From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WAUGH - THE ARCH-ENEMY OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS 171536 JAN 10 By Sam Greenhill, PA News Auberon Waugh was shy, courteous, kind and gentle - in person. In print, the writer and satirist was a different animal, his acerbic views variously described as scathing, nasty, rude, racist, sexist, snobbish and brutally provocative. His death at the age of 61, in the creaky Somerset house once owned by his novelist father Evelyn Waugh, ended abruptly a one-man crusade against political correctness that made him as many friends as it did enemies. But even his enemies could often be disarmed by his effervescent wit, not that he ever cared if his views offended. A heavy smoker and wine lover, the tall, balding Waugh, known as Bron to his friends, never made a secret of his pursuit of hedonism, but he was nonetheless an incurable workaholic. He wrote for virtually every national newspaper during his journalism career and was still writing his columns, "wittily and abusively" as one observer put it, until his death. But his health had always dogged him. In an interview in The Independent only two months' ago, Waugh recalled passing out recently out in the Academy Club, below his office in Soho. Asked what caused it, he said: "No one knows. The heart, probably. I don't think I'll survive long. I can feel I'm on my way out." His doctor recently advised him to go easy on the wine, but with no fewer than nine wine cellars at his home near Taunton, Somerset, this was never a realistic proposition. The doctor did not even bother to challenge his nicotine habit, Waugh having chain-smoked his way through 40 years despite only having one lung. His other lung was lost while doing National Service in Cyprus in 1958. Attempting to unblock a jammed Browning machine gun, he made the mistake of standing in front of the weapon and shaking the muzzle, causing six bullets to be fired at point-blank range into his chest. Not only did he somehow survive but his humour was left intact. As he lay on the ground waiting for an ambulance, he remarked to his platoon sergeant: "Kiss me, Chudleigh." But "Chudleigh did not recognise the allusion and from then on treated me with extreme caution," he recalled. Waugh lived after having 12 operations in which doctors removed several ribs, a lung and his spleen. But losing his spleen never stopped him from venting it, and he made a career from sounding off about what he saw as the hypocrisy and pomposity of British society - the "power freaks and the busybodies". Born 10 weeks into the Second World War, Waugh's early years were lonely ones and he saw little of his mother, Laura, and next to nothing of his father, Evelyn, who was a soldier undergoing the experiences that would later crystallise in Brideshead Revisited. He grew into the opposite of his father in the sense that Evelyn put the best of himself into his books and saved the worst for his encounters with others. The contrast made for a difficult childhood - his father once branded his son a "great bore" and described him and his siblings as "defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humourless" - but Waugh was still said to worship his father, writing to him every week until his death in 1966. His candid 1991 autobiography, Will This Do?, is the nearest he ever came to doing down his father. Waugh was a boarder at All Hallows prep school at the age of six and went on to Downside, where he was soon heard to be making "mocking asides" during the headmaster's speech. At Christ Church College, Oxford, he performed dismally, failing numerous exams. Waugh wrote his first novel, The Foxglove Saga, in 1960 and four more followed, including Consider the Lilies, which many regarded as his best. He started in journalism at The Daily Telegraph in 1960, writing for the Peterborough column. Over the course of his career, he wrote for the Times, The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, The Independent, the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail, the New Statesman, the Daily Mirror and the Catholic Herald. Among his exploits as a reporter, he once made a joke about the prophet Muhammed which caused the British Council building in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, to be burned down by an angry mob. He wrote Private Eye's Diary for 16 years and, in latter years, he had three weekly newspaper columns, wrote about wine for The Spectator and was editor-in-chief of The Literary Review. In 1961, he married Lady Teresa, daughter of the sixth Earl of Onslow, and they had four children: Sophia, Alexander, Daisy and Nathaniel. He listed his recreations in Who's Who simply as: "Gossip." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ six bullets to be fired at point-blank range into his chest IIRC from his autobiography he took 6 hits but only three in the chest (I think the others were in the hand and each arm). Astonishing enough in itself but what was really remarkable was that he walked to the back of the armoured car before collapsing. I guess these would have been 303 or 30-06. Just proves that nothing a man can carry has 100% reliable stopping power. We should all mourn his passing. Kenneth Pantling Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ____________________________________________________________ T O P I C A -- Learn More. Surf Less. Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Topics You Choose. http://www.topica.com/partner/tag01
