'Lost the Skill to Please'

Auberon Waugh (1939-2001) seems to have barely survived the voyage across the Atlantic. Even his surname (he was the eldest son of Evelyn) didn’t help. Perhaps because he was best known in England as a journalist, and journalism is eminently perishable and doesn’t travel well, awareness among American readers is minimal. I’ve read A Scribbler in Soho: A Celebration of Auberon Waugh (2019) and his autobiography, Will This Do? (1991), and I’ve always been touched by the simple, true verdict he passed on his father after the novelist’s death in 1966: “[H]e was the funniest man of his generation.” Now that’s filial piety. 

In 1972, “Bron” Waugh published his fifth and final novel, A Bed of Flowers. Nige has read it and on Saturday wrote: “It is Shakespeare's pastoral comedy reimagined as a hippie idyll, in all its sweetness and absurdity.” After half a century it’s about time I read it too. The novel is long out of print but I’ve put the library’s copy on hold. As Nige says, it’s unlikely a new edition will be published, “especially in these woke times.”

 

Nige’s post moved me to look around online and see what is available. In the September 1987 issue of Chronicles he published “Doggerel in a Good Cause’:

 

“As editor of the Literary Review, I am afraid I have formed rather a low opinion of the nation's poets. Every week 20 or 30 offerings arrive through the post, and I often glance at them before handing them over to the magazine's saintly, long-suffering poetry editor. With amazingly few exceptions, these ‘poems’ are prosaic, confused, derivative, usually hard to follow, and often quite unambiguously meaningless. The general atmosphere is one of gloom, which would not matter if there were any compensating originality of perception or joy in the use of words. But the prevailing spirit of dullness and selfabsorption produces no emotion stronger than boredom.”

 

Sounds familiar. The dreariness Waugh detects has only grown drearier in the last thirty-five years, as has the linkage between safely bien pensant sentiments and the wish to express them in prose camouflaged as poetry. Waugh perceives the “vague equation of obscurity with cleverness, of self-absorption with art, of triviality with elegance,” and continues:

 

“The modern poet for a long time accepted that few people would want to read him and saw this as a tribute to his own superiority. Now, in the post-Modernist age, he would dearly like to be read but has lost the skill to please.”