The Waugh family saga -- revisited

THE late John Gregory Dunne had about as shrewd an eye for familial wretchedness as he did for a well-turned sentence -- and that was a very formidable eye, indeed.

Back in the early 1980s, when a certain segment of America’s public television audience went rather understandably gaga for John Mortimer’s brilliant 11-part adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel “Brideshead Revisited,” Dunne remarked upon the irreducible dilemma at that undeniably great book’s core: The narrator and principal character, Charles Ryder, is not simply a priggish snob but a breathtakingly cold and unfeeling father.

Yet, there he is at the very center of what many regard as the 20th century’s finest English novel, a book whose structure and sentences are almost heartbreakingly beautiful.

Similar dilemmas attain for those who esteem “Decline and Fall” and “Vile Bodies” as two of their era’s finest novels, who think “Scoop” and “The Loved One” are the best satiric novels ever written about journalism and Hollywood, or who believe that the “Sword of Honour” trilogy is a deathless account of men at war.

Evelyn Waugh, in other words -- to borrow his character Lord Marchmain’s self-description -- still constitutes a “scandal” to his antagonists and “a stumbling block to [his] own party.”

For most American readers, Evelyn also remains the Waugh, and one of the many pleasures to be had from his grandson Alexander’s immensely valuable and altogether engrossing account of their clan, “Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family,” is the illumination it casts on the familial origins of so many of the elder writer’s memorable characters.

Forty-four-year-old Alexander has been a newspaper music critic, an author and -- along with his brother Nathaniel -- an award-winning musical playwright and British television personality. He thus belongs to the fourth generation of Waughs to take their living from the writing trade, though his book persuasively locates the first cause of the family’s fecund dysfunction to his great-great-grandfather Dr. Alexander Waugh, whose great passions in life appear to have been blood sports, the invention of surgical forceps and the sadistic physical and emotional torment of his entire household, particularly his children. To this day, his progeny casually recall him as “the Brute.”

The Brute begat, along with four others, Arthur -- man of letters and publisher, among others, of Charles Dickens -- who begat two novelist sons: Alec, who was beloved by his father beyond reason, and Evelyn, who was not and got even in the only way a truly great writer can. Evelyn begat seven children, the oldest of whom was the celebrated though savage journalist columnist and social critic Auberon (or “Bron”): His oldest son, Alexander, is our author.

Between the Brute and Alexander are some 180 books -- novels, biographies, travel, memoirs -- and enough essays, journalism and miscellany to fill a good-sized library wing. “Fathers and Sons” comes to American readers rather late; it’s been out in Britain for three years and was adapted into a BBC documentary -- with the author presenting -- two years ago. This American edition is adorned by cover blurbs from William Trevor and V.S. Naipaul.

It is a remarkable family account because Alexander has constructed not simply a five-generation narrative and drawn on heretofore unpublished family materials, but also adroitly employed the utterly remarkable letters that passed between father and sons in each generation. These, in fact, are the book’s sturdy spine and are unique for their combination of humor, malice, manipulation, erudition, honesty and, in memorable instances, wrenchingly inexpressible affection.

Evelyn’s acerbic relations with his own children are, of course, well known. He tormented Bron for a variety of imagined and real faults -- in the latter category particularly for Bron’s predilection for embellishment and deceit. Evelyn habitually referred to and addressed his favorite child, Meg, as “Hog.” In the late 1950s, while Bron was serving with the British army in Cyprus, Evelyn wrote to one correspondent concerning his children: “Bron is going bald, Meg is fat as suet. Teresa is dirty. Hatty dotty. The little boys just little boys.”

Arthur, Evelyn’s father, had favored Evelyn’s older brother Alec so extravagantly that, when the young man was sent down from school for “interfering” with the younger boys, the whole matter was overlooked. Alec, in fact, produced a scandalous and scandalously popular novel of public school homosexuality. (He had another great success late in life with “Island in the Sun,” whose film version featured a similarly scandalous interracial kiss.)

Evelyn, disdained and neglected by his father, nonetheless received the following remonstrance when Arthur -- on the occasion of reluctantly dedicating a collection of criticism to his younger son -- writes of a nostalgic visit to the children’s nursery in their home: “In memory of that room and of all that it has seen, I should like to offer you this book, which is, in its way, only another tribute to the passage of Time, the certainty of Change and the imperishable influence of Tradition. You are born into an era of many changes; and, if I know you at all, you will be swayed and troubled by many of them. But you are not yet so wedded to what is new that you seem likely to despise what is old.”

Evelyn would, to one acidic degree or another, satirize Arthur as the vaguely cruel and distracted father figure in all of his novels. And yet, it’s hard not to discern something of Arthur’s influence in the son’s celebrated conversion -- one that rocked literary and journalistic London -- to Catholicism. As Evelyn later would write, “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” He was at pains to give Bron, the object of his own parental torment, a Catholic education and, in fact, remained -- for his time and class -- unusually involved in his children’s lives and education, while his appropriately Catholic and titled second wife, Laura (daughter to the fourth Earl of Carnarvon) pursued her interest in cattle as a rather unsuccessful dairy farmer.

One of Alexander’s contributions is to demonstrate through letters and recollections how Evelyn made a kind of mental and spiritual reconciliation with his father, Arthur. Bron -- who, like his father, died early of too much tobacco and alcohol and too little exercise -- never attempted anything similar. Alexander, however, clearly loved his father, and his fumbling, slightly maimed and utterly engaging attempts to make that clear about Bron are genuinely and crushingly touching.

Taken as a family, the Waughs call to mind nothing so much as that famous passage from Auden’s elegy on the death of Yeats:

Time, that is intolerant

Of the brave and innocent,

And indifferent in a week,

To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit,

Lays its honors at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views,

And will pardon Paul Claudel,

Pardons him for writing well.