For adherents of the theory that Englishmen are all nuts, the mid-20th century novelist Evelyn Waugh is a prime exhibit. In the current (July 2) issue of The New Yorker, Joan Acocella reviews a new book by Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson. Alexander has written up the entire dynasty, starting with a previous Alexander, 1840-1906, Evelyn’s own grandfather. They all seem to have had a couple of screws loose. You need to read the entire thing to get the full flavor, but here are samples.
Evelyn was not a good father. The thing he feared most in life was boredom, Alexander tells us, and the six children he had by his second wife, Laura Herbert, often bored him to death. … When they were home from school, he took dinner in his library. They were glad of this, for they were afraid of him, as was almost everyone he knew. ‘He spent his life,’ Auberon [EW’s son, Alexander’s father] later wrote, ‘seeking out men and women who were not frightened of him. Even then, he usually ended up getting drunk with them, as a way out of the abominable problem of human relations.’…. Though she came from an old and rich family, she [i.e. Laura, EW’s wife] hated ostentation. Most days, she dressed in trousers belted with twine. If she had to go to a party, she wore an old, largely hairless Astrakhan coat, also belted with twine. (It had had a proper belt, but apparently she lost it.) [The more cynical among us might say that all this belts-of-twine stuff was a form of ostentation in itself–JD] She cared as little for her family’s wardrobe as for her own. Alexander writes that when the time came for her daughters to go to boarding school it turned out that they owned no underpants. Laura told their nanny to sew up the front of Auberon’s old undershorts for them. The nanny, scandalized, sneaked into town and bought them underwear with her own money. [The midcentury English upper and upper-middle classes] were extremely insular, and therefore confident. If something seemed silly to them, or even just unusual, they didn’t mind making jokes about it. They were not as nice as we are, and they were much funnier. They drank from noon to night, and wrote their books young and fast…
I treasure a moment in the early 1960s when I was sitting in my college refectory eating lunch as the PA system–staffed by low-paid college employees–announced: “This evening, Catholic society will discuss the works of the great Catholic novelist Mr. Evelyn Woff.”