WAUGH, Evelyn (Arthur St. John)

Nationality: English. Born: Hampstead, London, 28 October 1903; younger brother of the writer Alec Waugh. Education: Lancing College, Sussex (editor of the school paper); Hertford College, Oxford (senior history scholar), 1921-24; Heatherley School of Fine Art, London, 1924; studied carpentry at Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, 1927. Military Service: Served in the Royal Marines, 1939-40, and the Commandos, 1940-42: major; served in the Royal Horse Guards, 1942-45. Family: Married 1) Evelyn Gardner in 1928 (divorced 1930; marriage annulled 1936); 2) Laura Herbert in 1937, three daughters and three sons, including the writer Auberon Waugh. Career: Teacher, Arnold House, Denbighshire, Wales, 1925-26, and schools in Aston Clinton, Berkshire, 1926-27, and Notting Hill Gate, London, 1927; staff member, London Daily Express, 1927; full-time writer from 1928; joined Roman Catholic church, 1930; lived at Piers Court, Stinchecombe, Gloucestershire, 1937-56, and Combe Florey House, Somerset, 1956-66. Awards: Hawthornden prize, for biography, 1936; James Tait Black Memorial prize, 1953; fellow, and Companion of Literature, 1963, Royal Society of Literature. Died: 10 April 1966.

Publications

Short Stories

Decline and Fall: An Illustrated Novelette. 1928.

Mr. Loveday's Little Outing and Other Sad Stories. 1936.

Scott-King's Modern Europe (novella). 1947.

Work Suspended and Other Stories Written Before the Second World War. 1949.

Love among the Ruins (novella). 1953.

Tactical Exercise. 1954.

Novels

Vile Bodies. 1930.

Black Mischief. 1932.

A Handful of Dust. 1934.

Scoop. 1938.

Put Out More Flags. 1942.

Work Suspended: Two Chapters of an Unfinished Novel. 1942.

Brideshead Revisited. 1945.

The Loved One. 1948.

Helena. 1950.

Sword of Honour (shortened and revised version of trilogy). 1965.

Men at Arms. 1952.

Officers and Gentlemen. 1955.

Unconditional Surrender. 1961; as The End of the Battle, 1962.

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. 1957.

Basil Seal Rides Again; or, The Rake's Regress. 1963.

Poetry

The World to Come. 1916.

Other

PRB: An Essay on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1847-1854. 1926.

Rossetti: His Life and Works. 1928.

Labels: A Mediterranean Journal. 1930; as A Bachelor Abroad, 1930.

Remote People. 1931; as They Were Still Dancing, 1932.

Ninety-Two Days: The Account of a Tropical Journey Through British Guiana and Part of Brazil. 1934.

Edmund Campion. 1935; revised edition, 1946, 1961.

Waugh in Abyssinia. 1936.

Robbery under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson. 1939; as Mexico: An Object Lesson, 1939.

When the Going Was Good. 1946.

Wine in Peace and War. 1947.

The Holy Places (essays). 1952.

The World of Waugh, edited by C. J. Rolo. 1958.

The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox. 1959; as Monsignor Ronald Knox, 1959.

A Tourist in Africa. 1960.

A Little Learning (autobiography). 1964.

The Diaries, edited by Michael Davie. 1976.

A Little Order: A Selection from His Journalism, edited by DonatGallagher. 1977.

The Letters, edited by Mark Amory. 1980.

The Essays, Articles, and Reviews of Waugh, edited by DonatGallagher. 1983.

The Letters of Waugh and Lady Diana Cooper, edited by ArtemisCooper. 1992.

The Sayings of Evelyn Waugh. 1996.

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, edited by Charlotte Mosley. 1996.

A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes. 1996.

Editor, A Selection of the Occasional Sermons of Ronald Knox. 1949.

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Bibliography:

Waugh: A Reference Guide by Margaret Morriss and D.J. Dooley, 1984; A Bibliography of Waugh by Robert Murray Davis and others, 1986; An Evelyn Waugh Chronology by Norman Page, 1997.

Critical Studies:

Waugh by Christopher Hollis, 1954; Waugh: Portrait of an Artist by F. J. Stopp, 1958; Waugh by Malcolm Bradbury, 1964; The Satiric Art of Waugh by James F. Carens, 1966, and Critical Essays on Waugh edited by Carens, 1987; Waugh: A Critical Essay, 1969, and A Reader's Companion to theNovels and Short Stories of Waugh, 1989, both by Paul A. Doyle; Waugh edited by Robert Murray Davis, 1969, Waugh, Writer, 1981, and Brideshead Revisited: The Past Redeemed, 1990, both by Davis; Masks, Modes, and Morals: The Art of Waugh by William J. Cook, 1971; Waugh by David Lodge, 1971; Waugh and His World edited by David Pryce-Jones, 1973; Waugh: A Biography by Christopher Sykes, 1975; Waugh's Officers, Gentlemen, and Rogues: The Fact Behind His Fiction by Gene D. Phillips, 1975; Waugh by Calvin W. Lane, 1981; The Picturesque Prison: Waugh and His Writing by Jeffrey Heath, 1982; The Will to Believe: Novelists of the Nineteen-Thirties by Richard Johnstone, 1982; The Writings of Waugh by Ian Littlewood, 1983; Waugh: The Critical Heritage edited by Martin Stannard, 1984, Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939, 1986, and Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966, both by Stannard; Waugh on Women, 1985, and Waugh, 1988, both by Jacqueline McDonnell; Confused Roaring: Waugh and the Modernist Tradition by George McCartney, 1987; Waugh by Katharyn Crabbe, 1988; The Brideshead Generation: Waugh and His Friends by Humphrey Carpenter, 1989; Waugh's World: A Guide to the Novels of Waugh by Iain Gale, 1990; From Grimes to Brideshead: The Early Novels of Waugh by Robert R. Garnett, 1990; The Novels of Evelyn Waugh: A Study in the Quest-Motif by A. Clement, 1994; Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966 by Martin Stannard, 1994; The Ironic World of Evelyn Waugh: A Study of Eight Novels by Frederick L. Beaty, 1994; Evelyn Waugh in Letters by Terence Greenidge, 1994; Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Biography by John Howard Wilson, 1996.

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Evelyn Waugh's career as a writer was a relatively short one—he died when he was only 63 years old and his later years were largely unproductive—but he was a prolific author who wrote 17 novels, three collections of short stories, eight travel books, three biographies, an unfinished autobiography, and a multitude of essays, reviews, and short articles. In his day he made a handsome living from his writing and, in some respects, regarded literature as much as a profession as a calling. His first literary attempts were prompted by a desire to break free from the shackles of middle-class life as a schoolmaster and to rediscover the social excitement he had sensed at Oxford. Certainly there is a strong element of the autobiographical in his earliest short stories—and a hint of the direction his future writing would take.

In "The Balance: A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High-Necked Jumpers" (1925) he tells the story of Adam Doure, a youth torn between action and culture who attempts suicide after failing to win Imogen Quest. (At the time Waugh, too, had been rejected in love and had tried to take his own life.) Opting to kill himself through a life of dissipation, Adam befriends the shadowy Ernest Vaughan whose violent death shocks him back into sobriety. Vaughan makes a surprise reappearance in "The Tutor" (1927), another autobiographical short story, and many of the darker aspects of his personality were to resurface in Basil Seal, a recurring character in Waugh's fiction.

As he grew older Waugh always insisted that his work was "external to himself," but, as his voluminous diaries and letters make clear, his own personal experiences were central to just about everything that he wrote. This is not to say that his fiction is veiled autobiography: rather, Waugh transmogrified real-life characters and encounters as a means of creating a fictional world that would help him confront life's central issues. For example, "Charles Ryder's Schooldays" (1945) was both an intended sequel to Brideshead Revisited and an attempt to recreate Waugh's own religious self-questioning while a schoolboy at Lancing.

While Waugh never made any great claims for his prewar short stories, he was prepared to recycle many of the ideas, characters, and themes in his later fiction. "The Man Who Loved Dickens" (1933) found its way into A Handful of Dust; "An Englishman's Home" was used extensively for Put Out More Flags; and "Compassion" was used for Unconditional Surrender. For the most part these stories are highly stylized pieces in which characters like Henty in "The Man Who Loved Dickens" are little more than stereotypes, and the differences between good and evil, loneliness and boredom, are more clearly drawn. (These, too, were preoccupations of Waugh's at the time.)

After the publication of Brideshead Revisited in 1945 a harsher and more somber tone enters Waugh's writing as he steadily began to withdraw from what he thought was a drab new world. Typical of this mood was the story "Tactical Exercise" in which the central character, John Verney, is a villain who plans to murder his wife because she is having an affair with a Jewish colleague. Unbeknownst to him she, too, is planning to kill him and does so by the very methods he was intending to employ. Verney is a deeply flawed character, consumed by a deep loathing of the world around him, a hatred Waugh was also coming to share.

More engaging is the eponymous central character of the novella Scott-King's Modern Europe. A somewhat dim and solitary middle-aged bachelor, Scott-King is catapulted from his work as a classics master into the postwar world of Neutralia to attend the celebrations of their national poet Bellorius. To his dismay he finds that his Europe has disappeared, and classical culture, fine wine, and good food have been replaced by "the victories of barbarism." It transpires that Neutralia (a thinly disguised Yugoslavia) has ulterior purposes in celebrating Bellorius, and after giving a peroration in Latin at his memorial, Scott-King is prevented from leaving the country. After a series of preposterous adventures he ends up in a refugee camp in Palestine where he is rescued by one of his pupils, once a classics student but now a doctor. As Waugh makes clear in this sharp little fable, the new Europe has abandoned classical grace in favor of a sterile modernism.

He returned to the theme in a later novella, Love among the Ruins, which began as a short story before going through several drafts to become a Jamesian "long" short story. Set in a monstrous rehabilitation center in the indeterminate future, it follows Miles Plastic's vain attempts to kick against a system in which criminals are "the victims of inadequate social services." Himself a pyromaniac, Miles is incarcerated in the lavish surroundings of Mountjoy Castle where he falls in love with Clara, a ballet dancer. Inevitably she betrays him, and, having glimpsed the vestiges of an older and more cultivated past, Miles turns again to a life of crime. Not a great work, Love among the Ruins is nonetheless a harsh attack on the leveling drabness of state interference, which Waugh saw as one of the worst features of the postwar world.

A feature of Waugh's short stories is his preoccupation with many of the themes that run through all his fiction—the conflict between faith and reason and the relationship between loneliness and estrangement and cruelty and death.

—Trevor Royle