Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  At Combe Florey Evelyn wrote only one novel, his last, the final instalment of his trilogy about the Second World War, deemed by many of his critics to be the crowning glory and masterpiece of his literary career. It was called Unconditional Surrender. As with all of Evelyn Waugh's books, the trilogy (later recensed as a single volume under the title Sword of Honour) was essentially autobiographical. His novels, should you be asked, are best read in the order that he wrote them. Characters reappear, appropriately aged, from one book to the next; themes are kneaded, clarified, developed, enriched, juggled, sometimes discarded, sometimes resolved, along the winding, tipsy and often chaotic road that runs from Decline and Fall (1928) to Unconditional Surrender (1961). I can think of few novelists whose complete oeuvre comprises such a tightly woven canon as Evelyn Waugh's.

  The father-and-son relationship provides one of the central themes of his fiction, running, almost obsessively, through every book. But not until his last novel does the reader get to witness a father–son relationship that is even partially successful. In Unconditional Surrender, for the first time, a father is seen to take his paternal responsibilities seriously and the advice he gives to his son is both meaningful and beneficial. To Evelyn, full realisation of his own father's worth only became apparent after Arthur's death. The same is true of the Crouchbacks in Sword of Honour. Gervase Crouchback may not be scrupulously modelled on Arthur Waugh, but there are, as with most of Evelyn's fictional fathers, strong similarities. When he dies (like Arthur) suddenly and peacefully in 1943, his son Guy, serving as a soldier (like Evelyn), is fortunate (like Evelyn) to be stationed in England. At his father's funeral Guy ‘followed the familiar rite with his thoughts full of his father… His father had been a “just” man; not particularly judicious, not at all judicial, but “just” in the full sense of the psalmist … To Guy his father was the best man, the only entirely good man, he had ever known.’

  A year after the publication of Unconditional Surrender Evelyn further settled his account with Arthur in a long article for the Sunday Telegraph entitled simply ‘My Father’. Some of it I have already quoted. It is warm, generous, loyal and forgiving. Alec read it with trepidation and was amazed by the charity with which Evelyn portrayed the man with whom he had shared so many stressful antagonisms. Even Arthur's literary recitations in the book-room at Underhill, which Evelyn had so detested at the time, were handsomely praised:

  The happiest conjunction of my father's literary and theatrical tastes was in his reading aloud. This, for many years, was a feature of our family circle. It was never educational in intent. It was a shared delight, but it was also the basis of a generous education and of the recognition that education was something to be enjoyed, not the subject for schools. Some of what he read aloud was pure entertainment – the dramas of his youth which he would re-enact with vivacity. He also read us most of Shakespeare and Dickens, much of Thackeray and Trollope and of the staples of Victorian prose, but it was in reading poetry, with the fewest dramatic effects and the most reliance on rhythm and consonance, that he was most memorable to me. Indeed I have never heard him excelled except by Sir John Gielgud.

  I do not wish to accuse Evelyn of rewriting or covering-up history with these lines. I am sure he remembered as he wrote them the extent to which Arthur's book-room readings had caused him to bridle, but as a father himself he could now look back on Arthur's efforts in a kinder light. As he recorded in his diaries at the same time as this article was written: ‘Those who most reprobate and ridicule their fathers – e.g. Samuel Butler and Osbert Sitwell – were not fathers themselves.’1 Evelyn, who was always intensely self-critical, came to believe in his last years that Arthur had been a far better father to him than he was to his own children. In his diaries he confessed to having nightmares in which he was reading aloud endless tedious books to his family. He read occasionally to his girls, not so much to the boys, but the strain of it wearied him. Now, nearly twenty years after Arthur's death, he placed a new value on the childhood his father had given him and, perhaps, felt guilty at the cavalier manner with which he had treated Arthur in his last years. The point is best reflected in the final paragraphs of his article:

  My father and I were never intimate in the sense of my coming to him with confidences or seeking advice. Our relationship was rather that of host and guest. He stayed with me in the country. I regularly dined with him in Highgate. The war took me away but I was doing a spell of duty in London at the time of his death.

  I am now the father of three sons. I have very little knowledge, or curiosity, about what they think of me. They are always polite. I have tried to fulfil the same duties to them and provide the same amusements as my father did to me. I lack his gift of reading poetry and his liveliness.

  I think I am less good company to them than he was to me, but I think I am kinder than my grandfather [the Brute]. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

  A year after this article was published Evelyn set to work on the first volume of his autobiography, A Little Learning, in which he devoted more than an entire chapter to Arthur while to his mother, whom he loved a great deal more, he ascribed a single paragraph. The last lines of the chapter on Arthur are as redolent and fond a tribute as any father could hope from a son:

  My father never, in adult life, aspired higher, nor did he ever repine at his lack of excellence. His primary, overriding, instinctive aim was to make a home.

  There were times when I was inclined to regard his achievement as somewhat humdrum. Now I know that the gratitude

  I owe him for the warm stability he created, which I only dimly apprehended, can best be measured by those less fortunate than myself.

  On the other hand, I do accuse Alec of attempting to rewrite history. His motives, as I have said, were driven in part by guilt at having been his father's favourite. In his first autobiography, published in 1962 and dedicated ‘To the memory of my father, ARTHUR WAUGH, with a love that the years have deepened’, Evelyn is hardly mentioned. He wrote in that book:

  The reader may be surprised at finding so little here about Evelyn Waugh. If I were not myself and if I were to pick up the autobiography of Alec Waugh, the first name that I should look up in the index would be Evelyn Waugh. I am sorry to disappoint that curiosity… but I lack the key to Evelyn. I cannot enter imaginatively into the mind of a person for whom religion is the dominant force in his life, for whom religion is a crusade, as it is with Evelyn … So I shall confine myself reluctantly to this brief fraternal tribute of gratitude for the great pleasure that his books have given me and for the high honour they have conferred upon the name of Waugh.

  I do not think that religious differences provide an honest excuse for the omission. The truth is that Alec was afraid to write about his brother while he was alive. After Evelyn's death in 1966, he wrote freely about him in My Brother Evelyn and other Profiles (1967); A Year to Remember (1975); and The Best Wine Last (1978), and even introduced him as a semi-fictional character in his last novel The Fatal Gift (1973). In all of these he attempted to portray his brother's relationship with Arthur as rosier than it really was. ‘Evelyn and I,’ he claimed in A Year to Remember, ‘never failed to express appropriate gratitude for the devoted love that our parents gave us… we enjoyed our parents’ company and they knew we did.’ He approached the editor of Evelyn's diaries to persuade him to cut rude references to Arthur from the printed version. When he was going through correspondence, he threw away or crossed out whole sections that refuted the cosy-family-unity version of events that he preferred. When Arthur's letters to Kenneth McMaster briefly came into his possession Alec scribbled violently over the sentence ‘The fact is he [Evelyn] is thoroughly ashamed of his parents and does his best to banish them from his conscience’, though it can still be read by holding the paper upside-down and shining the light through it from behind.

  In his documentary accounts Alec was unwilling to admit the truth of Evelyn and Arthur's bad relatio
nship but he was more candid in his fiction. The best example can be found in his 1934 epic novel, The Balliols, a 500-page family saga that begins with a man building himself a house in North End Road, Hampstead in 1907. He is Edward Balliol, director of the old City firm of Peel and Hardy. He has two sons, Hugh, the elder whom he prefers, and Francis, who is clearly based on Evelyn. Hugh serves in the First World War and afterwards joins his father on the board of the company, while Francis, a schoolboy during the war, is ignored by both his parents. Edward's ‘capacity for curiosity had never been fully exercised on Francis’, we are told. ‘He had begun by thinking him a nuisance. Later he told himself that the child was his wife's concern. And now when she was too busy with her war work, he had grown into too confirmed a habit of ignoring Francis to take a very real interest in his concerns.’ Francis is well aware that his father considers him a second-class son. ‘“No one is really bothering about me:” thought Francis: “no one ever has; no one ever will.” And that old feeling of being alone, neglected, unaided, “out of things,” that had made him reserved and secretive as a child, volubly rebellious during his first terms at school, made him now ruthlessly resolved to decide his future for himself.’

  The phenomenal success of Alec's 1955 novel Island in the Sun made him a rich man. In fact, he earned more from this one book in the two months before its publication than he had made from all his other novels put together. New fame and fortune distracted him from gloomy ideas of suicide. Only a year earlier he had been swallowing mouthfuls of barbiturates in the hope of ending it all. Nobody seemed to be interested in his work any more, least of all in the short stories that for fifteen years had kept him in reasonable income. He could, of course, always have returned to England. Joan had never taken Alec's Reno divorce seriously – nor did she believe in the legality of it. As far as she was concerned Alec was welcome to return to Edrington at any time; but as he later recalled:

  I could not picture myself abandoning my immigrant status in the USA and returning to Edrington with ‘my tail between my legs’. I could not subject myself to that humiliation nor, if I did, should I have been a very satisfactory person about the house, either as a husband or a father. I should no longer be able to take a pride in myself; and when a man cannot do that he is better somewhere else.

  The sudden and unexpected success of Island in the Sun could not have been more timely. Alec's English agent complained that it was too long and needed cutting. For the first time in his life Alec ignored his advice and sent the book directly to his publishers in America. The next thing he knew was that his novel had been bought by Ladies’ Home Journal for a princely sum. Three days later it had been taken up as the Literary Guild selection for January; and the next day a telegram arrived to say that the Reader's Digest Condensed Book Club also wanted to serialise it. Then Hollywood jumped in. Within four weeks Alec had made quarter of a million dollars and more was on the way. The film version of Island in the Sun, directed by Robert Rossen, starring James Mason, Joan Fontaine, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge and the young Joan Collins, was the most talked-about film of the year. Alec's steamy yarn centred on two adulterous interracial romances and a murder on a West Indian island. The film's title song soon became a chart hit around the world:

  This is my island in the sun

  Where my people have toiled since time begun

  I may sail on many a sea

  Her shores will always be home to me

  My father used to play the record on his old Pye gramophone, singing and dancing round our Wiltshire sitting-room. ‘The influence of the Waughs is spreading!’ he used to say, as he took the record off. And indeed it was, for the world-famous reggae label, Island Records, was named after Alec's book and from this we might conclude that were it not for the ‘influence of the Waughs’ no one would ever have heard of Bob Marley. (Alec's other strange claim to fame was that he invented the cocktail party by serving a rum swizzle to astonished friends who thought they had come for tea at his flat in Earls Terrace in the spring of 1924. Within eighteen months early-evening drinks parties had become an established form of social entertainment right across the civilised world.)

  Alec was disappointed that neither his father nor his mother had lived long enough to witness the grand success of Island in the Sun. K, no doubt, would have found it all too sexual. The film gave Dorothy Dandridge the chance to appear as the first black woman to have an on-screen romance with a white man. It was this, and the black-white relationship between Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine, that caused the stir. Island in the Sun is actually quite a boring and cautious film and seeing it today I struggle to understand how it could have been such a sensational cult controversy in the fifties. Tempora mutantur…

  Though Alec's triumph succeeded in lining his pockets it did not, alas, bring him any closer to his family. In fact, the opposite: it held him longer in America. His eldest son, Andrew, grew into a handsome man with an eye, like his father, for the ladies. When they met they discussed sexual intercourse, sometimes in front of the rest of the family. Andrew once described to his father the sensations of a ‘spine-shattering fuck’. Alec thought about it for a minute before answering competitively, ‘Yes, I seem to remember one like that too.’ Joan employed, at that time, a demented Polish husband-and-wife team who lived in the attic and served at dinner. One day the husband accused Andrew of using the glue from his model aeroplane kit to anaesthetise his wife and rape her while she was comatose, and from that moment went around the house calling him ‘Die Focker’ under his breath. When Alec heard the story he was perplexed and slightly jealous. ‘Why doesn't he call me Die Focker? Surely he means me?’

  * * *

  For most of 1957 Bron's relationship with his father was epistolic. He took his ‘year out’ in Italy, and from September was stationed at army barracks in Windsor. Only for the first month and a half of that year was he at Combe Florey, getting on his father's nerves. Evelyn wrote to Meg at the end of January: ‘Bron seems unable to move himself abroad. He sits all day smoking cheroots, reading P. G. Wodehouse, and occasionally goes out at dusk with a gun and brings back a pheasant.’

  A fortnight later Bron was in Florence. Evelyn had asked his university friend Harold Acton, living with his mother in her opulent villa just outside the city, to keep an avuncular eye on Bron and to give him money as and when he needed it, which Evelyn would repay to Acton's account at the Heywood Hill bookshop in London. Acton was delighted by Bron and wrote to his old friend: ‘He strikes me as a charming chip off the not so old block, in certain ways uncannily like you.’

  In Florence Bron supplemented his income by holding out a hat to passers-by as his friend from Downside, Rob Stuart, drew kitsch, weeping Madonnas on the pavements in chalk. He also gave misleading English lessons to a surgeon and his wife:

  I simply sit down, give the old man Wilde's Intentions to read aloud and fill myself with their wine and food. Yesterday, after an exhausting day, I fell asleep which was embarrassing. My corrections of his pronunciation had become more and more erratic. ‘Gilbert lowed’ he used to read, ‘Gilbert laughed’ I said; ‘Gilbert laughed’ he repeated – ‘lowed’ said I automatically. He seemed very impressed with the eccentricity of the English language when I left.

  Rob and Bron earned enough in their various ways to buy themselves each a motor scooter and to dine on most evenings at the best restaurants in Florence. Days went by in happy indolence, peppered by insignificant adventures that Bron amplified, exaggerated and embellished to make them more amusing in his letters home. Evelyn's genial unruffled responses to his stream of calamitous endurance were commendable. Among the various adventures he reported to his father were:

  He was sitting peacefully in a train when a rifle bullet shot straight through the window passing out the other side. A minute later the window shattered into a thousand fragments.

  He had crashed into a policeman on his Vespa.

  His friend's motor scooter had exploded ‘scattering re
d hot metal everywhere’.

  He had fallen among ‘terrible painted hags’ – ‘cackling prostitutes’ – in a northern district of Rome.

  At the Mille Miglia motor-race he had seen a car spin like a top out of control and crash into a tree ‘within ten yards of me’. The Dutch driver was killed. ‘When the ambulance arrived the people in it had great difficulty getting near the poor man, and the only person for whom an instant passage was made was a newspaper photographer who snapped the driver's death agonies quite dispassionately.’

  ‘We left Assisi vowing not to stop again until we arrived at Rome. At night the only traffic on the roads is enormous, double-loaded lorries driven by the criminal population whom it is too dangerous to lock up. Over great mountain passes, time and time again they tried to murder us, and at every all-night inn where we stopped they were boasting of the people they had murdered that day. It was a charming mediaeval pilgrimage and even if there were not gallows at every cross roads, there were the hulks of crashed motorcars as an edifying admonition.’

  Most of Bron's letters contain wild exaggerations and downright lies. In one from Bologna (the only surviving letter to Evelyn addressed ‘Darling Papa’) he claimed to suffer a ‘lunatic experience’ similar to Evelyn's recent bromide-poisoning hallucinations from which he had forged his autobiographical novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: