–In the course of reviewing some of the notices regarding the recent death of Alexander Waugh, additional sad news is reported. This involves the apparent death of Alexander’s uncle, James Waugh, on 12 September 2022. This was reported in the Daily Telegraph, 24 September 2022, with only the name, date and age (76) reported and no mention of his parentage:
WAUGH. James Waugh, died on 12th September 2022 aged 76.
Beloved husband, brother, father, stepfather and grandfather. Memorial mass to be arranged. Online ref: 612485
This would have been the age of Evelyn Waugh’s second son, James Waugh, who was born on 30 June 1946. At least two internet sites have reported the death as being that of Evelyn Waugh’s son. Here is a link to the one on Ancestry.com. Anyone reading this and having more definitive information on whether the death of the James Waugh announced in the Daily Telegraph report was in fact that of Evelyn Waugh’s second son, James Waugh, is invited to comment as provided below.
–Mark McGinness has sent the following comments based on his article in the Quadrant which were noted and linked in a previous post:
Thank you for your kind notice.
I got the Auberons’ move to Combe Florey wrong – it was 1971- not 1967.
And one of the CWEW editors, Barbara Cooke, told me that although EW did not record Alexander’s birth in his Diaries, he did dedicate A Little Learning to his grandchildren (in 1964) –  Sophia and Alexander Waugh, Emily FitzHerbert and Edward D’Arms. A lovely touch I wish I’d known.
Barbara also told me that before Sophia Waugh was born (and of course her gender was unknown), Evelyn wrote to Auberon to suggest a name for his and Lady Teresa’s first born: “Alexander Foxglove Brideshead Pinfold Clandon Forty-Martyrs Dillon”.
Forty Martyrs!
–The New York Times has meanwhile published its own obituary of Alexander Waugh. Here are some excerpts:
Alexander Waugh, who throughout his varied career as a composer, columnist and historian bore lightly the weight of his literary inheritance — his father, Auberon, and his grandfather Evelyn were considered among the finest English writers of the 20th century — died on July 22 at his home in Milverton, in southwest England. He was 60.
His sister Daisy Waugh, herself a well-known English novelist, said the cause was cancer.
The Waughs are one of Britain’s greatest literary dynasties, both in their level of acclaim and their sheer output. Beginning with Mr. Waugh’s great-grandfather Arthur, the family has produced nearly 200 books and thousands of pieces of journalism; all four of Auberon Waugh’s children, including Alexander, became writers.
Evelyn Waugh was known for his witty, incisive novels of class and culture, while Auberon perfected a kind of cheeky, conservative journalism that took on the elites and the left in equal measure.
Trained as a musician, he spent several years as an opera critic for The Mail on Sunday newspaper, then for The Evening Standard. He and his brother, Nat, wrote an award-winning musical, “Bon Voyage!,” which they produced in 2000 in London.
He wrote scores of book reviews for The Daily Telegraph, as well as a book on the history of time (“Time: From Micro-Seconds to Millennia; A Search for the Right Time,” 1999) and a “biography” of God (called, simply, “God,” published in 2004).
He founded Travelman, a publishing company that specialized in short stories one could fold up, like a map, and that were sold around train stations for a pound. He hosted the Bad Sex Awards, given annually to writers for excellence in overwrought descriptions of copulatory acts.
And in 2016 he took over as chairman of the De Vere Society, a group committed to the proposition that “William Shakespeare” was actually a pseudonym for the real author of the Bard’s plays and sonnets, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
Though not as acerbic or sharp-elbowed as his father, Mr. Waugh relished a good literary row, and was constantly on the prowl for sparring partners, among them the writers Will Self, A.N. Wilson and Max Hastings, who had fired him from his critic’s job at The Evening Standard….
Alexander Evelyn Michael Waugh was born on Dec. 30, 1963, in the Belgravia neighborhood of London to Auberon and Teresa (Onslow) Waugh, herself an accomplished novelist and translator. His family soon moved to rural Somerset, in southwestern England, near his grandfather’s estate.Despite the mountains of books that surrounded Alexander as a child, he did not read much, aside from his grandfather’s novels; music was his passion, and he dreamed of being a conductor. His father wanted him to become a wine merchant, in part so he could manage the family’s overflowing cellar.
He took a year off after high school to work odd jobs in Paris. He studied music at the University of Manchester, but by the time he graduated he had decided to follow his father into journalism.
He married Eliza Chancellor, whom he met in college, in 1990. Along with his sister Daisy, she survives him, as do their children, Mary, Sally and Auberon; another sister, Sophie; his brother, Nat; and two grandchildren.
He began his career as a freelance newspaper cartoonist, then worked as an opera critic between 1990 and 1996.
By the late 1990s he was engaged in a project to edit 43 volumes of his grandfather’s books, letters and papers for Oxford University Press, a task that remained unfinished at the younger Waugh’s death.
After writing his books on time and God, he tackled his own family, digging into the diaries and correspondence left behind by his father and grandfather. The result, “Fathers and Sons,” received broad praise in Britain and the United States for its honesty and detail.
“He’s inherited the literary gene in spades, as well as a gift for very funny, coruscating prose,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times. “He has created a vivid, Dickensian portrait of his eccentric relatives and he’s done so with enormous irreverence and élan.”
Mr. Waugh followed that book with another portrait of an equally brilliant, dysfunctional clan, “The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War” (2008), in which the famously dyspeptic philosopher, Ludwig, comes across as the most normal of the lot.
One might say the same for Mr. Waugh. While previous generations of his family had no end of quirks and failings — fathers tended to beat sons; alcoholism was rampant; Auberon’s brother ended his career writing baroque pornographic novels — Alexander was by all accounts well-adjusted, at peace with the onus of his ancestors’ accomplishments and happy to keep any sibling rivalries on the tennis court.
“We’re very competitive at tennis, but it doesn’t spill over into writing at all,” he told The Independent in 2002. “But when it comes to tennis, I want to smash them all to smithereens.”
