Books: Fifty Years of Total Waugh

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The greatest comic genius since Shaw is still in style

Evelyn Waugh fortified himself against his times with a moat of disdain, crenelated views and a castle keep of private devotions. He was raised in the middle-class London suburb of Golders Green, son of a modest publisher. At Oxford in the '20s he associated with the aesthetes, young men he later termed "mad, bad and dangerous to know." He graduated far from the top of his class, then taught school. Evelyn's experiences left him well stocked for his first novel, Decline and Fall (1928): "I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour." A young critic named Cyril Connolly spoke of Waugh's "delicious cynicism." Years later it was apparent that the vivacious style had been based on profound disgust.

As he acquired recognition, Waugh adopted the ways and means of a country gentleman. In a big house he lived surrounded by six children, his second wife Laura, servants, heavy furniture, mullioned windows and good bindings. He was never chatty about his work. On those few occasions when he lowered the drawbridge to journalists, Waugh remained grandly indifferent to explanations of his comic genius. He insisted, "I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language."

He was even more emphatic about his intentions: "An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along." As a conservative convert to Roman Catholicism, Waugh decried the aims of Vatican II, the un-Latinizing of the Mass and papal excursions too far from Rome.

His own wanderings produced the raw material for most of his fiction. There are striking similarities between the African backgrounds in Black Mischief and Scoop and descriptions in his travel books. Military service in Britain, Crete and Yugoslavia during World War II supplied incidents for Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and The End of the Battle. In 1965, the year before he died, Waugh published an edited version of the trilogy under the single title Sword of Honour. It is a masterpiece in which the author fully joined the two sides of his nature: the detached satirist and the chivalrous, disillusioned romantic.