I’m not sure about this live-blogging idea. It seems to me that immediacy might be to the detriment of a considered opinion…
However, here I am at Waugh on Waugh, featuring Alexander Waugh, (AW#3) grandson of Evelyn and son of Auberon. Peter Craven wants to know what made him take them on?
I think it’s a silly question. (Which might not be a considered opinion). This Waugh feels a need to write, and that’s no different to anyone else wanting to write. If there are comparisons, odious or otherwise, he doesn’t seem to care, and why should he?
Anyway, what’s he got to say for himself in his latest book Fathers and Sons? Arthur Waugh was his great grandfather, and a publisher. His father was a brute, and AW #3 recounts some brutish tales about him. (Some people in the audience tittered at this. ) Arthur stood up to this brutish parent who derided books and literature and became the publisher Chapman and Hall, famous for publishing Dickens. Then there were other sons who had sons with ambitions to be writers and here I became quite confused and couldn’t keep track of who was who and shall have to look it up in the book (which we have at home, already autographed by AW#3, because The Spouse attended a Waugh session at the MWF during the week.)
AW#3 had some interesting tales to tell about Evelyn Waugh’s path to publication with Decline and Fall, which was the first EW that I read and loved. It was EW’s books which rescued Chapman and Hall from financial peril (because their Dickens copyright was running out) yet Arthur published these EW books with reluctance because there was no love lost between father and son and all of the books included some kind of unkind joke against him. (Scholars of the EW oeuvre no doubt have had a great deal of fun finding and analysing these jokes). There’s nothing new about writers paying out on parents in their fiction, and I found anecdotes about this and some other rather puerile topics not especially amusing.
My attention wandered, and once more I found myself distracted by the view beyond the windows of the BMW Edge. It was a grey day in Melbourne today and the windows had begun to mist over a little as the light faded. It was rather beautiful in a sombre sort of way, lights in the distance shivering through the gum trees under a lowering sky. I wanted to be outside beside the river, wrapped up in a warm scarf and enjoying the cool air on my face. It seemed like a long session…
I probably haven’t done this session justice, though I’m not sure whether this is entirely my fault. The New York Times review says that in Fathers and Sons Alexander Waugh’ demonstrates that he’s inherited the literary gene in spades, as well as a gift for very funny, coruscating prose’. That’s not the impression I got from Peter Craven’s questions, but perhaps I was just tired.
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