PERSPECTIVES The World of Evelyn Waugh The late Edmund Wilson, America's foremost critic, once hailed Britain's Evelyn Waugh as "the only first rate comic genius in English since George Bernard Shaw." Waugh's more serious work, including Brideshead Revisited and his war trilogy Sword of Honour, has steadily gained renown in this country. Yet until last fall, when they were re-issued here to coincide with the publication of his diary, Waugh's early comic novels were hard to find in America. Here, we present Kathleen Darman's profile of Waugh, followed by several excerpts from those penetratingly funny early books. by Kathleen Emmet Barman A comic, detached ambivalence lies cism. (Still, he found the Church's at the heart of Evelyn Waugh's work. Index of forbidden books a "conven- He immersed himself in the glitter- ient excuse for not reading Sartre.") ing, sordid swirl of prewar England He came out of a Victorian middle- but at the same time believed it class family but chose the high life would be "very wicked indeed to do among the titled rich, the merely anything to fit a boy for the modem rich, and the leisured indigent-most world." He could be generous, chari- of whom he both loved and deplored. table, and kind, but in his novels he His first published essay was a de- clearly, if genially, detests Ameri- fense of Cubism; but in the end, as he cans, blacks, peers, machines, Eng- conceded in his autobiographical lishmen, Jews, everything. He meted The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, "his out prejudice equitably, outrage- strongest tastes were negative. He ously, irresistibly. abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbath- He hated Communism, existen- ing, and jazz-everything, in fact, tialism, Liberalism, and at times, al- that had happened in his lifetime." though a devout Catholic, Catholi- This mix of intimacy and detach- The Wilson QuarterlyISpring 1978 162 PERSPECTIVES: DARMAN Decline and Fall was behind him, Vile Bodies yet to come, when Evelyn Waugh, aged 26, sat for this portrait by Henry Lamb. He was like a "prancing faun," recalled Oxford friend Harold Acton, "thinly disguised by conventional apparel." But Waugh switched disguises-the reckless dandy, the pious Christian, the crusty Tory- several times before his death in 1966. The Wils0i7 Quarii3riyiSprms, 1978 163 PERSPECTIVES: DARMAN ment made Waugh, as Edmund Wil- preconceptions of "a quintessential son put it, "the only first rate comic Oxford which I knew and loved from genius in English since George Ber- afar and intended to find." He was nard Shaw." Waugh could not have not disappointed. captured the world of fashionably Near the end of his second term, he decadent, upper-crust England if he joined the Hypocrites Club, a center had been born into it. He had not. of hard drinking, dandyism, and Ox- And Wilson ("Is he an American?" ford high life. Here Waugh found the sniffed Waugh), one of the first critics Oxford he was seeking; the world of to take Waugh seriously, recognized the "Bollinger Club" he would re-cre- this as an asset rather than a liabil- ate in Decline and Fall; the "smooth ity. Approaching the London social young men of uncertain tastes" scene as an outsider, Waugh had to whose backgrounds were drama- re-create it for himself. tically, seductively unlike his own; Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh was exotics like aesthete Harold Acton; born in London in 1903. His father, aristocratic dandies like Hugh Ly- Arthur Waugh, was a publisher of gon, a model for Sebastian Flyte in some note who described himself as Brideshead Revisited. "incorrigibly Victorian," though he Waugh was not a leader in this lived until 1943. group; he was too poor, too socially Reacting against what he per- insecure, too ambivalent in his feel- ceived as his father's emotionalism ings about "modernity." But he was and "weakness," Evelyn cultivated a an enthusiastic follower, relishing all different style. Even as a schoolboy, that Oxford offered him-from The he was ostentatiously aggressive, at Waste Land to drunkenness and, times a downright bully. for a time, homosexuality. Only aca- Despite his parents' rather tepid demic work failed to excite him and Anglicanism, Waugh early showed he never received a degree. But he did an unusual interest in religion and receive access to the "hot springs of was sent to Lancing, a public school anarchy" in his nature, which his up- with pronounced High-Church ten- bringing had undervalued and ig- dencies. He was a reasonably con- nored. tented and, his diaries suggest, sur- As the '20s waned, the dandies' prisingly conventional schoolboy, world shifted from Oxford to Lon- but in his last years at Lancing there don, and the circle expanded to in- was a change. At school he was rebel- clude younger, more daring ele- lious; at home, openly hostile toward ments-the Bright Young People of his father. Vile Bodies, whose parties were The real break came at Oxford. theatrical productions, lavishly exe- Waugh went up to Hertford College cuted in full costume. Condemned by in 1922 and spent his first two terms the newspapers as the epitome of quietly. But he had formed romantic reckless modern youth, the Bright Kathleen Emmet Daman, 35, is completing a critical study of Evelyn Waugh's life and work. Born in Boston, she received a B.A. in history and literature from Radcliffe (1964) and an M.A. from Tufts (1971). She has taught at Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia) and American University in Washington, D.C. The Wilson QzianerlvlSp~e,1978 164 PERSPECTIVES: DARMAN Young People obligingly turned note in the form of some appropriate London into an immense children's verses from Euripides. This, too, playground. Their parties and proved unsuccessful in a wonderfully hoaxes were duly reported in the Waugh-like way; a jellyfish stung gossip columns and consumed with him on the leg, and the pain drove relish and indignation. Such heavy him back to shore. investments in fantasy and frippery By 1927, however, Waugh had were foredoomed; in Vile Bodies, fallen in love with Evelyn Gardner. Waugh makes the frailty and unreal- Her mother, Lady Burclere, was not ity of his so-called Bright Young receptive to the prospect of an im- Things very clear. Even at Oxford he poverished schoolteacher as a son- realized that the aristocracy was in-law, so Waugh settled down to more aura than energy and had in writing, although it had never given fact been largely replaced by a him as much pleasure as drawing. menagerie of arrivistes, Fleet Street Nevertheless, he went seriously to barons, and trendy socialites. But work. Waugh remained enchanted with In June of 1928, the two Evelyns their antics, and the enchantment were secretly married in London. lasted all his life. Three months later, Decline and Fall Waugh came down from Oxford was published and well received, and £20 in debt, with no serious ambi- the Waughs, though not well off, tions or plans for a career. For a time seemed happily established. He- and he attended art school but soon she-Evelyn, as they were known, realized he had "not the talent nor were a striking pairÑ4'lik two little the application-I lacked the moral boys," Nancy Mitford said; at home qualities." Nor did steady jour- in their "smart little bandbox of a nalism seem to be his metier. A stint house," they seemed to combine at Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express sophistication with idyllic inno- lasted 16 days. cence. Within a year, however, the Worse, he was unhappily in love idyll was over, disastrously. with Olivia Plunket-Greene, one of The 1929 London season had been the Bright Young People, a moody particularly feverish, and in July and difficult girl. Partly through Waugh went to the country for some Olivia, Waugh was drawn into the peace to work on Vile Bodies. In his London scene, where he led an in- absence, she-Evelyn fell in love with creasingly expensive and exhausting a mutual friend. She confessed the social life. He went deeper into debt affair but attempts at a reconcilia- and was obliged, like Paul Pen- tion failed. In September, Waugh nyfeather in Decline and Fall, to get a sued for a divorce, and it was job as a schoolmaster, first at a granted. A year later, he entered the school in Wales, then at a school near Catholic Church. The wound of she- Oxford (from which he was fired for Evelyn's betrayal was deep, yet drunkenness), finally in London. Al- neither divorce nor conversion pro- though these episodes would later duced a dramatic change in Waugh's bear comic fruit, Waugh saw them at writing or his way of life. the time only as dreary additions to With the publication of Vile Bodies "an almost continuous record of fail- in 1930, Waugh achieved a certain ure." At one point, he tried to drown celebrity. Access to the glittering himself, leaving behind a suicide inner circles was far more easy than The Wilson QuarterlyISpring 1978 165 PERSPECTIVES: DARMAN it had been in the '20s, and in his habits of peace. London diary for these years, he Still, it is characteristic of Waugh's sounds tough, self-assured, very divided nature that the heroes of the much the dandy about town, con- novel, the characters who engage spicuously enjoying his success. Waugh's deepest imaginative atten- But Waugh, like others of his gen- tion, are two brilliant misfits, Am- eration, found England in the '30s a brose Silk and Basil Seal.