Brideshead Benighted and The Diaries of Auberon Waugh, by Auberon Waugh
Teachout, Terry
Books in Review - "Brideshead Benighted and The Diaries of Auberon Waugh, by Auberon Waugh" Auberon Waugh, editor of the Literary Review, has given considerable thought to "the ethics of gossip, scandalmongering and personal abuse" and has decided that "for the most part they are...
...Waugh may be deadly serious when it comes to first principles, but he is also, to use his own phrase, a "practitioner of the vituperative arts," and these arts are practiced with matchless flair throughout the laugh-flecked pages of Brideshead Benighted and The Diaries of Auberon Waugh...
...I find myself more than ever on the side of the Distillers Company against the money-mad thalidomide parents and their slop-mongering friends in the Press...
...like the urge to sexual congress with children or the taste for rubber underwear...
...Even American conservatives have lately been seduced by the optimism of Ronald Reagan into what Mencken delicately referred to as "the uplift...
...Auberon Waugh, editor of the Literary Review, has given considerable thought to "the ethics of gossip, scandalmongering and personal abuse" and has decided that "for the most part they are perfectly all right...
...Waugh is more than a little short of the very "tranquillity of mind" he so eloquently espouses, and his anger, usually tonic, sometimes flares up into something very much like nihihsm...
...Waugh's work is turning up in such stylish domestic venues as Vanity Fair and Harper's, while his two most recent books have just been brought out in American editions: Brideshead Benighted, a collection of his "Another Voice" columns for the Spectator, and The Diaries of Auberon Waugh: A TUrbulent Decade, 1976-1985, a selection from the "diaries" he contributed to the British magazine Private Eye from 1972 to 1986...
...Waugh is having none of this...
...Mr...
...The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power...
...Openly lukewarm towards the comforts of religion, he opts instead for "that tranquilHty of mind which, in an irreligious age, must fill the place of our being's end and aim...
...Waugh's formidable reputation as a literary troublemaker has never quite managed to take hold in the United States, where he is chiefly known as Evelyn Waugh's oldest son...
...He wears his hideous moustache in a downward-turning bow and invariably says "No way...
...There are," he says, "countless horrible things happening all over the country, and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible...
...He is far too tough a customer...
...The Auberon Waugh of the Private Eye diaries may be playing for laughs, but the Auberon Waugh of Brideshead Benighted is a man who believes, among other things, that "majority preferences are, by and large, things to be avoided and where possible frustrated," who argues that the British left aspires to "a malleable population of government employees, second-class citizens and welfare fodder," who fears "the unspeakable horrors of a society dominated by proletarian tastes and appetites...
...Even the most cursory reading of Brideshead Benighted and The Diaries of Auberon Waugh suggests the underlying inadequacy of this philosophical position...
...If we could all agree to behave as if the man did not even exist," Christopher Hitchens wrote in the New Statesman a few years ago, "that might be the answer...
...For the most part, though, Auberon Waugh eschews the empty nihilism of the agnostic Tory in favor of a far more genial quaUty: that principled malice which lends true savor to wit...
...He sees "the urge to power" as "a personality disorder in its own right...
...I have an open mind about queer-bashing...
...Maybe so, but it's hard to see how...
...He eats bad food greedily and is loud in his praise of nasty wine...
...From one point of view it seems rather cruel, although from another I can see it might be necessary on occasions...
...Waugh will ever become all that popular in this country...
...Judging the overall situation in England to be hopeless, he nonetheless repudiates the possibility of mitigating action...
...But this unfortunate state of affairs now seems to be changing for the better...
...His wife is even worse, with a terrible underlying seriousness which turns everything it touches to dust...
...The fact that George Will can get away with calling himself a Tory these days merely serves to prove the point...
...Waugh's affectations exaggerate rather than distort...
...As a result of this uncompromising stance, he has become one of England's best-known and most controversial right-wing journalists...
...Auberon Waugh is a Tory, in other words, and it is this quality more than anything else which is likely to alienate the average American reader...
...He is so fully committed to this drastic position, in fact, that he is willing to write off Margaret Thatcher with the same utter finality that attaches to his dismissal of the British left: Politics, as I never tire of saying, is for social and emotional misfits, handicapped folk, those with a grudge...
...Auberon Waugh, as it happens, is something of a case study in the risks and pitfalls of the reactionary position...
...Americans have been systematically taught to favor the pomaded hypocrisies and discreetly draped biases of our syndicated columnists and television anchormen over the masculine ferocity of an Auberon Waugh, who affords in his best writing the same robust pleasure that columnists like Westbrook Pegler once offered daily: the titillating thrill of hearing one's deepest social prejudices fearlessly shouted into a bullhorn: Terry Teachout is a senior editor of Harper's magazine, and an editor of the conservative newsletter Modern Times...
...His preferred response is one of urbane stoicism...
...untrustworthy in business matters, overconfident in conversation yet infinitely gullible in his cynicism, insecure in his boastfulness...
...But Mr...
...One very much doubts, however, that Mr...
...H. L. Mencken was probably the last unashamed Tory to be widely read in this country, and his popularity evaporated as soon as people saw him for what he was...
...For Mr...
...The only thing that any of them is really interested in is the chance to make decisions and see them put into effect—to press a button and watch us all jump...
...The New Briton . . . is white and overweight, flip, cynical, ignorant and boastful...
...when he means "I think perhaps not...
...Waugh suggests at one point that the rigidity of the British libel laws has inevitably pulled the teeth of controversialists like himself...
...Both are planning to vote for the Social Democratic Party next time round...
...Some of this ferocity is doubtless sheer affectation...
Vol. 19 • December 1986 • No. 12
