So Alexander Waugh has died, aged only 60. He was, as I wrote a few months ago, third in the line of great Waughs. His father, Auberon, died aged only 61. His grandfather, Evelyn, died aged only 62. Sixty two, 61, 60: diminishing returns, perhaps, at least in age. There is no question, I think, that Alexander was less famous than Auberon, who was less famous than Evelyn. But, remarkably, there was no loss of quality. Alexander was as perfect an embodiment of a classical, catholic and coruscatory sensibility in literature and the arts as was his father and his grandfather. I cannot think of a comparison. Amis fils was a lesser figure than Amis père. Adam Nicolson writes well – his Homer book was a marvel (the best single thing written on Homer apart from Weil’s essay and some of Gladstone’s speculations) – but whatever Nigel and Harold were, they were not capable of Waughfare. It is hard to think of any example of similar sustained activity across three generations as the three Waughs managed, or such continuity of critical and satirical assault – always manifested in the highest of styles.
For those of us who know, Evelyn Waugh has some claim to be the greatest novelist of the 20th Century. I myself would say that he was the equal only of the very different D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence was the master of the exploratory novel: the novel that went within, venturing into the inarticulate aspects of subjective experience, freed by the innovations of the ‘free indirect style’, invented by Jane Austen, explored by Flaubert and others, but brought to its highest art in Women in Love. On the other side, there were the novels of Waugh – the only novels I can reread in my fifties – which, as he himself knew, refused to venture within, and remained stoically, bitterly, without: achieving astonishing penetration by saying something about everything on the surface and sketching great satires of ‘bright young things’ and ‘vile bodies’ as they aged. The great exception in Waugh’s oeuvre is Brideshead Revisited. Some readers of Waugh greatly disliked this book – Norman Stone was one of them. But I think it was a great achievement in a different manner: the first-person as opposed to third-person manner. But this aside, Waugh was, by and large, the master of the third-person novel, the exterior view, whereas Lawrence was the master of the third-person novel, interior view. Woolf and Joyce, to my mind, come nowhere. Waugh’s only rival was Wodehouse: who was practically a different species of writer: as Waugh himself wrote, innocent.
Auberon Waugh was a keeper of the flame. In Books and Bookmen – that great review of books of the 1970s – he wrote some great critical pieces about his father. The last time I was on sabbatical I spent an entire summer reading back numbers of that magazine, just for Waugh’s pieces, along with the occasional thing by Richard Ingrams. But Waugh was not only the keeper of the flame: he became, in the diaries published in Private Eye and later collected as Four Crowded Years and A Turbulent Decade, the author of the most sadistic and downright amusing commentaries on the social and political affairs of the 1970s and 1980s. He also wrote essays for the Spectator, the New Statesman, and the Telegraph (taking over the Way of the World column), which offered the least painless political philosophy sketched in the 20th Century. The Oxford political philosopher Jerry Cohen more than once commented that the greatest political philosophers of all time were Plato, Hobbes and – [pause] – Rawls. Cohen was obviously an idiot, not noticing the diminuendo. (Alexander Waugh, student of music, would have noticed the diminuendo.) Plato – of course. Hobbes – why not? Rawls – Rawls? Rawls was nothing compared to Auberon Waugh. Rawls wrote one very poor, very long and very humorous try at a novel entitled A Theory of Justice in which he put a ‘man of no qualities’ into an ‘original position’ and derived all sorts of earnest and fanciful rubbish about him/her/it, his/her/its foolish principles, and the narcissism of his/her/its looking in the spuriously spirit-levelled mirror of reflective equilibrium. Whereas Auberon Waugh told us that politicians were people who were in the grip of a psychological abnormality as terrible as a sexual fixation: obsessed with power, bullying and bossiness. I remember thinking, as I read it, that even Machiavelli and Nietzsche did not say anything as penetrating. Polly Toynbee’s epitaph, in time, will be her humourless epitaph on Auberon Waugh.
Alexander Waugh was also, inevitably, a keeper of the flame. He recently was in the process of editing the 40-volume Oxford University Press edition of his grandfather’s works. And he wrote quite possibly the best single biographical or autobiographical study ever written by someone writing out of the middle of something: his book Fathers and Sons, which was a study of four or five generations: Alexander, the brutish doctor, Arthur, the sedate publisher, Evelyn, the victim of jazz age futility who reinvented himself as a sardonic observer of it, Auberon, the boy who lied and shot himself and then wrote a few failed novels before mastering the art of the satirical sketch, and reaching Alexander himself, who was born early enough to have been dandled on Evelyn’s knee in some photographs. Some of the greatest literature in the world is a literature of the apprehension of others: Orwell on Dickens, Lawrence on Hardy, Shaw on Ibsen (Gladstone on Macaulay, Carlyle on Johnson, etc). But in Fathers and Sons there was a circle relating the inheritor of the style to the inventors of the style and inviting reflecting on the nature of the style by extending it into the world of fact.
What is distinctive about the grandson is that he ventured further than grandfather or father into non-fiction: apt, since, as everyone observes, our age satirises itself; and, certainly, the sort of satire Evelyn or Auberon wrote might not work so well in a world which has elevated its own absurdity into a heightened kitsch of statistics, bureaucracy and shape-shifting uppers, downers and blockers so remarkable that Juvenal would pull the gravestone over his head were he to see it. And Waugh was, at first, not satirical, in the music journalism, and the book on opera: and consecretary or exploratory in the study of the Wittgenstein family and then the study of the Waugh family: though, the latter, at least, was a circling back to satire.
I have read Fathers and Sons. Alas, I have not yet read the other books – God or Time or the musical writings, though I suppose I will. But I rediscovered the third Waugh, and finally acquired a sense of his singular mastery of tone and style in the spoken YouTube ‘presentations’ he published on the subject of Shakespeare. Here was his final and true métier. The tone was highly polite, and hence perfectly merciless when critical of ‘the professors’. This is not the place to rehearse the arguments: about John Dee, about ‘Gematria’, about Thomas Thorpe, about Ben Jonson, etc., except to point out that Waugh managed to be extremely knowledgeable and suggestive about the sort of 16th Century literature which, until I heard his presentations, was an obscure bundle of sticks to me. I learnt from Waugh that the Elizabethans were not only politically but also literarily extremely conspiratorial, paranoid, allusive and brilliant. They all shook like spears: one of them more than others. It was the last era in which science and magic were intertwined. I had no idea. For someone like me, who started in the 19th Century, it was already difficult enough to venture into the commercial and orderly and sententious 18th Century and then into the scientific and revolutionary and religious 17th Century: I found a natural limit at Hobbes. But Waugh taught me to see that Shakespeare was not just the author of plays and poems but typical of his age, while surmounting it, in writing in a complete associated sensibility in which in and out, in which logos and mythos, in which Hamlet-type subjectivity and Coriolanus– or Macbeth-type objectivity jostled together in continual sound and fury. Shakespeare, for instance, in Troilus and Cressida, explains more brilliantly than Pascal or Schopenhauer or Thucydides (and they are the masters) what would happen if might became right. He declares, and I paraphrase, that the world would become a universal wolf and eat itself. Well!
Isn’t the world becoming a universal wolf and eating itself?
None of the academic books can explain this: this undissociated or associated sensibility. It is difficult. T.S. Eliot invented the phrase “dissociation of sensibility”, by which he meant the fragmentation of mind when sentences and science coerced our minds into a language in which we could no longer – except in novels – sketch an entire human sense of the world. R.G. Collingwood in Speculum Mentis argued that the medieval mind had been complete: and had fractured into categories thereafter: into the categories of art, religion, science, history and philosophy. Alas. Well, I read it in Collingwood, and Eliot: but Waugh, the youngest Waugh, has done as splendid a work in embodying the thought, displaying it, as anyone I have ever heard or read. His YouTube presentations are masterful works of imaginative reconstruction: indicating just how we dissociated moderns can attempt to think our way back into the undissociated or associated minds of the past, such as, exemplarily, Shakespeare’s.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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