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Article Excerpt
Discussed in this essay:
Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, by Alexander Waugh. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 472 pages. $27.50.
If Arthur Waugh were to address his son today as he did when the boy was at boarding school in the early 1900s, he would probably be summoned by a social worker and directed to seek counseling. "Son of my soul," he called the teenage Alec, in one of the letters he sent him almost daily, "who has walked so many miles, his arm in mine, and poured out to me a heart that the rest of the world will never know, but which I treasure as a golden gift from God." So besotted was Arthur that his friends feared for his sanity, and his employees--he was the managing director of Chapman and Hall, publishers of Dickens, among others--would inquire sarcastically as he entered the office, "And how is Master Alec this morning, sir?"
Having been tyrannized in his youth by his own sadistic father, who was known in family legend as the Brute, Arthur continued to pour out loving-kindness on his "Dear Boy" even when Alec had to leave school in disgrace after a homosexual dalliance. Instead of upbraiding him, a heartbroken Arthur invoked the image of a French crucifix in which "the nails that pierce the Son's hands pierce the Father's also.... And it is always so with you and me. Every wound that touches you pierces my own soul."
Meanwhile, Alec's younger brother, Evelyn, who was conspicuously excluded from their father's child-worship, seems to have developed, early on, a certain skepticism about Arthur's histrionics, regarding him as something of a fraud. By the age of sixteen, he was writing in his diary, "Father has been ineffably silly the whole holidays"; another diary entry records that Arthur was being "incorrigibly theatrical as usual." Significantly, Evelyn had also come to loathe Dickens, the author his father revered above all others. One of Arthur's great pleasures was to read aloud to his family, with many dramatic flourishes, and Dickens's were most often the books he chose.
A writer as well as a publisher, Arthur produced reams of essays and reviews and paeans to domestic harmony ("Home meant Mother alone; it was she who lit the light, fanned it with tender hands, and kept it glowing in her children's imagination, by day and night") that are almost as choked with sentiment as his letters to Alec. It does not seem entirely coincidental that his neglected second son, when he became a writer himself, ruthlessly satirized the misty-eyed pieties that were Arthur's stock-in-trade, in a style as cool as Arthur's was clammy. It would be reductive to attribute some of the most lucid prose produced in the twentieth century to filial resentment alone, but just as Arthur's saccharine tone willfully negates the realities of life with the Brute (sentimentality, said the psychoanalyst Donald Winicott, is a denial of hate), the collected works of Evelyn Waugh add up to a complete repudiation of everything his father stood for.
In fact, what emerges most clearly from Fathers and Sons, Evelyn's grandson's lively history of five generations of male Waughs, is the extraordinary degree to which all the complicated feelings that sons can have for their fathers--rivalry, fear, rage; the desire to win their fathers' approval on the one hand and to rebel against them on the other--were acted out in the pages of the nearly 200 books they wrote among them. It wasn't just a matter of sons dedicating books to fathers, or vice versa, though that was a frequent occurrence; it wasn't even confined to sons taking their fathers as models for their characters. Their relationships with their fathers seem to have been reflected...
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