Fathers and Sons by Alexander Waugh

Dr. Alexander 'The Brute' Waugh, grandson of Alexander Waugh 'The Great and the Good' and Great-Great-Grandfather of Alexander Waugh, the author of this book, was a singularly revolting man; looking like the product of a union betwixt man and caricature he was a tyrannical Victorian patriarch. He mentally and physically abused his son Arthur who was as wet as his father was brutal. Arthur in due course married his sweetheart Catherine "K" Raban. He broke with his father’s wishes by pursuing a literary career; he wrote poetry and reams of criticism, lunching with the likes of Henry James and F. Somerset Maugham. His marriage produced first one son, Alec, and then another, Evelyn, both of whom became successful writers; Alec was loved and nurtured by Arthur, whose obsession with his first son grew throughout his life; he was indifferent towards Evelyn, who became a cynical and abrasive depressive. Evelyn married Laura Herbert and produced a son Auberon, with whom relations were cold but intermittently pleasurable. Auberon also became a writer, first of novels, then of newspaper columns. Auberon married Teresa Onslow and begat Alexander. Their relationship was remote but loving, before he died in 2001.

Such is the perhaps unpromising narrative of Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons, which is subtitled An Autobiography of a Family. The interest, naturally, lies in the surname, a surname that has bestridden the world of English letters like some scurfy-haired colossus for a hundred years. Arthur Waugh was an extremely popular literary figure, not necessarily for his published works, but for his careers in publishing and criticism. His fame and connections allowed his two sons to achieve publication in their late teens. Alec achieved notoriety via his schoolboy memoir The Loom of Youth and spent the rest of his long life writing innumerable books, accurately characterised by his nephew Auberon as being "each worst than the last". The Loom of Youth is a very effective novel, it is a superb portrait of growth from youth to young manhood, with all the malaise and angst that one would expect. It's also rather dull, for all it's brevity, it is too fixated upon minor scholastic and sporting details, too clearly autobiographical, but gives disaffected youth it's ultimate slogan: "I am magnificently prepared for the long littleness of life".

Evelyn became England's most popular and celebrated comic novelist, twisting the light-hearted ribaldry of Wodehouse into darker and murkier shapes. Auberon Waugh's own novels are grievously underrated, published to acclaim in the 1960's, The Foxglove Saga and Who Are the Violets Now? are thoroughly vicious and incisive novels. He was a less accomplished writer than his father, whose The Loved One is one of the few 'perfect' short novels, but are possessed of a different, more addictively coarse humour. His later fame was assured through his columns in The Spectator, The Telegraph and Private Eye, where his self-designed "art of the vituperative" style won him as many friends as enemies. His beliefs were apolitical, and he was able to anger the left and the right with equal efficacy.

The latest Alexander dabbled in many careers: theatre agent, music teacher, before eventually ceding to the inevitable and publishing two unclassifiable works of non-fiction: Time and God, both of which achieved substantial trans-Atlantic success. Whilst in mourning for his father, Alexander finally found himself ready to write about the one thing he had studiously avoided: his family. Fathers and Sons has been an enormous success; when I wished to order a copy from the library where I work, it became necessary to shunt no less than 35 people one place further down the list.

To these people, I make no apology because Fathers and Sons is highly addictive reading. Waugh clearly realises that the unique selling point of the book is his personal involvement, thus the affected sheen of a dispassionate investigation is soon abandoned. The subject matter - the paternal/filial relationships across the years - is extremely fertile literary ground, particularly the relationships of Arthur with Alec and Evelyn. It is here that most time is spent. Arthur became convinced that Arthur ("The son of my soul") was given to him directly from God, and consistently drew biblical comparisons with himself as God to Alec's Jesus. It's pretty heady stuff, with unprecedented access to the letters of both, and Waugh shows no concerns about identifying the relationship as unhealthy, not sexually, but Arthur became involved so closely that it impacted negatively on the family around him, particularly upon Evelyn. When Alec returned home from Sherbourne, Evelyn had to greet him from beneath a banner proclaiming "Welcome home Alec: Heir of Underhill".

By telling the story this way, Evelyn is relegated to a subsidiary character until he publishes Decline and Fall, his first novel in 1928. From this point though, his doings take precedent (Waugh seemingly ‘following the talent’). Everything Evelyn did was touched by his depressions, it coloured everything in his life, especially his relationship with Auberon. The portrait though, as Evelyn loses interest in first fiction and then life as a whole, is never sentimental and never biased. Auberon too was not given to romanticising this decline, "The best thing a parent may do for a child" he remarked in his autobiography Will This Do? "is die early". What is of more interest to Waugh is how, in his later years, Evelyn became more and more like his father, affecting the mannerisms and characteristics of his father and even tapping into a similar vein of sentimentality (kick-started by his syrupy concoction Brideshead Revisited). Thus the banner of Fathers and Sons is no flimsy pretext to write in anecdotal fashion about his family in the vein of Alec Waugh's Memoirs; he writes coherently and informatively about the ways in which the Waugh's view their fathers and sons, and the ways in which their lives were affected by these relationships.

It is only in this way, by trimming the narratives of all extraneous factors (mothers are indistinct, sisters practically invisible) that Waugh keeps the book lean. It is a huge story to retell in one volume, but one can understand why he confined it to one expurgation, linked as it is to a cathartic release after his father’s death. Still, the book is not balanced equally between time periods, essentially Arthur/Alec/Evelyn take up the first half with Evelyn/Auberon dominating the second. The Brute/Arthur relationship is more of an introduction, which is a wise move; less forgivable is the way in which Auberon’s paternity is brushed over. At 450 pages, the book is hardly short, but one is still left searching for a definite impression of him. Perhaps Alexander hasn’t one himself, but he could certainly have made a better fist of it; given that he seems set upon not addressing the subject again, it seems a shame to leave gaps in the tapestry.

This is the only major quibble as Waugh’s writing is impressively suited to the task of rendering his unusual family. When one picks up an Alexander Waugh book, one experiences feelings similar, no doubt, to those of Auberon who refused to read his son’s first book for two years after publication for fear of it being tosh. Fortunately he has inherited his fathers wit and developed a singular habit for hiding snide remarks and an ironical abstraction beneath the conventions of ‘A Biography’. A picture of Arthur and fiancée K is subtitled “Arthur and K prepare for an exciting day on their bicycles”, all very quaint one may think until Arthur’s less than pure interest in young women sat astride their bicycles is later revealed. Just as Evelyn hid pejorative reflections of his father throughout his work (all of which Alexander picks out with consummate flair, never sounding like a critic) so Alexander has a way of damning or praising his forbears obliquely.

He closes with a short passage about his own son, a letter tells the newest Auberon not to feel compelled into a world of letters, which raises an interesting point about the family as a whole. The Waugh’s relationships, by and large are coloured by their inability to interact with each other, the bulk of Waugh’s source material is taken from autobiographies, not from letters or personal experience. The only exception is Arthur and Alec’s relationship, which developed a slightly bizarre loquacity, with long letters of love and adoration flung this way and that for as long as Arthur could write. In Will This Do?, Auberon noted his uncertainty over how to refer to his father, settling eventually upon “Evelyn Waugh”. Alexander charts how this confusion became central in his last dementia, “the father and literary figure had merged together”. It’s a rather sad image, but an appropriate metaphor for the flaws of a Victorian patriarchy and the small bourgeois tragedies that colour the family.

When he does write about his own experiences of parenthood, Alexander is commendably honest. He feels often as his father and grandfather felt - that sometimes the chatter, noise and mess of one’s children can be overwhelming and that a retreat must be beaten to "the library". However, he achieves a truer kind of clarity, surely his children will grow to appreciate the honesty rather than internalise all of the traditional family problems, as was the way of the Waugh's before. More than anything, I suppose, the story is testament to the havoc that genius' reek when let loose on common human matters like parenthood.

By J.L. Cranfield