Evelyn Waugh Biography and List of Works

English writer, regarded by many as the leading satirical novelist of his day. Among Waugh's most popular novels is BRIDESHEAD REVISITED (1945), which depicts the Oxford world of the late 1920s. He also wrote travel books and biographies (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edmund Campion, the Jesuit martyr, and Ronald Knox).

Evelyn Waugh was born in London into a comfortable middle-class family. His father was Arthur Waugh, a publisher and literary critic, and his brother was Alec Waugh, the popular novelist. Waugh was educated at Lancing College, Sussex, and at Hertford College, Oxford, where he read modern history and spent his time drinking and enjoying homosexual romances. After studying in London at Heatherley's Art School and working for a short time as a schoolmaster at Arnold House in North Wales, Waugh devoted himself to writing.

"Aim high" has been my motto,' said Sir Humphrey, 'all through my life. You probably won't get what you want, but you may get something; aim low, and you get nothing at all. It's like throwing a stone at a cat. When I was a kid that used to be great sport in our yard; I daresay you were throwing cricket-balls when you were that age, but it's the same thing. If you throw straight at it, you fall short; aim above, and with luck you score. Every kid knows that. I'll tell you the story of my life.'
(from Decline and Fall)

Three years before starting his career as a writer, Waugh attempted suicide. He walked out into the sea and began swimming but decided to return in the middle of a school of jellyfish. Fuelled with admiration for Pre-Raphaelites, Waugh wrote his first book, ROSSETTI, which appeared in 1928. In the same year Waugh established his literary reputation with the novel DECLINE AND FALL, an episodic story of Paul Pennyfeather who is expelled from Oxford. Paul is caught in the web of London Society, but in the end he escapes to a saner and happier life. Waugh's next novel, VILE BODIES (1930), explores the world of the Bright Young People. BLACK MISCHIEF (1932) is inspired by the coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie, and A HANDFUL OF DUST is an embittered tragi-comedy of adultery.

'The Welsh,' said the Doctor, ' are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing,' he said with disgust, 'sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver...'
(from Decline and Fall)

After the collapse of his marriage with the Hon. Evelyn Gardiner, Waugh travelled in Africa and South America. In 1930 Waugh became Catholic and married Laura Herbert in 1937; they had six children. He published several travel books, and worked as a foreign correspondent, notably in Abessinia to cover the Italian invasion in 1936.

"It was not everybody's nose; many prefer one with greater body; it was not a nose to appeal to painters, for it was too small and quite without shape, a mere dab of putty without apparent bone structure; a nose which made it impossible for its wearer to be haughty or imposing or astute."
(from 'On Guard' in Mr. Loveday's Little Outing, 1936)

From 1928 to 1937 he travelled widely in Europe, the Near East, Africa, and America. During the 1930s Waugh moved in aristocratic and fashionable circles. His friends and acquaintances provided him with material for his fiction. During World War II Waugh served in the Royal Marines and the Royal Horse Guards. In 1944 he joined his friend Randolph Churchill in the British military mission to the Yugoslav Partisans. Disenchantment with the war led to his taking leave in order to write Brideshead Revisited (1945), which gained a great popular success but was also criticized because of its glorification of the upper class. Subtitled 'The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder' it depicts the story of the wealthy Roman Catholic Marchmain family as told by Ryder, a friend of the family. His acquaintance with them begins at Oxford, where he meets Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the Marquis of Marchmain and his sister Julia. Sebastian flees to North Africa and becomes a menial in an African monastery and Julia marries a non-Catholic politician. By the end of the novel, each has shown some sign of acceptance of the faith.

After the war Waugh spent a retiring life in the West of England in Somerset, sporting exaggerated Edwardian suits and writing his trilogy SWORD OF HONOUR (1952-1961). Its central character Guy Crouchback enlists in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers to establish his identity. He loses his illusions of the army and departs for action in Alexandria. In the last volume Guy volunteers for service in Italy. He eventually goes to Yugoslavia as a liaison officer with the partisans and rescues a group of Jewish refuges. In the Epilogue Guy has remarried and is surrounded by his family.

In 1947 Waugh visited Hollywood as a guest of MGM to discuss a possible film version of Brideshead Revisited. "We drove for a long time down autobahns and boulevards full of vacant lots and filling stations and nondescript buildings and palm trees with a warm hazy light. It was more like Egypt - the suburbs of Cairo or Alexandria - than anything in Europe. We arrived at the Bel Air Hotel - very Egyptian with a hint of Addis Ababa in the smell of the blue gums." Waugh refused to accept proposed changes and confessed in his diary that he was relieved when the project failed. The following year he lampooned of the work of morticians in California in THE LOVED ONE (1948)

THE ORDEAL OF GILBERT PINFOLD (1957) is based on the author's bout of hallucinations caused by his use of both alcohol and sleeping potions. The first volume of Waugh's unfinished autobiography, A LITTLE LEARNING, appeared in 1964, and his letters were published in 1980. Waugh died on April 10, 1966, in Combe Florey, Somerset. The posthumously published DIARIES OF EVELYN WAUGH (1976) have been described by Auberon Waugh as showing "that the world of Evelyn Waugh did, in fact exist." According to a literary anecdote the author Nancy Mitford had asked the him how he could behave so abominably and yet still consider himself a practicing Catholic. "You have no idea," Waugh replied, "how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being."

For further reading: Roman Holiday by A.A. DeVitis (1956); Evelyn Waugh by M. Bradbury (1964); The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh by J.F. Carens (1966); My Brother Evelyn, and Other Profiles by A. Waugh (1967); Evelyn Waugh by D. Lodge (1971); Evelyn Waugh by Christopher Sykes (1975, rev. 1977); Evelyn Waugh by C.W. Lane (1981); The Picturesque Prison by J. Heath (1982); Evelyn Waugh by Martin Stannard (1986); Evelyn Waugh by Selina Hastings (1994) - Note 1: The Finnish writer Anja Kauranen used Brideshead Revisited as a basis for her novel Arabian Lauri (1997). The structure of the story and the characterizations of central persons are similar. Kauranen set the events in 1980s Helsinki. She acknowledged the source when the question of plagiarism arose. - "Evelyn Waugh concealed - beneath a camp façade of tweediness, snobbery, literary argumentativeness, downright insulting behaviour - a tenacious insecurity, social, sexual, and aesthetic, which never left him." - From Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth by Philip Core (1984) - Note 2: Evelyn Waugh's father was head of the publishers, Chapman and Hall, and had contributed to The Yellow Book. - Alec Waugh (1898-1891), his brother, was also a writer. His works include The Loom of Youth (1917), Island in the Sun (1956), The Mule on the Minaret (1965), My Brother Evelyn and Other Profiles (1967), A Spy in the Family (1970), A Year to Remember (1975). - Waugh's eldest son Auberon Waugh (d. 2001) published his first book, The Foxglove Saga, in 1960. Among his other works are Country Topics (1974), The Diaries of Auberon Waugh: A Turbulent Decade 1976-85 (1985), Another Voices (1986)

DECLINE AND FALL, (1928)