Gout du risque Sir: In his only partly parricidal notice
(4 September) of Michael Davie's edition of the Waugh diaries, Mr Auberon Waugh had yet another stab, before staggering back to the drawing-board, at mastering what Jean Cocteau called Tart de savoir jusqu'au aller trop loin'. A hereditary bullying streak coupled with an almost Russian-roulettish goat du risque encouraged him to some rough teasing of the publisher to whom, as he has more than once publicly proclaimed, he is presently contracted. Where else Should charity begin than at home in Clapham or Chelsea? Mr Waugh's aim can scarcely have been to go out of his way to Please the Zigeunerbaron of 'the newly disbanded Court of King Harold'.
Mr Waugh further wrote of his 'rare visits' to White's Club and the appalling vulgarity of the fat businessmen who sit around' there. Some of your readers may have been led from this passage to assume he was a member (as all Crouchbacks were Of Bellamy's) and wondered at his having such an unclubbable bash at his fellow rnembers. They will wonder still more to learn that he is so far only a candidate, due to come up for election next year, having Permitted his name to be proposed in 1970 by a former chairman of the News of the World, one of the few national newspapers " which he has never been even briefly a smart-aleck employee. It is greatly to be feared that the blackness of his humour may Prove contagious to those other balls as they drop into the ballot box. As to the businessmen elected since his father's el. each, I am at a loss to guess whom he has mind. Rothschild, Evelyn de; RothsChild, Jacob; Rayne, Max; Rayne, Edward ? None of these are fat, however sleek°Leaded they may be, or sleep o' nights. No, °S' far the least lean and hungry of them ;.v.ould seem to be Keswick, Henry, the Kindly Nabob who is his present Maecenas at the Spectator. One hopes, as he examines l'14r Waugh's teethmarks on his generous and, that his rabies injections are up to date, As to Mr Waugh's references to myself and the TLS, I am certainly tickled by them glad, as always, to be the occasion of ,a,aghter, even when at my own expense. I be standard of modern reviewing is aelentably low', wrote Evelyn Waugh ilhearlY a quarter of a century ago. However, the Might not be especially surprised to see „ ejl-S occasionally sending out a book for o'eview by someone who 'never had any wt,her preparation for criticism than his own reading and genial tastes and never attended a literary congress' and who pos
sessed only 'the great supporting strength of loving what he loved, deeply'. That is how Evelyn Waugh wrote of his own father. Alastair Forbes c/o Times Literary Supplement, Gray's Inn Road, London WC1
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