Friends can make a good death great
Friday, 19 January 2001
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It is said that, when it became clear that Auberon Waugh was dying, his close friends were invited by the family to his bedside. Pals and kindred spirits - Richard Ingrams, AN Wilson, Alan Watkins and the like - travelled down to the West Country to say a final farewell to him.
It is said that, when it became clear that Auberon Waugh was dying, his close friends were invited by the family to his bedside. Pals and kindred spirits - Richard Ingrams, AN Wilson, Alan Watkins and the like - travelled down to the West Country to say a final farewell to him.
This gathering of sorrowful, eminent men conjures up the sort of scene that Waugh, in his heyday as a Private Eye diarist, might have served up with his own brand of irresistibly heartless comedy. There is also, to those of us of a morbid disposition, something rather enviable about it.
Personally, when it comes to my deathbed scene, I would hope that some of my family would take time out of their busy schedules to make an appearance, but my friends might be something of a problem. They would not travel together because most of them would not be acquainted with one another. A few, awkward, hushed introductions would have to be made over my prostrate body. Among some of them, there might be mild surprise that I had been close to X or Y, or that they had had time for me.
It must be quite something, this business of having a set, a group of friends who have grown up together and have remained in touch into old age as, by all accounts, Waugh did. There would be shared memories, the fascination of seeing at close hand how people change through their lives, a social framework which must put one's own evolution into some sort of context.
I've never managed it myself, and now I suppose I never will. My friends, wonderful people as they are, are a disparate and various bunch. Few have lasted with me the distance from childhood or even youth into middle age. It is not just that our careers and personal lives have followed a shambolic, zigzagging course but that, alarmingly, our characters seem to have too.
Having a set of friends presumably requires a certain consistency in one's life. Not only can I not recognise most of the friends I had at Cambridge, but I can hardly recognise myself from those days. On the rare occasions when we meet up, we talk to one another guardedly, like strangers who are in possession of dangerous secrets.
As it happens, Valentine Guinness's new play Helping Harry, which opened at the Jermyn Street Theatre this week, explores precisely this theme of long-term friendship, bringing together a group of male contemporaries who have known each other for 20 years since they were at university.
In order to help one of their number whose life is on the skids, they gather for what turns out to be an eventful and revealing reunion. One of the ideas behind the play - which incidentally is as funny and thought-provoking an evening as is currently to be found in the West End - is that the lives of these men have largely been defined by the friendships, secrets and shared experiences which date back to those university years.
I thought of Helping Harry while reading the obituaries for Waugh. Several traced his superlative ease as a comic journalist, his ability to mock and make one laugh at his outrageously unfair fantasies without ever seeming rancorous or nasty himself, back to his father, but it seem to me that to have a brilliant, successful, cold writer father was a handicap rather than an advantage.
Perhaps there was a more direct connection between the confidence that enabled him to create a wild fictional persona under his own name - the hilarious, red-faced grotesque that made the Private Eye diaries such a masterpiece - and his gift for friendship.
The wit and savagery faded after he joined The Daily Telegraph but, according to one obituary, Waugh remained "a great wit to his friends".
It is not a bad tribute.
terblacker@aol.com
