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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Alexander Waugh, the grandson of Evelyn, has written a book, "Fathers and Sons" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; $27.50), about the father-son relationships--dramas, often, of mutual incomprehension and dismay--in five successive generations of his family. First comes Alexander Waugh (1840-1906), known as the Brute, a surgeon and a paragon of Victorian masculinity in its most unappealing aspects. The Brute loved to whip his dog. On display in his library were repulsive specimens that he had collected in his medical-school days, including a congealed substance called the White Blood. The Brute begat Arthur (1866-1943), made by God, it seems, to give pain to his father. Arthur, Alexander tells us, was a mama's boy, "scared of the organ in church, scared of twigs in the garden . . . scared of scissors, scared of lemonade." He grew up to be a man of letters: he wrote biographies of Tennyson, Browning, and Wordsworth, and he was the managing director of Chapman and Hall, an important publishing house in London. Arthur had two sons, both of them novelists. The first was Alec (1898-1981), who, in the words of his nephew, "wrote many books, each worse than the last." The second was Evelyn (1903-66), the greatest comic novelist of the twentieth century. Evelyn's first son was Auberon (1939-2001), a prolific, vituperative, funny, and famous journalist in London in the closing decades of the century. Auberon sired Alexander (born in 1963), who for some years was a composer and a music critic, then began writing books of general interest, including "Time" (2000), "God" (2002), and now this account of his crusty forefathers.
"Fathers and Sons" is witty, in the Waugh manner, but it is also poignant, especially regarding the relationship between Arthur and his two sons. No man ever loved a child more than Arthur loved Alec--"son of my soul," as he called him. He seems to have spent almost every hour of his non-work time talking to the boy, reading to him, taking walks with him. When Alec went away to his father's alma mater, Sherborne, the child and the school fused, in Arthur's mind, into one refulgent idol. He spent every weekend at Sherborne, visiting Alec and his friends, whom he wooed to become his friends. He said that he dreamed every night of being a new boy at the school. He and Alec wrote to each other daily, and Arthur awaited Alec's letters, Alexander says, like a teen-ager in love. (If a letter arrived after he left for work, his wife would travel across London to bring it to his office.) Alexander thinks that Arthur, because of his tortured relations with the Brute, never had a proper childhood. Now he had one: Alec's.
Then Alec, in his next-to-last year, was caught in flagrante with another boy. (Alexander says they may have been doing nothing more than kissing.) As a courtesy to his father, he was allowed to finish the term before leaving the school, but the other boys were instructed to shun him. Arthur was heartbroken, but he did not reproach Alec. On the contrary, he saw his son as a persecuted Jesus, and himself as the grieving Father. He wrote to Alec of a crucifix he once saw, with the figure of God hovering behind the dying Christ: "The nails that pierce the Son's hands pierce the Father's also: the thorn-crowned head of the Dying Saviour is seen to be lying upon the Father's bosom. And it is always so with you and me. Every wound that touches you pierces my own soul also: every thorn in your crown of life tears my tired head as well. . . . With deep love and unfaltering trust, still and always, your ever devoted and hopeful Daddy."
Two years later, at the age of nineteen, Alec published his first novel, "The Loom of Youth" (1917), which takes place at a school easily recognizable, to those in the know, as Sherborne. Among its evils is the staff's hypocrisy regarding sexual relations between the boys. Everyone knows that this is going on; the only crime is to get caught. "The Loom of Youth" sold many copies and created a scandal. Impassioned letters ran for weeks in the London press. Arthur was publicly humiliated, and many of his friends dropped him. Nevertheless, his cult of Alec remained unshaken. When Alec married and moved to Sussex, Arthur still spent most weekends with him. "I simply go about thinking of your love for me all the time," he wrote to his son. The wonder in all this is that Alec did not recoil from his father's obsessive devotion. He spent much of his adult life travelling. This started early, and it may have been his way of putting some distance between himself and Arthur, but in his many autobiographical writings he never spoke of his father with anything but love, and, apart from publishing books with hot sex scenes ("The Loom of Youth" was only the beginning), he treated the old man...
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