Out-of-Print Book of the Month

Sadly out-of-print, but still available used, are the satirical, mostly fictional diaries of Auberon Waugh, the irascible, somewhat resentful son of novelist Evelyn Waugh, who was once described in the Guardian as “effete, drunken, snobbish, sneering, racist and sexist.” Fine compliments indeed. As a young man serving in the army, Waugh famously managed to shoot himself six times in the chest with a machine gun after losing his temper with the seemingly-jammed gun, and shaking it in anger. In his autobiography, Waugh recalled that as he lay on the ground waiting for an ambulance, he jokingly said to his platoon sergeant: “Kiss me, Chudleigh.” But “Chudleigh did not recognize the allusion and from then on treated me with extreme caution.” Waugh also achieved a certain notoriety for his wine columns in The Spectator magazine, in which he memorably likened the bouquet of a disfavored wine to that of “a bunch of dead chrysanthemums strewn on the grave of a still-born West Indian baby.”

Probably some knowledge of / interest in British politics would aid in getting some of the jokes running throughout the diaries, but not so for most of the entries, written in the genial, absurd, gluttonous persona of a mad country squire, purportedly intimate with the Queen and other luminaries (“My tea-party with the Emperor Hirohito gets off to a sticky start”), and obsessed with food:

[M]y eye is caught by a man at a neighbouring table eating pigs’ trotters, so I order a couple. This gives rise to a Great Debate about the propriety of eating pigs’ trotters at such a time in the world’s history. I reply with the traditional Thomist argument that it is the consummation of a pig’s existence to have its feet eaten in this way: if the good Lord did not intend us to eat pigs’ trotters, He would scarcely have equipped pigs with feet in the first place, since they would fatten more easily in an immobile or sausage-like posture.