And another - pseudo-Waugh?

Golddigger

My father, Henry Golding, admired the novels of Evelyn Waugh, never read another writer after them, and was heartily sorry he had ever had the misfortune to encounter the written word before them.

Of that canon, he said he liked A Handful of Dust best, really liked The Sword of Honour best, and laughed most conspicuously when reading Scoop. Nevertheless it was after a conceit at the beginning and end of the Master’s second novel, Vile Bodies, that he determined he would name his daughters. The Pentecostal angel choir, the angelic voice of Chastity, directed his wishes. He wanted four daughters, and outdoing even his teacher’s choice of abstruse virtues, decided that they should be called Integrity, Dignity, Liberality and Diligence.

After securing a wife with the correct mixture of courage and complacence to allow him to implement his scheme, Henry engendered Integrity and Dignity. My mother, Mrs. Golding, fell pregnant a third time and gave birth while re-reading Ivanhoe. Henry was ushered through the hospital, throwing all feigned male indifference to the mysterious rites of Juno aside. His excitement built as he perceived the little creature had a gloriously dark head. Integrity and Dignity were fair in a monotonous yellow way, and Henry Golding, my father, that is, must have felt translucent with pride that he could forge a dark-haired daughter also.

No doubt she would be more trouble than her placid sisters, this dark Liberality. Those half-blind kitten eyes would plague her benevolent father’s existence, but he was ready for that, expectant and gleeful at this third, precious, unruly...but, oh, what aberration. Dark Liberality proved to be Henry Golding the Younger. Furthermore, my hair grew sandier as I reached adolescence.

I am a vain person, and have wanted to write my biography for a fairly long time, in fact ever since I worked out the difference between the words “autobiography” and “biography”. But I have noticed that most autobiographers almost always make those heroic colossi, themselves, look heavy-handed, portentous and unbearable; while a secondary character is capable of annexing some of the glitter shed by even the basest of pens.

So I am writing the biography of the younger of my two sisters, Golddigger, as everyone but her father called her since some distant playground, where the social concept of Golddigging was unknown and someone called Dignity Golding demanded a little attention. Golddigger has turned out to be a most unfair name with regard to its connotations, as my sister inherited a good deal more than I did, and has spent a good deal of her time ducking rich men. These things are in the hands of the Fates.

No, this isn’t working. It’s the first-person narration that’s the problem, though I have flirted with omniscience, with that silly comment about my father’s translucent pride for example. No, all these facts and jokes and bitternesses are yoked to my tongue, and I seem a bore already and will seem a boor by the end.

The solution has struck me. I like the first-person narration well enough; why should I not narrate as Golddigger? Yes, from now on he will be a discreet enough figure, my brother, narrow-faced and sympathetic at odd moments, a distant, failed young thing with a tinge of nobility. Only I must learn to mention him less.