A terrifying private world
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
THE DIARIES OF AUBERON WAUGH: A TURBULENT DECADE 1976-1985 by Auberon Waugh Private Eye/Deutsch, P.95 Is Auberon Waugh mad? Is God dead? Can we empirically verify the physical existence of things and beings? Is the world coming to an end? Am I drunk? Who knows?
The questions reel and spin through the mind after reading this very funny and wholly extraordinary hook. It's not so much a case of couldn't put it down (though, having read most of its pages before in Private Eye and laughed, I read them again and laughed out loud on a wet Sunday afternoon in Torquay). More a case of almost scared to pick it up and begin again the disorientating process of entering Mr Waugh's terrifying private world.
Like other writers, Mr Waugh wants an audience, and a medium. He has tried fiction, reviewing, political and polemical journalism. As Spectator readers know, his straight journalism – for want of another phrase – is unlike anyone else's, but it is not so unlike as all that. The Eye Diaries are different in kind as well as degree from anything else at all. They began (I think) as a spoof on Mr Alan Brien, and when Mr Waugh had lost the energy even to pretend to write a political column in the Eye. Quite soon the Diaries developed into what they are, whatever it is. On the face of things it is the day-to-day record of the life of an incredibly successful, irresistibly attractive, extremely rich, well-connected (`most of my cousins arc earls') man. If it was that only it would be a new literary form of sorts, as The Diary of a Nobody was. It is more.
For one thing it raises the settling of scores and the persecuting of enemies to the level of literary art. I had forgotten how long Mr Waugh's obsessions had been running, if obsessions are what they are. Who knows? Perhaps Mr Worsthorne is soon to be knighted. Perhaps Lord Gowrie really is black. Perhaps the Prince of Wales nurtured a secret passion for Mr Hunter Davies's daughter Caitlin (whose name was tattooed on a certain organ of the Prince's body).
It is not only that the Diaries push the boundaries of taste hack to where no man has dared to go. Mr Waugh discusses the burning question of whether the Japanese have pubic hair (another obsession) with the Emperor Hirohito; 'Back in London I am distressed to find the mood of anti- semitism sparked by Holocaust still ram- pant'; Mr John Bindon, 'when he had an erection, could balance five half-pint beer mugs on it', it is claimed, but this is denied by sources close to Princess Margaret. In psychoanalytical terms this book has no super-ego. It is conscienceless. It is unique.
Everyone, by the way, will have one or two memories of passages from the Diaries which sent them reeling, but the book brought back one especially happy memory. On 22 December 1979 Mr Waugh went 'shooting at Orchardleigh with my old friend Alexander Chancellor, the immensely distinguished Old Etonian editor of the Spectator. All the birds seemed to be flying backwards, which is strange . . .' A week or two after this was published Mr Chancellor was in Somerset where a family friend accosted him with the words, 'Look here, this time Waugh's gone too far.'
His chief comic effect is a particularly cruel one, of spotting, highlighting and mocking others' absurdities, e.g. among many others, when Miss Cartland wrote in the Times that virginity was coming back into fashion, she woke up a few days later to read that 'this year marks the 50th anniversary of Barbara Cartland's loss of virginity. She made the Supreme Sacrifice to the late Alexander George McCor- quodale in circumstances about which we can only speculate soon after her marriage in 1927.' But on whom, quite, is the joke? It is no news that satirists are continually overtaken by real life (whatever that is). I am sure that the form of discrimination known as `heightism' appeared in the Peter Simple column, like so many things, before it made the news pages.
In Mr Waugh's case, this problem is more severe, not so much for him as for us. In among the trivial round — his teas at Buckingham Palace, his cross-examination of Dr Castro about his sex life, in every detail of which one wants to believe — he quotes two modern prayers. One is the Bishop of Winchester's proposed prayer to be said after an abortion: 'Into your hands we commit in trust the developing life we have cut short. Look in kindly judgment on the choice that we have made . .' (which, as Waugh says, would also work as grace before a meal which includes a suckling pig). The other comes from a Catholic publication, The Treasury of the Holy Spirit, edited by Monsignor Michael Buck- ley: 'Lord, a healthy sexual relationship is so important in marriage that we want to thank you for ours . .' Only Mr Waugh could have made those up. Did he?
His own answer is simple: 'None of us can really he sure that we really exist. My whole life, as this Diary shows, is a lie. All the characters in it are invented . . People who claim to find themselves here, like the ludicrous Jon Pilger, the angry wee Harold Evans or the incredible Bernard 'Slimy' Shrimsley, must know that the only real existence any of us can claim is in the imagination of God.' Or, as Mr Mugger- idge's famous joke goes, everything is true except the facts.
Mr Waugh has been noisily telling any- one who will listen that this book is a – and his – masterpiece. I think perhaps that he is right. I had forgotten, by the way, how many ignominious walk-on parts I have in these pages. They are all quite true, except the claim that I was born in Highgate — I think. Who knows? Do I wake or sleep?
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