... And Waugh begat Waugh ...

Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, by Alexander Waugh; Headline, 2004, $55.

AFTER ALEC WAUGH assembled the letters he had received from his father, Arthur Waugh, he attached a note to the bundle saying: I feel that these are some of the most remarkable letters ever written from a father to a son." As always in such matters, Alec was bang right. The letters are "most remarkable", but not in the way one might at first expect. Of course they are appropriately wise, principled and eloquent. But they are surprising and fascinating because the relationship they reveal between father and son is perhaps unique in its intensity. They are the most surprising and fascinating feature of Alexander Waugh's groundbreaking account of five generations of Waughs, Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family. Moreover, they are pivotal. Arthur's obsessive love for Alec was not only a reaction against his own father's harshness but, as Alec predicted it would be, an unfortunate influence on Evelyn.

Words like loving and doting--and even Arthur's apostrophe, "Son of my soul!"--do not begin to describe Arthur's feeling for Alec. Alexander (I omit the surname to avoid drowning in Waughs) may appear to go too far when describing Arthur as a "teenage lover". But how classify, "I simply go about thinking of your love for me all the time"? Is this the language of loving, or of being "in love"? After Alec was caught at his school having sex with younger boys, he was required to leave at the end of term and, until then, live in isolation. Arthur's identification with Alec in this time of trial was complete: "The nails that pierce the hands of the Son are still driven through the hands of the Father." For Arthur, separation from Alec was purgatory, although the pair believed they were in touch telepathically. Alec wanted the world to know "what a wonderful father I had".

All this is astonishing because it took place before and during the First World War, when the fashion (and who was more fashionable than Alec, inventor of the cocktail party?) was for inter-generational hostility. Sons were rebelling against the tyrannical fathers of Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh and Edmund Gosse's Father and Son. Born five years after Alec, and in this case more in tune with the zeitgeist, Evelyn from earliest days subjected his father to cool appraisal.

Alec Waugh always acknowledged that Evelyn's novels, unlike his own, would last (Arthur disagreed). And he came to see that his father's obsessive love for himself must have affected his brother. Publicly, he minimised the preference. But the note attached to the letters was shrewd and frank. "I believe that ... Evelyn will be an object of public interest for many years," he wrote. "No equivalent relationship existed between [him] and my father and the fact there was no such relationship may provide a clue to my brother's complex character." This says a mouthful. I have read the autobiographies of Arthur, Alec, Evelyn and Auberon, the many memoirs written by various Waughs about each other, many of the letters the Waughs so profusely poured out, and all serious biographies of Waughs. And yet nothing prepared me for Alexander's revelations about the way in which Arthur, Alec and even Catherine (his mother) dealt with Evelyn.

In A Little Learning Evelyn recalls childhood as "an even glow of happiness". But his mother apparently shared his father's preference for Alec. It seems that Evelyn's birth left her an invalid for months. Furthermore, Catherine and Arthur were so disappointed at the new arrival's sex that they dressed him as a girl longer than usual and calculatedly gave him an androgynous name. In short, Evelyn's childhood contains many clues to his "complex character".

This book is ostensibly about five generations of fathers and sons. Fortunately, Alexander interpreted his brief freely and has recorded a wealth of new information about mothers, aunts and servants as well--in fact about anyone in the Waugh ambit with an interesting story. The Midsomer Norton aunts, for example, have so far existed only as part of Evelyn's happy childhood. Now, after the aggrieved letters of their brother Arthur and his wife, they come alive as all too human.

Evelyn's wife, Laura, has been depicted by some as a dim Catholic aristocrat who in effect buried her once creative husband in the depths of the country and stifled his talent. In Alexander's memoir she comes fully alive. Sharing her love of cows, he recalls Laura, trousers held up with twine, bidding at auction for dairy cows, and bitterly remorseful for paying too much for a good-looking but useless animal. Companionable around the farm, she is the reverse of the wife the British qualities imagined for that silliest of myths, Evelyn Waugh, Country Squire. As for Alec Waugh, he himself expatiated so often on his wives, long- and short-term lovers and one-night-stands that Alexander's ability to find something new to say about him is a tribute to truly impressive research.

THE CHANGING ROLE of the father over the five generations from 1850 to 2000 is a fascinating topic. Alexander does not theorise about this, nor does he relate the changes he sees in his own family to wider developments. Nevertheless, the story is there plain to see. Dr Alexander Waugh FRCS (1840-1906), commonly known as "the Brute", had two sons and three daughters. Though a tyrant and a sadist, he was also dutiful. Was Arthur timid? Father must devise unnerving experiences to cure the boy. The frightening ordeals were of course counter-productive, but they reveal a father who believed that it was his role to shape his children's characters. Compare Auberon (1939-2001) and his son Alexander, who "adored" his father. According to Alexander, "We never, in all our time together, had a single serious conversation."

Between these extremes come Arthur, Alec and Evelyn. Arthur (1866-1943), though be lived his life through Alec, nevertheless plied him with intensely serious advice aimed at developing a "soul well knit". Alec (1898-1981), the recipient of the good advice, became the complete absentee father. He barely saw his children when they were young and never paid a school fee. Evelyn (1903-66), father of three boys and three girls, was, in this as in most things, all contradiction. Alexander brings Evelyn the father newly alive in all his rapidly shifting moods--sternly demanding, chillingly aloof and riotously playful. In fact he confirms many aspects of the portrait of her father that Margaret, Evelyn's eldest daughter, drew for the first edition of Christopher Sykes's biography.

Evelyn, though at times driven by manic impulse, was also, contradictorily, much driven by calculation. Thus his seeming caprice in favouring or ignoring children might relate to the thinking in his early article, "Matter-of-Fact Mothers of the New Age". He argues that a regime of justly distributed rewards and punishments is a poor preparation for the randomness of life. And children should learn that if they want attention they have to earn it.

Alexander throws welcome new light on many puzzling aspects of Evelyn's behaviour, such as his refusal to visit Auberon after he accidentally shot himself while serving on Cyprus. Evelyn's youthful suicide attempt involving a revolver is dealt with exceptionally well; Alexander's reconstruction definitively contradicts A Little Learning and all biographical orthodoxy.

Frances Donaldson observes that Evelyn did all the things for his children at school, both boys and girls, which mothers usually do. Whether all the letter writing and dealing with teachers came from incurable bossiness, or from conviction, or because Laura could not or would not do it, we can only guess. But Mrs Donaldson's observation suggests that as early as the 1950s mothers were usually expected to do much of the work of bringing up children that had once belonged to fathers, and that Evelyn's activity in the paternal role was even then anachronistic.

Fathers and Sons is a big, generous, sprawling book with much to surprise and please every reader. Most of the abundant new information comes from deposits of family letters and family lore that Alexander alone has enterprisingly explored. Sometimes he leaves sources obscure. Thus we are lucky to be told, long after many discreditable stories about "the Brute" have been recounted, that their source was his daughter-in-law Catherine, who detested him.

Alexander is commendably proud of the Waugh family. But is it wise to dismiss his paternal grandmother's Raban forebears as "colonial"? The Raban uncle who employed Evelyn Waugh to write about some of the Middle Eastern territories he (the uncle) was then governing was not insignificant. Again, Alexander is justifiably proud of his father, Auberon. But is it wise to put his father's journalism in competition with his grandfather's art? Sincere admirers of Auberon Waugh were often disconcerted by his occasional lapses into crude personal abuse of opponents. Alexander gives a convincing, and often moving, portrait of his father but only indirectly deals with this difficulty.

The revenges perpetrated by Waughs against tutors who disciplined them, or against editors who sacked them, are no doubt very amusing when camped up in family gatherings. They do not always come off in print. Nor do Alexander's disconcerting lapses into the vernacular. The elderly spinsterish calligrapher Francis Crease, who taught the schoolboy Evelyn script, cannot convincingly be called his "buddy". Again, a nonsense misprint in the early editions of Decline and Fall, which Alexander follows, has the Welsh musicians "moulting". The Uniform Edition, corrected by Waugh, prints "mouthing", which makes sense. And when Arthur cites Hamlet in support of his advice to Alec about how to overcome masturbation, he is not referring to "To be, or not to be" but to Hamlet's advice to his mother about how to give up the pleasures of her wicked husband's bed.

It is bunkum to say baldly that Evelyn "plotted to buy [Midsomer Norton, his father's family home] and convert [it] into an Evelyn Waugh museum". The truth is more complex but more interesting. Evelyn wrote to Laura suggesting that they sell their house, Piers Court, so that Laura could buy a farm close to her sister, and he could buy out his brother's share in Midsomer Norton. This would give him the quiet place he needed to work and display the fruits of his "ineradicable habit" of collecting. (Everything in this book suggests that if the plan had been followed, the Waughs might have been a happier couple.) Just as (the complete reactionary) he was "Victorianising" Piers Court, he would restore Midsomer Norton to the "splendid state of 1870" and make it a "museum of Victorian art". The end of the letter makes the throwaway suggestion that if, after his death, none of the family wished to live there, the house, by then a "unique spectacle", could become "a public museum and memorial to myself".

Alexander presents an abundance of new information about the Waugh family and in its light disposes of some of the nonsense that has dogged Evelyn Waugh. Without directly attempting to deflate the Evelyn Waugh Monster myth so indefatigably promoted by the English qualities, he provides so much new information about the private world in which Evelyn lived that a more balanced opinion will inevitably follow. Any shortcomings in this book are far outweighed by the huge contribution it makes to understanding the Waugh phenomenon through five generations. No family has more comprehensively written itself into history than the Waughs. Readers will thank Alexander for so perseveringly collecting their letters, diaries and memories, and for ably allowing them to present so many of their previously untold stories in their own eloquent words.

Donat Gallagher, editor of The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, teaches in the School of Humanities at James Cook University.