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January 15, 2002
SYNDICATED: Waugh requiem
AUBERON Waugh, to put it mildly, excited differing views among the readers. Some loathed him and his works, while others stood up for him even five days after his death (“even in death he could still get a rise out of po-faced liberals”).
The anxious, as opposed to po-faced, liberal may be confused, or guilty, as if liking Waugh were as undeclarable as a fondness for pornography. As such, the pleasure liberals may take in his works is precisely that: a guilty pleasure. When Waugh wrote his diaries for Private eye, you could console yourself that his work counted as satirical, and therefore an amusing inversion of the moral order. The transplant to the Telegraph, where he was surrounded by columnists with views even more alarming than his, made him seem less of an exotic. Running jokes — the awfulness of Americans, the poisonous influence of hamburgers — became predictable; boring, even, to use his ultimate reproof.
Boredom, like beauty, is very much a matter of taste. I cavil at his description of the writer Will Self as an “exhibitionist bore”, but I do not when he calls the New York Times “the worst and most boring newspaper in the world” (its history, since you ask, is the history of knee-jerk puritanism, grinding pomposity and moral blindness).
And, like the Guardian letter-writer who punched the air and cheered on hearing of Waugh’s death, I figuratively did the same when Waugh called Alan Clark “the 70-year-old show-off and bore”. Clark, who considered himself a master of the insulting epithet, must have found himself wounded in a sensitive spot when Waugh added: “Anybody who went to public school will have recognized Clark as the sort of Old Boy who returns to his school in some veteran or vintage car to impress the smaller boys.”
It is difficult not to be fond of someone who can deliver such a line about such a person; and neither is it easy to dislike someone who declares that whenever he visits Australia, his “second, hidden agenda has been the hope that I might get a chance to eat a koala”. There may be a very faint and unintentional echo of Swift’s Modest proposal there, but the chief desire is to get a laugh — and the people who laugh at that will laugh because they are imagining the kind of people who will not find such a remark at all funny. We also enjoy the frisson of class treason or apostasy when he turns on his own kind, rebuking the Pope for his “babyish Latin”, or describing Peregrine Worsthorne, on his way to be knighted, as “clanking up to Buckingham Palace in his best suit of armour”.
So Waugh was a maverick. Toynbee put the word in withering inverted commas, which does indeed alert us to the suspicious nature of the self-declared rebel who turns out to live in the heart of the establishment. Someone whose responses could be as predictable as Waugh’s — it seems at times that modern society is itself merely a conspiracy designed to vex him — should perhaps not be called a maverick; yet his moral positions, which were occasionally unambiguously declared, may surprise the inattentive. He was, for example, a pacifist, in the sense of disapproving of ever bombing people as a political solution.
The ultimate position on Waugh depends, I suppose, on whether you think he wrote well or not. It is, of course, your right to dismiss someone only because you disagree with their political opinions. But there is a place for entertainment all the same, and Waugh was not only an entertaining but a graceful writer. I shall miss him. Here is one of my favourite sentences: “There is something inexpressibly gloomy about the thought of an Andrew Motion Fan Club.” And here, for good measure, is another: “Acting largely on intuition, I took it on myself at quite an early stage to warn the world about mobile telephones. If you watched a mobile telephonist closely enough, I declared, you could see strange rubbery tubes and pieces of jelly hanging out of his ears.” — Dawn/Guardian news service
Closing the circle: the best of “The way of the world”
By Auberon Waugh
Macmillan
ISBN 0333907825
496pp. £6.99
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