Love and Waugh

The death of Alexander Waugh at only sixty is a grievous blow for the world of scholarship and letters. And yet, although only sixty, he leaves a prodigious and eclectic oeuvre. Cartoonist, musician, impresario, record producer, composer, opera critic, publisher, writer, editor and archivist. Perhaps it was inevitable  — and it seems he fought it – that the great-grandson of Arthur Waugh, grandson of Evelyn, and son of Auberon would be a writer. He certainly inherited a number of Waugh-like traits  —  eloquence, intelligence, wit and a genius for mischief. As the Spectator’s literary editor, Sam Leith, saw it, the Waughs’ have had a ‘patrilineal inability to pass an applecart without giving it a shove.’

Alexander Evelyn Michael Waugh was born on December 30, 1963, the second child and elder son of Evelyn’s eldest son, Auberon, and Lady Teresa, daughter of the 6^th Earl of Onslow. Intriguingly, Grandpapa did not record the birth in his diary but by then, poor Evelyn was gloomy, wakeful, soon to be toothless and ready to die. His death on Easter Day 1966 before  Alexander was three meant that he had no memory of his grandfather but after Auberon’s move later that year to Combe Florey (below), the  family home near Taunton, Somerset since 1956, he must have felt his presence as the rooms hung heavy with the spirit,  the style, the idiosyncratic elan of Evelyn.

Alexander remembered the house as  “a shambling fortress of creaky stairs and alien smells. Chief among its attractions—at any rate to a seven-year-old boy—were a life-sized carved wooden lion in the hall; Victorian painted furniture by William Burges; a stuffed white owl whose wing I could remove by lifting the glass dome that covered it and yanking; . . . a crystal chandelier that tinkled when you punched it; a ferocious gander called Captain, whose attacks we fended off with umbrellas.”

Evelyn’s widow, Alexander’s grandmother, Laura, moved to the north wing of the house. She was only 50 but seemed older and was as aristocratically eccentric as any of the Herberts, devoting herself to her cows, dogs and the garden. He had grown fond of her and after she died in 1973, Alexander was left with an abiding memory of the smell that attached to all her jerseys – “sherry, French cigarettes and dog baskets all blended into one, a lovely Granny fragrance”.

Auberon had been so unhappy at boarding school – Downside under the Benedictines – that he sent Alexander as a day scholar to nearby Taunton School, a minor public school founded for dissenters in 1847. Alexander was not as anarchic as his forebears. Evelyn was remembered for sticking pins into poor little Cecil Beaton at their prep school; while Auberon falsely accused a class mate of stealing at Downside, and when a fire (did he start it?) burned down much of the school, he wrote to his father with relish: “Father Hubert van Zeller danced in front of the fire singing the Te Deum rather off key.”

The (London) Telegraph’s obituary (of July 23) recalls Alexander conceiving the notion that a maths teacher was guilty of hiding women’s underwear in a locked cupboard in his classroom. Unable to force open the doors, he threw the cupboard down a flight of the stairs “in an effort to break it open and reveal his dirty secret”. The cupboard proved bare of knickers and of course Alexander was rusticated; but Auberon “took the view that his son had for once shown bravery, skill and enterprise, and wrote to the headmaster recommending that he be awarded school colours for his actions.”

He was embarrassed at being the first of four generations to miss out on Oxford (he failed his interview for New College, Arthur’s alma mater. Evelyn too had hoped to enter New but won a scholarship to Hertford. In fact, it is a century this summer since he left Oxford with an uncertain future). In any case, Alexander  emerged from the universities of Manchester and Surrey with degrees in music. At Manchester he fell in love with Eliza Chancellor, beautiful daughter of Auberon’s great friend, the journalist and editor Alexander Chancellor. They married in 1990.

An enthusiastic oenologist – Combe Florey had nine brimming cellars —  Auberon had promoted the idea that Alexander, who had been introduced to wine at five and drinking full glasses at twelve, would return to live in the 16^th century gatehouse and become an independent wine merchant. Fearing bankruptcy, he decided to embrace music instead.

He had submitted cartoons to his father’s Literary Review but moved on to become director of the entrepreneurial firm Manygate Management, responsible for events including the International Prize Winners Festival, the UK visit of the Bern Symphony Orchestra and the world premiere of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony. As a record producer he was nominated for  a Grammy for his recording of Kurt Weill songs. He became the chief opera critic of The Mail on Sunday and then the Evening Standard, towards the end of which he wrote Classical Music: A New Way of Listening (1995) and Opera: A New Way of Listening (1996).

In 1998 he conceived the idea of Travelman — a library of classic short stories printed on a single broadsheet, which concertinas into pocket size. Elegantly printed in Perpetua font, on creamy paper from sustainable forests – scarlet for crime, blue for romance….

In 2000, he and his brother, Nathaniel, wrote a musical comedy  Bon Voyage! staged at the Tabernacle in London. It won the 12th Vivian Ellis Award for Best New Musical and apparently scored three standing ovations.

Alexander then took up the pen in earnest with two huge subjects — could they have been any more infinite and exalted?

Alexander then took up the pen in earnest with two huge subjects — could they have been any more infinite and exalted? — Time (1999) and God ( 2002). The astronomer Patrick Moore hailed the former as a “very special, outstandingly successful, a remarkable book”. Christopher Hitchens saw the latter as “a sparkling atheist polemic.” According to The Times obit (23 July), Alexander was “a Hermetist and Tolstovian Christian anarchist rather than atheist.”

Auberon’s death on January 16, 2001, was cathartic. Alexander had rushed to Combe Florey the previous evening for what was to be their final, brief conversation. “‘Everything is going to be dandy,’ Papa had insisted, as he lay uncomfortable and bemused with the skids well underneath him. ‘Isn’t life grand?’” Only a few months earlier he had said, “I’ll be sorry to leave my wife and various friends, but better to go than sit around being a terrible old bore.”

Alexander would write, “I adored my father, more, I suppose, than he adored me, or at least I thought about him much more than he thought of me — but I do not repine … for that is the nature of any father–son relationship. A father may have many children to add to his many concerns but a son has only one father…”

Auberon had continually craved his father’s attention and approval and wanted nothing more than to amuse the irascible Evelyn as he battled insomnia and ennui. The question Auberon posed in the title of his brilliant autobiography Will This Do? (1991) was essentially directed to his father.

And so was Alexander’s Fathers and Sons  (2004). He had written the memoir at the urging of Sir Vidia Naipaul but was clearly inspired by his father’s death. While observing that he and his father  had never once had a single serious conversation, Alexander opened and closed his memoir with an unclouded affection for Auberon. When, in 1998, Alexander called his own son Bron – Auberon, delighted at the news, told one of his daughters: “They are going to call it Papa.”

Filial feelings ran deep but were never expressed. Alexander had found after Auberon’s death in the bottom of a trunk, a letter written when he was in hospital after a near-fatal machine-gun accident in Cyprus, and his survival seemed uncertain. Auberon had lodged it with his bank, to be sent to Evelyn in the event he should predecease him, “Dear Papa, Just a line to tell you what for some reason I was never able to show you in my lifetime, that I admire, revere and love you more than any other man in the world.”

Alexander claimed in Fathers and Sons that the word “waugh” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “tasteless, insipid; unpleasant to the smell or taste, sickly, faint, weak, etc.,” while as a noun it is “an exclamation indicating grief, indignation or the like. Now chiefly as attributed to N. American Indians and other savages.” However, the fabulist and professor of English language at Oxford J.R.R. Tolkien assured Auberon, that “waugh” was the singular of “Wales” and means a Welsh person. “Papa,” Alexander wrote, “gleefully told this story to his friend, Diana, Princess of Wales, but to his dismay she didn’t appear to understand it.”

In his quest to define what it means to be a Waugh (he had wanted to call his book, Waviana, but thought no one would get it) Alexander delves into the inner lives of five generations – from his 1860’s namesake, Dr Alexander Waugh, (‘The Brute’) to himself. But it is essentially the three generations in between – Dr Alexander’s son, the publisher, Arthur; Arthur’s novelist sons, Alec and Evelyn; and Auberon — who compose the heart of this anything but insipid dynasty.

As John Banville observed in the New York Review of Books (his review was entitled ‘The Family Pinfold’), “not for nothing was the family motto industria ditat (“work enriches”)” and in answer to the charge of snobbery “neither [Evelyn nor Auberon] entertained pretensions above their station—all the writing Waughs, and there have been many of them, took pride in the fact that what wealth they enjoyed was got by trade and not inherited.”

Reviewing  a 2010 BBC Four documentary on the memoir, Alexander’s father-in-law, Alexander Chancellor, wrote, “Now we have come full circle, and Alexander is as free as his Victorian great-grandfather [Arthur] in showing his paternal feelings. The great difference, however, is that he studiously avoids the favouritism that Arthur showed, with poisonous consequences. Alexander made his seven-year-old son, also Bron, the star of his film, but he lavishes no less affection on his daughters, Mary and Sally. I consider my grandchildren to be very fortunate.”

Interviewed by The Guardian’s Susanna Rustin, he confided,  “I think every generation is better than the last,” he says, “not just at being good parents but cleverer, smarter. Everything’s getting better all the time.”

“Does that mean he is cleverer than Evelyn Waugh?” she asked.

“Does that mean he is cleverer than Evelyn Waugh?” she asked.

“Yeah. I think I probably am, well I’m sure I am. But that’s not the same thing as saying I can write a better novel. I would say I could probably write a better non-fiction book but that’s not really the point about being cleverer.”

Before he plunged back into Waviana, Alexander wrote an extraordinary  biography of a family and father-son dynamic that rendered the Waughs as mild as the OED defined them. The House of Wittgenstein (2008) tells the dramatic story of the rise and fall one of Vienna’s richest families: Karl and the two of his five  sons who did not kill themselves – Paul (1887-1961) who managed to become an internationally celebrated concert pianist despite the loss of his right arm in World War I; and Ludwig (1889-1951), the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Of course, while researching and writing this biography, Alexander learnt to master the piano with one hand

Alexander the iconoclast came to the fore as an advocate of the Oxfordian theory, which contends that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the works of William Shakespeare, having uncovered surreptitious allusions embedded in 16th- and 17th-century works revealing that the name William Shakespeare was a pseudonym used by Oxford to write the Shakespeare oeuvre. There is no reason to think this was relevant but Alexander happened, through his grandmother and the Herberts, to be a descendant of de Vere.

In his book, Shakespeare in Court (2014), he concluded  that Shakespeare was a front for others. In 2016, he was elected chairman of the De Vere Society. The Times pointed out that that more than 12 of Shakespeare’s plays- Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest among them —  were likely to have been written and performed after De Vere’s death in 1604. Oxfordians  counter that the dating of these plays is open to question.

There was still time for mischief. He assumed the mantle of his beloved father in presenting the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Awards, launched in 1993 to honour the year’s “most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description” drawing attention “to the poorly written, redundant or downright cringe-worthy passages of sexual description in modern fiction.” One year  Norman Mailer was posthumously awarded. In 2020 the editors announced that the year had been unpleasant enough without their contribution and the awards were cancelled.

In 2019, Alexander stood as a candidate for his local constituency,  Bridgwater and West Somerset, representing the the Brexit Party, declaring, “ I have taken the decision to stop whining about it to my friends and to stand up and be counted. If I am elected to Parliament I shall do everything in my power to help to restore honesty, integrity, trust and democracy to our now broken system of government and to ensure that Britain is put back in command of its own money, laws and borders. When these things are achieved, when we are once again a properly democratic nation, I shall return to the gorgeous green pastures of West Somerset to get on with the rest of my life.”

But shortly before the election, party leader, Nigel Farage, stood down those candidates from seats with Conservative MPs. The sitting MP, Ian Liddell-Grainger, happened to be a great-great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria’s, through his grandmother, Lady May Abel Smith, a Queensland vicereine in the 1960s. Alexander expressed some disappointment; but mainly relief.

Auberon was abidingly pro-European, having proclaimed (according to William Cook, the editor of Kiss Me, Chudleigh: The World of Evelyn Waugh) “His ideal form of government …. was a junta of Belgian ticket inspectors – far less of a threat to the English way of life that he adored than the cultural and economic imperialism of the USA, which he detested”.

With Alexander entering the fray, there were shades of his father. Thirty years earlier, Auberon, that ‘rebel in a tweed suit’,  did put aside his contempt for politics (or did this confirm it?) by standing in North Devon in the General Election of 1979 as the sole member of the Dog Lovers’ Party against former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, then awaiting trial for conspiracy  to murder an alleged lover. In a bungled murder attempt, the alleged lover’s Great Dane, Rinka, had been shot. So Auberon’s manifesto read  ‘Rinka is not forgotten, Rinka, lives’ and ‘Vote Waugh to give all dogs the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’  He  polled 79 votes; Thorpe lost his seat but was later acquitted of any crime the following month.

Somehow confirming each generation’s striking originality, Evelyn’s attitude to politics  was decidedly eccentric. Asked his views on the 1959 Election he pronounced “I do not aspire to advise my Sovereign on her choice of servants.”

Asked his views on the 1959 Election he pronounced “I do not aspire to advise my Sovereign on her choice of servants.”

With his last substantive project, Alexander firmly grasped the Wavian flame and led with diligence, discipline, collegiality and devotion. With generous funding from the  Arts & Humanities Research Council, he initiated  The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (CWEW), signing up Oxford University Press in 2009, with scholarly support from the University of Leicester. Alexander brought with him to the project  the world’s most eminent Wavians: among them Martin Stannard, Donat Gallagher, Robert Murray Davis, Douglas Lane Patey, Barbara Cooke, John Howard Wilson, Alan Bell, Ann Pasternak Slater, and Michael Brennan.  No other collection of a British novelist’s work had been undertaken on a comparable scale.

Under Alexander’s general editorship, the project envisages forty-three scholarly volumes of everything this complex, brilliant monster sacré wrote – from seven words on a postcard in March, 1908, when he was four, to his brother, Alec; to a letter penned on the morning of his death, April 10, 1966. And of course, everything in between – his bright young novels, his biographies, his travel books, his mordant comedies, his magnum opus Brideshead, his masterly Sword of Honour trilogy, his journalism, and his memoir of his early years. Twelve volumes, described as Personal Writings, were to be co-edited by Alexander.

Apart from his filial ties, he was ideally positioned for this task, curating from home a massive Wavian archive  – the largest in Europe, including some 8,000 letters. (Laura, convinced that she was destitute, sold off Evelyn’s library in 1967, even some of his furniture, to Austin University, Texas).

Home for Alexander and Eliza was a remote, rambling farmhouse at Milverton, not far from Taunton. (Lady Teresa had finally sold Combe Florey in 2008.) Scholars and colleagues were warmly welcomed to Luckham Farm, especially to the kitchen where, according to The Times,  life-sized portraits  of George III and Queen Charlotte overlooked an oversized dining table.

So like his father, although he could, at times, be sharp, confronting and combative on paper; in person Alexander was gentle and generous. As The Spectator wrote of Auberon, “A demon on the page; an angel off it.” 

In September  2017, the first fruits of the CWEW project were published: his first book, Rossetti (1928); his second novel, Vile Bodies (1930);  his last book and only real memoir, A Little Learning (1964);  and Precocious Waughs 1903 – 1921. Of the four, the last, coedited by Alexander and Alan Bell, was the revelation. These dozen volumes will contain the bulk of the unpublished work. It was said the older Waugh tended to write his diary at night in a maudlin fog of claret and port while he wrote his letters in the morning when he was playful and bright. Only some 15% of the extant complete letters had ever been printed. At the time of Alexander’s death, thirteen of the forty-three volumes have appeared.

He revealed last year in an Oxfordian debate that he had inoperable prostate cancer.

He revealed last year in an Oxfordian debate that he had inoperable prostate cancer. In his last weeks he moved his bed into the library so his friends could visit. Alexander’s death on July 22 sadly mirrors the early demise of Evelyn at 62, and Auberon at 61.

As well as his mother, two aunts (Teresa and Harriet), his brother (Nat) and two sisters (Sophia and Daisy), Alexander is survived by his wife Eliza, their two daughters, Mary and Sally, and Bron. Not long before his death he had the joy of meeting his first grandchildren, twin girls. It is encouraging to read that 26-year-old Bron is a writer and comedian. In the knowledge that while devoting themselves to writing, each generation tended to avoid the genre in which the previous one had shone, Alexander quipped that as Evelyn focussed on fiction, Auberon on journalism, and he non-fiction, Bron could be a playwright.

In the concluding scene of that BBC Four documentary of Fathers and Sons (2010), Alexander and Eliza, at home, express their hope that their children would be happy something previous generations were not always able to expect. He concludes that that there is really no such thing as a “good” or “bad” father, but that fathers and sons just have to rub along together as best they can until both are dead.

Alexander then read to his son the conclusion of Fathers and Sons, dedicated to young Bron, “Bear the name of Waugh with pride. The Waugh name is not a satchel of rocks, or a blotchy birthmark, or a tuxedo with medals for you to swank about in. Do not let it browbeat you into thinking you have to become a writer, that it is your destiny or your duty to do so. It isn’t. There is no point in writing unless you have something to say and are determined to say it well.” He ended with some words of advice: “Beware of seriousness: it is a form of stupidity. Fear boredom. Never use the word ‘ersatz’.”

Little Bron then asked his father if he could ‘treasure’ it and wanted to read it immediately, at which Alexander broke into a smile.