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Grab life by
Or, a surrealist in tweed
the barrel like Auberon Waugh
Benjamin Errett Mar 4 18

It can be challenging to choose the same profession as your parent, especially if your parent
is acclaimed as one of the best in the eld. But you know what’s even more challenging?
Accidentally shooting yourself in the chest nine times with a machine gun.

Auberon Waugh bore each of these indignities with good humour and charm, which
underlines the stoic’s argument that it’s not what happens to you but rather how you
respond.

“My rst reaction to shooting myself in this way was not one of sorrow or despair so much
as mild exhilaration,” he wrote of the mis re, which occurred during his military service as
he shook the barrel of the Browning gun to nd out why it wasn’t working. “The incident
deprived me of a lung, a spleen, several ribs and a nger but nothing else.”

All our sentences should have buts like that one. Waugh recovered, more or less, and went
on to a long career as a writer in what he termed the “vituperative arts.” 

And what was it like to be the son of Evelyn Waugh, one of the century’s most acclaimed
authors and a father who won no parenting prizes even by wartime British standards?
Auberon wrote that “a lot of sons of famous fathers seem to be upset by the circumstance,
even destroyed by it, but I don’t think they need be. People are interested to meet you when
they would not be interested otherwise, and when they do meet you they already know
something about you, so you don’t have to start from nothing in creating your own image.”

Consider the contortions of optimism required for a son to write this sentence about his
father:

“He was frequently violent and aggressive even when in boisterous mood, it is true, but many
cases of alleged cruelty which have been reported to me seem no more than a pathetic attempt
to create humour and spread a little sunshine into the lives of vain, conceited and humourless
men by inviting them to laugh at themselves and prove they are not quite as dreadful as they
seem.”

This, for Auberon Waugh, was the point of it all: Creating humour and spreading a little
sunshine, o en by irritating dreadful people.

He wrote decades of columns and diaries to this end, ostensibly conservative but always
surrealist. It is “the essence of good journalism that it should be read and thrown away,” he
wrote, and was deeply suspicious of anyone attempting to build an empire.

He hated all politicians, arguing that “the urge to power is a personality disorder in its own
right” and that “Of course they are mentally ill, or they would not feel this terrible urge to
be important and boss other people around in the rst place.” He trusted the instincts of
the British people, though he also maintained that his ideal form of government was “a
junta of Belgian ticket inspectors.”

His advice for his fellow writers was really his advice on life:

“Literature is a minority interest, like budgerigar breeding, catered for by minority magazines,
kept alive by small groups of enthusiasts at ill-attended meetings in small libraries and halls.
 When its followers come to realise that there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, they
may become politer, friendlier people and lead happier lives as a result.”

And his argument for the monarchy, in which he praised the “serious, conscientious
German housewife, with her relentless common sense,” sprung from the same belief:

“By performing elaborate acts of self-abasement before these strange, humourless foreigners in
our midst, we all learn to laugh at our ourselves as well as at each other and at our
institutions.”

Auberon Waugh was able to laugh at himself immediately a er shooting himself. Wounded
and winded, he turned to his commanding o cer and croaked, “Kiss me, Chudleigh,” an
allusion to Admiral Horatio Nelson’s last-ish words at Trafalgar. (“Chudleigh did not spot
the historical reference, and treated me with some caution therea er,” Waugh recalled.)

In a more roundabout, tweedy, and conservative (in other words, British) way, Auberon
Waugh lived his life by John Lewis’s dictum to make good trouble. Or as Waugh phrased it:

“There are countless horrible things happening all over the world and horrible people
prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or de ect us from our
sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible.”

Quick quips; lightning

“Gravity is the joy of imbeciles.”
— Montesquieu 

“The wrong sort of people are always in power because they would not be in power if
they were not the wrong sort of people.”
— Jon Wynne-Tyson

“The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from inviting it to dinner.”
— Margaret Hasley

Errett@gmail.com ✓
Year of the Potato
In the last year of lockdown, have you ever felt:

Exhausted
Overwhelmed
Tired of cooking because didn’t you just make lunch and now they’re saying it’s dinner
Sick of looking at screens
Er
That’s it?

Of course you have. And that’s why Let The Potato Rest is the O cial GWQ Meme of the
pandemic lockdown. This is a joke that grew out of a WikiHow article on how to
microwave a baked potato. Imagine, for a moment, the set of circumstances that would lead
a person to such an article. Then imagine that person reading the following step and having
a ash of empathy:
“Let the potato rest for ve minutes” became an all-purpose reaction to the universe, be it
the demanding boss or the alarm clock. It’s simultaneously grandiose to refer to yourself in
the third person and belittling to self-identify as a stem tuber. We are all potatoes now.

Matt.
@MattTheBrand

when i have to do two tasks in one day

 February 17th 2021

8,021 Retweets 33,323 Likes

Jack Saundrs ❤ 🖤
@jack_saundrs

I may be losing it because "let the potato rest for 5 minutes" feels like a
profound rallying cry for humanity rn

Matt. @MattTheBrand
when i have to do two tasks in one day https://t.co/7eUXND14I1

February 19th 2021

74 Retweets 371 Likes

Well, spud, that was Get Wit Quick No. 88, your weekly elaborate act of self-abasement. Evelyn
Waugh was featured back in No. 19. I remembered this line from Patricia Lockwood, GWQ No. 87:
“White people, who had the political educations of potatoes—lumpy, unseasoned, and biased
toward the Irish—were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice.” Auberon Waugh’s
writings are nicely compiled in the book Kiss Me, Chudleigh. My writings were merely piled in the
book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. There is no pot of gold at the end of
the rainbow, but there is a tappable ♥ below.
 18
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