In Memoriam: Auberon Waugh, 1939-2001
Reid, Stuart
Auberon Waugh, 1939-2001 BY STUART REID Auberon Waugh died the day before the House of Commons voted to ban fox-hunting, but he saw the vote coming and perhaps decided that enough was enough. Here...
...But Auberon Waugh was a much kinder and gentler man than Evelyn Waugh...
...He believed that the "hamburger gasses" emitted by the United States and its satellites were the cause of global warming and of memory loss in late middle age...
...So after a few stumbling apologies, I simply read my speech on breast-feeding...
...I disliked doing this, as it seems to cheapen everything the Women's Freedom Movement stands for...
...The New Statesman, May 10,1974 My own theory about the death of Vincent Foster—that he was caught smoking in the White House and shot out of hand by a member of the First Lady's Secret Service bodyguard—does not rely on an elaborate conspiracy...
...They have not had our advantages, and in many cases, I have been told, they live in terrible conditions...
...When I arrived in Dakar, I found a very grand dinner party, with the English ambassador, and Senegalese Ministers of Culture and Communications in tuxedos...
...In this way we will elevate the whole tone of political debate while reducing the risk of awkward misprints in the great journals of opinion which comment on public affairs...
...His writing was often cruel, but, unlike his father, he was seldom cruel in person...
...I agreed to do so, and composed a speech in French on breast-feeding...
...Besides, if he was anti-American, he was also anti-English...
...He was nobody's poodle...
...I also thought my beard might excite ribald comment, but in this I underestimated the sisterhood...
...Those of another persuasion can denounce it as recklessly profligate, pouring petrol on the fires of inflation and divisive to boot...
...In the end his heart gave out...
...He lost a lung, his spleen, several ribs, and a finger...
...With a woman we can't do that, but have to listen politely to all her fatuous pronouncements...
...Everything he loathed was represented by the hunting vote...
...AUBERON WAUGH ON OBITUARIES F0 Winston Churchill as a "war criminal, mass murderer and persecutor of P. G. Wodehouse...
...The New Statesman, January 17,1975 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 997,1975 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 99...
...What was he, then...
...Way of the World, Daily Telegraph, January 13,1996 [I]f I am right, then it would save endless boredom and trouble if politicians and leader writers could avoid the use of figures altogether...
...The only problem was that I was not meant to be giving a talk on Breast-feeding but on Press Freedom...
...From Private Eye diary, October 12,1972 Alas, I can think of no advice to your fellow countrymen on their reading...
...That is the moment to let 1,000 flowers bloom, 100 philosophies contend (or whatever figures apply...
...According to his friend Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Bron had a "Sicilian taste for vendetta...
...If they are correct—the U.S...
...Perhaps they should start with the Bible and move on to Shakespeare before tackling Joyce and Milan Kundera...
...He died in his sleep, arms folded across his chest, having said farewell to his closest friends the day before...
...Perhaps, perhaps...
...The Senegalese Minister of Culture fell out of his chair laughing and took me to a nightclub afterwards...
...It seems to me they have an awful lot of OR HE WON T. BE FORGOTTEN, SINCE OURNALISTS, THE SPECTATOR, AUGUST 5, 2000 catching up to do...
...Women make surprisingly good steeplejacks and pub bouncers, however...
...For TAS'z Christmas Books recommendations (1985) Some years ago, when I was on the [Private] Eye, I also wrote a regular medical column in a now-defunct magazine called British Medicine...
...He hated the radical and irreligious left, but also the radical and religious right...
...Simply the funniest commentator of his generation, a mixture, to place him in an American context, of P. J. O'Rourke and H. L. Mencken...
...That's not to say that he disliked all Americans: he rooted for Barry Goldwater in 1964, thought well of Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter (for his common sense), and Pat Buchanan, and adored Tina Brown (surely she counts as an American by now...
...Next, some obsequious PPS to the minister concerned can write in and say that the duck is just right...
...True...
...There is scarcely a writer in the broadsheets here who has not either borrowed or stolen from him...
...his prejudices were inherited...
...He once dismissed rich, white males, they must yet surely have carried some sort of prayer to heaven by virtue of her obvious sincerity...
...A proper writer will either survive through his writinc If he is not going to survive, it is best that he shouli WE ALL HAVE FAR TOO MANY THINGS TO REMEMBER IN LIFE...
...He had a Catholic's contempt for Protestant culture, and was deeply suspicious of official propaganda, not least the myth of "our finest hour...
...He hated big government, but he also hated big business...
...He died young, at 61...
...Way of the World, Daily Telegraph, July 12,1995 It is no good expecting the same standards of behaviour from foreigners as we would expect from our own countrymen...
...It was too late to change my speech, written in French, and impossible to explain to a French speaking audience the confusion between breast-feeding and press freedom...
...For some reason I was running a campaign against compulsory breast-feeding, and was only slightly surprised to receive a telephone message at my Private Eye office asking me to fly to Dakar, in Senegal, and give a talk on that subject...
...From the introduction to the American edition of The Diaries of Auberon Waugh Public men may complain of what we can do to their reputations in their lifetime, but this is nothing to what we can do after they are dead...
...98 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 Waugh In His Own Words To get into the Women of the Year Lunch at the Savoy Hotel I was forced to dress up in drag and give my name as Miss Glenda Slag, first Lady of Greek Street...
...That is no excuse for shooting them, let alone for shooting more than 5,000 a year...
...Bron detested all political ideologies, and regarded politicians, especially British politicians, as warped human beings...
...Way of the World, Daily Telegraph, Nov 29,1995 Although political ambitions are nauseating enough in a man, they are even more unattractive in a woman...Politics is about bossing other people around and exerting power...
...It was illustrated by a picture of a dead Bron being flushed down a lavatory pan...
...Even his admirers allowed that the coverage was a bit embarrassing...
...Bron had never been frightened of speaking ill of the dead...
...He wrote of Andrea Dworkin: "Obese to the point of freakishness, unattractively dressed in ill-fitting workmen's trousers, stupid, ignorant, self-pitying and (as the Americans say) full of s—t, she cut an undeniably heroic figure in the Oxford Union, enumerating what to her and her friends were self-evident truths: even if they could be disproved by the costlier information bases and crude logic of Bron was his father's son...
...Some symbol might be adopted—a duck, perhaps—which was universally acknowledged as representing any contentious, highly significant figure...
...everything he loathed, in other words, was represented by New Labour and its "progressive" and populist values...
...Whatever his platform—left-wing New Statesman, right-wing Spectator—he always played the reactionary anarchist...
...He would therefore have approved of the hatchet job done on him by Polly Toynbee in the center-left Guardian...
...But I do not see how anyone, in any country, can fail to be appalled by the statistics for child murder in the United States which were published in this week's Observer...
...His health had been poor since 1958, when, while serving in Cyprus as a National Service officer, he accidentally shot himself in the chest with a Browning machine-gun...
...Polly's anger was provoked by the sometimes mawkish tributes that greeted news of his death...
...Not that the Conservative Party lifted his spirits...
...It can be said in defense of the Americans that some of their children, or "kids," are not like other children, being rude, selfish, greedy, uncommunicative and totally undisciplined...
...He loved France, but not America...
...but he will forgive his children—and his many friends and admirers—if in this case they disagree...
...has no reliable national crime statistics, and these were prepared by the Children's Defense Fund in Washington—more than 15 American children and teenagers are shot dead every day— 5,379 of them in 1992, the last year for which figures are available...
...Where a man puts himself forward for this task, we feel that at least we can punch him on the nose if he becomes too objectionable...
...Furthermore, Polly's main point—that Bron was the leader of a pack of "effete, drunken, snobbish, sneering, sexist" journalists—was not without substance...
...He had the wit to suffer fools gladly...
...Those of one school can argue that the duck is scandalously small, a betrayal of every historical responsibility and election promise...
...Bron (as he was known to friends and enemies) was a conservative and an extremist, but he was never a right-wing extremist (too vulgar) or a movement conservative (too predictable...
...Some say this is part of their charm, others that they have motivational problems...
...Like his father, the novelist Evelyn Waugh, he was contemptuous of the Tories for never having put the clock back by one minute...
...They loved it...
...Yet he was happy to forgive his enemies if they were brave...
...Here was yet another victory for what he saw, or professed to IN MEMORIAM see, as the enemy: the stupid, ignorant, biddable, corrupt, cowardly and greedy working classes of Great Britain and their allies in the liberal media...
...In his autobiography, Will This Do?, he wrote that "perhaps one of the kindest things we parents can do for our children is to die reasonably young...
...He was a passionate European, and famously declared that he would rather be governed by Belgian ticket inspectors than by MPs sitting in Westminster...
...Is the rest of the world prepared to sit idly by while this massacre of the innocents continues...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
