Will This Do?
Duffy, James
SECOND BANANA James Duffy G iven the partiality of American editors for confessions by ambulance chasers and fading comedians, it is hardly surprising that it took journalist and novelist...
...As the young curate in a small town, he quickly became a popular figure among the locals and could very easily have lived happily among them for the rest of his life...
...Then he was off to the exclusive Benedictine school of Downside at twelve...
...a military casualty (he accidentally shot himself with a machine gun) and pensioned vet at nineteen...
...Hardly surprising, given his prolific output as editor of the Literary Review and as columnist for the Daily Telegraph and, until recently, the Spectator...
...Like the best narrative historians, Bridgers is able to show how events and societies are shaped by men whose actions are not always typical of their time and place, even though Machebeuf was in most regards typical of the missionaries sent to America in the nineteenth century...
...Yet the postprandial games and merriment were the "happiest and fondest memories of our father from these early years...
...He rails, for example, against "the new Mickey Mouse church of Cardinal Hume," which has nothing to do with traditional religion, "being no more than an idle diversion for the communally minded...
...Instead, inspired by a chance meeting with the elderly Bishop Flaget of Bardstown, Kentucky, Machebeuf put himself forward as a candidate for the Society of Foreign Missions in 1839 and Commonweal 3 9 September 11, 1998...
...Except for Rupert Murdoch and that "midget north-country journalist" Harry Evans (former president of Random House and Tina Brown's husband), the names of the colleagues he remembers--and often skewers--are not well known here...
...Born in France in 1812, in a small village in the Auvergne, he was raised in a pious middle-class home, entered the seminary at an early age, and was ordained a priest in 1836...
...an undergraduate sent down from Oxford without a degree, a published novelist and a married man at twenty-one...
...Bron's most appalling memory involves the first shipment of bananas to Commonweal 3 8 September 11, 1998 reach Britain after the war...
...In Evelyn's last years, father and son did enjoy "a distinct cordiality" and all admirers of Evelyn Waugh will appreciate the story of the mature relations between the two...
...The government decreed that every child in the country should be allowed one banana...
...SECOND BANANA James Duffy G iven the partiality of American editors for confessions by ambulance chasers and fading comedians, it is hardly surprising that it took journalist and novelist Auberon Waugh eight years to have his memoirs (which came out in England in 1990) published here...
...PRIEST PIONEER James J. Uebbing C atholics who have grown up within a flourishing church may find it easy to overlook the efforts of those who first established it, and Catholics of a certain age may be inclined to discount the value of these efforts altogether...
...Not surprisingly, Bron notes that at this time he "would gladly have swapped him for a bosun's whistle...
...The author makes a modest claim for his handiwork: It "is only an autobiography ~' and not "definitive...
...Three were consigned to the Waugh household, for Bron and two of his sisters...
...James Duffy is a writer living in New York City...
...Energetic, docile, and even-tempered, Machebeuf was wellsuited to parish work and, as a native of the region, comfortable with the rhythms of village life...
...The presence of my children affects me with deep weariness and depression," he wrote in 1946...
...He tells of an elaborate ruse that led to the stomach-pumping of World War II refugee children at his family's country home (he was three at the time...
...Nonetheless, one can be amused when he writes that "the secret of success on the Mirror was never to try to get anything into the paper...
...He recalls that his Uncle Alec wrote "innumerable autobiographies, as the mood took him," and indicates that in ten years' time he may do the same...
...At the same time, I have advocated my son coming to London...
...Under ordinary circumstances, his story might have ended there...
...It would seem from this that I prefer my books to my son...
...All were eaten by their f a t h e r - - with scarce cream and rationed sugar-as the children watched...
...In the middle of the war, the father wrote in his diary: "There is a great deal of talk at the moment about the rocket guns which the Germans are said to have set up in France with a range to carry vast explosive charges to London...
...It is well known that the elder Waugh was bored with his offspring...
...This fear is seriously entertained in the highest quarters...
...This is truly a sentiment worthy of his father's immortal satire, Scoop...
...I have accordingly given orders for the books I have been keeping at the Hyde Park Hotel to be sent [to the country...
...Bron [then seven] is clumsy and disheveled, sly, without intellectual or spiritual interest...
...It is small wonder that he appears a trifle fogeyish at fifty (due perhaps not only to his precocity but his heredity...
...Despite this corruptible proximity, I hope I have maintained the same cool objectivity that the author displays in appraising his Uncle Alec as a man who "worked hard all his life, and wrote many books, each worse than the last...
...His American publisher will not make profits comparable to those rolling in for the McBlarney Brothers' reminiscences, but the book should sell to admirers of the author's father, Evelyn Waugh, and to those who might simply enjoy a volume of graceful writing...
...One is fascinated by what Waugh ills reveals...
...That stirred up endless resentments among your fellow scribes...
...Champagne was drunk, but father always gave a speech on "some variation of the theme of how delighted he was that the holidays were over and that his children were going back to school...
...All the more reason, then, why we should be grateful for Lynn Bridgers's timely biography of Joseph Machebeuf, the French missionary who became the first bishop of Denver...
...Full disclosure: I am the godfather of Bron Waugh's first-born nephew...
...I can argue that firemen rescue children and destroy books, but the truth is that a child is easily replaced, while a book destroyed is utterly lost...
...the episode will remind his father's readers of the terrible Connollies in Put out More Flags...
...Bron Waugh accomplished much at a young age...
...For Americans, his adventures and feuds--and libel suits--as a journalist and columnist will probably be of least interest...
...In fact Waugh has not written another memoir...
...His narrative is peopled with wonderful eccentrics in and outside his family, but the most eccentric character of all is, of course, his father...
...He tells of end-of-holiday dinners when, contrary to usual practice, the children ate with their parents in the dining room, Evelyn in white tie and wearing his military medals...
...From that moment, I never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously," Bron writes...
...And he perhaps deserved a rest as well from his sixteen years as an acerbic contributor to Private Eye...
Vol. 125 • September 1998 • No. 15
