Evelyn Waugh

Great dynasties of the world: The Waughs

Ian Sansom on a family of writers who admired and disliked each other

Ian Sansom
Saturday 5 February 2011

Y

ou might know the banana story. During the second world war, Evelyn Waugh's wife managed to procure three bananas for their children. When she brought the fruit home, Evelyn sat down in front of the children, peeled the bananas, poured on cream and sugar, and ate them all. "It would be absurd to say that I never forgave him," wrote Waugh's son Auberon many years later, in his autobiography, Will This Do? (1991), "but he was permanently marked down in my estimation from that moment."

Waugh has long been marked down in people's estimations. He was, by all accounts, an unpleasant character, rude, unhappy, and despairing in the traditional high Tory fashion – though even George Orwell grudgingly admitted, in private at least, that "Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be ... while holding untenable opinions".

His opinions about his children were uncharitable as well as untenable. He preferred to avoid them if at all possible, taking his meals in his library, alone. "The presence of my children affects me with deep weariness and depression," he wrote in 1946. And in 1954: "Of children as of procreation – the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable."

"As a parent," wrote Auberon after his father's death, "he reserved the right not just to deny affection to his children, but to advertise an acute and unqualified dislike of them." It was the Waugh way of parenting.

His full name was Arthur Evelyn St John. He was born in 1903, the second son of Arthur Waugh, an author, literary critic and the managing director of the publishing house Chapman and Hall. Waugh describes his childhood in his autobiography, A Little Learning (1964) as "an even glow of pure happiness". But there was a shadow: his elder brother Alec, who was his father's favourite. The now lesser known Alec was also a writer: he published his first novel, The Loom of Youth, in 1917 while still in his teens.

Evelyn clearly felt second best. One of his stories, Winner Takes All (1936), is about two brothers divided by the rules of primogeniture and family preference. Gervase, the elder brother in the story, is sent to Eton and Oxford. Tom, the younger one, goes to a lesser public school, and is sent straight out into employment.

Things weren't quite so bad in real life, though Waugh did face setbacks and difficulties. He went to Oxford, but left without a degree. He then tried, unsuccessfully, to become a painter. His first wife, Eveyln Gardner – known as She-Evelyn to Waugh's He-Evelyn - ran off with another man. The marriage was annulled, and in 1937 Waugh married Laura Herbert, and settled down to country-house life, jaunts abroad, and writing. He published 17 novels, short stories, travel books and journalism. He died in 1966.

Evelyn and Laura had seven children – one, a daughter, died in infancy. Their eldest son, Auberon – known as Bron – became famous in his own right as an author and journalist, and for the banana story, though Auberon's son Alexander has unearthed a letter from Auberon to Evelyn, which he never sent, which begins, "Dear Papa, Just a line to tell you what for some reason I was never able to show you in my lifetime, that I admire, revere and love you more than any other man in the world."

Among the fourth generation of Waugh writers, Alexander is the author of Fathers and Sons (2004), the story of the Waugh men, and Daisy Waugh is a journalist. The third Evelyn Waugh conference, sponsored by the Evelyn Waugh Society, will be at Downside Abbey and School, Somerset, 16 to 19 August. Anyone wanting to present a paper should email a brief abstract to Professor JV Long at Portland State University, jlong@pdx.edu

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