Pithy rejoinder
Sir: 'Old Friends', though doubtless wittily intended, was, I fear, a rather inaccurate heading for the singularly humourless piece of schoolboy graffito you allowed to scrape the very bottom of your Letters Page barrel last week (28 September). For it was Auberon Waugh's grandmother, 'What? What?' Mary née de Vesci and her late son Auberon his uncle who are the 'old friends' of whom I cherish such very affectionate memories. I have always greatly treasured the encomium, 'No one, perhaps excepting me, ever enjoyed your jokes as much as she did' in the letter written to me after her death by Auberon Herbert, of whom our friend Isaiah Berlin has written so appre- ciatively and perceptively in his characteris- tically admirable book Personal Impres- sions! How I wish we could all three of us be now on our way to visit no longer com- munist Kiev via no longer communist Riga!
It was Isaiah, by the way, who first intro- duced me to that most useful Russian adjective nizhnilaitiku (I could do it in Cyrillic but doubt Doughty Street would print it right ) meaning 'beneath criticism', which is so perfectly applicable to most of the dicta of Waugh fits, obiter or otherwise. I would like to think that the squeals of incoherent rage that my 'high-minded ser- mon', as he chooses to call my purely and simply civilised rebuke of his unworthy and ungentlemanly malevolence evoked from his spluttering pen, concealed guilty thoughts once upon a time motive for a trip to the confessional box. As for his choice of words to describe me it can only be classi- fied as Humpty-Dumptyish. `Mean'? I've never been that in either the Brit or Yank sense of the term and have certainly never understood my Wasp kinsman Emerson's cryptic `mean cathartic virtue'. 'Old'? That certainly, as I've been pushing 80 since my long passed 70th birthday and therefore all the more surprised to see myself subse- quently called (surely actionably) a 'tart'. In the Business Traveller world of freebie swanning, the aging Brontosaurus has always boastfully gloried in his reputation for having, from Bayswater to Bangkok and back, had a great many more tarts than ever the Queen of Hearts baked all on a summer's day. But I suppose if he only paid them £25 a go they must have been getting on for my age, poor things. As it happens, my last, and I mean by that my very last, contribution to the Literary Review, much praised at the time by the editor for its scholarship and wit, brought me a cheque in the £40 bracket which was alas not enough to reimburse me for the many long- distance telephone calls to Beak Street and Combe Florey necessitated by Bron and his Girl-Friday's total cock-up of the logistics of the operation.
Alastair Forbes
1837 D'oex, Switzerland
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