Great men shouldn’t have sons. This moral axiom is dubious, at best. It’s understandable why some say it. It’s even more understandable why sons of great men occasionally say it. Great men too often make terrible fathers. Even if apples don’t fall far from trees, they are too often bruised by the branches. Auberon Waugh, eldest son of the great novelist Evelyn, who died twenty-five years ago on January 16, 2001, took from his father both a great deal of suffering and a great deal of good.
Evelyn Waugh was both a serious Catholic convert and a famously cantankerous and slow-to-be-sanctified man. To the question of how a Christian could be such a nasty person, he responded that he would be scarcely human were it not for the faith. It is not to say he had no lovable, loving, or even holy qualities. It is to say that this great artist of the page often made messes of the pages of his life.
As a father, Evelyn was distinctly troublesome. The son’s 1998 memoir, Will This Do?, began by observing that “the children of Evelyn Waugh did not come particularly well out of his published letters and diaries.” He then quoted a passage typical of his father, written when Bron (as he was always known and how I will refer to him henceforth) was only seven years old, that described “the presence of my children” causing in him “deep weariness and depression. I do not see them till luncheon, as I have my breakfast alone in the library, and they are in fact well trained to avoid my part of the house, but I am aware of them from the moment I wake.” Though he did take luncheon with the children, he described it as “very painful.” Of Bron, he wrote that the boy was “clumsy and disheveled, sly, without intellectual aesthetic or spiritual interest….”
If you don’t think the above sounds sufficiently unfatherly, Bron quotes a much worse passage from his father’s diary written a few years earlier in 1943:
There is a great deal of talk at the moment about the rocket guns which the Germans are said to have set up in France, with a range to carry vast explosive charges to London. This fear is seriously entertained in the highest quarters. I have accordingly given orders for the books I have been keeping at the Hyde Park Hotel to be sent to Piers Court. At the same time, I have advocated my son coming to London. It would seem from this that I prefer my books to my son. I can argue that firemen rescue children and destroy books, but the truth is that a child is easily replaced, while a book destroyed is utterly lost; also a child is eternal; but most that I have a sense of absolute possession over my library and not over my nursery.
While Bron wouldn’t have known of such passages at the time, he certainly had knowledge of his father’s attitudes. Given that Evelyn would give speeches at the table at the end of holidays concerning his happiness that his children were going back to school, Bron took his “undisguised dislike of his children’s company” as “a simple fact of life.” Though the Waugh brood held their father “in awe, certainly,” they had “not much affection” for the old man.
The saddest part of all is that Bron hints that an act of conspicuous cruelty on his father’s part was connected with his eventual abandonment of his father’s Catholic faith (though, to be fair, Bron wrote like his father of the shocking and scandalous banalization of the Church after Vatican II). Shortly after World War II ended, Bron’s mother obtained a treat “unprocurable” throughout the conflict: bananas. The first batch of three were all “put on my father’s plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three.” None of the undisguised dislike or any of the other outrages had so much an effect on the son as this act of cruel selfishness. “From that moment,” Bron wrote, “I never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously.”
I am no judge of Evelyn Waugh’s soul or even my own, but as one who loves him, such episodes have always been troubling. Of course, the reader of this essay who comes away thinking Bron’s memoir was all about his father will be mistaken. Evelyn takes up much of the space, certainly, but not all of it. And one of the happier aspects of the book is that Bron did not hate his father.
Indeed, Bron recounted how in the last five years of the old man’s life, there was a kind of new ease in their relationship. He wrote compassionately of what he believed to be his father’s maltreated depression and its contribution to his inability to relate to people. Bron appreciated, even venerated his father’s genius as a writer—he was outraged at the failure of the British papers to recognize his father’s literary contribution properly at his death. Bron even sensed the true love his father really did possess, no matter how inconstant, for himself. Long after his father’s death, the affection for his father he only developed after youth still haunted him.
It was many years before I could break the habit of viewing every event with half an eye to the bulletin I would send to my father. Even now, I find that when I hear a funny story about someone in whom he would have been interested—the child of a friend, perhaps, or some grandee—I mentally store it away to repeat to him. There always follows a pang of bereavement when I remember that he is no longer around to hear it.
There is an unaccountable gentleness in Bron’s memoir, not just for his father but all his relatives and friends, no matter how cantankerous or weird. Interestingly, that gentleness in the memoir wasn’t shown much publicly when he finally found a career. After a stint in the British Army, in which he accidentally nearly killed himself trying to unjam a machine gun, Bron did time at Oxford, attempted to join the spy agency MI6, and looked for a teaching job. Like Evelyn, who once explained that he only became a writer when all else failed, Bron, too, seemingly backed into the work. He was offered two positions as a teacher but refused them.
Bron wrote five novels, several of which had decent reviews, but the bulk of his publications were journalistic. He wrote about books, wine, politics, and people for many newspapers and magazines. He even did some editing. As editor of The Literary Review, he established the “Bad Sex” award for what we today would call the most cringeworthy depictions of physical intimacy.
Some of his writing (e.g. on African politics) was very deeply serious in content and tone. Much was not. Although sometimes associated with conservative politics because of his writing for the Spectator, he wasn’t a partisan. He simply advocated for common sense and abominated humbug, as he saw those categories.
Eventually, the man who had sympathy for his personally vituperative and occasionally monstrous father took to wielding his pen in a somewhat as a weapon in the service of what he called “the vituperative arts,” by which a discriminating use of “vulgar abuse” was humbled the proud and powerful. Abominating humbug and scourging the guilty became his métier.
“Vituperation is not a philosophy of life nor an answer to all life’s ills,” Bron wrote. “It is merely a tool, a device, part of life’s rich pageant, and in the right hands, a happy part of life’s pageant, a salutary tool.” That tool, used properly, “redresses some of the forces of deference which bolster the conceit of the second-rate; it also prevents the first-rate from going mad with conceit.”
Bron attacked all manner of public figures, commenting on the stupidity of their words, the awfulness of their taste, and the ugliness of their faces. He speculated on the appearance of their intimate anatomy and invented wholly fantastical stories about them that matched those his father privately created for his own personal enemies and victims. Writing of one figure immediately after his death, Bron claimed that the cause of death was gluttony, explaining that he had eaten a Filipino servant. “Looking back over my career, and at all the people I have insulted,” he mused, “I am mildly surprised that I am still allowed to exist.” Though he described the vituperative arts in moral terms, he didn’t overestimate its moral or artistic worth: “My own small gift—for making the comment, at any given time, which people least wish to hear—is more ephemeral than any of theirs. Perhaps we should all cultivate our immortal souls.”
Much as he had been hated for his connection to his father and for advantages derived from the relation, and much as he was hated by some who felt the sting of his vituperation in print, Bron was, however, a man who was deeply loved by a great many friends—and his family. Even as he provided for his family with his manic journalistic production, he seems to have provided them also with encouragement to take up the family line of writing. His wife, Lady Teresa (née Onslow), took up the writer’s pen, as did two of his children, Alexander (a critic and journalist) and Daisy (a novelist still active).
Much as one wishes the great Evelyn Waugh had treated his son better, no one should regret that he fathered the funny, talented, lovable, and literarily vituperative Bron.
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The image of Auberon Waugh, uploaded by Lauracalero99, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The featured image of Fleet Street, uploaded by Josep Renalias, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
