European Document/Memoir of the Year

...To prigs, of course, he will always be a monster, but even those of us who don't admit to being prigs, and who recognize Waugh's soaring genius, have to agree that he was a cruel and unusual person...

...He is, indeed, hostile to Law 'n' Order, believing that the police today are little more than well-equipped urban terrorists, with their flak jackets, automatic rifles, and helicopter gunships...

...He inherited his father's literary gifts, but not his nastiness, or not all of it...

...Graham Greene declared that he filed his teeth and had the cruellest face he had ever seen...

...Besides, Waugh has no reason for self-pity...

...The culture sub is the chap who edits the late-night theatre and concert notices...

...On the other hand, we all know gibbering imbeciles whose parents doted on them...

...The headlines he writes today, as edi- tor of the Literary Review, are altogether more sophisticated, but not as funny...

...He guards his back against the enemies he has cultivated over the years andpokes his tongue out at the levelers...

...It might be going a bit far to describe their relationship as deeply moving, but at times it comes dangerously close to it...

...In one term he was beaten fourteen times—a school record...

...It comes as no surprise to learn that after the banana incident Waugh never again paid much attention to anything his father,an accomplished moral theologian, had to say on the subject of faith and morals, or that, at five, he would gladly have swapped the old bugger for a bosun's whistle...

...Though he is often cruel and malicious in print, his friends insist that he is kind, tolerant, and generous in private, and he doesn't beat his children up...

...He is one of Britain's most successful journalists, earning, if we are to believe the Wall Street Journal, more than $170,000 a year...

...In 1957, the undoted-upon Waugh was drafted into the army and joined his father's old regiment, the Royal Horse Guards...

...Auberon Waugh is, as they say, a person in his own right, and better known, through his newspaper columns and television appearances, than his father was in his lifetime...

...He gave a good account of himself in his struggles with the monks...

...their correspondence is full of happy ironies and good-natured insults...

...The answer, clearly, is that he is always joking, and always serious...

...In it he suggests that government can tackle the twin problems of homelessness and unemployment by making the wages of domestic servants tax-deductible...

...Auberon and his two sisters were looking forward in their deprived way to experiencing for the first time what they had been assured was one of the most delicious tastes in the world...

...He did not distinguish himself as a soldier...

...The poor man did not get the reference to Nelson's dying words ("Kiss me, Hardy"), and thereafter treated Waugh with some caution...

...280 pp., £15.99...

...Here is an example, taken from a column he wrote in the Spectator just before the last Tory party conference...

...Did he not perhaps find consolation in the arms of his mother...

...Indeed, as the book progresses it becomes clear that in later life he held "Papa" in great affection...

...is not one to wave before the electorate, or even to debate with great gusto before the conference...

...An Autobiography, by Auberon Waugh...

...Hilaire Belloc, on first meeting him, decided that he was a man possessed...

...Au contraire, he clearly hopes that a wider and deeper Europe will have a civilizing effect on Britain...

...No doubt, most of us would have cracked in his circumstances...

...That Waugh could have ended up a gibbering imbecile as a result of his upbringing is neither here northere...

...When their mother arrived home with three bananas, writes Waugh, "all three were put on my father's plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three...

...Waugh himself once told Nancy Mitford that without supernatural aid, "I would hardly be a human being...

...But he is realistic in his approach: My proposal...

...At the Telegraph in Waugh's day the culture sub would pick up the telephone and say, "Hullo, Culture...

...Funnier things have happened...

...Auberon Waugh's solution is to set out modest proposals and then to mock the politicians in the hope of thereby goading them into action...

...Nor is he, like so many Tory traditionalists, an anti-federalist...

...Waugh loathes the lager-drinking, bond-dealing, decision-making New Brits who flourished in the eighties, and he loathes too the redneck Tories who at the party conference most years bay for the rope and for tougher prison sentences...

...Even if he did, I cannot find it in my heart to grudge him such little consolations...

...The one sentence in his autobiography that sums up his philosophy is this: "The price of privilege is eternal vigilance...

...But conservative ideologues should not believe they have a soulmate in Waugh...

...Anyone who falls short of the ideal provokes hisses of "crybaby," "sneak," "swot," "whining catamite," and so on, demonstrating once again what horrible damage the boarding school system has done to the intellectual fiber of Britain's ruling class...

...His military career ended farcically when, in a moment of absentmindedness, he shot himself in the chest with a Browning machine gun (and lost, in consequence, one lung, two ribs, one finger, and his spleen—but, as he always insists whenever there is mocking speculation, nothing else...

...London: Century...

...Waugh also writes for the London Spectator and the Daily Telegraph (where he has recently taken over the "Way of the World" column from Peter Simple, Fleet Street's legendary reactionary...

...Those who care for New York Times headlines will delight in the headlines Waugh wrote at the time: BALLET TEACHES NOTHING NEW, AFRICAN PLAY MISSES ITS AIM, NO THRILLS BY VISITING SWEDE, DOCUMENTARY FILM SHEDS NO LIGHT...

...In this case, though, the charge is false as well as pre-pubescent...

...n other words, Waugh does not conform to any right-wing stereotype...

...As he lay dying (as it then seemed), he turned to his Corporal of Horse, whose name happened to be Chudleigh, and said: "Kiss me, Chudleigh...

...If she wept when he was packed off to boarding school at the age of six, the incident has gone unrecorded...

...The fact is he didn't...

...he has not time for ideology or orthodoxy...

...In 1989 he advised the Iron Lady to resign...

...His experiences in the nursery and at school provided him with precisely the strength a young man needs if he is to get through this vale of tears with a smile on his face...

...His father certainly did not weep...

...Waugh's gratitude to his father is palpable...

...It is one to be discussed quietly in smoke-filled rooms over the port, brandy, and fizzy peach wine before the lights are turned down, clothes are taken off and the serious business starts...

...Inevitably, therefore, when his autobiography was published here in the autumn, the London literary set focused on the fresh portrait it presents of Papa Bear.1 Death has done little to mellow Evelyn Waugh...

...This settles the question often asked about Waugh: Is he joking or is he serious...

...In fact, it must have seemed to his victims that he was pitching it a bit high in assuming that he was even hardly human Would a human being deprive his own children of bananas...

...The stories Waugh tells are funny, resigned, philosophical, generous...

...It was all rather dispiriting...

...0 The American Spectator January 1992 47...

...But how to mount such a defense...

...Waugh has been accused of whining about his childhood, a serious charge, since Waugh's circle (if not Waugh himself) lays great store by the spartan values of the prep school dormitory...

...I find it hard to believe that he derived much pleasure from [the beatings...

...No, none...

...they'll get over it...

...Stuart Reid is assistant features editor of the London Sunday Telegraph...

...After Oxford, where he again failed to distinguish himself, Waugh became a journalist, joining the staff of the Daily Telegraph as a gossip writer and "culture sub...

...S till, man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, and the young Waugh soon discovered what every child of the British upper middle classes must discover: that to survive at school one must learn to behave with the low cunning of the criminal classes...

...not, if we are to judge by the response here to the story of the Great Banana Scandal, as told by Auberon Waugh in his autobiography...

...Here he is on his headmaster at Downside, Dom Wilfred Passmore: He was immensely fat, the front of his black habit invariably covered with food stains...

...But he reserves his special spleen, as it were, for that perennial vice of the British middle classes, compassion...

...He continues to reproach the vulgar and the illiterate from beyond the grave...

...There is something of P J. O'Rourke in him, something perhaps of William F. Buckley, but Hunter S. Thompson is in there, too, and so is Gore Vidal...

...Foolishly, she did not listen, with we-all-knownow-what results...

...She preferred her cows to her children...

...Most people think 1Will This Do...

...Even so, it is impossible to consider the life and times and outrageously conservative views of Auberon Waugh without at the same time taking into account the F (for Father) word...

...I should not be surprised if the next Conservative government makes wages for domestic servants tax-deductible...

...I do not think he was particularly cruel, although it seems odd, in retrospect, for a highly intelligent man to have spent so much of his time beating boys...

...By the time he went 46 The American Spectator January 1992 to Downside, the exclusive Benedictine public school, he was the sworn foe of all authority, and still only 12...

...Waugh pêre could not wait to get his children out of the house, for the simple reason that he did not like them...

...His concern is first to defend his own turf, then to defend civilization against barbarism...

...What is remarkable about this achievement is that Waugh does not pander to popular prejudices but goes out of his way to trample them...

...Such epithets are as ill-informed as they are unjust, and based on nothing more substantial than penis-envy...

...Every evening in term-time a list of boys he wished to see appeared on the headmaster's noticeboard...

...Ask Mrs...

...Sometimes it was merely to tell them that their mothers had died or whatever, but mostly it was to beat them...

...He dislikes everything that is decent, worthy, and fashionable in modern thinking, especially if the thinking is being done by a friend, or even an acquaintance, of the earth...

...It follows that he is no Thatcherite...

...Shortly after World War II, it seems, a consignment of bananas reached Britain, and the socialist government of the gentlemanly Clement Attlee decreed that every child in the land should be allowed one banana...

...To the charge that vituperative writing such as his own causes the children of its victims to weep, he replies: let them weep...

...People do not read Waugh fils, or for that matter spit at the mention of his name, just because the author of his being was also the author of Brideshead Revisited...

...Thatcher...