NEW YORK, NY.- Alexander Waugh, who throughout his varied career as a composer, columnist and historian bore lightly the weight of his literary inheritance — his father, Auberon, and his grandfather, Evelyn, were considered among the finest English writers of the 20th century — died July 22 at his home in Milverton, in southwest England. He was 60.
His sister, Daisy Waugh, herself a well-known English novelist, said the cause was cancer.
The Waughs are one of Britain’s greatest literary dynasties, both in their level of acclaim and their sheer output. Beginning with Waugh’s great-grandfather, Arthur, the family has produced nearly 200 books and thousands of pieces of journalism; all four of Auberon Waugh’s children, including Alexander, became writers.
Evelyn Waugh was known for his witty, incisive novels of class and culture, while Auberon perfected a kind of cheeky, conservative journalism that took on the elites and the left in equal measure.
Alexander followed their leads in style and attitude, though his oeuvre ranged much more widely. What he lacked in academic or professional credentials he made up for in writerly energy and general learnedness.
Trained as a musician, he spent several years as an opera critic for The Mail on Sunday newspaper, then for The Evening Standard. He and his brother, Nat, wrote an award-winning musical, “Bon Voyage!,” which they produced in 2000 in London.
He wrote scores of book reviews for The Daily Telegraph, as well as a book on the history of time (“Time: From Micro-Seconds to Millennia; A Search for the Right Time,” 1999) and a “biography” of God (called, simply, “God,” published in 2004).
He founded Travelman, a publishing company that specialized in short stories one could fold up, like a map, and that were sold around train stations for a pound. He hosted the Bad Sex Awards, given annually to writers for excellence in overwrought descriptions of copulatory acts.
And in 2016 he took over as chair of the De Vere Society, a group committed to the proposition that “William Shakespeare” was actually a pseudonym for the real author of the Bard’s plays and sonnets, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
Though not as acerbic or sharp-elbowed as his father, Waugh relished a good literary row, and was constantly on the prowl for sparring partners, among them writers Will Self, A.N. Wilson and Max Hastings, who had fired him from his critic’s job at The Evening Standard.
When in 2013 noted literary historians Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells published “Shakespeare Beyond Doubt,” outlining the evidence for the conventional view of the famed playwright, Waugh rushed out his own book in response. He brazenly titled it “Shakespeare Beyond Doubt?”
Like his immediate forebears, Waugh was politically conservative and culturally contrarian — he ran unsuccessfully for Parliament on the Brexit Party ticket in 2019 and opposed vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic — but was usually self-deprecatory about his own positions.
“My various solutions to the problems which beset the nation are intended as suggestions to be thrown around in pubs, clubs and dining rooms,” he wrote in “Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family” (2004). “If the government adopted even a tenth of them, catastrophe would surely result.”
He was equally insouciant about his writing, and dismissive of journalists who took themselves too seriously.
“The essence of journalism is that it should stimulate its readers for a moment, possibly open their minds to some alternative perception of events,” he wrote in “Fathers and Sons,” “and then be thrown away, with all its clever conundrums, its prophecies and comminations, in the great wastepaper basket of history.”
Alexander Evelyn Michael Waugh was born Dec. 30, 1963, in the Belgravia neighborhood of London to Auberon and Teresa (Onslow) Waugh, herself an accomplished novelist and translator. His family soon moved to rural Somerset, in southwestern England, near his grandfather’s estate.
Despite the mountains of books that surrounded Alexander as a child, he did not read much, aside from his grandfather’s novels; music was his passion, and he dreamed of being a conductor. His father wanted him to become a wine merchant, in part so he could manage the family’s overflowing cellar.
He took a year off after high school to work odd jobs in Paris. He studied music at the University of Manchester, but by the time he graduated he had decided to follow his father into journalism.
He married Eliza Chancellor, whom he met in college, in 1990. Along with his sister Daisy, she survives him, as do their children, Mary, Sally and Auberon; another sister, Sophie; his brother, Nat; and two grandchildren.
He began his career as a freelance newspaper cartoonist, then worked as an opera critic between 1990 and 1996.
By the late 1990s, he was engaged in a project to edit 43 volumes of his grandfather’s books, letters and papers for Oxford University Press, a task that remained unfinished at the younger Waugh’s death.
After writing his books on time and God, he tackled his own family, digging into the diaries and correspondence left behind by his father and grandfather. The result, “Fathers and Sons,” received broad praise in Britain and the United States for its honesty and detail.
“He’s inherited the literary gene in spades, as well as a gift for very funny, coruscating prose,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times. “He has created a vivid, Dickensian portrait of his eccentric relatives and he’s done so with enormous irreverence and élan.”
Waugh followed that book with another portrait of an equally brilliant, dysfunctional clan, “The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War” (2008), in which the famously dyspeptic philosopher, Ludwig, comes across as the most normal of the lot.
One might say the same for Waugh. While previous generations of his family had no end of quirks and failings — fathers tended to beat sons; alcoholism was rampant; Auberon’s brother ended his career writing baroque pornographic novels — Alexander was by all accounts well-adjusted, at peace with the onus of his ancestors’ accomplishments and happy to keep any sibling rivalries on the tennis court.
“We’re very competitive at tennis, but it doesn’t spill over into writing at all,” he told The Independent in 2002. “But when it comes to tennis, I want to smash them all to smithereens.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
