A few years ago I read Alexander Waugh’s marvellous biography of five generations of his family, Fathers and Sons. Alexander is the son of Auberon (’Bron’) Waugh, whose scathing and hilarious columns I used to read in Private Eye when I was a teenager. Bron was the son of Evelyn, author of cynical 1920s novels like Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Scoop, all of them wonderful, and, much later, Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn was the brother of Alec, an untalented hack and erotomaniac, and they were the two sons of Arthur, a rather strange, over-religious late-Victorian literary gentleman. Arthur’s father was a mid-Victorian sadist known as ‘The Brute’ who enjoyed locking his son in a cupboard all night and firing off guns in his ear without warning. A classic English upper-middle-class family in other words.
With material like this to work with a biographer can hardly go wrong, and Alexander’s task was made easier by the fact that all of these men, except the Brute, were copious writers of letters and diaries. Alexander claims to have some 12,000 letters in his house – I think that’s what he said – and there are many more in various libraries and universities. His book is wonderful, not just because of the bizarre anecdotes it contains, but as a case study of weird parenting passed on through the generations. Interviewed by Peter Craven at MWF, Alexander did not disappoint, providing more than an hour of entertaining anecdote which almost lived up to Craven’s characterisation of him as the finest biographer since Boswell wrote The Life of Johnson.
Arthur Waugh, having been brutalised by his own father, devoted extraordinary love and attention to his older son, Alec, convinced that Alec would be a sporting and literary genius. In fact Alec was nothing of the sort, and it was the neglected Evelyn who became the literary star, with books that his father regarded as contemptible. Evelyn got his revenge by portraying his father in absurd and demeaning guises in his fiction. In one of Evelyn Waugh’s short stories, ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’, a lunatic is taken for a day out by a lady on a bicycle, whom he then strangles, before returning happily to the asylum. This is a not-too-subtle dig at Arthur Waugh’s fetish for lady cyclists.
Evelyn Waugh, according to Alexander, was a pretty good father to his own son, Auberon – although when Bron nearly killed himself with a machine gun while doing national service in Cyprus, Evelyn refused to visit the young man as he lay close to death. Evelyn’s diaries are full of derogatory references to his children, but according to Alexander that is because he was: a) unusually honest about how irritating one’s children can be, and b) he always wrote his diaries in the evening when he was pissed. Alexander’s own father, Bron, seems to have been the best when it came to parenting skills, although now Alexander considers him to have been almost excessively supportive. When Alexander was kicked out of school for pushing the maths master’s cupboard down a flight of stairs and smashing it (he thought it contained a secret stash of women’s underwear) Auberon wrote in his son’s defence to the headmaster, saying “Vandalism is no more senseless than playing tennis.”
There are too many stories to go on quoting them so you will have to obtain the book if you want to know any more. The serious point to the story, I suppose, is the many ways in which parents can mess up their children’s lives, whether through lack of love or excess of it.
I must add a word of praise for the interpreter at the event who provided signing in Auslan for the deaf. This woman was highly skilled and watching her was a treat even if you could hear perfectly. I suppose she has worked at a lot of gigs but it cannot be every day that she has to translate sentences such as “Arthur enjoyed watching the undulating bottoms of young ladies as they rode their bicycles” or “My Uncle Arthur discovered the joys of self-abuse while on his knees in the school chapel one night.” It was a magnificent effort.
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