'The only question left hanging in the air is the one
which every journalist asks himself on submitting an article. It is also the
one with which we may all eventually, in trembling hope, face our Maker: Will
this do?'
The question should rather be: How does one cope with
being the son of a father as famous as Evelyn Waugh? From this side-splittingly
funny autobiography it is clear to see that the young Auberon more than
managed. A privileged background, unusual childhood and public school education
are followed by Oxford and a career as a writer and columnist. Waugh's portrait
of his father is affectionate yet droll, his tone self-deprecating, and his
stories entertaining and sad by turns. The biting wit is addictive.
Auberon Waugh
A writer with a talent for vituperation and a taste
for vendettas, his columns showed a hatred of authoritarianism of both left and
right
Geoffrey
Wheatcroft
Thu 18 Jan
2001 10.51 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/jan/18/guardianobituaries.booksnews
Auberon
Waugh's death at the age of 61 is more sad than surprising. His immediate
heredity wasn't promising - his father died at 62, his mother at 57 - and he
suffered from ill-health all his life, partly resulting from severe wounds
sustained during National Service at the age of 18.
That may,
in part, have accounted for the acidic personality which made him the most
verbally brutal journalist of his age. Everyone who met him remarked on the
contrast between his ferocity in print and his personal geniality, but this was
hard to explain to those who didn't know him, especially if they had been on
the rough end of his pen.
Apart from
health, his background shaped his career in one other respect. He spent much of
his life trying to escape from the shadow of his father, the greatest English
novelist of his age. This provided an obvious weapon for Auberon's enemies.
Philip Larkin joked about "my projected series, Talentless Sons of Famous
Fathers - Waugh, Amis, Fuller...", and for Polly Toynbee, "Poor Bron
is but a Randolph to a Winston." In fact, Auberon Waugh could be called
many things, but not talentless, as he showed once he shook off that shadow.
He was the
second child and first son of Evelyn and Laura Waugh. Auberon Alexander -
always Bron to those who knew him and to many who didn't - was born just as the
war broke out, and just as his father was setting off on his quixotic and in
the end bitterly thwarted search for military redemption. Bron barely saw his
father until he was five, and even thereafter Evelyn boasted with chilling
jocosity that he saw his children "once a day for 10, I hope
awe-inspiring, minutes".
After his
father's death in 1966, Bron became his champion and continued many of his
feuds. But his distinctly bleak autobiography Will This Do? (1991) casts a cold
light on those early years, epitomised by the moment when father removed son's
banana - a rare delicacy at the end of the war - from his plate and ate it.
Coming clean, Bron would now admit that he had barely begun to like his father
by the time of his death.
For his
part, Evelyn never concealed the boredom and vexation Bron caused him. Father
wrote to 16-year-old son with considerable insight, "You have a sense of
humour and a gift of self- expression. On the other hand you are singularly
imprudent and you have a defective sense of honour. These bad qualities can
lead to disaster."
Although
Bron Waugh was often described as reactionary or rightwing, this missed the
point about him personally as well as ideologically. If he was a Tory, he was a
Tory anarchist, whose upbringing was a series of rebellions. He detested
Downside, the Benedictine public school, quaintly claiming that the headmaster
had "set himself up in opposition to me".
He then
loathed his National Service training, and never ceased to rail at the
stupidity and brutality he had encountered at the Guards depot at Pirbright.
Waugh was nevertheless commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues),
and sent to Cyprus. There one day he became annoyed by a fault in the Browning
machine-gun of his armoured car, seized it by the muzzle and shook it, until it
had fired several rounds through his chest at pointblank range. He was very
lucky to survive.
This later
inspired one of his best columns, in the New Statesman. He had heard it said,
Waugh wrote, that he had been shot by his own men, or that he had lost a
testicle. In reality, the injury had been self-inflicted, and he had lost a
lung, his spleen, several ribs, and a finger, "but nothing else (my
italics)".
While
recuperating in Italy, he began his first novel. The Foxglove Saga (1960) was
undoubtedly promising, and was undoubtedly helped by the name Waugh. It sold
14,000 in hardback, setting a mark for later disappointment. Waugh then went up
briefly to Christ Church, Oxford, to which he had won an exhibition in English,
to read PPE, but left after a year having failed to pass an exam, and taken a
dislike to the academic authorities. After an unsuccessful attempt to join the
Foreign Office - yet another part of the establishment which earned his undying
enmity - he turned the obvious way.
His early
career in Fleet Street was chequered, working briefly for the Peterborough
column on the Daily Telegraph, then joining the Daily Mirror. The highlight of
his career as a Mirrorman was in 1967. During the Six Day war he flew to
Israel, where Mandy Rice-Davies was said to have gone to the front as a nurse.
In fact, she was pursuing her usual honest trade as a Tel Aviv night-club
hostess but, in the best Scoop tradition, Waugh had her don a nurse's uniform
for a photograph. He saw this as one of his proudest journalistic achievements,
along with another some years later when a column of his in the Times, which
included a flippant joke about the prophet Mohammed, led an enraged mob to burn
down the British Council building in Rawalpindi.
In 1967, he
was made political columnist of the Spectator, an enterprising choice on the
part of the then editor, Nigel Lawson. Waugh took his duties seriously enough,
though attendance at Westminster only increased his aversion to politics and
politicians. His time at the Spectator coincided with the Biafra war, when the
Ibo-speaking, and largely Catholic, province seceded from Nigeria. This was the
first serious cause to engage Waugh, who poured savage indignation on the
Wilson government and Michael Stewart, the foreign secretary, for colluding at
the conduct of the war, in which millions of Africans were starved into
submission.
In 1970,
Waugh abruptly left the Spectator. He had been seeing the week's issue through
the press, and on a whim changed George Gale's name to "Lunchtime
O'Gale" in the contributors' list. When Lawson sacked him, Waugh sued for
wrongful dismissal. After a court case worthy of Beachcomber, when Bernard
Levin and Alan Watkins testified on his behalf, he surprisingly won damages of
£600.
Despite
this, Lawson magnanimously re-employed Waugh as a novel reviewer, where he
honed his talent for vituperation, which he later and even more brilliantly
practised in the obscure magazine Books & Bookmen. Like other
"slashing" reviewers, he would point out that he often lavished
praise on the writers he liked. These were far from predictable. One favourite
was the Californian hippy novelist Richard Brautigan, another Angela Carter.
And Martin Amis never forgot how "very generous" Waugh had been.
In 1970 he
found a natural billet at Private Eye. The "Diary" he wrote for the
Eye over the next 16 years was unique, a combination of polemic, causerie,
parody and fantasy. Those who liked it thought it very funny indeed, though its
technique was partly pure abuse.
Harold
Wilson was an "old crook" (and a Soviet agent, Waugh sometimes
suggested), with his "revoltingly ugly" colleague Barbara Castle. Not
that Waugh was politically partisan. Heath was a buffoonish ninny, and
Churchill a "war criminal, mass murderer and persecutor of PG
Wodehouse".
This taste
for the calculatedly distasteful even extended to his wine columns: he compared
one wine to "a bunch of dead chrysanthemums on the grave of a still-born
West Indian baby". He ruthlessly used these columns, and the Spectator
Wine Club, to stock his own cellar. Waugh was never squeamish about
journalistic ethics. Once he discovered the delights of the
"freebie", he gave breathless accounts of his trips to the Orient,
and the wonderful "Thai two-girl massage".
Sometimes
his abuse was random. Watching television of an evening, Waugh caught the
Tchaikovsky bio-pic, The Music Lovers. "Hideous woman, dreadful film. One
can't really blame Tchaikovsky for preferring boys. Anyone might become a homosexual
who had once seen Glenda Jackson naked."
But other
diatribes were deliberate. Waugh had a truly Sicilian taste for vendetta,
pursuing Lord Gowrie for decades because they had once competed, Gowrie
successfully, for the same girl at Oxford. His tendresse for Tina Brown helped
explain another long feud, with Harold Evans. His diatribes against Jimmy
Goldsmith (on the possible size of whose "organ" he once dilated in
print), or Shirley Williams, at any rate had no personal basis.
If that
sounded childish, Waugh's writing was valued by good judges. Anthony Howard
took on Waugh for the New Statesman, where he wrote some of his best columns
for what he imagined was his typical reader, a bad-tempered leftwing woman
teacher in the Midlands.
By now
Waugh had finally given up fiction, after publishing five novels in all. He
said that his novels were not selling any more and were not getting any better,
though at least one, Consider the Lilies (1968) is still very funny and
readable (the others are Path of Dalliance, 1963, Who Are the Violets Now,
1966, and A Bed of Flowers, 1971). Maybe the truth was that abandoning fiction
was another way of escaping his father's shadow.
Another was
his increasingly detached attitude to Catholicism. Gradually he stopped going
to church, later ceasing to be a practising or even believing Catholic.
In 1976,
the new editor of the Spectator, Alexander Chancellor, hired Waugh to write a
weekly column. This decade, his own thirties, was perhaps the best of Waugh's writing
life. His political as well as literary opinions were unpredictable. If he went
on repetitiously about the "foul-mouthed, dirty and drunk" working
classes, he disliked them not least because of their taste for punishment,
especially capital punishment, which he abhorred. He also loathed war, and
later opposed the Falklands, Gulf and Kosovo campaigns. In his idiosyncratic
way, he was part of an authentic mood of revulsion against the bossy
authoritarianism of left and right.
Then he
found another obsession. Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader, had been caught up
in a seamy scandal concerning a youth called Norman Scott, which led finally to
Thorpe's departure as party leader and then his prosecution and acquittal. At
the 1979 general election, Waugh stood against Thorpe in his North Devon
constituency on behalf of the Dog Lovers' Party, an allusion to the strange
episode when a hitman trying to frighten Scott, or worse, shot his pet dog.
Waugh lost his deposit, but had the gratification of hearing Lord Denning say
that his election address, which Thorpe had tried to suppress, could be
published, and of seeing Thorpe lose his seat.
Then Waugh
published a book about the case, The Last Word. It showed his inability (shared
by all the Eye gang) to understand the basic principles of justice, but it also
supplied an appropriate note of black farce: as the journalist David Leigh
said, Waugh gave a version of the affair in the style of Joe Orton.
That North
Devon constituency was near home for Waugh. He had married very young, in 1961,
Lady Teresa Onslow, daughter of the Earl of Onslow, and lived with his family
in the country, first in Berkshire and then at his father's old house, Combe
Florey, in Somerset. After raising her family of two sons and two daughters,
Teresa took a degree and made her own notable career as translator and
novelist.
By the
1980s, Waugh showed signs of restlessness, and looked for excuses to spend more
time in London. When Ian Hislop became editor of Private Eye in 1986, Waugh
left haughtily and abusively to take up the editorship of the Literary Review,
a monthly owned, and heavily subsidised, by Naim Attallah. These later years
were puzzling. Waugh devoted much energy to his beloved magazine, bullying all
his friends to write for tiny fees, and he established an annual party for the
magazine's Bad Sex Award, a back-handed prize for novels with excruciating
sexual descriptions.
And yet the
truth was that the Literary Review was not so much bad as pointless. Equally,
though Waugh was more prolific than ever, the columns he wrote for the Sunday
Telegraph from 1980 and the Daily Telegraph from 1990 never quite matched the
dash and bite of his best work for the Spectator or Private Eye.
Part of the
answer may have been that he was never quite at his best in national papers.
But part was exhaustion. He kept working at a manic pace. Although he was
earning more than most English journalists, Waugh seemed obsessed by the
prospect of poverty, or at least by the need to provide for his family. Apart
from the Thorpe book and his memoirs, the only books he published in his later
years were collections from his various columns. He twice won the What the
Papers Say Award for Columnist of the Year.
To say that
not everyone loved Bron Waugh would be an understatement. A certain kind of
politician and journalist, often though not always female, found him repugnant,
and his success incomprehensible. Such foes were baffled by the boyish
camaraderie of old Fleet Street, not to say its tradition of ecumenical
friendship: before he had a London flat of his own, Waugh used to stay with his
great friend Paul Foot.
In fact, apart
from his vague dislike of male institutions, Waugh himself had many women
friends. And he enjoyed holding court to pretty girls and jolly lads at the
Academy Club, a bohemian joint he founded next to his office.
Some of the
more impassioned attacks on Waugh over the years appeared in the Guardian.
Alexander Chancellor responded to one. He wasn't a disinterested witness: he
had been a friend and colleague of Bron's for many years before their children
Alexander Waugh and Liza Chancellor married. Nevertheless, when he wrote that
Waugh was "brave, generous, funny and an extremely skilful writer,"
it may not have been the whole story, but it was a large and true part of it.
• Auberon Alexander Waugh, editor and writer,
born November 17 1939; died January 16 2001
Auberon
Alexander Waugh (17 November 1939 – 16
January 2001) was an English journalist and novelist, and eldest son of the
novelist Evelyn Waugh. He was widely known by his nickname "Bron".
After a
traditional classical education at Downside School, he was commissioned in the
army during National Service, where he was badly injured in a shooting
accident. He went on to study for a year at Oxford University.
At twenty,
he launched his journalism career at the Telegraph Group, and also wrote for
many other publications including Private Eye, in which he presented a profile
that was half Tory grandee and half cheeky rebel. As a young man, Waugh wrote
five novels that were quite well received, but gave up fiction for fear of
unfavourable comparisons with his father.
He and his
wife Lady Teresa had four children and lived at their manor house in Combe
Florey in Somerset.
Origins
He was born
at Pixton Park, near Dulverton in Somerset, his mother's ancestral home. He was
the eldest son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, grandson of the author and
publisher Arthur Waugh and nephew of Alec Waugh. His mother was Laura Herbert,
his father's second wife, a daughter of Colonel Aubrey Herbert (1880–1923) of
Pixton, diplomat and traveller, a younger son of Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of
Carnarvon, of Highclere Castle in Hampshire, a leading member of the
Conservative Party, by his second wife Elizabeth Howard, a great-niece of
Bernard Howard, 12th Duke of Norfolk, and a sister of Esme Howard, 1st Baron
Howard of Penrith, ambassador to the United States. Laura's half-uncle was
George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, the famous Egyptologist who sponsored
Howard Carter who discovered King Tutankhamen's tomb, and her mother was Hon.
Mary Gertrude Vesey, only child and sole heiress of John Vesey, 4th Viscount de
Vesci (1844–1903).
He was
named after Auberon Herbert (1922–1974), his mother's brother, a landowner and
advocate of Eastern European causes after World War II, himself named after
Auberon Herbert (1838–1906), a son of the 3rd Earl of Carnarvon. His nickname
used by friends and family was "Bron".
Early life
Born just
as World War II broke out, Waugh hardly saw his father until he was five.[2]
His parents being Roman Catholics (his mother by birth and his father by
conversion), he was educated at the Benedictine Downside School in Somerset and
passed his Greek and Latin "A" Level exams at the early age of
fifteen. He went on to begin a philosophy, politics, and economics degree at
Christ Church, Oxford, where he held an exhibition in English. He was
rusticated by the academic authorities, and never returned to the university,
preferring to make an early start in journalism.
Career
During his
National Service, he was commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards and served in
Cyprus, where he was almost killed in a machine gun accident. Annoyed by a
fault in the machine gun on his armoured car which he drove frequently, he
seized the end of the barrel and shook it, accidentally triggering the
mechanism so that the gun fired several bullets through his chest. As a result
of his injuries, he lost his spleen, one lung, several ribs, and a finger, and
suffered from pain and recurring infections for the rest of his life. While
lying on the ground waiting for an ambulance, his platoon sergeant kept him
alive providing vital first aid. He was first treated for his injuries at
Nicosia General Hospital. While recuperating from the accident in Italy, he
began his first novel, The Foxglove Saga.
Journalism
Waugh began
his career in journalism during 1960 as a cub reporter on Peterborough, the
social/gossip column of The Daily Telegraph.
His early
work as political columnist on The Spectator coincided with the war in Biafra,
a mainly Catholic province that had tried to secede from Nigeria. Waugh
strongly criticised Harold Wilson's government, especially the foreign
secretary Michael Stewart, for colluding in the use of mass starvation as a political
weapon. He was sacked from The Spectator in 1970, but with the support of
Bernard Levin and others, he won damages for unfair dismissal in a subsequent
action.
He was
opposed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and criticised the Church
that emerged from it. He was often critical of Archbishops Basil Hume and Derek
Worlock.
He also
wrote for the New Statesman, British Medicine and various newspapers (including
the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Evening Standard and The Independent). From 1981
to 1990 he wrote a leader-page column for The Sunday Telegraph. In 1990 he
returned to The Daily Telegraph as the successor of Michael Wharton (better
known as "Peter Simple"), writing the paper's long-running Way of the
World column three times a week until December 2000. In 1995 he finally ended
his long association with The Spectator, but in 1996 he rejoined The Sunday
Telegraph, where he remained a weekly columnist until shortly before his death.
Private Eye
Waugh
became known for his Private Eye diary, which ran from the early 1970s until
1985, and which he described as "specifically dedicated to telling
lies". He fitted in well with the Eye, although he made clear his
particular dislike of the Labour government of the 1970s. The education secretary
Shirley Williams became an especial hate figure because of her support for
comprehensive education. In his autobiography Will This Do?, Waugh claimed that
he had broken two bottles of wine by banging them together too hard to
celebrate when she lost her House of Commons seat at Hertford and Stevenage in
the general election of 1979.
Waugh was
himself a candidate at the 1979 election, indulging another of his pet hates,
former Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe, who was about to stand trial for
conspiracy to murder in a scandal that Waugh had helped to expose. It was
alleged that Thorpe had links to an incident in which a man called Norman
Scott, who claimed to have had an affair with Thorpe, had seen his dog shot
dead. Waugh stood against Thorpe for the Dog Lovers' Party in North Devon, and
Thorpe obtained an injunction against the distribution of Waugh's election
literature. Waugh polled only 79 votes, but Thorpe lost his seat.
Waugh left
Private Eye in 1986 when Ian Hislop succeeded Richard Ingrams as editor.
Waugh's
views
Waugh
tended to be identified with a defiantly anti-progressive, small-c
conservatism, opposed to "do-gooders" and social progressives. After
his death the left-wing journalist Polly Toynbee in The Guardian attacked him
for these views. He has been called a nostalgist and a romantic, with a strong
tendency towards snobbery, although his anarchistic streak ensured that he
retained the admiration of a surprising number of people whom he would have
considered horribly "progressive" or "leftish", including
Francis Wheen who vociferously disagreed with Toynbee's obituary comments.
Waugh
expressed an intense dislike of poet Ezra Pound. In a Spectator column of 20
March 1976, he wrote: "Ezra Pound, as I remember, wrote some disgusting
lines about storm clouds over Westminster in his Cantos. I haven't looked at
them for twenty-one years and certainly don't intend to look them up again now.
Ever since I was fifteen when I first read Pound's boring filth, the thought of
storm clouds over Westminster has filled me with nausea and gloom." In a
letter dated 15 January 1973, writer Guy Davenport reported "Auberon Waugh
in the English press giggled over Ez's demise [1 November 1972], informing his
audience that Pound's silly verse was so much twaddle, and his example the
cause of Modern Poetry and all its vulgar pretense. He also confesses that he
immensely enjoyed torturing Pound in the madhouse with letters asking what
passages in The Cantos might mean. Pound's replies, tedious and lengthy, he
destroyed after having his laugh."
Waugh
broadly supported Margaret Thatcher in her first years as prime minister, but
by 1983 he became disillusioned by the government's economic policy, which he
felt used the destructive economics and cultural ideas of the New Right. When
Thatcher became a strong public opponent of his friend and Sunday Telegraph
editor Peregrine Worsthorne, Waugh became a staunch opponent of Thatcher. Her
closeness to The Sunday Times' editor Andrew Neil, whom Waugh despised, further
confirmed his view.
To a
traditional Tory, these were some of the most deplorable aspects of the
Thatcher years. There was a certain amount of public posturing in his popular
anti-Americanism; he visited the US whenever he could, and spent a lot of time
holidaying in New England and on US speaking tours.
He had a
house in France and, despite his conservatism, was a fervent supporter of
European integration and the single currency, which he saw as a means of
de-Americanising the UK. He said that his ideal government would be a
"junta of Belgian ticket inspectors". Neither did he conform to
reactionary stereotypes in his strong opposition to the death penalty, or in
his antipathy towards the police force in general (especially when they sought
to prevent drink-driving; Waugh believed strongly that this was not as serious
a problem as it is widely believed to be, and referred to the
anti-drink-driving campaign as the "police terror"). He opposed
anti-tobacco smoking legislation (despite a heart condition which was
ultimately to kill him prematurely) and in his later years he was highly
critical of Labour attempts to ban fox hunting. In 1995 he fervently opposed
attempts by the then Home Secretary Michael Howard to introduce a national
identity card, a policy which at the time was opposed by the Labour opposition.
Along with Patrick Marnham and Richard West, Waugh was one of three signatories
to a letter to The Times that called for a British monument to honour those
repatriated as a result of the Yalta Conference; it was eventually erected in
1986.
Waugh held
that while the dangers of smoking (especially passive smoking) and drinking
were exaggerated, the dangers of hamburger eating were seriously
under-reported; he frequently referred to "hamburger gases" as a
serious form of atmospheric pollution and even made references to the dangers
of "passive hamburger eating". He also claimed that computer games
"produce all the symptoms and most known causes of cancer". The
Tobacco Advisory Council of the UK organised a pro-smoking book to be ghosted
for either Bernard Levin or Auberon Waugh.Neither columnist agreed to put their
name to it, but Waugh wrote a foreword endorsing the book and hitting out at
the anti-smoking lobby: "Let us hope this book strikes a blow against the
new control terrorists", he said. He also posed for photos with a
cigarette in his hand.
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