler. He has a natural break from the off. If he is carefully nursed he should do well.’ I went home that night very happy; but Alec's achievements were to come with the bat rather than with the ball. After he left Fernden his bowling seemed innocuous, except in house matches, until the years after the War gave him a new chance in the cheery, sporting tours of Mr Clifford Bax. Perhaps the trend of modern coaching had something to do with it. The batsmen get most of the attention at the nets; bowling is commonly regarded as a skill that needs ‘heaven-sent moments’. Perhaps that is the reason why there are so few fast bowlers in England today.

  It is hard to understand how the author of this passage could have fathered one of the greatest prose writers of the English language, but there it is. After that, and by popular request, Papa used to declaim his grandfather's ‘Bax Passage’ (as we came to call it) in a fluty, ecclesiastical tone for family and friends round the dinner-table. My mother, who disliked this form of showing off intensely, barracked him with loud protestations to desist, but at each interruption he would look up to the ceiling, stick out his tummy and say, ‘Right, I shall begin again.’ And begin he did, from the very top, with his voice pitched a semitone higher and the volume defiantly turned up: ‘Alec's four years at Fernden, brought us some pleasant reunions…’

  In fairness One Man's Road is not all as wasted as this short gobbet from it implies. When I read the whole thing, many years later, I was entranced, particularly by the first half with its intimate picture of a timorous boyhood spent in the rarefied atmosphere of Victorian rural England. The book's most obvious defect is its sentimentality – a glaring error of judgement that stretches far beyond the fashion of its age. I have always believed sentimentality to be a gross self-indulgence and was brought up to treat sentimentalists, especially those among my relations, with unreserved suspicion. ‘Sentimentality,’ as Papa used to say, ‘is the exact measure of a person's inability to experience genuine feeling.’ Arthur was cripplingly sentimental. Cricket and his elder son were, as I have said, dominant triggers, but so were his home, his school, women on bicycles, his mother – ah, yes, his mother:

  Home meant Mother alone; it was she who lit the light, fanned it with tender hands, and kept it glowing in her children's imagination, by day and night. For four years I had the kingdom to myself and did not undervalue it. Morning after morning in the sunny sitting room, mother and son nestled together, the mother only too often lying full length upon the sofa (for in those days she was very delicate), the boy on a footstool at her knee. She taught lessons, she cut out, in paper, birds, beasts and fishes; she sang; she told tales of her own childhood; she filled the day with enchantment. It was her first real home and she found happiness in making it happy for others.

  And, Arthur, tell them about that nursery poem you could never hear without the ‘washed eyes of Cordelia shaming your boyhood’:

  I love it! I love it! And who shall dare

  To chide me for loving that old armchair?

  'Tis bound by a thousand bands to my heart,

  Not a band will break, not a link will start:

  Would you learn the spell? A mother sat there;

  And a sacred thing is that old armchair.

  The saccharine sentiments expressed in One Man's Road are not of themselves especially moving, but no alert reader could fail to be stirred by the image of Arthur Waugh luxuriating among them. This inadvertent exposure of all that was most soft, frail and fat in the author's personality is what elevates this book, in my opinion, from the level of a fatuous piece of fluff-candy to that of an absorbing and often poignant psychological study. It would have been even more poignant, though, if instead of sentimentalising about his mother, Arthur had had the gumption to write more about his relationship with his father, but he flunked that task, fearing his sisters’ recriminations.

  Dr Alexander Waugh, the father in question, has been labelled by his descendants ‘The Brute’ partly to distinguish him from an earlier Dr Alexander Waugh nicknamed ‘The Great and Good’, and partly in fair recognition of his most repulsive attributes. Evelyn's children, seeking to be amused, often asked their father to draw pictures of the Brute for them. He was a deft caricaturist and the arresting images he produced – snorting nostrils, flaming devil's eyes, lascivious mouth and snapping black-dog teeth – never failed to set their imaginations aflame. In youth the Brute was not unattractive; some might even have thought him handsome. He had jet-black hair and clever, piercing eyes set flat in a round and well-proportioned face. Perhaps he seemed dashing to the blushing young ladies of the 1860s and 1870s, but a long life of cruel, selfish behaviour gradually showed itself upon his face.

  Victorians never said ‘cheese’ to the camera. That is a modern conceit. Instead they donned maudlin expressions of philosophic thoughtfulness, proud eminence or family piety in which to pose for the new-fangled machine. I have photographs of the Brute striking all three of these attitudes but none of them credibly, for he had no facial expression winning enough to obscure the core loutishness of his nature. He was a small man – barely five foot in his socks. Towards the end of his life he was portly. All his jackets and hats smelt of pipe and cigar smoke, and the exhalations of his mouth filled the air around him with a rank, second-hand savour of whisky. By 1870 a rich thicket of grey hair sprouted from either side of his face, providing his contemporaries with a vision of patriarchal gravitas, but concealing from them, no doubt, a heinous host of suppressed sexio-socio emotional inadequacies. To the modern eye, the Brute's Dundreary whiskers might look ridiculous, but, as a means of concealing the flaws in his nature, they were, in their day, perhaps no sillier than any of the hairstyle tricks devised and paraded by the social inadequates of our own age.

  At Radley College the Brute was a tough little child of solid achievement, not only in the classroom (where he came top in every subject) but on the games field and in the school theatre also. As third prefect he developed a taste for flagellation that never deserted him. He represented the school at football, captained the rowing team, and was champion in both the mile and the two-hundred-yard running races. In 1858 he left Radley for the Bristol Medical School, completing his studies at Guy's Hospital in London, from which institution he walked away with all the major prizes, including the Senior Prize for Practical Anatomy, as well as gold medals in medicine and surgery. At about this time he invented an obstetric apparatus called ‘Waugh's Long Fine Dissecting Forceps’, which continued to be used by generations of surgeons after his death. I shudder to think how they worked. When the word ‘sadist’ was first explained to Arthur he is reported to have nodded in recognition: ‘Ah, that is what my father must have been.’

  But you won't find many examples of the Brute's sadism recorded in Arthur's memoirs. There are passing references only to the ‘dolorous’ hours spent learning Latin verbs in his study and to his father's pointless and exacting discipline: ‘The great lesson of my childhood was undoubtedly discipline: the discipline under which I began, continued and ended every day. I was bred to obedience and I believed what I was told. Hands folded for grace; chair straight to the t
able; to bed without demur when the clock struck:

  – day after day, week after week, discipline, discipline and discipline…’ The only evidence of the Brute's sadism in One Man's Road is a small matter concerning a dog. As a boy, Arthur was frequently taken shooting by his father and it was his unfortunate duty on these occasions to carry the old man's ivory-tipped whip. Whenever their Irish setter, Grouse, misbehaved by barking or chasing birds, Arthur had to convey the weapon to his father and look on as the yelping pet was thrashed to within an inch of its life. These floggings made a deep impression on the boy. In a juvenile poem entitled ‘The Power of the Dog’, composed in memory of one of these unpleasant experiences, Arthur sides with the beaten animal, who avenges his master's cruelty by leaving home with a cocky sneer on his face.

  Well, we beat him, oh, we beat him! But he lay upon the ground;

  He never writhed, he never snarled, he never made a sound!

  And when our arms were weary, and the walloping was done,

  We felt there'd been a battle, and we knew that he had won!

  With an air of tired repose, full of dignity he rose,

  Stalked across the lawn before us, as some shining vanguard goes!

  'Twas the progress of a monarch who had never known defeat,

  For the dog had proved his power; and revenge is passing sweet!