Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh ( ) (28 October 1903
– 10 April 1966) was an English writer, best known for such darkly
humorous and satirical novels as
Decline and Fall,
Vile Bodies,
Scoop,
A
Handful of Dust, and
The
Loved One, as well as for serious works, such as
Brideshead Revisited
and the
Sword of Honour
trilogy that clearly manifest his Catholic background. Many of
Waugh's novels depict British aristocracy and high society, which
he satirises but to which he was also strongly attracted. In
addition, he wrote short stories, three biographies, and the first
volume of an unfinished
autobiography.
His travel literature and his extensive diaries and correspondence
have also been published.
Waugh's works were very successful with the reading public and he
was widely admired as a humorist and as a prose stylist, but as his
social conservatism and religiosity became more overt, his works
grew more controversial with critics. In his notes for an
unpublished review of
Brideshead Revisited,
George Orwell declared that Waugh was "about
as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions."
Martin Amis found that the
snobbery of
Brideshead was "a failure of
imagination, an artistic failure."
On the other hand, American
literary critic Edmund
Wilson pronounced Waugh "the only first-rate comic genius that
has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw." Time magazine, in a 1966 obituary,
summarised his oeuvre by claiming that Waugh had "developed a
wickedly hilarious yet fundamentally religious assault on a century
that, in his opinion, had ripped up the nourishing taproot of
tradition and let wither all the dear things of the world."
Biography
Early life
Born in London, Evelyn Waugh was the second son of noted editor and
publisher
Arthur Waugh.
He was brought up in
upper middle class circumstances, although his parents' address in
Golders
Green
embarrassed him. He attended Heath Mount
School
. His only sibling was his older brother
Alec, who also became a writer.
Both his
father and his brother had been educated at Sherborne
, an English public
school, but Alec had been asked to leave during his final and
he had then published a controversial novel, The Loom of Youth, which touched on
the matter of homosexual relationships among students and which was
otherwise deemed injurious to Sherborne's reputation. The
school therefore refused to take Evelyn, and his father sent him to
Lancing College, an institution of
lesser social prestige with a strong
High
Church Anglican character.
This circumstance would rankle with the status-conscious Evelyn for
the rest of his life but may have contributed to his interest in
religion, even though at Lancing he lost his childhood faith and
became an
agnostic.
After
Lancing, he attended Hertford College, Oxford
as a history scholar. There, Waugh neglected
academic work and was known as much for his artwork as for his
writing. He also threw himself into a vigorous social scene
populated by
aesthetes such as
Harold Acton,
Brian Howard and
David Talbot Rice, and members of the
British aristocracy and the upper classes.
His social life at Oxford would provide the background for some of
his most characteristic later writing. Asked if he had competed in
any sport for his college, Waugh famously replied "I drank for
Hertford."
It has been claimed through diary entries and letters that he had
relationships with other men during his college years, but may have
ultimately been
bisexual. (In his diary
Waugh refers in retrospect to "my first homosexual love".) During
what has been described as an "acute homosexual phase" between 1921
and 1924, at least three relationships have been suggested, with
Richard Pares, Alistair Graham and
Hugh Patrick Lygon. These may have helped
shape his future works .
Waugh's final exam results qualified him only for a
third-class degree. He was prevented from
remaining in residence for the extra term that would have been
required of him and he left Oxford in 1924 without taking his
degree.
In
1925 he taught at a private school in Wales
. In
his autobiography, Waugh claims that he attempted suicide at the
time by swimming out to sea, only to turn back after being stung by
jellyfish. He was later dismissed from another teaching post for
attempting to seduce the matron, telling his father he had been
dismissed for "inebriation".
He was briefly apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and afterwards
maintained an interest in
marquetry, to
which his novels have been compared in their intricate inlaid
subplots.
Waugh also provided the artwork for many of
his books having been greatly inspired by a chance meeting with
Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali at the Slade School of
Fine Art
in Bloomsbury. According to Picasso, Waugh
attempted to remove Dali's trademark moustache, suspecting it a
surrealist joke. Dali was furious and
never spoke to Waugh again; Waugh took his revenge by caricaturing
the artist in a later novel (
Brideshead Revisited, where he
portrayed him as Catelli, 'a gauche Spanish artisan ... with a
less than attractive limp'.)
Waugh also worked as a journalist before he published his first
novel in 1928,
Decline and
Fall. The title is from
Gibbon, but whereas the Georgian historian
charted the bankruptcy and dissolution of the
Roman Empire, Waugh's was a witty account of
quite a different sort of dissolution, following the career of the
harmless Paul Pennyfeather, a student of
divinity, as he is
accidentally expelled from Oxford for indecency ("I expect you'll
be becoming a schoolmaster, sir," says the College porter to Paul,
"That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down
for indecent behaviour") and enters into the worlds of
schoolmastering, high society, and the
white slave trade. Other novels about England's
"
bright young things" followed, and all
were well received by both critics and the general public.
Waugh entered into a brief, unhappy marriage in 1928 to the Hon.
Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner, youngest daughter of
Lord
Burghclere and Lady Winifred Herbert. Their friends called them
"He-Evelyn" and "She-Evelyn." Gardner's infidelity would provide
the background for Waugh's novel
A
Handful of Dust, but her husband had made little effort to
make her happy, choosing to spend much time on his own. The
marriage ended in divorce in 1930.
Waugh converted to Catholicism and, after his marriage was annulled
by the Church, he married Laura Herbert, a Catholic, daughter of
Aubrey Herbert, and a cousin of his
first wife (they were both granddaughters of
Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of
Carnarvon). This marriage was successful, lasting the rest of
his life, producing seven children, one of whom, Mary, died in
infancy. His son
Auberon, named after
Laura's brother, followed in his
footsteps as a writer and journalist.
The 1930s
Waugh's fame continued to grow between the wars, based on his
satires of contemporary
upper class English society, written in prose
that was seductively simple and elegant. His style was often
inventive (a chapter, for example, would be written entirely in the
form of a dialogue of telephone calls). His conversion to Roman
Catholicism in 1930 was a watershed in his life and his writing. It
elevated Catholic themes in his work, and aspects of his deep and
sincere faith, both implicit and explicit, can be found in all of
his later work.
Waugh's conversion to Catholicism was widely discussed in London
society and newspapers in September 1930. In response to the
gossip, Waugh made his own contribution in article entitled,
"Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me." It wasn't about
ritual, said Waugh, nor about submission to the views of others.
The essential issue, he believed, was making a choice between
Christianity or chaos. Waugh saw in Europe's increasing materialism
a major decline in what he felt created Western Civilization in the
first place. "It is no longer possible ... ," he wrote, "to accept
the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the
supernatural basis upon which it is based." He added that
Catholicism was the "most complete and vital form" of Christianity.
His faith and his conviction persisted throughout all the chapters
of his life.
At the same time (and perhaps because it integrated both his
beliefs and his natural "dark humour"),
Black Mischief and
A Handful of Dust contain episodes of the most savage
farce. In some of his fiction Waugh derives comedy from the cruelty
of mischance; ingenuous characters are subject to bizarre
calamities in a universe that seems to lack a shaping and
protecting God, or any other source of order and comfort.
The period
between the wars also saw extensive travels around the Mediterranean
and Red
Sea
, Spitsbergen
, Africa (most famously
Ethiopia) and South America. Sections of the numerous
travel books which resulted are often cited as among the best
writing in this genre. A compendium of Waugh's favourite travel
writing has been issued under the title
When The Going Was
Good.
Second World War
With the advent of the
Second World
War, Waugh used "friends in high places", such as
Randolph Churchill — son of
Winston — to find him a service
commission. Though 36 years old with poor eyesight, he was
commissioned in the
Royal Marines in
1940. Few can have been less suited to command troops. He lacked
the common touch. Though personally brave, he did not suffer fools
gladly. There was some concern that the men under his command might
shoot him instead of the enemy. Promoted to captain, Waugh found
life in the Marines dull.
Waugh
participated in the failed attempt to take Dakar
from the
Vichy French in late 1940.
Following a joint exercise with
No.
3 Commando (Army), he applied to join
them and was accepted.
Waugh took part in an ill-fated commando raid on the coast of
Libya
. As special assistant to the famed commando
leader
Robert Laycock, Waugh showed
conspicuous bravery during the fighting in
Crete in 1941, supervising the evacuation of
troops while under attack by
Stuka dive
bombers.
Later, Waugh was placed on extended leave and later reassigned to
the
Royal Horse Guards. In the
preface to the revised edition of
Brideshead Revisited he
writes,
"In December 1943 I had the good fortune when parachuting to
incur a minor injury which afforded me a rest from military
service.
This was extended by a sympathetic commanding officer, who let
me remain unemployed until June 1944 when the book was
finished.
—Waugh, Preface to Brideshead Revisited, Combe Florey
1959
He was recalled for a military/diplomatic mission to
Yugoslavia in 1944 at the request of his old
friend Randolph Churchill. He and Churchill narrowly escaped
capture or death when the Germans undertook
Operation Rösselsprung, and paratroops and
glider-borne storm troops attacked the
partisans' headquarters where they
were staying. During his time in Yugoslavia Waugh produced a
formidable report detailing
Tito's persecution
of Catholics and the clergy. It was "buried" by Foreign Secretary
Anthony Eden as being largely
irrelevant.
Some of Waugh's best-loved and best-known novels come from this
period.
Brideshead Revisited (1945) is an evocation of a
vanished pre-war England. It's an extraordinary work which in many
ways has come to define Waugh and his view of his world. It not
only painted a rich picture of life in England and at Oxford
University at a time (before World War II) which Waugh himself
loved and embellished in the novel, but it allowed him to share his
feelings about his Catholic faith, principally through the actions
of his characters. The book was applauded by his friends, not just
for an evocation of a time now — and then — long gone, but also for
its examination of the manifold pressures within a traditional
Catholic family. It was a huge success in Britain and in the United
States. Decades later a television adaptation (1981) achieved
popularity and acclaim in both countries, and around the world; a
film adaptation has been released in 2008. Waugh revised the novel
in the late 1950s, saying that he wrote the novel during the grey
privations of the latter war years and later found parts of it
"distasteful on a full stomach".
Much of Waugh's wartime experience is reflected in the
Sword of
Honour trilogy. It consists of three
novels,
Men at Arms (1952),
Officers and
Gentlemen (1955) and
Unconditional Surrender (1961),
which loosely parallel his wartime experiences. Critics felt that
these were some of the best books written about the Second World
War. Many of his portraits are unforgettable, and often show
striking resemblances to noted real personalities. Waugh biographer
Christopher Sykes, felt that the
fire-eating officer in the
Sword of Honour trilogy,
Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook, "...bears a very strong resemblance
to..." Lieutenant-General Sir
Adrian Carton de Wiart VC, a friend of the author's father-in-law.
Waugh was familiar with Carton de Wiart through the club to which
he belonged. The fictional commando leader, Tommy Blackhouse, is
based on Major-General Sir
Robert
Laycock, a real-life commando leader and friend of Waugh's,
whom he greatly admired.
Later years
The
period after the war saw Waugh living with his family in the
West Country, first at Piers Court, and
from 1956 onwards, at Combe Florey
, Somerset
, where he enjoyed the life of a country gentleman
and continued to write. (Combe Florey was bought from his
widow by their son
Auberon.) Waugh was
highly critical of
Vatican II's 1960s
changes to his beloved
Tridentine
liturgy, which he in part loved for what he saw as its
timelessness. (Cf.
Bitter Trial by Waugh and ed. by S.
Reid)
For a
base in London, he was a member of White's
and the St James's
Club in Piccadilly
.
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) is a thinly-veiled
fictionalisation of Waugh's own real-life experience of
alcoholic hallucinosis. This short
but disturbing malady was almost certainly caused by alcoholism but
Waugh preferred to blame the interaction between alcohol and
sleeping medications. Unlike
delirium
tremens, this condition induces auditory hallucinations rather
than visual ones, which in turn led Waugh to acute
paranoia. The illness was remedied once medication
had been stopped and alcohol intake ceased or became moderate.
During this period he wrote
Helena (1953), a fictional
account of the Empress Helena and the finding of the True Cross,
which he regarded as his best work.
Waugh's health declined in later life. He put on weight, and the
sleeping draughts he continued to take, combined with alcohol,
cigars and little exercise, weakened his health. His productivity
also declined, and his output was uneven. His last published work,
Basil Seal Rides Again, revisiting the characters of his
earliest satirical works, did not meet critical or popular
approval, but is still read today. At the same time, he continued
as a journalist and was well received.
He appeared in two television interviews with the BBC in the early
1960s, the only time his appearance was recorded publicly, during
which the interviewers sought to corner him as an anachronistic
figure. He overcame them, particularly in the second interview with
novelist
Elizabeth Jane Howard
on the
Monitor programme in
1964. (The other interview was on
John Freeman's
Face to Face series broadcast
on 18 June 1960.) An earlier radio interview on the
BBC Home Service in 1953 was somewhat less
convivial.
Waugh's diaries, published in the 1970s, were widely acclaimed. His
correspondence with lifelong friends, such as
Nancy Mitford, is still published today. He is
a fruitful source for biographers; three major works have been
produced since
Christopher Sykes's
friendly and familiar account of Waugh's life was published in the
1970s.
Evelyn Waugh died, aged 62, on 10 April 1966, after attending a
Latin Mass on Easter Sunday. He suffered a heart attack at his
home, Combe Florey. His estate at probate was valued at £20,068.
This did not include the value of his lucrative copyrights, which
Waugh put in a trust (humorously named the 'Save the Children
Fund') for his children. He is buried at Combe Florey,
Somerset.
Critical reception
The American conservative commentator
William F. Buckley, Jr. found in Waugh "the
greatest English novelist of the century" (though Waugh was
dismissive of Buckley), while Buckley's liberal counterpart
Gore Vidal called him "our time's first
satirist." Even the "overt racism" of his African writings has been
forgiven by Ethiopian luminaries because his humour, satire,
cruelty and wit were spread even-handedly, attacking the foibles of
his own country at least as vigorously as those of foreigners. In
Cultural Amnesia, the critic
Clive James called him "the supreme
writer of English prose in the twentieth century, even though so
many of the wrong people said so."
List of works
Novels
Short Story Collections
- Mr Loveday's Little Outing: And Other Sad Stories
(1936)
- Work Suspended: And Other Stories (1943)
- The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)
- Selected Works (1977)
- Charles Ryder's Schooldays: And Other Stories
(1982)
- The Complete Short Stories (1997)
- The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (1998)
Travel writing
- Labels (1930): An account of Waugh's cruise around the
Mediterranean.
- Remote People (1931): Waugh's journey to Addis Ababa
at the time of the coronation of Haile Selassie.
- Ninety-Two Days (1934): Waugh's journey through
British Guiana.
- Waugh In Abyssinia (1936): Waugh's second travel book
in Africa.
- Robbery Under Law (1939):
Waugh's travels around Mexico in 1938.
- When The Going Was Good (1946): A selection of Waugh's
earlier travel works.
- A Tourist In Africa (1960).
Biography
Autobiography and memoirs
- A Little
Learning (1964)
- The diaries
of Evelyn Waugh (1976) - edited by Michael Davie.
- The Letters of Evelyn Waugh by Evelyn Waugh and Mark
Amory (Editor), London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 1st edition (4
Sep 1980), ISBN 0297776576
Biographies of Waugh
References
- http://forvo.com/word/evelyn_waugh/
- Quoted in Christopher Hitchens, "The Permanent
Adolescent," The Atlantic Monthly, May
2003
- Quoted in Jim Holt, "On Writers and Writing; Decline and Fall and Rise
Again," New York Times, 31 Aug. 2003,
- " 'Never Apologize, Never Explain', The Art of Evelyn Waugh,"
The New Yorker, 4 March 1944, reprinted in Classics
and Commercials, A Literary Chronicle of the Forties, by
Edmund Wilson, page 140, Vintage Books, New York, 1962
- Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966): The Beauty of his
Malice, obituary in Time, Apr. 22, 1966
- What would Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell
think?, Christine Odone, The Times, 5 August 2008 (accessed 15
May 2009)
- Heath Mount School website
- The Waughs: Fathers and Sons in BBC Four
Documentaries online (accessed 22 March 2008)
- Paula Byrne, 'Mad World: Evelyn Waugh And The Secrets of
Brideshead', 2009
- Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Sykes
- Auberon Waugh, Will this do?, p206 Century/random
house, London 1991
- WAUGH, Evelyn Arthur St John in Who Was Who
1897–2006 online (accessed 10 January 2008)
- The Oxford Companion to British Literature
- "It's the best written; the most interesting theme." Evelyn
Waugh, appearing on the BBC television "Face to Face" interview
with John Freeman, 18 June 1960.
- "Evelyn Waugh in his own Words - Waugh’s interview
with Elizabeth Jane Howard", Partial transcript of the
Monitor programme 1964.
- Mark Brown "Waugh at the BBC: 'the most ill-natured interview
ever' on CD after 55 years", The Guardian, 15 April
2008. Retrieved on 15 April 2008.
- "Evelyn Waugh, R.I.P.", National Review, May 3, 1966 [1]
- "Evelyn Waugh," New York Times Book Review, 7 January
1962, reprinted in Rocking the Boat, by Gore Vidal, pages
235-243, Little
Brown, Boston, 1962
- [2] BBC World Service "Anniversary Waugh of
words" 23 April 2003
External links
(Waugh was deeply critical of modernity and notions
of rational progress)
.
funeral business. Film made in 1965.
Wikis
Quiz
Facts
Map
Search