Product Description

If there is a literary gene, then the Waugh family most certainly has it—and it clearly seems to be passed down from father to son. The first of the literary Waughs was Arthur, who, when he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford in 1888, broke with the family tradition of medicine. He went on to become a distinguished publisher and an immensely influential book columnist. He fathered two sons, Alec and Evelyn, both of whom were to become novelists of note (and whom Arthur, somewhat uneasily, would himself publish); both of whom were to rebel in their own ways against his bedrock Victorianism; and one of whom, Evelyn, was to write a series of immortal novels that will be prized as long as elegance and lethal wit are admired. Evelyn begat, among seven others, Auberon Waugh, who would carry on in the family tradition of literary skill and eccentricity, becoming one of England’s most incorrigibly cantankerous and provocative newspaper columnists, loved and loathed in equal measure. And Auberon begat Alexander, yet another writer in the family, to whom it has fallen to tell this extraordinary tale of four generations of scribbling male Waughs.

The result of his labors is Fathers and Sons, one of the most unusual works of biographical memoir ever written. In this remarkable history of father-son relationships in his family, Alexander Waugh exposes the fraught dynamics of love and strife that has produced a succession of successful authors. Based on the recollections of his father and on a mine of hitherto unseen documents relating to his grandfather, Evelyn, the book skillfully traces the threads that have linked father to son across a century of war, conflict, turmoil and change. It is at once very, very funny, fearlessly candid and exceptionally moving—a supremely entertaining book that will speak to all fathers and sons, as well as the women who love them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115791 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-29
• Released on: 2007-05-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The scion of an illustrious—and fabulously eccentric—English literary dynasty referees four generations of father-son antagonisms in this scintillating family memoir. Waugh (God) focuses on the fraught relationship between his great-grandfather, prominent critic and publisher Arthur Waugh, and Arthur's son, the famous novelist Evelyn. Arthur was a hopeless Victorian who doted on his elder son Alec and warmly sentimentalized their family life and boarding school traditions, Evelyn was the disaffected black sheep who wallowed in drink, bisexual dissipation and modern cynicism. In contrast to Arthur's paternal overinvolvement, Evelyn tried hard to avoid his own children's company or, when contact was inescapable, to heap exquisitely refined derision on their heads. But while he found his seven-year-old son, Auberon, the author's father, to be "clumsy and disheveled, sly, without intellectual, aesthetic or spiritual interest," he managed to impart a legacy that emerged in Auberon's career as a notoriously acerbic columnist. Waugh often lets the diaries and letters of his compulsively self-documenting subjects carry the story, sprinkling in smarmy family anecdotes and his own color commentary. If this tome were merely an excuse to reprint some of Evelyn's hilarious jottings, it would be well worth the price, but it's also an absorbing study of how writers process their most painfully formative experiences. (May 29)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Michael Dirda

"The autobiography of a family" -- so reads the low-keyed subtitle of Fathers and Sons. Yet this isn't, of course, any ordinary family: For more than three generations the Waughs have been extremely prominent literary figures in Great Britain. Arthur Waugh oversaw Chapman and Hall (publishers of Dickens, among others); both his sons, Alec and Evelyn, became well-known writers, the latter arguably the leading English novelist of the century; and one of Evelyn's many offspring, Auberon, was long reviled and revered for his no-holds-barred, fiercely scathing and very funny political and social journalism. The author of this memoir, Alexander Waugh, is Auberon's son, and he has already thrown in with the family business by bringing out works bearing such ambitious (and perhaps slightly ludicrous) titles as Time and God. He tells us, in passing, that nine of Arthur Waugh's descendants have already produced 180 books.

Perhaps the most, and least, interesting parts of the entertaining Fathers and Sons are those devoted to the author of Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust. Evelyn Waugh has previously been the subject of half-a-dozen significant biographies; his letters, diaries and essays have amused and appalled readers for several decades now, and his fervent admirers -- I am one -- tend to read anything by or about him. After all, Evelyn's prose may be the best of the past century: That quietly coruscating style can be as ironic as Gibbon, as darting and subtle as Austen.

Not just his oeuvre, though, but the man himself has become a kind of monument. During the last two decades of his life, Evelyn sloughed off his persona as the 1920s "voice of youth" to emerge after World War II as a huffing, malicious, hypersensitive monster, at odds with every aspect of the modern world. It's as though a butterfly transformed itself into a fat, noxious caterpillar, peering disdainfully at all it surveyed (and liable to sneer "Who are you?"). His later fearless discourtesy made him even more witty, a caustically cruel version of the kindly Oscar Wilde. His great fault, he once told a television interviewer, was "irritability." It was also the engine for his best comic fiction.

After so much intense biographical scrutiny by scholars, Alexander Waugh doesn't really have much to add to what we already know about his grandfather, though he does offer a good potted account of the life (a few of the novels are mentioned when they can illuminate the man). In the case of his own father, Auberon, the son must similarly compete with one of the most entertaining of all modern autobiographies, Will This Do?. He quotes periodically from that book, including the remarkable paragraph describing a rather serious misjudgment. The young Auberon is serving with the British army in Cyprus:

"I had noticed an impediment in the elevation of the Browning machine-gun in the turret of my armoured car, and, having nothing else to do, resolved to investigate it. Seizing hold of the end with quiet efficiency, I was wiggling it up and down when I noticed it had started firing. Six bullets later I was alarmed to observe that it was firing through my chest, and got out of the way pretty sharpish. It may encourage those who have a fear of being shot to learn that it is almost completely painless, at any rate at close range with high velocity bullets."

After surviving this trauma, though with severe injuries (including the loss of a finger), Auberon went on to become as famous a newspaper columnist in Britain as, say, George Will is in this country. But Fathers and Sons mainly depicts a patient and eccentric paterfamilias, a workaholic writer who never in his life had a serious discussion with his son and who loved to drink good wine. As an ignorant colonial, I yearned for some greater understanding of Auberon's career as a journalist and why it mattered. In particular, for what reasons do V.S. Naipaul and A.N. Wilson maintain that Auberon was a more important writer than his father, Evelyn?

This leaves Arthur, the publisher, and Alec, the "other" Waugh novelist. Here, we are on less familiar ground. Besides being managing director of Chapman and Hall, Arthur contributed a weekly book column to a major newspaper, knew every fashionable author, and was recognized as an expert on Dickens. Most of all, he was devoted to his family, especially his son Alec. So great was his intense affection for his elder son that it evidently verged on the unhealthy. (He tended to neglect the five-years-younger Evelyn, who eventually drew on his father's traits to describe one decrepit buffer after another. Recall, too, the title of his classic of gallows humor, "The Man Who Liked Dickens.") Throughout his life Arthur wore wool three-piece suits in even the hottest weather and loved nothing better than to watch schoolboys play cricket or pretty girls ride bicycles.

By the time he was 18, Alec achieved notoriety with The Loom of Youth, a semi-autobiographical novel set largely in a boys' school modeled on his own. It was lavishly praised by H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and other eminences of the day. What made the book sell and sell, though, were the shocking suggestions of homosexual romance among the students. After serving in World War I -- at one point, his family was told he was presumed dead -- he went on to establish himself as a moderately successful author of commercial novels and magazine short fiction. Relatively late in his career, Alec managed a second great coup: Island in the Sun, set in the Caribbean and featuring forbidden romance and adultery, was picked up by the major American book clubs and then turned into a controversial movie. (It featured the first interracial kiss seen in a commercial film.) In his private life, the chubby, bald and charming Alec lived largely without fixed address, preferring to travel around the world, engage in casual sexual affairs and, to all appearances, enjoy his time immensely. He died in Tampa, Fla., married to a woman who wrote children's books. Alec never made great claims for his own novels but spoke frequently of his brother's genius.

In Fathers and Sons, Alexander Waugh's own easygoing, conversational style can sometimes grow a little arch, as if trying too hard to be bright and amusing. He shrewdly notes that "theatricality" is the besetting sin of his family. But the Waughs aren't alone in this. Somehow the British literary aristocracy -- Mitfords, Nicolsons and Pakenhams, among others -- do seem to have a flair not only for writing but also for conducting extravagant, even histrionic lives that are great fun to read about.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* The hearts of four generations of Waughs have pumped more ink than blood. This, after all, is a family that since 1888 has published nearly 200 titles in a half-dozen genres. Naturally, that means that when Alexander Waugh looks back at his family history, he surveys literary monuments, including his great-grandfather's "Gordon in Africa," his grandfather's Brideshead Revisited, his father's oxglove Saga, and his own Time. But Alexander concerns himself here chiefly not with the family's books but rather with the family's tangled emotional relationships. Again and again, his candid narrative exposes fathers who alienate their sons, who in turn attack their fathers. Readers thus learn how Arthur cruelly slighted his younger son, Evelyn, who subsequently vented his rage against his unjust father through condemnatory images of fictional fathers recognizably similar to his own. But as a real-life father, Evelyn failed in his own way, yielding to pathological depression and condemning his son Bron with unforgiving rigor for his imaginative lies. Yet in Bron, Alexander finally finds a Waugh father willing to break the pattern by giving his children a home life of love, loyalty, and happiness. Alternately scalding and tender, this group portrait deserves a place next to other Waugh masterpieces. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Well written, entertaining, but a tad, tedious
Alexander Waugh writes with intimacy and honesty about his lineage. Stocked with access to intimate family papers and diaries of his father (Auberon Waugh), grandfather (Evelyn Waugh), Uncle Alec (Evelyn's author brother), and, great grandfather (Arthur Waugh), the author tenaciously keeps to his theme of the influence of fathers upon sons, all to the exclusion of other family members. He dwells too long on his grandfather and his offspring. At the end, however, he writes movingly about his famous father, Auberon Waugh, the more admirable person. Regrettably, the book skimps on "Bron" Waugh, the better father, the funniest and most entertaining, and a man of "greater stature than his father," according to A.N.Wilson and V.S. Naipaul." Evelyn was an ogre; a supercilious prig whose chilly personality and misanthropy can not be downplayed despite his art and the ameliorating attempts by his grandson to do so as Evelyn approaches death.

Fathers and Sons
You will find very few books that can match Fathers and Sons as a revealing family biography. The Waughs have been one of England's most literary families for four generations. This effort by Alexander is a fascinating study of their filial relations. Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) is the best known of the family, though his father, brother, son and grandsons have all turned out well-crafted prose. What was not well-crafted was their relationships. Evelyn was an irritable being and he could suffer no foolishness. Since all the principals kept diaries and corresponded frequently, we have a shocking record of their foibles and failures as well as their obvious talents. (All the Waughs wrote entertainingly, even in casual notes.)

Is this biography by a family member to be judged unbiased? An adversarial opinion draws strength from the author's comment to his mother-in-law who had inquired what sex he hoped his in utero child would be. 'I don't particularly mind so long as it's a liar' he replied. And then, "a child is no good unless it is charged with fantasy and confidant enough to foist it upon others."

In many ways, this gives insight into what propelled the whole clan. While they thought they were acting justifiably in embroilments, they were primarily responding to what their circle expected of them. And that was to produce well-written and entertaining prose. Much of this book consists of long quotations from the authors' works, including diary entries and correspondence. The relationship between Evelyn and his father is the best developed and the old man's preference for Evelyn's less renoun brother Alec is deeply elaborated. Be assured that the author spares nothing for relations sake. At one point, he criticizes another contemporary biographer for describing a family member's genitals and concedes that this is beyond the pale. However, thanks to decades of journal-keeping and inter-generational speculation, the Waughs are presented more nakedly than any camera could reveal. I blushed for them repeatedly.

I don't know if this is a true picture of how things were, but I do know that I've read a thoroughly engrossing family tale that gives superb insight into the social and literary events of twentieth century England. Fathers and Sons is required reading for all future explorations of Waviana.

Too Many Details, Not Enough Information.
After hearing Alexander Waugh discuss this book on a radio program recently, I felt compelled to buy it. He spoke so intelligently and humorously on the subject of the Waugh family's male line. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm does not translate onto the written page. Some very funny dialogue and events are lost amongst the author's determination in sticking to the theme of father and son's and their relationships and the minutae of dreary details and long recitations of dreadful poetry and dull diary entries. If the reader is already well-informed about the Waugh line, he/she might find the book illuminating with some valuable insight about the subject. I, however, knew little on the subject, and many interesting details Mr Waugh might have put in the book, he declines to, to it's detriment. I found the book, on the whole, a dissapointing muddle of quotes, memories and long drawn-out diary entries. This book could have doen with some careful editing.