LETTERS Hyde-Waugh, Jekyll-Bron
Sir: Pray allow me to make most energetic protest at what I consider to have been rather questionable editorial judgment on your part in having permitted Auberon Waugh (Another voice, 18 January), tak- ing as his headlined text 'On the dangers of trying to correct a wrong impression about oneself, to use up his weekly space preaching a sermon that was notable chief- ly for its baseless but base suspicions about my alleged disregard for the truth of a 3,000-word-long review of the late Ann Fleming's Letters that had appeared a whole month earlier (20 December 1985) in the TLS. After a rather jejune introduc- tory apologia for his apostasy, he came to the nub of his piece, his $6.40cts question: 'What impression, I wonder, was intended to be given by Ali Forbes's recent re- view. . . etc?', a query I am happy here to answer. Quite simply the impression that I had read the letters, their introduction, commentary and footnotes most carefully from cover to cover, blurb included, at least a dozen times, that I had known very well indeed all the principal actors in the situations they unfolded, that I had talked at length to their relicts in order to refresh my memory and that I had been forced to the reluctant conclusion that the decision to publish her singularly ill-edited and for the most part boringly backbiting letters, which possessed no literary merit and only exceedingly marginal social or historical interest, was an extraordinary act of gra- tuitous if unintentional character- assassination.
'When I was young they called me a liar,' said a recent Nobel Prize winner, 'but when I grew up they called me a writer.' In middle age Bron Waugh makes no secret of his pride in contriving to be both, or of his as yet unshaken obedience to Beaumar- chais's 'Calomniez, calomniez, il en restera toujours quelque chose!' That my friendship with Mrs Fleming had been, as Evelyn Waugh wrote of his own with Connolly, 'a long and precarious' one, running over its two score years from time to time aground on the shifting sands of her alas very labile personality, was made perfectly clear in the seven-column-long letter from me you were pleased to publish here a year ago. It was, however, even by his own abysmally low standards, quite spectacularly disingenuous of Bron to con- ceal from Spectator readers that it was in fact Mrs Fleming who first introduced herself into her letters as a 'horrid bitch', a 'shrew' and a `narky girl', so that it was she who led me up quite naturally from beyond the grave to the artistically almost inevit- able punch line of the libretto I chose to give her 'teasing Voice' and by which, butter suddenly refusing to melt in his 'fair is foul and foul is fair' mouth, he Tartuf- fishly pretended to have been so shocked. Furthermore, he knows very well indeed that it was certainly not my review that 'revealed' the quarter-century-old stale news that Ann was Hugh Gaitskell's last attachment or that Ian Fleming's shocked objection to this affair when he discovered it was not to his wife's sexual infidelity but to the evidence presented of her snobbish, power-loving seduction of the Leader of the Opposition. In the unworldly seclusion of my Alpine attic I had never heard or seen Bron's expression 'bum-fluff' before and would have supposed it to have been more likely something he might pick up from the editorial chair he is about to occupy in Beak Street, but I can assure him that after his massive 1961 heart-attack Ian, whom I had known for more than 20 years as a generous and unboring friend and of whom Bron had barely caught sight until shortly before his death, did not often feel like going a-James-Bonding by the light of the moon.
Unlike Evelyn Waugh and The Letters of Rose Macaulay (which Ann Fleming wrote 'should never have been published'), when he was asked by their publishers 'did I mind references to myself in the letters. . . I said, yes, I minded', I myself, as those 'beastly Marks twain' can confirm, made no objection whatsoever to the publication of the letter, first shown to me two years ago, from which Bron plucked with such Little Jack Horner glee what he took to be a for him juicy and for me bitter plum, suggesting that it was the 'wrong impress- ions' of me it contained that it had been 'the main concern' of my review to correct, and thus 'set the record straight'. On the contrary, I was distinctly chuffed by the many nice things, not of course quoted by Bron, about me and 'the very beautiful girl' then sharing my life that were con- tained in that letter, and even by the pleasing adjective 'endearing' with which Ian had chosen to qualify me in the passage so carefully selected.
I was particularly interested by the un- compromising admiration expressed by Ann in one of her letters for the malignity of Willie Somerset Maugham, whereas in the last communication she addressed to the Spectator before her death she had been permitted to call me a 'vindictive' reviewer for failing to praise what she eccentrically alleged to be his kindness and sweetness of character. For a three-figure sum I learned from the capo of that particular legal mafia that this libel could bring me a five-figure windfall, but my affection for Algy Cluff, your Chairman, stayed my hand, just as it has today dissuaded me from briefing another libel- lawyer at present with his flag up, the recently relegated backbencher Mr Leon Brittan. The latter's litigious appetites would, I am sure, have been much whetted by a passage from a letter, which I now leak, received by me six days before I had sight of the offending piece in your col- umns. In it, after soliciting from me future contributions for his Literary Review, Hyde-Waugh mischievously expressed the 'hope that you will not take a mortal offence over the insulting article which I plan [my italics] . . in the Spectator' while Jekyll-Bron rnitigatingly added that 'should you take the contrary view, may I just say how much I enjoy your stuff and wish you well'. The offence, as can be seen here, has been taken but it is not mortal. Furthermore, when I am tempted to regret the prayers I offered up for his survival when in 1958 he came within a whisker of butter-fingeredly fragging himself to death, I always try to remind myself of something his uncle, my dear friend Auberon Her- bert, said to me about him at a time of family grief at Combe Florey: 'Bron, as usual when he is not either saying or writing something inadmissible and un- pardonable about someone, has behaved like the perfect gentleman he au fond is.' Alastair Forbes
1837 Chateau d'Oex, Switzerland
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