'Enliven This Vale of Tears With a Little Fantasy'

I defy you to identify the writer being described: 

“[A]ll he really wanted to do in company was to make jokes, to turn the world upside down and laugh at it, to enrich and enliven this vale of tears with a little fantasy. The important questions of man’s relationship to God and man’s responsibility for the material and spiritual welfare of his fellow men could be left to private contemplation. The main purpose of human association was to share enjoyment of the world's absurdity.”

 

What an admirable testimonial. No, it’s not Mark Twain or P.G. Wodehouse. I’ll give you another clue: This is a son, also a writer, describing his father, and the son was himself a rather funny fellow. Both, but especially the father, were gifted writers of prose, the father one of the finest of the last century. One more sample:

 

“[He] was a small man--scarcely five foot six in his socks--and only a writer, after all, but I have seen generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six foot six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quail in front of him. When he laughed, everyone laughed, when he was downcast, everyone tiptoed around trying to make as little noise as possible. It was not wealth or power which created this effect, merely the force of his personality.”

 

You’ve been reading Auberon Waugh in Will This Do?: The Memoirs of Auberon Waugh (1991) remembering Evelyn Waugh, his father, who seldom fails to make me feel good about life again if my thoughts have grown grim. There’s probably no prose in the world I admire more than his. For example, in his first and best travel book, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (1930), Waugh spends his first night in Paris in the Crillon, a comfortable but expensive hotel. Complaints about money – real or parodied -- are often funny. Next day, Waugh moves to a cheaper place: “My next hotel was remarkably less comfortable. It was exactly facing into the Metro, where it runs very noisily above ground, and the bed was, I think, stuffed with skulls.”

 

Note the rhythm. The passage begins like a unpromisingly naturalistic travelogue and closes like a bear trap. Here’s the rest of the paragraph:

 

“The only furniture was a bidet and a cupboard full of someone else’s underclothes. There were some false teeth under the pillows, and the door opened oddly, being permanently locked and detached from both hinges, so that it could only be moved at the wrong side just far enough to admit of one squeezing through.”

 

One more sample of Waugh fils on Waugh père:

 

“The most welcome aspect of him, as a parent, was his lack of interest in his children, at any rate until they were much older and became fit subjects for gossip. So long as we were out of sight and sound, we could do whatever we wanted. In that sense, he was a permissive, even indulgent parent. At the age of nine of ten I announced that I was interested in chemistry--I never studied it at school, but neither or my parents would have known that--and wished to make some chemical experiments for Christmas. Papa thought this a capital idea, and asked for a list.

 

“Not many parents, I believe, would be prepared to give their sons of nine or ten bottles of concentrated sulphuric, hydrochloric, and nitric acid to play with unsupervised. Some will decide that this was a deliberate, Charles Addams-like plot to get rid of me, but my parents were similarly unconcerned about firearms, which presented a greater threat to everyone else. From my earliest years I stalked our 40 acres alone looking for small animals, or blasted away at targets around the house. Similarly, they were unconcerned about school rules and school reports, holding all authority in derision until the threat of expulsion brought with it the danger that children might be returned home.”