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Evelyn Waugh

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Evelyn Waugh, as photographed in 1940 by Carl Van Vechten

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (October 28 1903 – April 10 1966) was an English writer, best known for such satirical and darkly humorous novels as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust, and The Loved One, as well as for more serious works, such as Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy, that are influenced by his own conservative and Catholic outlook. Many of Waugh's novels depict the British aristocracy and high society, which he savagely satirizes 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 accounts and his extensive diaries and correspondence have also been published.

American literary critic Edmund Wilson pronounced Waugh "the only first-rate comic genius the English have produced since George Bernard Shaw," while Time magazine declared that he 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." Waugh's works were very successful with the reading public and he was widely admired by critics as a humorist and prose stylist, but his later, more overtly religious works have attracted controversy. In unpublished notes for an essay on Waugh, George Orwell declared that Waugh was "about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions." The American conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. found in Waugh "the greatest English novelist of the century."

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[edit] Early life

Born in London, Evelyn Waugh was the son of noted editor and publisher Arthur Waugh. He was brought up in upper middle class circumstances in Hampstead. His only sibling was his older brother Alec Waugh, who also became a writer. Both Arthur and Alec had been educated at Sherborne, an English public school, but Alec had been expelled during his final year and had then published a very controversial novel, The Loom of Youth, based on his school life. Sherborne therefore refused to take Evelyn and his father sent him to Lancing College, a school 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.

At Oxford, 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 both aesthetes such as Harold Acton and Brian Howard, as well as members of the British aristocracy and the upper classes. His social life at Oxford influenced Waugh's personal transformation into something of a snob and provided the background for some of his most characteristic later writing. Waugh had at least two homosexual romances at Oxford (whether they had a physical dimension is unclear) before he began to date women in the late 1920s. Asked if he had competed in any sport for his College, Waugh famously replied "I drank for Hertford."

Image:Evelyn-waughportrait.jpg

Waugh's final exam results qualified him only for a third-class degree. He refused to remain 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 apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and worked briefly as a journalist, before he had his first great literary success in 1928 with his first completed novel, Decline and Fall. The title is from Gibbon, but whereas Gibbon charted the bankruptcy and dissolution of Rome, Waugh's was a hilariously 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, unsuccessful marriage in 1928 to the Hon. Evelyn Gardner. (Their friends called them He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn.) Gardner's infidelity would provide the background for Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust. The marriage ended in divorce in 1930. Waugh converted to Catholicism and, after his marriage to Evelyn Gardner was annulled by the Church, he married Laura Herbert, a Catholic, daughter of Aubrey Herbert, and granddaughter of Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon. This marriage was successful, lasting the rest of his life, producing seven children. His son Auberon Waugh achieved recognition as a writer and journalist.

[edit] The Thirties

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. Often, his style was 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.

The period between the wars also saw extensive travels around the Mediterranean and Red Sea, Spitsbergen, Africa 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.

[edit] 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 a 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.8 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 for several years and reassigned to the Royal Horse Guards. During this period he wrote Brideshead Revisited. 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 Partisan headquarters where they were staying. An outcome was a formidable report detailing Tito's persecution of 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 is 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 point in 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. Amazingly, he was granted leave from the war to write it. 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. Later, it became a popular series on televison in both countries, and around the world. Waugh revised the novel in the late 1950s because he found parts of it "distasteful on a full stomach" by which he meant that he wrote the novel during the grey privations of the latter war years.

Much of Waugh's war 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. His trilogy, along with his other work after the 1930s, became 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 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.

[edit] Later years

The period after the war saw Waugh living with his family in the West Country at his country homes, Piers Court, and from 1956 onwards, at Combe Florey in Somerset, where he lived as a country gentleman. He bequeathed Combe Florey to his son Auberon. He made his living through writing and became, to his critics, a self-parodying reactionary figure.[citation needed] He was bitterly disappointed when the Roman Catholic Church, which he in part loved for what he perceived as its timelessness, began to adopt modern vernacular liturgy and other changes.[citation needed]

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) depicts its hero's steady descent into madness — the experience was actually Waugh's own, the result of taking sleeping medication which induced a severe bout of paranoia that reached its peak on a sea-voyage to Ceylon (Sri Lanka).[citation needed] This period also produced Helena, (1953), a fictional account of the Empress Helena and the finding of the True Cross, which Waugh regarded this novel as his best work. [citation needed]

Latterly Waugh put on a lot of weight, and the sleeping draughts he continued to take, combined with a heavy intake of alcohol, cigars and little exercise, weakened his health. His writing productivity gradually ran down, and there was a very noticeable falling off in the quality of what fiction he did write (his last published work, Basil Seal Rides Again, taking up some of the characters from his very earliest satirical works, did not meet critical or popular approval). At the same time, he continued to produce valuable journalism.

He died, aged 62, on 10 April 1966, on returning home from Mass on Easter Sunday. 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 for his children. He is buried at Combe Florey, Somerset.[citation needed]

[edit] List of works

[edit] Novels

[edit] Biography

[edit] Autobiography

  • A Little Learning (1964)

[edit] Biographies about Evelyn Waugh

[edit] Cultural references

[edit] External links

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