Happy New Year! How were your holidays? Were you as festive as undergraduate Evelyn Waugh kicking off his Christmas break in 1924?
Then I went to Oxford. Drove to 31 St Aldates where I found an enormous orgy in progress. Billy and I unearthed a strap and whipped Tony. Everyone was hideously drunk except, strangely enough, myself. After a quiet day in cinemas, I had a dinner party of Claude, Elmley, Terence, Roger Hollis and a poor drunk called MacGregor. I arrived quite blind after a great number of cocktails at the George with Claude. Eventually the dinner broke up and Claude, Rogers Hollis and I went off for a pub crawl which after sundry indecorous adventures ended up at the Hypocrites where another blind was going on. Poor Mr McGregor turned up after having lain with a woman but almost immediately fell backwards downstairs. I think he was killed. Next day I drank all morning from pub to pub and invited to lunch with me at the New Reform John Sutro, Roger Hollis, Claude and Alfred Duggan. I ate no lunch but drank solidly and was soon in the middle of a bitter quarrel with the President — a preposterous person called Cotts — who expelled me from the club. Alfred and I then drank double brandies until I could not walk. He carried me to Worcester where I fell out of the window then relapsed into unconsciousness punctuated with severe but well directed vomitings. On Wednesday I lunched with Robert Byran at the New Reform and the man Cotts tried to throw me out again. Next day I lunched with Hugh and drank with him all the afternoon and sallied out with him fighting drunk at tea time when we drank at the New Reform till dinner… Next day, feeling deathly ill, I returned to London having spent two months’ wages. I had to dine with Alex, Richard Greene, Julia Strachey … and then back to Richard’s home for a drink. …
[…]
I picked up Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004), several weeks ago. I’ve been enjoying it so much that I’m rationing it, reading about ten pages at a time to make it last.
Alexander Waugh is a music writer and biographer, former opera critic at the Evening Standard, son of novelist and Private Eye diarist Auberon Waugh, grandson of the aforementioned Evelyn, the titan of English letters whose brother, Alec, and father, Arthur, were also reasonably famous writers. The book is about the interpersonal relations of these three generations of men who produced about 180 books among them. And it’s wild. These are hugely and incorrigibly flawed people. Often horrible to one another (also to outsiders but they save their best for kin). They are in equal parts perverse and hilarious, and often brilliant, especially Evelyn. I can’t believe people ever behaved this way.
Undergraduates have never required reasons to binge drink, but you can’t read the opening chapters of Fathers and Sons without thinking Evelyn had special motivation. He was the second son of Arthur. His older brother, Alec, was “the firstling”, the “future head of the family”, their parents’ “darling lamb”, and mom and pop didn’t care who knew it, least of all Evelyn.
Arthur and his missus, Kate, had an “unbounded fascination for Alec”, who won all his school honours and was star of the cricket team. Arthur considered the boy a literal gift from God and believed that they could communicate telepathically. He would write him notes like: “I simply go about thinking of your love for me all the time”. Their relationship, writes Alexander, was “hot, clammy and compulsive”, and to the “objective eye their behavior might have resembled a pair of star-crossed teenage lovers”. Indeed, it was romantic in all but the physical sense — Arthur saved his sexual depredations for girls of tender age with whom he played “tickling games” (he also had a fetish involving young women and bicycles).
In addition to being second born, Evelyn made the mistake of being male. His parents had wanted a daughter; they consoled themselves by giving him an effeminate name and dressing him in bonnets and frills long beyond the standard of the day. He was said to be a “warm, bright. sweet-natured and affectionate child”, at least until an awareness of the family dynamic dawned. In Edwardian terms, he was treated as a bastard child by his legitimate parents. His possessions were hand-me-downs. He attended the less expensive school. When eleven-year-old Evelyn asked for a bicycle, his parents bought a bigger and better one for Alec. When Alec asked for a billiard table, space was found for it in Evelyn’s room. Despite winning prizes and becoming head of his house in school, and president of the debating society, and editor of the school magazine, Evelyn remained an afterthought and something of a nuisance in the minds of his Alec-obsessed parents.
Evelyn responded to his circumstances in a clever and self-protective fashion, defining himself against his brother and father. By adolescence, he had an inkling that he was smarter and funnier than both. They could keep their mawkish outpourings of emotion toward one another; he would be hard of head and sharp of tongue. By his early teen years, he was confiding to his diary that Arthur was a fat and “ineffably silly” Victorian sentimentalist. He considered both Alec and Arthur philistines. “Terrible man, my father”, Evelyn said to a schoolmaster. “He likes Kipling.”
To the extent that his parents thought about Evelyn, they were disturbed by his dark moods and lassitude, and intimidated by his cynical wit. Both Alec and Arthur were threatened by Evelyn as a potential literary rival. When Evelyn, in what was becoming a typical act of rebellion, ran up an expensive restaurant tab and had it sent to an outraged Arthur, Alec said: “You know father, if Evelyn turns out to be a genius, you and I might be made to look very foolish by making a fuss over ten pounds, seventeen and ninepence.”
So you can perhaps see how young Evelyn Waugh developed an enthusiasm for drink remarkable even in an undergrad, and why the rare characters killed in gruesome fashion in his fiction tended to be fathers.
