The Waughs

Who could decline an invitation to join the most celebrated literary family in England for a weekend in a country house with a fine wine cellar, in a lovely setting far from the noisome proletariat? Alexander Waugh, grandson of the novelist Evelyn Waugh and an accomplished writer himself, offers as much in "Fathers and Sons," his "autobiography of a family." He promises to introduce us to his progenitors, not only his own father, the incendiary columnist Auberon, but also: Auberon's father, the famously acerbic Evelyn; Evelyn's brother, the prolific writer Alec; Evelyn and Alec's father, Arthur, a publisher, critic and author; and even Arthur's father, Dr. Alexander Waugh (1840-1906).
That is a lot of Waughs. It should be noted that, except for the current biographer, all of them are dead, but one's disappointment has to be muted, because meeting the Waughs alive, en masse, would have been a terrifying experience -- like stumbling into the house of Addams.
Let us imagine ourselves, at the start of a Somerset weekend, running into the author's great-great-grandfather, Dr. Alexander Waugh, a repulsive, red-faced little fat man who is drunkenly smashing ornaments in the hall, screaming at the servants and flagellating an Irish setter with an ivory-tipped whip. A wasp settles on his wife's forehead; instead of brushing it off, he squashes it with the ivory tip so as to ensure that she does not escape the sting. If we stay the night, we will see him drag his son, Arthur, out of bed to shove him into a downstairs cupboard, where the little wretch, foolish enough not to enjoy shooting animals, is made to lavish kisses on his father's gun-case.
Dr. Waugh, in short, is a sadist. "The Brute," as he is known to his descendants, is also a skilled surgeon; he is the inventor of a sinister apparatus known as "Waugh's Long Fine Dissecting Forceps." He is clearly not the fount of the literary genes that define succeeding generations, but elements of his talent for sadism are passed on. Spasms of it keep surfacing in five generations, like flecks of foam in the family's brilliantly translucent stream.
In the library, if we could brave the occupant's glare on our entering, we find a porcine man in tweeds with murder in his heart. This is Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), acclaimed by many notable writers as one of the greatest novelists in the English language ("about as good as one can be," said George Orwell, "while holding untenable opinions"). He is presently dipping his pen in vitriol to assassinate his father, Arthur, either in a diary entry or in a novel, as the model for a fatuous character. One feels that if Arthur insists yet again on sonorously reading from the entire Dickens canon to the assembled family, Evelyn will assault him with Dr. Waugh's long fine dissecting forceps.