Fond memories of Uncle Sex - by Alexander Waugh, who has sadly died at 60

To his great nephews and nieces, Alec Waugh was known as ‘Uncle Sex’ – a sobriquet he would have relished had he known of it, for he was an erotomane and an unusually candid one.

I remember him only dimly, because he lived most of his adult life abroad – in Tangier, New York and Florida – and seldom came to our house in Somerset.

He was 83 when he died in September 1981 and had been married three times. I was seventeen when told of his demise by a man in a record shop in Taunton who heard it on the radio.

I remember his shape – very small (I think under five foot three) and bald from the age of 19. His voice was like a treble recorder trying to play high notes in pianissimo. When silent (he was a good listener), he made distracting little popping noises with his lips. I can’t remember his having teeth. My father said he was like a tortoise; my mother thought him simian; I saw only the loris.

He was genial but not especially interested in children. He got on to a bad start with my mother when introducing himself to her cheerily, saying, ‘Hello, I am Alec Waugh, 65 and still interested in women.’

His first novel, The Loom of Youth, set in an English public school, was a thinly disguised account of his own experiences at Sherborne in Dorset – from which he was expelled in summer 1915 for being caught in agrante delicto; or, as he would have put it, ‘plunging himself into the feverish waters of pleasure’ with Davis minor. In one of his autobiographies, he revealed he’d been inspired to masturbation by Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and a tame, pre-war novel, Joseph in Jeopardy, by Julia Frankau.

It is hard to find in Loom, published a hundred years ago this year, what English society found so scandalous about it, but it caused a big stir. The Nation labelled it ‘revolutionary’, calling upon all parents to read and to act upon it or ‘have it on their conscience that they risk the ruin of their children’s characters and minds’. The book laid bare the shortcomings of the public school system, just when its old boys, the officer class, were leading the troops to their deaths in the trenches.

There is nothing overtly sexual in it, but senior boys paired with younger boys and everybody knew what was going on. The only dishonour, the ‘one unforgivable sin’, was to be found out.

The Loom was followed by more than fifty books over a long, successful career, each slightly raunchier than the last. I found among his papers at Boston University a sporting little note, in his tiny handwriting, concerning one Phyllis Finch, a girlfriend from 1922. ‘I kept a list of the times we made love – 84. I imagine I made love more often with her than any other woman until I met Virginia Sorensen, 32 years later.’

The publication of his Caribbean novel, Island in the Sun – featuring an adulterous, black man-white woman liaison – was his second great succès de scandale in the mid-50s. Producers of the film adaptation refused to allow Joan Fontaine and Harry Belafonte to kiss on screen. But, from that moment, Alec was rich and, according to his younger brother Evelyn, never again drew sober breath. Wealth allowed him to live part-time at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, where he took expensive potency drugs (recommended to him by Somerset Maugham) and visited a pornographic cinema every day.

Evelyn wrote to Ann Fleming in June 1960, ‘My brother Alec came here for the first time last week. He has fallen victim to aphrodisiac injections and is leading a life that is not seemly at his age.’

Evelyn had been reading Fuel for the Flame [1960], when he wrote to his brother, ‘Dear Alec, It was extremely kind of you to send me your new novel, which this time has arrived safely. I have so far read only 50 pages but there have been five f**ks already. I look forward to many more.’

I have a copy of his 1970 novel, A Spy in the Family, inscribed to my father Auberon Waugh.

I purloined it from our library at Combe Florey and was rusticated when my housemaster found me, in a lunch break, commanding two boys to assume the postures of the lesbians on page 71:

‘They had swung into reverse, their knees drawn close under their chins. Lying on their right sides, Myra’s left foot pressed against Anna’s shoulder blade; Anna, her left leg drawn under Myra’s, pressed her foot under Myra’s arm; her left hand, from beneath her leg, was clasped around the small of Myra’s back. Myra’s own left hand was curved between Anna’s thighs. Their breasts were held apart by a confusion of knees and elbows, but each was completely, intimately exposed to the other’s darting tongue.’

Alec was proud of Evelyn. In 1957, the Daily Express claimed Alec was more successful than his brother. Evelyn sued. Under oath, Alec gamely conceded Evelyn was a much greater novelist. Thanks to this self-e acing testimony, the court awarded Evelyn £5,000 in damages. Alec, wearing a foulard scarf and a stripy blazer, left the court before the verdict was announced, cheerfully returning to his busy sex-life in Tangier.