Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

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)
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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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese; Reprint edition (May 29, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385521502
• ISBN-13: 978-0385521505
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #206,214 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Waughs past and present, and maybe even Turgenev, would be satisfied with the job he has done. , June 18, 2007

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

It's no accident that the publication of this book coincides with Evelyn Waugh's centenary (and George Orwell's, too, by the way). British headline writers, over-stimulated by reading pieces about the various Waughs, have perpetrated a series of ghastly juvenile puns, including "In Waugh and Peace," "A Family at Waugh with Each Other," "My Life in the Waugh Zone," etc.

The title, FATHERS AND SONS, is perfect and evidently couldn't be resisted, even though that Russian fellow, Turgenev, had thought of it first. Mothers, and women in general, are of no consequence in this history of five generations of illustrious Waugh males. Of course, females played a role in bringing them into the world, but afterwards they receded quietly into the background and were heard from no more.

The progenitor of the most famous literary Waughs --- Evelyn and his son Auberon --- was Arthur Waugh, great-grandfather of Alexander, the author of this book. Arthur might have been the obvious starting point. But Alexander takes readers back one generation further --- to Dr. Alexander Waugh, FRCS, who is known to all of his descendants simply as "the Brute." He was a sadist "whose taste for flagellation never deserted him," who carried with him, wherever he went, an ivory-handled whip and an urge to use it. Stories of his brutish excesses continue to be passed down from generation to generation. A video made available on the Internet shows a Waugh toddler spitting on the Brute's headstone while an approving father or uncle stands in the background, beaming at his precocity.

The Brute's grandfather, Dr. [of Divinity] Alexander Waugh, known to the family as "The Great and Good," didn't make the cut for inclusion in this limited history. Nor did the Brute's father, another divine, the rector of Corsley. These omissions may only reflect an author's informed assessment of his prospective audience; no one ever read a Waugh for moral enlightenment or spiritual uplift.

Alexander's earlier books were TIME and GOD, their subjects calculated perhaps to put off the really challenging task of writing this "autobiography" of his family. If so, he needn't have worried. Although it's not true that you can't miss with good material, Alexander has fulfilled his obligations both to his family and his readers, and it seems likely that the Waughs past and present, and maybe even Turgenev, would be satisfied with the job he has done.

--- Reviewed by Harold Cordry

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wavian, June 13, 2007

By	Christian Schlect (Yakima, Washington/USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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A well-written, dryly-humorous account of the male line of the famous English literary clan. Some bold accounts of womanizing and yet lower -- but still keen -- pleasures. Alexander Waugh is an apple that did not drop far from the family's vigorous tree.

(I rank the jacket's author photograph as one of my favorites.)

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Waughderful Stuff, June 18, 2007

By	David Schweizer "Almawood" (Kansas, USA) - See all my reviews

If you have ever wondered what is wrong with the American public schools, read this book. Here you will at least be exposed to what a real school system can produce: people who can use the English language with grace and wit and clarity. This is a first-class piece of writing, gorgeous and positively Tacitian in his brevity. The subject matter is the torment of family life, specifically as experience by one of England's great dynasties of "letters," the Waughs. Alexander, son of Auberon, and grandson of Evelyn Waugh, possesses that extraordinary ability to avoid sentimentality. Like his grandfather, he possesses an undertaker's aloofness. His description of his father's death reminded me of the best passages of "The Loved One," his grandfather's little masterpiece on death and dying. What is it about English boarding schools that produces generation after generation of prose masters?