In the summer of 1932 – I have heard it said, on the rebound from Ruth – Alec became engaged to Joan Chirnside, a thirty-year-old adopted daughter of a sporting millionaire from Melbourne, Australia. He proposed on Arthur's birthday, 24 August, so that as soon as Joan had accepted him he could telegraph the news to Arthur as a special gift. No doubt there was much welling up of watery eyes that day at Underhill. Arthur adored Joan from the start. She was to him the daughter he had always wanted, charming, polite, generous, warm and a great appréciatrice of all that was most delightful in himself. ‘You are a member of the family now, you must call me Poppa,’ he announced, on hearing of the engagement. She was happy to oblige. K, who was uncomfortable with Joan calling her ‘Momma’, settled instead for the more comfortable but silly ‘Mrs Wugs’.
The novelist Anthony Powell once claimed of Alec that he was curiously attracted to boredom and boring people and it was for this reason that he was such a popular dinner guest: he could be seated next to anyone, however dreary, and get along fine. Alec was, it is true, an excellent listener, which made him popular with egomaniacs and saloon-bar moralists. Recently I chanced on a collection of his essays, On Doing What One Likes, privately printed in 1926, the year he escaped from Chapman and Hall, and was surprised to find in it a passage extolling the virtues of boredom in literature, which seemed to support Powell's thesis:
We cannot deny, if we are honest with ourselves, that we have rarely read a classic without being for quite long intervals considerably bored by it. And yet it is the reading of those
books that we recall with the most enjoyment; precisely, I sometimes think, because of those tedious interludes; those long accounts of trivial people and uninteresting conversations which provided so admirable a contrast for such sensations as the novelist had subsequently to offer. They were the breathing space. They bored him so that he should be able to relish more keenly the excitement when it came.
So much for literary criticism. But what Powell had been trying to say was that Alec was attracted to Joan Chirnside, not because she was rich or pretty or charming, but because she was boring. A far-fetched notion, but there it is. In any case, if it were true, Joan was clearly not boring enough, for Alec soon became restless in married life and longed to escape their Hampshire home and return to the Tahitian palm-tree and beach romances of the last six years.
Once married, Alec no longer needed a base at Underhill. The traffic, roaring up and down North End Road had increased exponentially since Arthur had built the house in 1907 and the long walk from the tube was increasingly tiresome to him. So, in the summer of 1933, Arthur decided to sell Underhill and move to a two-floor flat in a quiet street in Highgate. Departure from Underhill gave Arthur an excuse to wax and moan and to pour out his feelings on old associations and past times. Evelyn did not seem to care much, one way or the other. If anything, he was pleased to leave a place that had bored and irritated him. He liked the new flat, in which he was given a room to himself and, as a present to his parents, he paid to have the whole place repapered.
Only Alec was shocked and saddened by the sale of Underhill: he remembered wistfully how Arthur had described him as its heir. Arthur quickly established himself in his new environment, a few yards above the Highgate School cricket ground. All summer long he watched the boys play cricket and soon became a familiar sight to them in his Homburg hat, with his white hair, short round figure, red face, slow, shuffling walk and jet black poodle by his side.
I have not so far mentioned the black poodle scenario as it seems to have little to do with fathers and sons – but throughout their married lives K and Arthur had a succession of them. There was one called Marquis, one called Wooley (after the cricketer), one called Gaspard, one called Beau, who, according to Barbara Jacobs, ‘lurked under the table and would rush out suddenly with red eyes flashing’, and heaven knows how many others. Needless to say Arthur was hopelessly emotional about them all. When Gaspard died in November 1933 he wrote in his diary: ‘Dear darling Gappy. No more walks together on the Heath. No more welcoming barks as I open the gate. Goodbye, dear little companion of so many happy hours,’ but once again, I digress…
Three years after the tragic death of Gaspard, Evelyn was busy writing travel books, novels, journalism and short stories. Arthur must have shuddered when he saw, for the first time, the title of Evelyn's short story ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’. ‘What new onslaught – what new patricidal biffing am I in for now?’ The title alone was enough for him to know that he was in line for another of Evelyn's cruel, satirical wallops. As a man who described himself as ‘a Dickensian’, and was known to Ellen Terry as ‘that dear little Mr Pickwick’, who liked to dress in the old-fashioned frock coats and shirts of the Victorian era; as president of the Dickens Fellowship, a renowned expert who lectured on Dickens, who had edited two complete sets of Dickens's works, who, for thirty years, had been managing director of Dickens's publisher and who, throughout Evelyn's childhood, had read aloud the works of Dickens night after night to his sons, Arthur was not simply ‘the man who liked Dickens’, he was the maniac who was obsessed by Dickens. ‘All the more likeable Dickens characters,’ according to Evelyn, ‘provided him with roles which, from time to time, he unde-signedly assumed.’
In Evelyn's ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ Henty, an amateur explorer escaping a heartless wife in London, finds himself lost, alone and with a fever somewhere in the middle of an uncharted South American forest. He is revived by an English-speaking, half-caste, illiterate chief called Mr McMaster (also the name of Arthur's close friend) who implores Henty, once he is returned to health, to read to him from his treasured insect-chewed collection of Dickens. At first Henty enjoys reading; but soon realises that he is trapped, that McMaster has no intention of helping him return to civilisation, but intends to hold him there for ever, reading Dickens. After a couple of years, when Henty has finished the whole of Dickens's oeuvre, McMaster makes him start again with Bleak House. Henty learns that before he came to the forest there was a black man who had also read Dickens aloud to Mr McMaster and that he, too, had been desperate to escape.
A clear parallel can be drawn between Evelyn's enforced return to Underhill following his wife's betrayal and Henty's situation in the Brazilian forest with Mr McMaster, but the story cleverly reverses, mirrors and refracts the events of Evelyn's life. McMaster, who inherited his love of Dickens from his father, uses his children to prevent Henty escaping. By reading Dickens aloud, night after night, Henty becomes a substitute father to the deranged McMaster: ‘You read beautifully, with a far better accent than the black man. And you explain better. It is almost as though my father were here again.’
When a rescue team from England finally arrives, McMaster puts Henty to sleep with a native drug, gives them Henty's watch, shows them a grave and they leave. When Henty wakes, McMaster tells him of the Englishmen's visit in a chilling monotone:
‘I thought you would not mind – as you could not greet them yourself I gave them a souvenir, your watch. They wanted something to take home to your wife who is offering a great reward for news of you. They were very pleased with it. And they took some photographs of the little cross I put up to commemorate you coming. They were pleased with that, too. They were very easily pleased. But I do not suppose they will visit us again, our life here is so retired – no pleasures except reading … I do not suppose we shall ever have visitors again… well, well, I will get you some medicine to make you feel better. Your head aches, does it not… We will not have any Dickens today… but tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Let us read Little Dorrit again. There are passages in that book
I can never hear without the temptation to weep.’
McMaster is not, of course, a precise character portrait of Arthur, but Arthur must have recognised Henty's entrapment in the house of a Dickens fanatic as a criticism of himself and a clear message from his son that he was desperate to escape his father's house. The story was reuse
d the following year as the bitter dénouement to Evelyn's fourth novel and some say his greatest masterpiece, A Handful of Dust.
Arthur's exasperation with Evelyn reached a new peak at the time of the publication of ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’. In September 1933 when Alec and Joan had their first child, Arthur wrote a letter to his mewling grandson to be cherished when he was older. In it Arthur reveals, by a deliberate act of omission, that he has, by this time, more or less disowned his younger son:
My dear Andrew,
I send you my love and every fondest wish for Sunday. I am sorry I shall not be there; and I hope your father and mother are not vexed with me for not coming. But I should not see anything of you three in the crush; and my thoughts and hopes can be ever closer to you all here in the quiet. I shall be thinking of you all, all the time, and sending you every wish of love and hope.
If your parents put this letter away for you, so that you can read it when you are older, I should like to tell you that your father has been one of the three great things in my life. If you are half as good a son to him, as he has been to me, you will bring untold happiness into his life, and into your Mothers. The three great things in my life have been my mother, my wife, and my son – your father. Nothing else has mattered much to me but their love. You have a splendid mother. May you have as good a wife and may you and your father understand each other as well as he and I have done, all the days of our life together.
Your Grannie and I are sending you a Bible, which I hope you may like to read in the years to come… May you have love beside you all your days, my dear Grandson, and it will lead you into peace. God bless you.
Your loving grandfather Arthur Waugh
In the six years following the dissolution of his marriage Evelyn travelled continuously abroad – to central Africa, British Guiana, Brazil, Italy, Egypt, Norway and three times to Abyssinia. With Alec he carved up the world into two territories so that their travel books would not overlap. Alec took the far East, the Middle East, the Caribbean and North America, Evelyn the rest. In London Evelyn's meetings with Arthur were kept to a minimum. He stayed as often as possible at his club or with friends, rather than at the flat in Highgate, but he was still forced to keep the bulk of his belongings at his parents’ home. At the end of January 1935, on a rare visit to his father, Evelyn destroyed many of Arthur's most precious possessions. Arthur's diary of 29 January records:
Woke at 4 am to a strong smell of burning. On opening the bookroom door found the room ablaze. Called K. Evelyn called the firemen. The Whites were most kind; took us in and gave us brandy. Firemen did not arrive for nearly twenty minutes and soon got the fire under control, the armchair, Rossetti chair, carpet, curtains all scorched. Firemen had gone by 5. Evelyn went to bed again.
In an article for Nash's Pall Mall Magazine two years later Evelyn wrote:
My father is a literary critic and publisher. I think he can claim to have more books dedicated to him than any living man. They used to stand together on his shelves, among hundreds of inscribed copies from almost every English writer of eminence, until on one of my rather rare recent
visits to my home, I inadvertently set the house on fire, destroying the carefully garnered fruits of a lifetime of literary friendships.
I have a few of Arthur's books, with charred spines, from this fire and my cousin has a mirror that was blackened in the blaze. The Rossetti chair did not survive. Papa told me that Evelyn had fallen asleep with a lit cigar, though in those days he may still have been smoking a pipe in emulation of his father.
I keep suggesting with each new father–son atrocity that it marked the apex of Arthur and Evelyn's poor relationship. Of course I am only guessing but, if I had been Arthur, the one deed that would have upset me most would have been the publication in 1936 of Evelyn's short-story anthology Mr Loveday's Little Outing. I have already mentioned the first story in which Evelyn pokes fun at a lunatic with a fetishism for women on bicycles, but the last one of this collection is by far the most poisoned dart Evelyn ever shot at his father. It is called ‘Winner Takes All’ and concerns two brothers: Gervase, the favourite, and Tom, who is ignored and deprived. There is no resemblance between the single mother of the story, Mrs Kent-Cumberland, and Arthur Waugh, but her attitude to her sons is identical to his.
Mrs Kent-Cumberland gives her elder son names that are ‘illustrious in the family's history’: Gervase Peregrine Mountjoy St Eustace. The younger is whimsically named Tom. Evelyn hated his name and envied Alec – Alexander Raban Waugh – for having names that were ‘illustrious in the family's history’. In the story both boys are brought up to accept the elder's superiority and that he will one day inherit everything. When Tom is given a model car for Christmas by a generous uncle, Mrs Kent-Cumberland assumes there has been a mistake and swaps the labels so that Gervase receives the car. Later Gervase is sent to Eton, Tom to a ‘less famous, cheaper school’. When Tom writes a book, Mrs Kent-Cumberland ensures that Gervase gets all the credit. When Tom walks out with a young girl of whom Mrs Kent-Cumberland disapproves he is sent to Australia to cool off and when he returns a few years later engaged to an attractive Australian heiress, his mother sees to it that the girl marries Gervase instead.
‘Winner Takes All’ is a deadly story of favouritism, with no happy end and no uplifting twist. The younger brother is trodden underfoot from start to finish. Sadly no record has survived of Arthur's reaction to it. Had I been he, I should have been thoroughly ashamed.
36As a youth I put it around that I wished I had been a fly on the lampstand at my own conception. This information somehow reached my parents and disgusted them. When confronted I refused to recant: ‘No, honestly, it's good to be open about these things. If you fail to understand this you fail to understand ME!’
37When Arthur's cousin Sir Telford Waugh, a diplomat at Constantinople, published a book called Turkey Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Arthur remarked: ‘It should have been called Boxing Day.’ This, according to Evelyn, was his father's only memorable joke.
38Only four people attended the Evelyns’ wedding service at St Paul's, Portman Square. Alec was one of them. Someone was typing on the altar.
39Prendergast, in Decline and Fall, is murdered as above; Mr Plant in Work Suspended is murdered by a mysterious character whose name enigmatically resembles Arthur Waugh – Arthur Atwater.
40Heygate was sacked by the BBC for eloping with Mrs Waugh. They married in August 1930 and were divorced six years later without progeny. He admired Hitler before the War. He married three times, suffered depression and syphilitic madness and shot himself in 1976. Shortly before his suicide Heygate wrote to my father: ‘I have been thinking of the whole sad episode which brought such unhappiness into your father's life, and for which I suppose I was mainly responsible. Several people have asked me to write what little I knew about him, but I never have nor ever will. I merely wish you to know, Auberon, that whatever happened – and it was not good – I still retain now exactly the same feelings of love and admiration. Your father was a great man and one of the great writers and I feel proud to have known him.
41Heygate had lunched with Arthur, K and the Evelyns at Underhill two months earlier.
IX
Happy Dying
Alec's marriage to Joan was not faring well. He was restless and when, after a short year, she was summoned to Australia to comfort her ailing mother, he seized the opportunity to organise himself a one-room bachelor flat in Abbey Road, book his son into a hotel with a nanny and set off on his own for America. Alec saw neither Joan nor his son for four months. By the time she left for Australia, Joan was pregnant again. Their second child, Veronica, was born on her return in July 1934. Arthur was thrilled and sent Alec his congratulations: ‘I have always longed for a daughter. She will make a great difference to you when you are fifty.’ Shortly after Joan's return, her father died, leaving her in possession of a large fortune and, as soon as her inheritance was fixed, she bought an attractive Queen A
nne house near Silchester on the Hampshire–Berkshire border and called it Edrington after her father's estate in Melbourne. The famous decoratrice, Sybil Colefax, was hired to offer her fashionable opinions on carpets, curtains, wallpaper and kitchen fittings. A large retinue of domestic servants was hastily assembled – cooks, maids, cleaners, two gardeners, an unconventional butler, who wore a jersey and served Coca-Cola, and a uniformed chauffeur to sweep them all around in their spanking new 20 Speed Alvis motor-car.
But for all the creature comforts that Joan brought to her marriage, nothing would induce Alec to settle down. He felt discomforted and emasculated by her wealth, refusing to draw on it or to allow himself to feel at home at Edrington. Self-consciously he chose a tiny attic room for his study, but hardly ever worked there. He told his wife that he would pay for wine and proudly insisted on giving her four pounds per week as a contribution towards his upkeep.
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