Auberon Waugh – I shall declare my interest – was my first editor; I still have the generous letter he sent me from the Literary Review. I called in to the Beak Street offices on numerous occasions at that time, and found Waugh to be an amiable and encouraging man, when he was awake. “Hello,” he would say, “Mr . . . Foxe, yes, of course”, and return to his post-prandial meditation. For someone who seemed to despair of young people (“with their small memory span and almost infinite suggestibility”, “few have the intellectual equipment which was once considered necessary to read for a degree, and all expect instant obedience from parents and grown-ups”), Waugh was very hospitable to them as an editor.
Closing the Circle is a superbly selected collection of Waugh’s pieces from “The Way of the World”, a column in the Daily Telegraph, from the 1990s until his death. It was a column he had coveted since the 1960s, always certain – despite damaging setbacks – that one day it would be his. He succeeded in wresting it from Christopher Booker after “a necessary, bleak and tortuous, sometimes crab-like campaign”. In his hands, the column became, to quote Craig Brown’s jovial introductory remarks, “a parallel world, a world at once more colourful and grotesque than our own, and, of course, immeasurably funnier”.
The pieces continue, in a gentler fashion, the persona Waugh developed in his Private Eye diaries of the 1970s; faux fogey, de haut en bas, he takes a news item as a starting point and slides inexorably into surreal musings and Swiftian modest proposals; the insane logic of each twist and return is nearly always exhilarating. Waugh was a true ironist, in that the pieces, beneath their extravagant hyper-real humour, conceal any amount of potential seriousness, but nothing that one could be sure was sincerely meant. A healthy libertarianism rubs shoulders with the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” style of conservatism, complicated by a glittering array of eccentric “prejudices” expressed with a wit and panache that far outweigh their brutality.
His pretended obsessions achieve a life of their own, intermingling and breeding with others – the damage done by hamburgers, for instance, almost becomes a mitigating plea for the Americans and young people he otherwise excoriates (his account of seeing Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, in silence, “as Swiftian satire in mime” is exemplary; and his disquisition on “whether Americans can be said to have immortal souls” ends with the remarkable question “when an American sneezes, which should be thrown away, the paper handkerchief or the American?”) Considering Labour’s proposals to lower the age of homosexual consent while raising the age at which tobacco could be purchased, he writes, “I am appalled at the suggestion that these 16-year-old boys, being seduced for the first time, will not be allowed a cigarette to help them through an ordeal which may be painful as well as unfamiliar.” Indeed, the main enemies are often bossy health fanatics; he maintains that “excessive reliance on salad” is one of the real dangers.
After his death earlier this year, Waugh was rounded on by Polly Toynbee, and feted by everyone else. The Toynbee remarks were venomous, but her offence against “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” ought to have been applauded by those who praised Waugh for his iconoclasm and gorgeous bad taste. Instead they said that Waugh was “perhaps the most brilliant journalist of his age”, and the Daily Telegraph, in particular, Diana-ified him over entire pages. Some may still be tearfully leaving flowers and teddy bears outside his home now, for all we know. Best, perhaps, to finish instead with his own words, from the last time such a collection of these columns was made, all of four years ago: “Nearly everybody who has seen the book agrees that it is the best one published this year. But you will have to move fast, and be prepared for a disappointment. Century have only 600 copies left. All the rest have been taken home by literary editors to gloat over in the unbelievable squalor of their North London flats.”