article 144: Waughbegone, or: On the Passing of Alexander Waugh Evelyn Waugh is my literary idol for the English language. (German: Fontane. Dutch: Elsschot. French: the Marquise de Lafayette. Italian: not Dante. Spanish: Unamuno. Japanese translated: Zeami.) Shakespeare, of course, is supreme, but he is rough going. For sheer unvarnished delight in reading, it’s Waugh. In lighter moods, it’s Waugh’s own idol, P. G. Wodehouse. (At the British Library I once saw a letter from Waugh addressed to “The Head of the Profession, Dr. Wodehouse”.) An article in the New York Times recently alerted me to a book by one Alexander Waugh entitled “Fathers and Sons / The Autobiography of a Family”. Alexander turned out to be Evelyn’s grandson by the second most prominent member of the Waugh dynasty, the novelist and satirical journalist Auberon, whose own brilliant autobiography, “Will This Do?”, I had read many years ago when it came out. How can a family write its autobiography? By letting the members speak mainly in their own written or remembered words. The passages are nicely knitted together by the author’s own contributions, which are, of course, autobiographical as well. The story begins in the late 18th century with the first of the line to come to England from Scotland, a schoolmaster who was known as “the great and good”. Alexander inherited or was given what remained of the family archive after the bulk had been sold for a song by Evelyn’s widow to the University of Texas. He was working as editor of the new Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (Oxford University Press) when he died. The eccentricities, not to mention the cruelties of all the members of this family are unfathomable to a dull ex-Midwesterner like me. Does weirdness come with the territory of being a literary genius? It seems to in many cases. One mildly shocking discovery was that Alexander, obviously a person of enormous intelligence, was for years chairman of the De Vere Society, which holds that Shakespeare was not the author of…Shakespeare, but a front for the Earl of Oxford. These people claim to find secret codes in the works, and in the case of Alexander Waugh, in the brief dedication of the Sonnets. The codes also predict that His Lordship will eventually be re-buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. This nonsense is akin to the numerology fantasies swirling around J. S. Bach. I can only explain it as a perverse form of egoism, a need to show superiority through esoteric knowledge. “I, or my clique, are better than you duffers, because we know stuff about which you are obstinately ignorant.” In the same fashion, Evelyn was a tenacious convert to the absurdities of Roman Catholicism. Or it may have just been a perverse form of wit, to which Evelyn and Auberon (“properly pronounced ‘Or’bron’”) were no strangers. What is all this doing in a website devoted to music? Because Alexander Waugh, in a bid to break free from the “family business” of writing, studied classical music. He was a violinist, pianist and composer. It goes almost without saying that in this, he went against the wishes of his father, who considered all the arts (except, it seems, mastery of the English language) “weak”. He produced and performed on recordings (winning a nomination for a Gramophone Award), composed an award-winning musical, worked as a concert agent/impresario, and was for many years the opera critic for London dailies, before eventually giving in to internal urges and starting his successful career as a writer. I was so impressed by “Fathers and Sons” — the title was adapted from “Father and Son” by Sir Edmund Gosse, a friend and colleague of Arthur Waugh, Evelyn’s father and the first man of letters in the family — that I decided to contact Arthur’s great-grandson and send him a CD of mine; maybe even my own recent attempt at book authorship, “Hitler’s Harpsichordist”. But I found to my dismay that he died of cancer just last 22 July. He had been a famous writer long before I had even heard of him. The book I so admired dated back to 2004, and he had since written a major work on the equally dotty Wittgenstein family. As was the case with Eta Harich-Schneider, the subject of my book, I missed the chance to contact someone who could have proven life-enhancing in unexpected ways. RIP. October 16, 2024. - back -