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Waugh TalentHow one family became a dynasty in the world of British letters.

By Geoffrey WheatcroftPosted Monday, June 25, 2007, at 2:52 PM ET

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That genius cast a long shadow over Evelyn's own literary son. Like his father, Bron began to write early and with precocious success, but his novels, while not at all bad (I recommend Consider the Lilies, a most amusing book about an affectless vicar and his ghastly wife, satirizing political correctness avant la phrase in 1968), cannot be called seriously good. Then he discovered his métier as a polemical and satirical journalist, the funniest and most vituperative of his age.

But Bron, too, was wounded, and not only by a bizarre, near-fatal accident with a machine gun when he was doing his military service in 1958, a tragicomic set piece related again here. After Evelyn's death in 1966, Bron for years took up the cudgels on his father's behalf (and anyone who felt their blows will remember what his cudgels were like), in the process giving a most misleading account of his upbringing and of Evelyn's last years. Then in his own 1991 memoir, Will This Do?, Bron at last came clean about a childhood starved of love by the father he revered, who "reserved the right not just to deny affection to his children but to advertise an acute and unqualified dislike for them."

We might already have guessed that from Evelyn's letters. Wonderfully funny as they are, and full of penetrating insight on every kind of topic, the passages about his children, even when you make allowances for wit and irony, are more than chilling: "I abhor their company because I can only regard children as defective adults," he wrote. "I hate their physical ineptitude, find their jokes flat and monotonous. ... I can't afford to waste on them any time which could be spent on my own pleasures."

Although Bron was keen not to inflict the sins of the fathers on his own children, he, too, was a victim of almost terminal irony. Alexander says that he barely ever had a serious conversation with his father. Bron never addressed him by his real name, but always by facetious or mildly derisive nicknames, never played games with him, took no interest in his career at school or university, and didn't even "inspire in me a love of books." And yet, Alexander writes, "I adored my father, more, I suppose than he adored me." Yes, they are a strange family.

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As the children of one's friends grow up, one follows with pleasure their lives, personal and professional. In Alexander's case that meant his dynastic marriage to Eliza, daughter of the journalist Alexander Chancellor, which produced three children (beginning with another Bron), as well as his previous books, and now this bittersweet chronicle. Although a little long, a little self-conscious, and spotted with one or two solecisms ("wreaking" for "reeking" may be a slip of the spell check, but Evelyn would have ground his false teeth at the use of "aggravate" to mean "annoy"), it is written with, yes, truly hereditary verve and humor.

For all that, the final flavor the book leaves is melancholy, a story of bravado concealing repressed emotion. Nor did it help that the family hasn't proven long-lived: Evelyn died at 62 and Bron at 61, in each case before their relationships with their devoted sons could be resolved; both of them, despite everything, missed more than they could have imagined. As Evelyn used to say in letters to his women friends: goodness, how sad.

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Geoffrey Wheatcroft's book Yo, Blair! has just been published in Britain.
COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Maybe I'm just being contrary here, but I've never been that dazzled by Evelyn Waugh.

Scoop was pretty good about the pack instincts of journalists, but his treatment of Africa is nothing short of racist and hateful; The Loved One was an attempt to write a satire of American society informed by nothing but a few frustrating weeks in Hollywood and the limited glimpses of the country he got while making well-remunerated lecture tours (Nabokov's thrusts at American culture hit much harder because he got the details right, and he got those right because he lived here). As for Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust, they are mostly animated by his anger at his awful first wife (she was awful, but he seems to have married her mostly because she was upper-class, so he probably got what he deserved). And then there was that endless trilogy of novels where he posited himself as the last honorable man in England, an antidote to all of the gray mediocrities taking over the country.

I could tolerate the animating presumption of those books if Waugh had ever convinced me of his exceptionalness, but I've only found his work to be exceptional for its bile, not the talent with which the bile was expressed.

--lump516

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