Virtuoso of the Vituperative

William Cook, Kiss Me, Chudleigh: The World According to Auberon Waugh (Coronet/Hachette, 2011), 384 pages, $49.99. 

Asked abruptly (as in a quiz) for the names of two journalists writing in my lifetime whom I most esteemed, I would instantly answer: George Orwell and Auberon Waugh. They might seem an odd pair to choose, and they were barely even contemporaries. (Orwell was born in 1903; when he died in 1950, Waugh had not yet entered his teens.)

Their lives and their literary styles could hardly have differed more: Orwell resolutely left-wing, style rather serious but with a transparent clarity and honesty that lent joy to reading. Waugh’s words sparkled with wit and paradox, irreverence and frivolity. Pompous readers he infuriated, whether from the Right or from the Left, but his outrageous insights were as shrewd and as biting as Orwell’s.

It was odd that both authors (far apart in time and space) had once almost died of bullet wounds. George had been shot through the throat by the Fascists while fighting for the Republicans in the ill-omened Spanish Civil War. Auberon, then a British Army junior officer in fighting between the Greeks and Turks in Cyprus, collected half-a-dozen bullets in the body, nearly eviscerating him. Was it a characteristic Waugh bizarrerie that he had inflicted these horrible wounds upon himself while trying to clear a stoppage in his Browning machine-gun? As his writing career developed, many of his victims among the pious and self-righteous must have wished that they had been there on Cyprus and finished off the job with the Browning.

But the accident suggested at least that he was not cut out for a military career, and indeed his whole style was civilian and sybaritic, champagne and caviar, London clubs and grand country houses; thus again, a distinct contrast to George Orwell. Yet it was part of the paradox that most victims of Waugh’s stinging wit belonged to his own self-same bourgeoisie.

In Quadrant of June 2009, after his death, I drew attention to Waugh’s enshrinement in the English language he loved; the Oxford Dictionary itself now included his inspired phrase “the chattering classes”. I added that his sharp comments “had been a strong sea-wall against the tides of sludge of political correctness”.

Over the years, I have collected all George Orwell’s books, and few weeks pass without one of them being consulted. His hyper-famous novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are there, of course, but what comes down most often from the shelf is one or another of the four fat volumes of his collected (and splendidly indexed) journalism. Alongside stand copies of all the biographies and studies of Orwell made by other writers. On Orwell, my library is pretty well the full bottle.

About Auberon Waugh—nothing on my shelves whatever. Or nothing until yesterday, when there arrived unexpected in the post a present from one of my old editors from newspaper days. It was a copy of a brilliant new book, Kiss Me, Chudleigh: The World According to Auberon Waugh by William Cook. The book is constructed basically from a great many short but telling extracts from Waugh’s immense body of journalism. The volume is given shape and order by Cook’s own connecting passages of knowing and interpretative biography.

Auberon Waugh was the son of the famous novelist Evelyn—a parent whose offspring might well turn out to be almost anything, though unlikely to be dull. Cook says little about the relations between father and son; other sources tell us that they were uneasy, with Auberon grieved that he and his loved and admired father did not get on better.

The boy was brought up well-to-do: prep school; boarder at public school (Catholic Downside); Oxford, where he failed. Auberon’s own account says that he acted the monster at school, and that he could have graduated from Oxford if he had tried.

Neither he nor Orwell had any formal training as writers. They simply followed the passion in their hearts to set down the truth for readers. Waugh very early published a precociously successful novel—The Foxglove Saga—which made him a good deal of money. But all of us are lucky that he made Comment and Gossip his kingdom, writing columns for newspapers and for the intelligent magazines. (I read him mostly in the Spectator.)

When the London Sun began printing its page 3 photographs of bare-breasted girls, right-thinking people waxed loud in outrage, demanding censorship and prosecutions for obscenity. “How illiberal,” said Waugh, distasteful as he himself found the pictures. “They would be better handled by a government-imposed nipple tax.” It might even have been a good idea. That was the trouble with Waugh—readers were never quite sure whether he was laughing at them.

Few (if we except well-premiated Senior Counsel) would undertake a defence of Judas Iscariot or Pontius Pilate. This brief was no problem for the Catholic Waugh. How, he asks us, could the sacred central story of Jesus ever have been written if these two dark roles had remained unfilled? It was a forensic performance not equalled in the many decades since Mark Twain rose in court to appear for the Devil.

Yet Auberon Waugh was much more than a tease. When all the supercilious scholarship of Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper pronounced the “Hitler Diaries” to be genuine, so that the Sunday Times published them, the instincts and the worldly grasp of Auberon Waugh denounced them as frauds. And they were.

Certain manifestations of modern life he made his own special hunting ground: Green preciosity; the grim severity of much feminism; fraud in universities, with grubby idle battalions sitting about at public expense, dreaming up superfluous research projects which might attract a grant.

We have plenty of this sort of thing in Australia, but have we an Auberon Waugh to flay it? I felt his lack in recent times in Melbourne, with the arrival of a new Anglican archbishop. Hard upon His new Grace’s arrival, the handsome south spires of St Paul’s Cathedral were polluted by a tatty calico poster. It read: “Free David Hicks”. Ah—Auberon!

Doctor Johnson, no coward in controversy, always felt he “had not struck” unless he provoked a reaction. Auberon Waugh need have felt no unease on that score. On his death, Polly Toynbee wrote in the Guardian with elation of the departure of a fellow writer so “effete, drunken, snobbish, sneering, racist and sexist”. Waugh had then not even been buried, and beside Toynbee’s article the Guardian printed a cartoon of his body being flushed down the toilet. One gets from this a strong impression that, while alive, Waugh had held the upper hand. He himself described as the “proudest moment of my journalistic career” the burning to the ground of the British Council Library in Rawalpindi by an Orthodox Muslim mob. He had criticised the cut of their trousers. All the way from London! That was influence.

For his part, Waugh had always claimed to think well of his fellow scribes. In April 1982 in the Spectator he wrote a piece called “In Defence of Journalists”. He claimed to have spent “a large part of his time defending them”. He said he: 

had always maintained that the practice of journalism—and especially gossip journalism—is a genial one … Journalists, in my experience, are generally easy-going, unpompous people … 

Should we, on the whole, accept this friendly conclusion as the truth? The only judicious answer to that question had been written years earlier by his father, in a famous line in the novel Scoop: “Up to a point, Lord Copper.”

William Cook truly calls his man “a virtuoso in the vituperative arts”, but there is much—very much—more. If your own taste inclines a little to the acidic; if a soupçon of the sardonic is acceptable to you, get this book. You’ll love it!