Will This Do? - Softcover

Waugh, Auberon

3.76

91 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786706392 ISBN 13: 9780786706396

Publisher: Carroll & Graf, 1999

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A resounding chorus of "Yes, it will!" greeted the long-awaited American publication of the memoirs of the eldest son of Evelyn Waugh and the best-loved practitioner of what he calls "the vituperative arts" in Britain. As enjoyable and outrageous an autobiography as the best of his father's fiction, Will This Do? takes the reader from Waugh's difficult childhood, through his education first at Oxford and then Fleet Street, to his stingingly funny column at the libelous Private Eye.

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About the Author:

Auberon Waugh is the editor of London's Literary Review and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph. He lives in England.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A minor, triflingly amusing memoir by the British journalist best known for being Evelyn Waugh's son. Though Waugh (The Last Word, 1980, etc.) has carved out a respectable niche as the editor of Londons Literary Review, has contributed to a number of other English publications, has even cranked out the occasional small book, he has not led the kind of life that usually justifies a memoir. He failed out of Oxford, accidentally shot himself in the army, then embarked on a literary/journalistic life, just this side of hackdom, with middling success. His account is all too typical of the gently retributive, dryly amusing, name-dropping memoir cranked out on the other side of the Atlantic, but it doesnt travel well. Unless youre a rabid anglophile, the passing squawks and the squabbles of the British literary world look, at several thousand miles removed, a lot like microbes fighting. And why do British memoirists insist on going on and on about their school days, as if the first 18 years were the only ones that mattered? Fans of Waugh pre, will find some worthwhile nuggets here. A letter to Nancy Mitford typifies his peevish, snitty attitude toward his children: ``My two eldest children are here and a great bore . . . the boy [Auberon] lives for pleasure and is thought a great wit by his contemporaries. I have tried him drunk & I have tried him sober.'' Waugh fils, fortunately, is made of sterner stuff, laving his childhood, indeed his life, with an appealing, gimlet-eyed acerbity. He has inherited much of his fathers gift for invective, and his account of the numerous libel actions hes been involved with (Englands libel laws notoriously favor the plaintiff) are some of the better non-Evelyn parts of this book. Will this do? Perhaps not quite. -- Copyright �1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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