Auberon Waugh; Acerbic Writer, Satirist and Editor Was Son of Novelist Evelyn Waugh

Auberon Waugh, acerbic son of novelist Evelyn Waugh and an accomplished author and editor in his own right, died in his sleep Tuesday night at the age of 61. He was an inveterate smoker with just one lung and had been suffering from a heart condition.

Waugh, editor of the Literary Review here since 1986 and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph newspaper, was a courtly gentleman who made a career out of being wickedly funny--and sometimes just plain wicked--in print. He was a professional snob who adored the upper class and frequently thundered against workers, women, leftists and the downtrodden.

He was politically incorrect by instinct and ideology, speaking out in favor of topics like chain-smoking in public and drunken driving.

Remarking on Prince Charles’ comment that he saw no reason a Roman Catholic should not one day sit on the British throne, Waugh wrote in the Telegraph last month that he could think of a few:

“When MPs [members of Parliament] decided to elect a first Catholic speaker [Michael Martin] six weeks ago . . . they failed to discover that the first Catholic was also a teetotaler and was unable to select the special Speaker’s Choice Whiskey given by MPs as bribes to their constituents, which is an essential part of our democracy. One dreads to think how many such problems might arise in the case of a Catholic monarch.”

A few days before, Waugh reacted poorly to a rumor that one of London’s oldest gentlemen’s clubs had decided to admit women.

“Few will have been as astounded as I was by last week’s announcement that White’s Club, in St. James’s Street, had decided to open its doors to women and to tieless men in shirt sleeves,” he wrote.

“This may be true, but I do not believe it and there is a beautiful freedom in being able to disbelieve whatever one reads in the newspapers. Perhaps this element of creating uncertainty is what makes journalism such a worthwhile profession.”

On the same day, he said, “nothing has ever been completely certain about human life except that at the end of it we shall all be dead.”

The balding, bespectacled Waugh died in the Somerset house once owned by his father.

In a November interview with the Independent newspaper, Waugh discussed his ill health and recent collapse in Soho’s Academy Club. As for the cause of the latter, he said, “No one knows. The heart, probably. I don’t think I’ll survive long. I can feel I’m on my way out.”

Waugh said he was losing his concentration, but denied that drink was to blame. He had nine wine cellars in his home and apparently rejected a doctor’s suggestion that he go easy on the claret.

He also never bothered to give up his 40-year habit of chain-smoking, despite having only one lung. Waugh lost the other in 1958 while doing his National Service in Cyprus, when he attempted to unblock a jammed Browning submachine gun while standing in front of the weapon and shaking the muzzle. He took six bullets in the chest, losing several ribs, a lung and his spleen, which he nonetheless continued to vent against the deserving pompous.

Waugh was born Nov. 17, 1939, 11 weeks into World War II. He rarely saw his soldier-father, who later dedicated himself to writing books rather than raising children--described by the famed author as “defective adults: feckless, destructive . . . humorless.” For Auberon Waugh, the father reserved the label of “great bore.”

Nonetheless, Waugh was said to have adored his father, though he lived in the great man’s long shadow.

Waugh “refused to be resentful, though he caused such resentment in others,” columnist A.N. Wilson wrote Wednesday in the Evening Standard.

Known to his friends as Bron, Waugh was best known for his journalism and commentary. He also wrote five novels, beginning with “The Foxglove Saga” in 1960, none of which reached the fame of his father’s works.

Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye magazine, for which Waugh wrote for 16 years, called him the “master of surreal comic vitriol.”

But Waugh had many friends who said he was gentle, “the sweet, courteous, kindly man one meets in the flesh,” according to profile writer Lynn Barber in a 1991 Independent On Sunday interview.

He was a lover of food, drink and gossip, a loyal friend, “charming in private, while . . . quite poisonously vituperative in print,” Wilson wrote in the Evening Standard. Waugh married Lady Teresa, daughter of the sixth earl of Onslow, in 1961. They had four children: Sophia, Alexander, Daisy and Nathaniel. Unlike his father, Waugh was “through and through a family man,” Wilson wrote.