Astonishingly, it is nearly ten years since Auberon Waugh died. I never met him — I came about half a glass of wine away from introducing myself at a party, but didn’t quite make it — but like most of his fans, read him avidly and admired him from afar. My girlfriend used to work at the Academy Club and was very fond of him, even though she was a lefty actress who thought he was the most right-wing man who had ever lived. It’s strange the way this reputation clung to him.
After he died, Polly Toynbee wrote a quite crazed hatchet-job in the Guardian, describing him as the leader of a clan of writers who were ‘effete, drunken, snobbish, sneering, racist and sexist’. You can forgive her inability to take a joke — Waugh had been mocking her remorselessly for years — but this passage suggested that she had failed to get the joke as well. In his introduction to this magnificent book, William Cook describes him as ‘a born trouble- maker, cunningly disguised as an irascible old buffer’. He was an instinctive satirist in the conservative-anarchist tradition, distrustful of authority in all its forms, sharp-eyed for all manifestations of bullshit and cant:
There is no point or purpose in any form of political idealism. Not only does socialism do nothing to improve the lot of the poor, making it in fact considerably worse, but capitalism also, by scattering plenty o’er a smiling land, creates as much vileness and havoc as socialism creates poverty and oppression.
Nothing, though, falls into abeyance more quickly than a journalistic reputation. Five minutes after we have filed our last ever piece we are forgotten, and might never have existed. I don’t think Waugh was too worried about this. He knew that his feuds with people like Nora Beloff and Lord Gowrie (who had stolen his girlfriend at Oxford, and was thereafter repeatedly accused in print of being secretly black) would mean nothing to anyone even a few years later. His work was always entirely of the moment. You read him to find out how he would tie in his current repertoire of obsessions and running jokes into whatever was happening then, that week, that day.
Sometimes he was a little off the pace, as all columnists are, but there wasn’t the long, slow decline into irrelevance and dullness that afflicts almost everyone else. Instead, there was what you might call a process of refinement, as he wrote what, to unbelievers, might have looked like the same piece over and over again. We admirers, alive to his inventiveness and his subtle variations, knew otherwise, knew that the running jokes were essentially a huge running joke in themselves, that the best way of annoying people (in the 1970s, social workers and union leaders, in the 1990s, Sunday Times readers) was to keep going at them, never to let them get away with anything. He would have enjoyed Toynbee’s piece immensely: it showed that he had won.
So, after a bleak decade of abject Waughlessness, comes William Cook’s book. Cook is something of a comedy specialist, having written books about the Comedy Store, Morecambe and Wise and Viz magazine, and edited two splendid biographical collections of the work of Peter Cook (no relation) and Dudley Moore. He is trying something similar here. Kiss Me, Chudleigh is part biography, part introduction to the great man’s work, part greatest hits collection. It takes its title from something Waugh said after he had accidentally fired six bullets from a machine gun into his own chest during National Service in 1960. As he lay grievously wounded, a tough corporal called Chudleigh walked past, and Waugh couldn’t resist it. If he had died there and then, his last words would have been a joke.
Cook has read the millions of words Waugh produced, and made selections from every stage of his prolific career. There are juvenilia here, as well as bite-sized chunks from the early novels, not quite enough from the Private Eye diaries and maybe one too many slightly dull travel pieces. But this is niggling, because overall the consistency is breathtaking. Quite simply, no one else writes like this:
Dieting destroys brain cells and permanently impairs mental performance. It distorts moral perceptions and tends towards unsafe driving, removing all libido while making the dieter more prone to HIV and its concomitant scourge, Aids. It makes those who fall victim stupid, mad, ugly and boring. Death is seldom long delayed.
According to William Cook, ‘there’s easily enough material for a second volume, and a third.’ Oh go on. Please.
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