Will This Do? An Autobiography

National Review, Sept 1, 1998 by Florence King

Daddy Dearest

Will This Do?: An Autobiography, by Auberon Waugh (Carroll & Graf, 288 pp., $24)

CHILDRAISING in the English upper class violates every principle of what Americans used to call "togetherness" and now call "parenting skills." Exchanging affection and attention for alchemy, the happy few combine a perpetually choleric father and a mother detached to the point of somnambulism, add a sadistic headmaster, shake vigorously, and pour. To the horrified incredulity and cloaked envy of their American cousins, out comes a Winston Churchill.

Now they've done it again, probably for the last time. Post - World War II egalitarianism and post-Diana emotionalism have conspired to turn the green and pleasant land into one big slippery slope, but Auberon Waugh, born in 1939, is pure unhugged gold.

His father, Evelyn Waugh, modern England's most savage wit as well as her most devout Catholic convert, combined his two cachets by hating children and having six. Regarding them "as part of the cross which every Christian must bear," he ran them down in letters to friends and in his own diary, predicting they would become "defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless." A master of riposte himself, he had no patience with broad childhood humor and grew infuriated when they laughed at pratfalls and sight gags. Their inability to appreciate and practice sophisticated verbal wit proved they were working-class clods at heart and therefore beneath his contempt, and he did not shrink from telling them so to their faces.

The most terrifying aspect of Evelyn Waugh as a parent was that he reserved the right not just to deny affection to his children but to advertise an acute and unqualified dislike of them. This was always conditional on their own behavior up to a point, and seldom entirely unjustified, but it was disconcerting, nevertheless, to be met by cool statements of total repudiation.

Mrs. Waugh had the aristocratic lineage so prized by her class-conscious husband, but unfortunately for the children she also had aristocratic interests. A countrywoman happiest when slogging through her cow pasture in muddy Wellies, she was the last to notice the bald patches in her fur coat but the first to notice mange in her beloved animals. She had nothing against children, it was just that they didn't walk on four legs.

A wife first, a dairymaid second, and a mother last, she played the complaisant zombie to her husband's unspeakable selfishness in the matter of the bananas. Just after the war, the government tried to alleviate five years of harsh food rationing by decreeing that every child in England should be allowed one banana. At this time there were three little Waughs, none of whom had ever tasted a banana.

My mother came home with three bananas. 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. . . . From that moment, I never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously.

Coming as a kind of schizoid relief from paternal contumely and maternal detachment was the extreme permissiveness the children enjoyed. When Auberon developed an interest in chemistry at age nine, his parents gave him a back room in the house for a lab and ordered large quantities of sulphur, saltpeter, charcoal, nitric acid, and glycerine for making gunpowder and other explosive materials; glass tubing and spirit lamps and a Wolff jar for distilling alcohol. "Some will decide that this was a deliberate, Charles Addams - like plot to get rid of me," he writes, but his parents were just as indulgent about firearms, which endangered everyone, and bad school reports, "holding all authority in derision until the threat of expulsion brought with it the danger that children might be returned home."

Sent to boarding school at six, he acquired a headmaster only the English could produce: a pedophile who hated children. He was a brilliant classicist who taught Greek so well that Waugh can still conjugate all the irregular verbs, but he refused to enlighten his charges on the facts of life, "which was probably just as well, as he would almost certainly have got them wrong." A fetishist attached to an item known as "the Furry Object," the headmaster liked to watch naked boys being weighed at the annual physical but otherwise "never lifted a finger or touched a boy except to beat him."

Opting to do his national service before entering Oxford, Waugh was commissioned a cornet in the Royal Horse Guards and sent to Cyprus, where he accidentally shot himself with a machine gun. Noticing that it was a little askew on its mounting, he "seized the barrel from in front and gave it a good jiggle." The next thing he knew he was on the ground being comforted by his corporal, who looked so stricken that Waugh could not resist saying, "Kiss me, Chudleigh." His father would have loved it, but the parody of Nelson's last words was lost on the working-class Chudleigh.