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Evelyn Waugh

A Life Revisited

Henry Holt and Company

Second Son

In A Little Learning, the autobiography published two years before he died, Evelyn Waugh maintained that his childhood memories were suffused with 'an even glow of pure happiness'. This was possibly designed to thwart what he called the 'psychological speculations' and 'naive curiosity' of nosy interviewers and biographers, who seemed to be always 'eager to disinter some hidden disaster or sorrow'. In any event, there is plenty of contrary evidence that from an early age he occasionally felt both alienated and unloved, excluded above all from the extraordinarily gooey bond between his father, the publisher and critic Arthur Waugh, and his elder brother Alec – the 'popular novelist' as Evelyn later disparaged him. Nothing approaching an equivalent relationship existed between the father and his more exceptional younger son, who remembered that 'at the height of the day's pleasure his [father's] key would turn in the front door and his voice would rise from the hall: "Kay! Where's my wife?" '. The arrival of this intruder would mark the end of his mother's company for the day and confine him to the nursery. 'The latch-key which admitted him imprisoned me. He always made a visit to the nursery and always sought to be amusing there, but I would sooner have done without him.'

Alec remained very obviously his father's favourite throughout Evelyn's childhood. 'Daddy loves Alec more than me,' Evelyn once said to his mother. 'So do you love me more than Alec?' 'No,' she tactfully replied. 'I love you both the same.' 'In which case,' concluded Evelyn, 'I am lacking in love.' 'I was not rejected or misprized,' he later told his friend and biographer Christopher Sykes, 'but Alec was their firstling and their darling lamb.'

When Alec returned home from school for the holidays, a notice would be hung over the face of the grandfather clock in the hall, declaring 'Welcome Home to the Heir of Underhill!' – eventually prompting Evelyn to ask his father: 'When Alec has the house and all that's in it, what will be left for me?'

Underhill was the house that Arthur had built for his family at North End, Hampstead, in 1907, when Evelyn was four. Its construction was paid for by a small inheritance from Arthur's father, Dr Alexander Waugh (1840–1906), an exceptionally gifted country doctor who had won all the major student prizes at Bristol and Barts and invented Waugh's Long Fine Dissecting Forceps – still used by obstetricians today. Publicly jovial and popular with his patients in Somerset, Dr Waugh nonetheless came to be known by his family as 'the Brute' because of his tyrannical behaviour at home. Geneticists might wonder whether certain of his foibles explain the more demonic traits of his grandson Evelyn, who was only three when he died.

Barely a hint of the doctor's less wholesome characteristics found their way into his son Arthur's cloying memoir One Man's Road, however family tradition has it that when the word 'sadist' was first explained to him, Arthur responded: 'Ah yes, I believe that is what my father must have been.' Subsequent Waugh memoirists, notably Evelyn and his grandson Alexander Waugh, have been less reticent, hence we learn that Arthur's rowdier younger brother Alick was regularly thrashed by his father while timid Arthur was deliberately frightened – ostensibly to toughen him up – by being sent downstairs to kiss his father's gun-case in the dark (the Brute was mad about shooting but Arthur, although a good shot, was never keen), or violently swung on five-bar gates, or mounted on a rockinghorse while it reared on its back rockers, or left on high branches for hours on end and then surprised by the blast of his father's shotgun just behind him. After a bad day, Dr Waugh was apt to lash out at the drawing-room ornaments with a poker, or fly into a ludicrously disproportionate rage, as when he came home to find his family using his sacred whist cards to play snap.

Despite the ordeals of his childhood, Arthur made no mention of these explosions in his autobiography, partly, it seems, out of some residual filial piety and partly out of deference to his sisters, who despite being badly bullied themselves remained curiously loyal to their father's memory. He merely recorded that 'the great lesson of our childhood was undoubtedly discipline ... day after day, week after week, discipline, discipline and discipline'.

Evelyn, though, already knew all about the Brute from his mother, who hated her father-in-law with a passion after witnessing his tantrum over the game of snap and eagerly disseminated many of the least flattering stories about him. Later in life Evelyn would entertain his own children with cartoons depicting the Brute's misdeeds and, as his grandson Alexander records, 'the arresting images he produced – snorting nostrils, flaming devil's eyes, lascivious mouth and snapping black-dog teeth – never failed to set their imaginations aflame'.

Arthur grew up asthmatic – a condition often associated with 'nerves' – and a worrier. His mother Annie, a talented watercolourist, was a great worrier too; as her grandson Alec recalled, she was 'infinitely apprehensive ... her imagination pictured dangers everywhere'. Yet however watchful, she could not escape her husband's extraordinary and unpredictable cruelty. Evelyn recorded how one day when his grandmother was sitting opposite his grandfather in a carriage and a wasp settled on her forehead, he 'leant forward and with the ivory top of his cane carefully crushed it there, so that she was stung'.

The Brute derived his nickname partly from stories such as this, and partly to distinguish him from his grandfather, known in the Waugh family as 'Alexander the Great and Good'. Born in 1754 at East Gordon in Berwickshire, where the Waughs had been yeoman farmers for several generations, this Alexander Waugh was ordained a minister of the Secession Church of Scotland before moving south to London – thereby anglicising the family – where he became one of the most celebrated Nonconformist preachers of his day, a vigorous campaigner for the abolition of slavery and founder of the London Missionary Society. His popularity was never more evident than during the remarkable scenes at his funeral in 1827, when his horse-drawn hearse was followed from Trafalgar Square to Bunhill Fields cemetery by more than fifty carriages and a vast crowd of people stretching over half a mile – according to Arthur Waugh 'one of the longest processions that had ever attended a private citizen through the streets of London to his last resting-place'.

Alexander the Great and Good had ten children, among them Evelyn's great-grandfather James, who with his brother George used his inheritance (they each inherited £30,000 from their mother's brother, John Neill, who had made a fortune trading corn during the Peninsular War) to establish a smart chemist's in Regent Street, with exclusive rights to import the mineral waters of Vichy, Seltzer, Marienbad and Kissingen. Still more lucratively, they invented Waugh's Curry Powder – which is still made today – Waugh's Lavender Spike, an ointment for aches and pains, and Waugh's Family Antibilious Pills, which Queen Victoria was known to favour as a palliative. After experiencing a religious calling, James eventually sold his share to George, who further acquired a large house in Kensington, a country villa at Leatherhead and blocks of property in and around Regent Street. Of George's eight beautiful daughters, Alice married the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor and poet Thomas Woolner, and Fanny married his friend Holman Hunt. Ten years after Fanny died in childbirth, Holman Hunt flouted convention and the law as it then stood to marry her younger sister Edith. Evelyn rarely spoke about his heredity but he often expressed fascination with his connections with the Pre-Raphaelites, which helped inspire the choice of subject for his first book, a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

James meanwhile became an Anglican clergyman and at his own expense built a large vicarage at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, which he later bequeathed to the parish when the Marquess of Bath offered him the living of Corsley in Somerset – near to where most of Evelyn's other forebears had by then somehow converged. There the Rev. James Waugh, a tall, striking figure with a long white beard, 'lived well in mid-Victorian style,' Evelyn recorded, 'with long, abundant meals and an ample installation of servants and horses'. His theatricality would be inherited by subsequent Waugh generations, however his apparent joylessness and high regard for his own dignity and reputation were such that his less reverential descendant Auberon deemed him 'mildly ridiculous'. By Evelyn's reckoning he was fundamentally benevolent, but the same could scarcely be said for his son Alexander.

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Born in 1840, Alexander 'the Brute' Waugh was sent to Radley, where he excelled at almost everything – academic, sporting and theatrical. His subsequent successes as a medical student promised a glittering career in London, however the lure of country life with its endless possibilities for shooting and fishing took him instead to the then remote village of Midsomer Norton, near Bath, where at the age of twenty-four and already sporting fashionable Dundreary whiskers he set up as a GP. He remained there for the rest of his life, tending to patients as far afield as his dog-cart would carry him – including Downside Abbey and school, whose monks later recalled him as always smartly turned out, 'with a button-hole and a jolly word of greeting'. He married Annie Morgan, descended from an ancient but impoverished family of Welsh gentry, 'unambiguously armigerous' according to Evelyn, and granddaughter of William Morgan (1750–1833), the clever, club-footed and acerbic associate of Thomas Paine who later earned a small fortune as a pioneering actuary to the Equitable Life Assurance Company. Annie's father, John Morgan, one of the earliest eye surgeons, died when she was six, and she was brought up by her mother Anne, one of the Gosse family of fundamental Christian Plymouth Brethren movingly if unreliably portrayed by her cousin Edmund Gosse in his classic memoir, Father and Son (1907). Years later Evelyn's grandmother would recall 'with a recurring shiver, the sound of Philip Henry Gosse's [Edmund's father] knock at the door, his austere appearance at the portal, and his solemn but confident question, as he unwound an interminable worsted scarf from his neck: "Well, Cousin Anne, still looking daily for the coming of dear Lord Jesus?"'

Annie doubtless saw marriage as a way of escaping the oppressive solemnity of her childhood, however she quickly found herself bound by a new set of constraints, her well-being according to Evelyn 'entirely subject to [her new husband's] will and his moods'. While pregnant with their first child, Evelyn's father Arthur, she became terrified lest his arrival interfere with her husband's first day of partridge-shooting. To the relief of everyone, he was born a week before the start of the season, on 24 August 1866. After Arthur came his ill-fated younger brother Alick and three girls, Connie, Trissie and Elsie, who were never properly educated and were regularly reduced to tears by their father's outbursts. It is possible that they were all put off men for life and Evelyn later hazarded that 'so far as there can be any certainty in a question which so often reveals surprising anomalies, I can assert that my aunts were maidens'. Though not without suitors, none of them married, Evelyn later explaining that within 'the stratified society of North Somerset they were part of a very thin layer, superior to farmers and tradesmen, inferior to the county families'. After their parents died, the sisters all stayed on at the family home at Midsomer Norton, where Evelyn spent many of his childhood summer holidays, about two months a year. Save for decay, the house had hardly changed since his father's childhood and Evelyn relished its dark hidden corners and assorted interesting smells. Behind the creeper-clad façade lay a rambling interior in which the only bathroom featured a stuffed monkey that had, improbably, died of sunstroke after being brought to England from Africa by a great-uncle. Its grinning teeth were all that could be seen when the room filled with steam. Other curiosities included a collection of fossils in the library that the local coalminers used to bring Evelyn's grandfather, and a glass phial of 'white blood' that he had morbidly preserved from a patient dying of acute anaemia. Evelyn would always be fascinated by the macabre, and when the last of his aunts died in 1952 and he came to oversee the disposal of their property he 'sought vainly for this delight of my childhood'.

For Evelyn the house at Midsomer Norton 'captivated my imagination as my true home never did'. As a boy he explained his preference to his parents on the basis that 'people had died there' – a pointed contrast to the sterile newness of Underhill where he grew up. 'The bric-a-brac in the cabinets, the Sheffield plate, the portraits by nameless artists quickened my childish aesthetic appetite as keenly as would have done any world-famous collection and the narrow corridors stretched before me like ancient galleries. I am sure I loved my aunts' house because I was instinctively drawn to the ethos I now recognise as mid-Victorian; not, as perhaps psychologists would claim, that I now relish things of that period because they remind me of my aunts.'

For Arthur, childhood at Midsomer Norton had held less happy memories. He recalled being 'perpetually haunted by vague apprehensions, fermented by the mysterious talk of the younger servants' – favoured topics included the brutal murder of a local cripple and the wicked activities of a cross-dressing highwayman. Aged eight he was sent to board at a 'dame-school' in Bath, from where he wrote plaintively to his mother: 'Dear Muz, I will try to be a dutiful son and put cold cream on my lips at night.' He later went to Sherborne, where he was teased for being swotty and unathletic. The nightly expeditions to kiss his father's gun-case had failed to arouse any enthusiasm for field sports and the only interests they ultimately shared were amateur theatricals and cricket, which Arthur adored despite being regularly outplayed by his sisters – he eventually scraped into the Sherborne second eleven. To the added disappointment of his father, he showed no desire to enter the medical profession, and instead began to incline towards a literary career, editing the school magazine and winning the Senior Poetry Prize. At New College, Oxford he managed only a double Third in Mods and Greats but won the prestigious Newdigate Prize (past winners of which included John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde) for his poem on 'Gordon in Africa'. A great surprise to everybody, this triumph laid the foundations of what was to be a remarkable literary dynasty, Arthur's descendants having since produced some 180 books between them.

By now resigned to his son's calling, the Brute told Arthur that he had 'nearly cried with joy' when he heard the news. 'You have made us very very happy and it is such a good thing for you in connection with any literary career you may take up & I am so glad because you have had disappointments and have borne them so nobly and now you have gained this great distinction – & one I know you will prize ... God bless you my own darling son & make your career worthy of your best endeavours & then I know it will be a glorious one.' If subsequently irked by the 'self-satisfied atmosphere of puffed success' surrounding Arthur, the Brute affected equal magnanimity when he learned about Arthur's third-class degree: 'Do you imagine that I look upon my sons as machines for the gratification of my self-esteem? You did your best and that is more than enough.'

After he came down from Oxford, Annie Waugh sent her son's prize-winning poem to her cousin Edmund Gosse, the family's only literary contact, hoping he might open doors. Edwardian England's pre-eminent man of letters, whom Evelyn later shuddered to recall as the worst of the 'numerous, patronising literary elders who frequented our table', Gosse began asking his young cousin to his Sunday literary soirées, where a star-struck Arthur met the likes of Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker, J. M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett and others. He also introduced him to Wolcott Balestier, the dazzling if slightly shambolic American publisher who had recently arrived from New York to woo English authors on behalf of John W. Lovell & Co.

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Excerpted from Evelyn Waugh by Philip Eade. Copyright © 2016 Philip Eade. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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