Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Here’s a memoir that’s not a portrait in tragedy

Friday, July 9, 1999 | 9:11 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books/magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at 259-4022 or dickens@vegas.com

Should you wish to prepare your child for a successful career in the exciting field of memoir-writing, there are some steps you can take right now.

First, decide whether you'd rather be rich and distant or dirt poor and abusive. Then you must alternately traumatize your child and lavish him or her with fierce affection, hopelessly snarling their emotional wiring. Drink to excess. Beat them. Beat or be beaten by your spouse. If at all possible, sleep with them when they're adults. These have come to be the elements of the successful modern memoir. They aren't pretty, of course, but publishers rarely cut six-figure advances for happy childhoods.

I don't know if English novelist and journalist Auberon Waugh got six figures for "Will This Do?" (Carol and Graf, $13.95), his memoir of life as the son of the noted writer Evelyn Waugh. I can't imagine that he did; the book is too jaunty, too cheeky, too lacking in harrowing accounts of childhood depredation to have earned a publisher's top dollar.

Which isn't to say that Auberon (Bron to family and friends) didn't go through some rough patches. Evelyn Waugh was a demanding and distant father, all stiff upper lip and crusty disdain, definitely not a kid person. (Maybe it comes from being a boy with a girl's name.)

The elder Waugh wrote this in his (later published) diary: "The presence of my children affects me with deep weariness and depression ... Bron is clumsy and disheveled, sly, without intellectual, aesthetic or spiritual interest. ..." Auberon was 7 at the time.

But unlike so many memoirists of our time, Auberon doesn't spend the rest of his life seeking healing, closure, therapeutic revenge or an apology. In fact, one of the most intriguing aspects of this memoir is his constant excuse-making for his father. With charming self-deprecation, Auberon portrays himself as a rotten little brat, mean-spirited and lying; his father's harsh reactions, he suggests with candid good cheer, were simply to be expected when dealing with a problem child like him.

Auberon maintains his sparkle whatever the circumstances. Of his injury in a machine gun accident while in the British military, he writes: "A split second later I realized it had started firing. No sooner had I noticed this than I observed with dismay that it was firing into my chest." I observed with dismay! That gorgeous, comic understatement has a particularly British feel; a contemporary American memoirist would no doubt have played it up like the invasion scene from "Saving Private Ryan."

But he is his father's son, after all -- and his father could be a savage, unsentimental satirist -- which means sometimes Auberon can sting. Not for nothing has he earned a rep as a curmudgeonly man of letters. Fearlessly and without a nod to prevailing pieties or sensitivities, he issues judgments on the upper, middle and lower classes, finding none of them without fault; on politicians; on foreigners; on those foolish enough to become his enemies. He seems to relish such skirmishes.

Some of the book's Britishness rang strange to me. Auberon lived one of those English lives of privilege, if not wealth, that take place in a series of houses with ancient, silly-to-American-ears names like Combe Florey. Then it was off to boarding school, a fun if academically unsuccessful stint among the swells of Oxford, and the slow, rocky process of following in Dad's literary footsteps. Can't relate. But his unfailingly entertaining writing pulls the reader through the stretches of cultural dissonance.

As with so many a memoir, Papa looms over "Will This Do?" Not as a symbol of all the hardships and healings the autobiographer has endured, but simply as a large and complicating influence on his son's life.

Auberon writes: "Nothing ever happened to me while he was alive but I mentally sub-edited into a report which would be sent to him in my next letter ... it was many years before I could break the habit of viewing every event with half an eye to the bulletin I would send to my father."

He loved the old goat, all right. But don't try that at home, raisers of prospective memoirists. It'll never make for a best seller.

Reading list

* Cosmopolitan All About Men, Summer 1999: This special issue of Cosmo seems quite unnecessary, as the main magazine seems to be all about men itself, every issue ("74 Ways to Please Him So Thoroughly He Won't Leave You for That Sexy Coworker Whose Thighs Aren't Nearly as Cottage-Cheesy as Yours").

I picked up this special edition to see if I could find my own reflection in its vision of maleness. Should've known better. By "All About Men," the editors mean "sex." In one way or another -- from the incessant columns of advice about bedroom behavior to the roundup of every state's top bachelors -- most of this issue is devoted to the horizontal bop. As if that's all we're about.

Come on. As with most guys, sex occupies a mere 85 percent of my thoughts. What about food and TV, the former preferably enjoyed while parked in front of the latter? Maybe Cosmo is saving those cliches for the fall issue.

* Experience Las Vegas, $19.95: I don't have a desk scale to confirm this, but my guess is that the hefty new Experience Las Vegas guidebook beats most other city guides in sheer tonnage. It's competitive in information delivery, as well.

Sure it includes all the touristy stuff -- hotels, attractions, gaming, restaurants, recreation, convention services. And it would certainly be handy to newcomers. But it's also long on information useful to locals. It has a good inventory of Las Vegas' cultural resources, for instance, and a nice section titled "assistance," which lists sources of aid for the handicapped, the poor, the battered, the in-need-of-legal-help. It even notes books of local interest; it belongs on that list itself.

Footnotes

* Not who they appear to be: Celebrity impersonators will join author Bea Fogelman as she signs copies of her book "Copy Cats" -- about celebrity impersonators -- at 3 p.m. Saturday in the Borders store at 2190 N. Rainbow Blvd.

* 'Bird's' brain: Former Las Vegan Bill Moody will sign copies of his new Evan Horne jazz mystery, "Bird Lives!," at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Borders at 2323 S. Decatur Blvd. Call 258-0999.

* Signing 'History': Barbara Land will sign copies of "A Short History of Las Vegas" at 7 p.m. July 27 in the Barnes & Noble Booksellers at 2191 N. Rainbow Blvd. (631-1775), and at 7 p.m. July 28 in the Borders Books and Music at 1445 W. Sunset Road (433-6222).