Will This Do? An Autobiography. - book reviews

Auberon Waugh Carroll & Graf, $24, 288 pp.

James Duffy

Given the partiality of American editors for confessions by ambulance chasers and fading comedians, it is hardly surprising that it took journalist and novelist Auberon Waugh eight years to have his memoirs (which came out in England in 1990) published here. His American publisher will not make profits comparable to those rolling in for the McBlarney Brothers' reminiscences, but the book should sell to admirers of the author's father, Evelyn Waugh, and to those who might simply enjoy a volume of graceful writing.

The author makes a modest claim for his handiwork: It "is only an autobiography" and not "definitive." He recalls that his Uncle Alec wrote "innumerable autobiographies, as the mood took him," and indicates that in ten years' time he may do the same.

In fact Waugh has not written another memoir. Hardly surprising, given his prolific output as editor of the Literary Review and as columnist for the Daily Telegraph and, until recently, the Spectator. And he perhaps deserved a rest as well from his sixteen years as an acerbic contributor to Private Eye.

For Americans, his adventures and feuds - and libel suits - as a journalist and columnist will probably be of least interest. Except for Rupert Murdoch and that "midget north-country journalist" Harry Evans (former president of Random House and Tina Brown's husband), the names of the colleagues he remembers - and often skewers - are not well known here. Nonetheless, one can be amused when he writes that "the secret of success on the Mirror was never to try to get anything into the paper. That stirred up endless resentments among your fellow scribes." This is truly a sentiment worthy of his father's immortal satire, Scoop.

Bron Waugh accomplished much at a young age. He tells of an elaborate ruse that led to the stomach-pumping of World War II refugee children at his family's country home (he was three at the time); the episode will remind his father's readers of the terrible Connollies in Put out More Flags. Then he was off to the exclusive Benedictine school of Downside at twelve; a military casualty (he accidentally shot himself with a machine gun) and pensioned vet at nineteen; an undergraduate sent down from Oxford without a degree, a published novelist and a married man at twenty-one. It is small wonder that he appears a trifle fogeyish at fifty (due perhaps not only to his precocity but his heredity). He rails, for example, against "the new Mickey Mouse church of Cardinal Hume," which has nothing to do with traditional religion, "being no more than an idle diversion for the communally minded."

His narrative is peopled with wonderful eccentrics in and outside his family, but the most eccentric character of all is, of course, his father. It is well known that the elder Waugh was bored with his offspring. "The presence of my children affects me with deep weariness and depression," he wrote in 1946. "Bron [then seven] is clumsy and disheveled, sly, without intellectual or spiritual interest." In the middle of the war, the father wrote in his diary: "There is a great deal of talk at the moment about the rocket guns which the Germans are said to have set up in France with a range to carry vast explosive charges to London. This fear is seriously entertained in the highest quarters. I have accordingly given orders for the books I have been keeping at the Hyde Park Hotel to be sent [to the country]. At the same time, I have advocated my son coming to London. It would seem from this that I prefer my books to my son. I can argue that firemen rescue children and destroy books, but the truth is that a child is easily replaced, while a book destroyed is utterly lost."

Not surprisingly, Bron notes that at this time he "would gladly have swapped him for a bosun's whistle."

One is fascinated by what Waugh fils reveals. He tells of end-of-holiday dinners when, contrary to usual practice, the children ate with their parents in the dining room, Evelyn in white tie and wearing his military medals. Champagne was drunk, but father always gave a speech on "some variation of the theme of how delighted he was that the holidays were over and that his children were going back to school." Yet the postprandial games and merriment were the "happiest and fondest memories of our father from these early years."

Bron's most appalling memory involves the first shipment of bananas to reach Britain after the war. The government decreed that every child in the country should be allowed one banana. Three were consigned to the Waugh household, for Bron and two of his sisters. All were eaten by their father - with scarce cream and rationed sugar - as the children watched. "From that moment, I never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously," Bron writes.

In Evelyn's last years, father and son did enjoy "a distinct cordiality" and all admirers of Evelyn Waugh will appreciate the story of the mature relations between the two.

(Full disclosure: I am the godfather of Bron Waugh's first-born nephew. Despite this corruptible proximity, I hope I have maintained the same cool objectivity that the author displays in appraising his Uncle Alec as a man who "worked hard all his life, and wrote many books, each worse than the last.")

James Duffy is a writer living in New York City.

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