Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/01/25/all_in_the_family.php

All in the Family

Friday, January 25, 2008

Alexander Waugh—grandson of English novelist Evelyn Waugh—chronicles in his new book the intergenerational interactions of his well-known British family, a family known for both their eccentricity and wit. The book is entitled Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family. A strange title, but it fits the book perfectly. The Waugh dynasty is unusual in that the last four generations have all been writers. Alexander takes advantage of this and for the most part allows each generation to tell its own story. He was able to draw on four autobiographies, diaries, and untold personal correspondence between the fathers and sons. This trove of the written word, along with the author’s wavian wit, creates an interesting, unsentimental, humorous, and ultimately powerful book about the ties between fathers and sons in the 20th century.

The book opens with the relationship between Alexander ‘the Brute’ Waugh (1840-1906) and Arthur Waugh (1866-1943), the author’s great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather respectively. Arthur sired Alec (1898-1981) and Evelyn (1903-1966), the latter fathered Auberon (1939-2001, pronounced Or’brn) who is the father of the author (1963). Most readers on this side of the Atlantic are only familiar with Evelyn (pronounced eev-lin) Waugh, one of the greatest English novelists of the last century; yet, in England the family has consistently been in the public’s eye for the last hundred years.

The Brute was, as his familial nickname makes clear, a sadist: a doctor who routinely beat his dog, forcing his young son Arthur to carry around the ivory whip between beatings. When Arthur was nearing birth in 1866 his mother was terrified “lest her labour should interrupt the Brute’s first day of partridge-shooting.” In a BBC documentary that accompanied the release of his book, Alexander stands at the Brute’s grave with his young son. Towards the end of the shot Alexander encourages his son to spit on the gravestone; the camera cuts away. This short scene captures that particular wavian humor, a dark wit that is so evident in Evelyn’s novels as well as, fortunately, Fathers and Sons.

The most fascinating part of Alexander’s book is the relationship between Arthur and his sons, Alec in particular. Arthur followed his father to Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize, the University’s top prize for poetry. He was able to leverage this achievement along with a biography of the recently deceased Tennyson into a literary career. As managing director of a respected London publishing firm Chapman and Hall (the firm had exclusive rights to the works of Charles Dickens) he was, if not famous, well known in the literary circles of early 20th century England. In what becomes a leitmotif in the book, Arthur reacts to his father’s sadistic character by swinging to the polar opposite—sentimentality.

Nowhere is Arthur’s suffocating sentimentality more on display than in the relationship with his first son, Alec. His autobiography One Man’s Road is replete with fawning accounts of young Alec’s cricket games and other achievements both in the home and at school. Alexander notes that One Man’s Road’s “most obvious defect is its sentimentality—a glaring error of judgment that stretches far beyond the fashion of its age…. ‘Sentimentality,’ as Papa [Auberon] used to say, ‘is the exact measure of a person’s inability to experience genuine felling.’”

Arthur’s tie to Alec bordered on the obsessive. His co-workers would sarcastically call out “And how is Master Alec this morning, sir?” as he passed by. Yet Arthur continued to dote on Alec as if he were his teenage love. Indeed, most modern readers will be profoundly uncomfortable with Arthur’s involvement in Alec’s life. The author goes so far as to compare him with Michael Jackson in his fascination with young children, often overstepping the bounds of simple sentimentality and becoming creepy. When Alec went away to school at Sherborne, his father exhorted him to “keep nothing from me, for I know all. I beg you always to trust me, and to tell me all your troubles and to be sure of my best help.” He goes on to write, “I am not your ‘governor,’ your critic, or your judge, but always in the darkness and in the light, your true friend, your real sympathizer, and your devotedly loving Father.”

So blinded by his devotion to Alec was Arthur that when, in his penultimate semester at Sherborne, Alec got expelled for either molesting or fooling around with a younger classmate (it’s unclear which). Arthur rushed to reassure him:

There is a rare sort of crucifix found in one or two Gothic cathedrals in France, in which behind the figure of the Son, as he hangs upon the cross, is vaguely to be discerned the figure of God the Father also. The nails that pierce the Son’s hands pierce the Father’s also: the thorn-crowned head of the Dying Saviour is seen to be lying upon the Father’s bosom. And it is always so with you and me. Every wound that touches you pierces my own soul also: every thorn in your crown of life tears my tired head as well.

That response is from a man who flatly refused to shake Oscar Wilde’s hand when the two crossed paths in 1890.

Arthur’s relationship with Alec made his stance toward Evelyn all the more incredible. Evelyn loathed his father’s sentimental outbursts, whether at the dinner table or in the evening as he read Dickens aloud to his guests. Arthur, in turn, despised his younger son’s sharp tongue. Throughout the course of reading this book it becomes quite clear that Evelyn did not forgive easily, his father included. Of all the novels he wrote, only one had a father who was supportive—and it was published more than fifteen years after Arthur’s death.

Evelyn speculated that the coldness he received from his parents was in part because they had wanted a girl after Alec (that would explain his effeminate name). This speculation was largely confirmed when a letter came to light in which, thirty years after Evelyn’s birth, Arthur confesses to Alec that he had “always longed for a daughter.”

When Evelyn was finally allowed to go to school, his teachers where appalled by how he was treated at home. “Arthur wrote to Alec at Sherborne: ‘Mrs Fleming cordially told me that I had never been a good father to Evelyn, who was afraid of me, and at his worst in my presence! Cheery News!!’”

Alec’s expulsion from Sherborne occurred during the First World War. Before being sent to the continent he trained in England. During this time he wrote a ‘fictional’ memoir of a boy’s time at a school much like Sherborne. The Loom of Youth was a scandal when it was published for its depiction of rampant schoolboy homosexuality in the English public school system. Sherborne had Alec removed from its registry of Alumni, and Evelyn was forced to go to Lancing instead of Sherborne, a school he considered inferior. The theme of homosexual love would resurface often in Alec’s career, and it always made Arthur profoundly uneasy. Nonetheless, Arthur remained devoted to Alec throughout his life, once writing his son’s wife that the three things that brought him the most happiness were herself, his own wife, and Alec. Evelyn is conspicuously missing.

From Lancing Evelyn continued on to Hertford College at Oxford. He studied History and represented his college in, as he put it, drinking. Evelyn’s years of perpetual drunkenness and ribaldry during these years have been well chronicled elsewhere. I will only recount his most well known tussle from this time. C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, a history tutor, despised Evelyn because he was obnoxious, but also because his sharper wit ensured that we always came out the victor of verbal entanglements with Cruttwell. Cruttwell took away his scholarship, blocked his attempts to find employment after school, and even managed to play a significant role in breaking up his first marriage. In response Evelyn outed Cruttwell as a dog sodomist, and named a variety of unenviable characters Cruttwell in his novels. Alexander happily carried on his grandfathers vendetta against the memory of Cruttwell when:

As part of the Evelyn Waugh centenary celebrations in 2003 I was invited to give an after-dinner speech in the dining hall of Hertford College to an audience of two hundred international Waugh scholars…. As I stood addressing these good people from a spot directly beneath a pompous boardroom portrait of Cruttwell…great waves of family pride engulfed me. That ancient wound needed once more to be reopened, ‘Let us now raise our glasses and drink to C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, that he may for ever be remembered as a dog sodomist and a total shit.’ With a V sign to the portrait, our glasses clinked and the two hundred clever professors drank deep.

I believe it was Virginia Woolf who once complained of Evelyn that for such a great writer he wasted his talent by not writing more realistic fiction. Reading through this history, it quickly becomes evident to the reader that his outlandish characters were true representations of many of the people around him. Many of the familial episodes recounted sound like they come straight from and Evelyn Waugh novel, to wit, he once poisoned his children’s pet rabbits with vodka.

Evelyn Waugh was considered a cruel man by many of his contemporaries and the present age’s obsession with overbearing child rearing only tends to exacerbate this portrayal. This view was in part encouraged by his son Auberon, who would recall how his father gathered up all of his children’s war-rationed bananas when he got home and ate all of them, his children looking on. The public in Britain was scandalized when after Evelyn’s death his diaries where published; the entries spared no one. Auberon would later write that “The most terrifying aspect of Evelyn Waugh as a parent was that he reserved the right not just to deny affection to his children but to advertise an acute and unqualified dislike for them.”

In general, however, both Auberon and Alexander are defensive of Evelyn as a father. Alexander notes that Evelyn’s chief fault was his annoyance at how boring his children where. This is no different than any parent’s feelings about his children, except that Evelyn was honest about it, the author contends. That may be, yet many instances are incomprehensible to the modern reader. For example, when Auberon got shot point-blank six times while repairing a machine gun in Cyprus, Evelyn didn’t even write to him, let alone travel to see him in the hospital.

When Auberon later recalled the event in his autobiography he flippantly noted only that, “It may encourage those who have a fear of being shot to learn that it is almost completely painless, at any rate at close range with high velocity bullets.” Evelyn waited until Auberon was back in England (weeks after the incident) before he visited him in the hospital. After the visit Evelyn fretted that Auberon was becoming soft from all of the attention he was receiving; this is at a point where it was still uncertain whether or not his son would survive.

By the time Evelyn died, Auberon had set himself up as a reporter and newspaper columnist. Auberon Waugh is best imagined by American readers as a cross between the humorous and satirical Jon Stewart and the old-school conservative George Will. For all of Evelyn’s distance as a father, Auberon was quick to defend his father in the wake of his death. In a response to many of the falsehoods in the obituaries being printed at the time, he wrote, “The main point about my father…is simply that he was the funniest man of his generation. He scarcely opened his mouth but to say something extremely funny. His house and life revolved around jokes.”

The author’s father, Auberon, governed with a lighter and gentler hand than Evelyn—though that didn’t stop him from calling Alexander ‘Fat Fool’ for the first ten years of his life. In the second grade Alexander was convinced his teacher was hiding women’s underwear in one of his cabinet, and so he pushed the cabinet down a flight of stairs, breaking it open. Auberon wrote to the headmaster recommending that his son be congratulated for his enterprise and bravery. Indeed, it must have seemed trivial to Auberon, who allegedly burned part of his school to the ground.

Though not as antagonistic as Evelyn, Auberon was still an aloof father. The author didn’t even know that his father had read his first book until he read Auberon’s newspaper column praising it. It was Auberon’s death in 2001 that spurred Alexander to write this history.

Near the end of his book Alexander summarizes the father-son dynamic, distilling the whole history into a paragraph:

Perhaps it is the same for all sons: a childhood of trust (sometimes hero worship) leads to an adolescence of disillusionment and rage. In the busy years that follow we try to ignore our fathers and concentrate on feathering our nests without them; and when, at last, in fair round belly and seasoned middle age, we think ourselves emotionally ready to review the relationship with equanimity, we usually discover, to our dismay, that we have arrived on the scene too late. By then our father’s star is fading, obscured in mists of eccentricity and semi-senile detachment…. [A] father’s death resolves nothing. While the son remains conscious the relationship never ends. Neither does it flourish. Instead it trundles round and round on an axis of the mind, suspended, unclosed, incomplete. Most unsatisfactory.

It is a remarkable study and a remarkable book. In Fathers and Sons Alexander Waugh effectively allows his forbears to tell their own stories, interjecting only to briskly move the saga along with his family’s characteristic wit and pitch perfect prose. He closes the book with a letter to his young son, within which he gives the following advice: “Beware of seriousness: it is a form of stupidity. Fear boredom. Never use the word ‘ersatz’. Good luck. The road ahead is tough and tricky.” n