The Waugh Family Guide to Fatherhood

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I give up. It's turning out to be Evelyn Waugh week after all. (But I promise this is the end of it! Think of this as Sunday morning of Evelyn Waugh week: struggle through this one last sermon and it's all over.)

Today is for those of you who have, or are considering having, children. I, childless and with nary a glimmer of the desire to pass on my genes, can read Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004) as sheer entertainment. I can enjoy the bizarre anecdotes--occasionally flinching at the worst of them--while gaining insight into one of my favorite writers and one of England's most illustrious literary families. Parents, however, can employ the book for a wholly different--and far more important--purpose: they can read it in order to learn how not to raise their children!

The Waughs, it seems, have for generations raised their children in such a way that the casual reader--one who, say, having seen nature films of birds vomiting in the screeching beaks of their offspring or polar bears teaching their children how to kill, vaguely imagines that parents are driven by natural forces to care for and about their young--will regularly find himself staring gapemouthed at the page, wondering just where English eccentricity shades over into . . . well, best to let Evelyn's father tell it:

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."

Now, to be fair to the later Waughs, Arthur's father, Alexander, was by far the worst of the batch. His sobriquet, "The Brute," was no accident:

The Brute's solution to his elder son's faiblesses was to enroll him on a toughen-you-up induction course based on the old-fashioned wisdom: "'Tis fear as makes 'em brave." To this end he forced his son to cling for his life to farm gates as he swung them violently back and forth, shouting, "Hold on, m'boy." He perched him on high branches, deserting him there for hours on end, and then would creep up behind him, blasting off both barrels of his gun just inches from his ear--all this to fortify Arthur's character and to teach him about surprises.

If the Brute's abuse is enough to make one question whether there is such a thing as innate filial sentiment, the fact that Arthur never even seems to have considered murdering the monstrous shit may provide a countervailing example. In fact, considering his upbringing, Arthur turned out surprisingly well--though still, admittedly, leaving a bit to be desired as a father. As I noted the other day, his involvement with the life of his eldest son, Alec, was intense to the point of obsession, while he essentially ignored his younger son, Evelyn. Sometimes his decisions seem bizarrely cruel:

When Evelyn asked for a bicycle in April 1914 . . . he went off and bought a bigger and better one for Alec, and gave Evelyn a small box of theatrical facepaint instead.

Strangely enough, the result of the stifling closeness to Alec and the general dismissal of Evelyn seems to have been relatively similar: neither man wanted to have all that much to do with his children. Alec, however, was by far the worse offender in that regard, spending nearly his whole life apart from them. In his autobiography he wrote, regarding his return from six years on active service during the war:

My conventional civic duty was clearly to devote my energies to my family, to reforging links with them, to planning for their future, to making amends for the six years' separation. That was my civic duty. Yes, I know, I know. I had been six years away from my family, but I had also been six years away from my desk. I put the claims of my writing first. Time was running out. I had to make the most of the time still left.

Evelyn, on the other hand, was around his children quite a bit, though as his grandson Alexander explains,

He did his best to entertain them but he was never strong enough to keep up the effort for long--he put too much in and felt he got too little out--so that by the end of each school holiday no on was happier than he to see them return to school.

From Alexander's account one gets the sense that it wasn't his kids specifically that Evelyn objected to, but the whole species. He wrote to his friend Lady Diana Cooper that,

I abhor their company because I can only regard children as defective adults. I hate their physical ineptitude, find their jokes flat and monotonous.

He also apparently treated Lady Diana to the following gruesomely funny scenario, telling her that:

"[F]or choice he would take his six children to church at Easter, see them shriven and annealed and, at the church door, slaughter the lot in their innocence and absolution."

"But what about you, Evelyn?" Diana asked him.

"O, I would repent at leisure and be forgiven."

As Evelyn was one of the great satirists of the age, rarely writing anything that didn't betray a glint of cruel steel, it's not difficult to dismiss such sentiments as playing. But the exchange does add a gruesomely personal cast to Brenda Last's callous acceptance of the death of her son in A Handful of Dust. At the very least it seems true that Evelyn was no more comfortable in the presence of his children than he was in the company of adults he actively disliked.

Yet over the years at least some of Evelyn's children seemed to develop a real affection for him--especially Alexander's father, Auberon, despite Evelyn's describing him to Nancy Mitford as a bore (even though "I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober"). Alexander recounts a tale from his uncle Septimus that is almost touching, in which the child Septimus demonstrates more understanding--and certainly more compassion--than customarily evinced by Evelyn the adult:

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 th 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.

Despite all of this bad heritage Auberon (and quite possibly his siblings, whose adult lives mostly go unnoted in Alexander's book) somehow, it seems, became a pretty good father--perhaps a bit hands-off and reticent for the modern taste, but supportive and caring. And Alexander, the father of three children, seems at the very least to have a healthier attitude towards his own relationship with his children than one often sees on the more hotly contested playgrounds of the contemporary urban paradise:

We are all bored by our children on occasion and the world might be an easier place if we were only frank enough to admit it, but modern parents tend instead to furrow their brows, force smiles onto anxious lips and talk down in sentimental goo-goo voices that sometimes stick even after their children have grown up. This, I believe, is the way to damage children.

Ah, but if goo-gooing is the way to damage children, what is the way to raise them properly? Well, though my childlessness may justifiably lead you to discount this prescription, I would argue for happy songs, hugs, regular readings from Good Night, Gorilla--and, just to be sure things don't get too saccharine, a copy of A Handful of Dust held back for the later teenage years.

Consigned to the Flames VI: Evelyn Waugh

From Evelyn Waugh's diary of Friday, October 10, 1919

This morning I tore out and destroyed all the first part of this diary about the holidays. There was little worth preserving and a very great deal that could not possibly be read and was really too dangerous without being funny.

Considering how open and unashamed (and funny) are the portions of Evelyn Waugh's diaries that have appeared in print, it's natural to speculate about what tales of teenage enormities he may have destroyed that day. If his grandson Alexander Waugh's guess is accurate, however, the excised portions dealt primarily with his frustration with--and embarrassment about--his absurdly theatrical father. Most likely, it seems, we lost little by Evelyn's temporary squeamishness.

Of more interest is this tidbit, also gleaned from Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004), regarding Evelyn's first attempt at a full-length novel, written when he was an aimless twenty-one:

During his second term The Temple of Thatch was returned to him in the post by a trusted friend, with a letter stating that he had not in the least enjoyed it. Evelyn consigned the manuscript to the flames of the school boiler.

Whereas the missing diary entries seem ultimately unlamentable, the novel, though almost certainly not good, would be interesting to see, if only because of its subject, black magic--an art in which both Evelyn and, later, his son Auberon dabbled jokingly as part of their perpetually performed suite of effects designed to discomfit their schoolmasters.

The Wauvian Wodehouse--or should it be the Wodehousian Waugh?

From Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004), by Alexander Waugh

[B]y popular request Papa [Auberon Waugh] used to declaim his grandfather's "Bax Passage" . . . 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.

From "The Letter of the Law," by P. G. Wodehouse, collected in Lord Emsworth and Others (1937)

The Oldest Member, who often infested the seventh tee on a fine afternoon, nodded. . . . "The only man I ever knew who derived solid profit from driving into somebody who was not out of distance was young Wilmot Byng . . ."

The two men started.

"Are you going to tell us a story?"

"I am."

"But--"

"I knew you would be pleased," said the Oldest Member.

From Fathers and Sons

[Evelyn Waugh's wife] Laura's happiness at Piers Court was drawn mainly from her cows. She owned six or seven of them, some named after her daughters, all jealously guarded by herself and the cowman, Mr Sanders. . . . The happiest moments of her day were spent in discussing her herd with Sanders, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of individual beasts, comparing moos with milk yields, moving them slowly from one field to another and wondering what to do with them next. . . . If Bron [Auberon Waugh] ever suspected that his mother was more interested in Sanders and her cows than she was in her children, he may have been right. . . . In his autobiography he wrote: "My mother had only a few cows and they cost a fortune to keep, but she loved them extravagantly, as other women love their dogs or, so I have been told, their children."

From "The Crime Wave at Blandings'" by P. G. Wodehouse, collected in Lord Emsworth and Others (1937)

She drew the pallid peer aside, and spoke with sharp rebuke.

"Just like a stuck pig!"

"Eh?" said Lord Emsworth. His mind had been wandering, as it so often did. The magic word brought it back. "Pigs? What about pigs?"

"I was saying that you were looking like a stuck pig. You might at least have asked Mr. Baxter how he was."

"I could see how he was. What's he doing here?"

"I told you what he was doing here."

. . . .

"You mean the chap's out of a job?" he cried aghast.

"Yes. And it could not have happened at a more fortunate time, because something has got to be done about George."

"Who's George?"

"You have a grandson of that name," explained Lady Constance with the sweet, frozen patience which she so often used when conversing with her brother.

From Fathers and Sons

One summer [Evelyn] grew a handlebar moustache, which made him look like a motor-bike queen on the Earl's Court Road circa 1968: "Every man must grow a moustache or a beard at least once in his life," he said--one piece of his advice that I have never taken. His family thought he looked loathsome with that on his face.

From "Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg," by P. G. Wodehouse, collected in Carry On, Jeeves (1925)

I was sorry if Bicky was in trouble, but, as a matter of fact, I was rather glad to have something I could discuss freely with Jeeves just then, because things had been a bit strained between us for some time, and it had been rather difficult to hit on anything to talk about that wasn't apt to take a personal turn. You see, I had decided--rightly or wrongly--to grow a moustache, and this had cut Jeeves to the quick. He couldn't stick the thing at any price, and I had been ever since in an atmosphere of bally disapproval till I was getting jolly well fed up with it. What I mean is, while there's no doubt that in certain matters of dress Jeeves's judgment is absolutely sound and should be followed, it seemed to me that it was getting a bit too thick if he was going to edit my face as well as my costume. No one can call me an unreasonable chappie, and many's the time I've given in like a lamb when Jeeves has voted against one of my pet suits or ties; but when it comes to one's valet's staking out a claim on your upper lip you've simply got to have a bit of the good old bulldog pluck and defy the blighter.

From Fathers and Sons

[Evelyn] had no expectation for [his son James] as a writer, believing him devoid of literary taste. "James is reading P. G. Wodehouse with great seriousness. 'Don't you find it funny, James?' 'I think this book is meant to be serious, Papa.' The book was Carry on Jeeves."

From "Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg"

It was a wrench, but I felt it was the only possible thing to be done.

"Bring me my shaving things."

A gleam of hope shone in the man's eye, mixed with doubt.

"You mean, sir?"

"And shave off my moustache."

There was a moment's silence. I could see the fellow was deeply moved.

"Thank you very much indeed, sir," he said, in a low voice.

The Members of the Waugh Family

{Auberon, Alexander, and Evelyn Waugh at home in 1965. The cigar is, so far as I know, just a cigar.}

At the risk of unintentionally turning this into Evelyn Waugh Week . . . and at the further risk of permanently alienating whatever small portion of my small readership has any taste or good sense . . . . I think I have to--I see no other course but to--write about some of the members of the Waugh family's . . . members.

Ahem.

See, despite Alexander Waugh's acknowledgment of the problematic nature of familial nudity--

I never saw my father's bare arse or his exposed genitals and am glad of that, as a glance at either might have traumatised me for life

--his Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004) is chock full of, if not descriptions of, then at least information about, Waugh family units.

A blogger with a sense of decency would pass over those moments in this heartfelt and amusing book in silence, or at most would dignify them with a quiet "Harrumph" or two. But decency be damned--they're too horridly entertaining to ignore!

Take, for example, this demonstration of the unintended consequences of punishment, from the schooldays of Alexander's great-uncle Alec Waugh:

One day he was caught misbehaving and, by way of punishment, was ordered to spend the night kneeling on the stone floor of the school chapel. It was there that he first worked out how to masturbate.

Surely Alexander's grandfather Evelyn would have appreciated that nicely chosen "worked out," with its whiff of remembered furtive experimentation. For his own part, Evelyn later wrote to a friend that he was "reading all the case studies in Havelock Ellis and frigging too much."

Then there's the official horror provoked by the discovery of such illicit activity. The headmaster wrote to Alec's father, Arthur, and Arthur--whose involvement with the details of Alec's youth, at this distance in years, appears obsessive to the point of creepiness--dispatched a lengthy, moralizing letter to his son, in the midst of which is this howler of a paragraph:

And something more. The man who is addicted to self-abuse generally becomes the father of feeble and rickety children, even if he is not incapable of being a parent at all. It is an awful thought that someday you might take to a pure girl's arms a body that will avenge its own indulgences upon children yet unborn. It is a deadly thought. It must be prevented at all costs.

I understand that Arthur Waugh was writing from a sensibility rooted in the Victorian era--including its science of glands and depletion of essence and such--but masturbation must be prevented at all costs? Goodness--surely there are some remedies that even the staunchest opponent of self-defilement wouldn't countenance?

The modernity that is rooted so deeply in us reflexively argues that such a relentlessness quest to stamp out sexual expression inevitably will lead to its emergence elsewhere, in some murkier, possibly damaged form. In that vein, take note of the drawing that Alec's 8-year-old brother Evelyn commits to his diary to commemorate his appendicitis operation, which was "performed with chloroform on the kitchen table":

It shows a jubilant doctor waving scissors and a knife in the air as Evelyn is held down by his mother. Another figure (probably Arthur) bangs a chisel into his son's penis.

I don't think one has to be steeped in Freud to raise an eyebrow at that. (This takes us off the topic a bit, but I can't resist: after the operation, Waugh was bedridden for a week, and he was too weak to stand when released. Arthur

sent him to a vacated girls' school to recuperate where they forced him to undergo electric-shock and cold-water treatments.

Evelyn Waugh was a complicated, frequently unpleasant man, and his cranky awkwardness can't entirely be blamed on his bizarre childhood--but it clearly gave him a solid shove on his way.)

I'll skip over Arthur's hiring of a young woman to give him buttock massages in his old age--because it's too grotesque to contemplate--and instead move up a generation, which offers me a chance to give the memberless members of the Waugh family their nude due. (Which, clothed or not, Alexander doesn't do much of in this volume: until recently only the Waugh men wrote, so only the Waugh men get written about.) Alexander speculates whether,

in my own father's case, if his erotic sensibilities were not slightly impaired by the seminal shock of seeing (aged three) his nonagenarian step-great-great-grandmother naked in her bath. Her name was Grace Wemyss: she was his mother's mother's stepmother. "How beautiful you are looking today, Granny Grace," he is said to have said. Evelyn, oblivious to the psychological damage this grotesque spectacle might have inflicted upon his little boy, wrote proudly in his diary: "Auberon surprised her in her bath and is thus one of the very few men who can claim to have seen his great-great-grandmother in the raw."

If any of you are members of that exclusive club, I don't want to know!

To be read, may I take the liberty to suggest, with a dry gin martini

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Some offerings from the I've Been Reading Lately bar today: belly up and pick your poison.

1 Having just written about the Amises, I was glad to discover last night in the new issue of Bookforum an article by Alexander Waugh on Kingsley Amis's books on booze . . . of which there are not one, not two, but three! My first reaction was that Amis, a champion tippler (whose monthly bill for Scotch topped £1,000 in the 1970s) and the best writer on drunkenness since Noah first snarfed the grape and rucked up his robes, ought to be a good source for recommendations about drink, but Waugh rightly questions that assumption:

[I]t is worth ruminating for a moment on the question of whether a person who drinks as much as Kingsley Amis did is, or is not, a reliable expert on the subject. You would think that someone who had devoted so much of his life to alcohol would know a thing a two about it—and he certainly did—but are the taste recommendations of alcoholics useful to people who drink only moderately? As an immoderate imbiber myself, I am not the best placed to answer this question, though I cannot imagine that the average two-glasses-of-wine-a-day man is going to think very highly of some of Amis’s recommendations—Bloody Mary with tomato ketchup and no Tabasco, red wine with lemonade, a pint of Guinness mixed with gin and ginger beer (this he erroneously claims to be the invention of my grandfather Evelyn Waugh), Scotch whisky with fried eggs. And who but a committed alcoholic could possibly wish for a glass of the “Tigne Rose,” an Amis cocktail made up of one tot of gin, one tot of whisky, one tot of rum, one tot of vodka, and one tot of brandy? Alcoholics have special cravings that obfuscate, warp, and exaggerate their tastes and, like committed sex maniacs, are often prepared to try almost anything.

The scariest thing about that paragraph for me is that I've encountered—though thank god not tasted—a tomato ketchup Bloody Mary, prepared by Jose, one of the hash-addled South African moving men with whom I shared a horrid travelers' house in north London's Neasden neighborhood in the mid-90s. Not only did Jose seem to have no qualms about making—and heartily quaffing—the aforementioned abomination, he didn't even seem to realize that his concoction was unusual. Thinking of its corn-syrup-thickened redness oozing down his chin still induces a shudder.

2 From Amis's book On Drink (1972), Waugh quotes the following brutally perceptive passage about hangovers:

When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is, and there is no use crying over spilt milk.

Even those among us whose deepest appreciation for drink is more notional—even literary—than actual can recognize familiar elements in that description, however much we might prefer to banish them from memory.

3 Since Anthony Powell featured in the discussion of the Amises the other night, I ought to note that Powell, too, is very good when writing on drink and drunks. On the recommendation of Ed at the Dizzies, we've been slowly making our way through the 1997 BBC adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time, and one of the many surprising pleasures of the film has been the skill at playing drunk evinced by the actor cast as the hopeless alcoholic Charles Stringham; his wide-eyed efforts to effect a hopeless pretense of sobriety on entering a room elicit equal parts sympathetic pain and horrified laughter.

4 At various times in Dance, many of Powell's characters make appearances while deep in their cups. I particularly like this description, from At Lady Molly's (1957), of the extremely minor character Hegarty, who is employed alongside Nick Jenkins as a screenwriter by a dismally shabby film studio:

Hegarty was also in poor form that day. He had been a script-writer most of his grown-up life—burdened by then with three, if not four, wives, to all of whom he was paying alimony—and he possessed, when reasonably sober, an extraordinary facility for constructing film scenarios. That day, he could not have been described as reasonably sober. Groaning, he had sat all the afternoon in the corner of the room facing the wall. We were working on a stage play that had enjoyed a three-weeks West End run twenty or thirty year before, the banality of which had persuaded some director that it would "make a picture." This was the ninth treatment we had produced between us. At last, for the third time in an hour, Hegarty broke out in a cold sweat. He began taking aspirins by the handful. It was agreed to abandon work for the day.

5 In his notebook, which was published in 2001 as A Writer's Notebook, Powell vented a bit, from bitter experience, about film executives:

One of the reasons that films are so bad is that producers assume that a class of picture-goer exists, stupider and slower witted and more vulgar than themselves, which would, of course, be impossible.

Invective is such a pleasure when balanced and properly coiled, concealing until the last the venomous stinger.

6 For a long time, I've vaguely imagined that the drunken Hegarty incorporated characteristics of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Powell met while working in Hollywood. Checking the third volume of Powell's autobiography, Faces in My Time (1980), however, I find that the two never actually worked together; in fact, their acquaintance was limited to a single long and amiable lunch. But I did discover the following description of Fitzgerald, which you'll surely agree is timely:

His air could be though a trifle sad, not, as sometimes described at this period, in the least broken-down. When, years later, I came to know Kingsley Amis, his appearance recalled Fitzgerald's to me, a likeness photographs of both confirm.

Powell also describes memorably the tone in which Hollywood figures spoke of Fitzgerald:

It was as if Lazarus, just risen from the dead, were to be looked on as of somewhat doubtful promise as an aspiring scriptwriter.

7 To wrap this up, I'll turn to back to Powell's notebooks, which include plenty of entries touching on drink.

At a party, make up your mind whether you are going to go all out for women, food or drink. You can't have all three.

In quarantine for a hangover.

"I might come in and have a drink with you." "You might come in; a drink depends on my hospitality."

Life is a comedy for those who drink, and a tragedy for those who eat.

A wine snob boasts that he has some bottles corked with corks made from Proust's soundproof room.

A rich left-winger who put his trust in Marx and kept his sherry dry.

A bore, who at worst would explain the meaning of life.

Though the final entry, you'll have noticed, didn't explicitly mention alcohol, I included it nonetheless; I find it nearly impossible to imagine the bore reaching his worst state without the timely assistance of strong drink.