Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)

The Beauty of His Malice

IT was like a scene from an early novel by Evelyn Waugh. An intellectual dandy, hardly a year out of Oxford and already weary of the world, dashed off a suicide note in classical Greek and then, as a mauve moon rose, swam wistfully out to sea. Not far out, however, his reveries of picturesque quietus were interrupted by a slight sting on his shoulder. A jellyfish! Shuddering in revulsion, he floundered to shore, jumped into his clothes and hurried home to bed.

The jellyfish soon forgot the whole affair, but the world will not soon forget the jellyfish. Its sting preserved to literature a fierce peculiar genius who, in the 40 years before his death last week at 62, achieved recognition as the grand old mandarin of modern British prose and as a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers' row (Swift, Pope, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters. In 15 novels of cunning construction and lapidary eloquence, Evelyn Waugh developed a wickedly hilarious and 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. God it had killed and in his stead had raised up gadgets; and in gadgets had gone haring into outer space to hide from an inner vacuity unbearable to contemplate. Reflected in his icy eye, a mad world knew that it was mad, but it has recently suspected that Waugh, like most great satirists, was a little mad as well. In his later years he became in fact the most scarifying of his own caricatures: a Quixote of the Cotswolds who abdicated his century and thereafter lived in quasi-medieval delusions that degenerated at last into melancholia.

The medieval and the delusory lay all around him in his youth. Born near Hampstead Heath in 1903, Evelyn (pronounced evil in) Waugh grew up in a nursery papered with "figures in medieval costume" and was assured by his mother that cities were "unhealthy and unnatural places of exile." His father, a publisher (Chapman & Hall) of theatrical disposition, was a sort of hearty Walter Mitty who continually pretended that he was somebody else. Evelyn himself, though somewhat daunted by Alec, an extraverted elder brother who also became a novelist (Island in the Sun), was a dreamy and credulous child who adored Sunday evensong and lived in "an even glow of pure happiness."

At 13, he suffered the rude awakening traditional to upper-class English boys. Sent off to Lancing, a public school near Brighton, he found himself scrapping for perks with a pack of young snobs in full cry. He hated it, but in self-defense he repressed his homesickness and began to play the devil with his wit. At Oxford, where wit and atheism made him fashionable, he drank like a drain, hobbed with the nobs, japed and scraped his way through 2 1/2 years of invaluable idleness. He wrote little but he peered at the peerage, at the descendants of the knights and ladies on his nursery walls, with the cold clear eye of a disappointed romantic.

Filled with rage and outrage, Waugh in his middle 20s gave tongue to his disgust in Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930). The world these books describe is the world Eliot called the waste land and Yeats described as a "mere anarchy" in which "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." Waugh's people are the Bright Young Things of London's high society, people who ride to hounds while the world is going to the dogs. Waugh loathes them because they have betrayed the aristocratic ethos, and he depicts the society they dominate as a moral chaos, a twittering world in which bored women leave their husbands for men they do not even like, mothers regret the death of children only because mourning limits social life, and convicts given tools to stimulate their creativity employ them to decapitate the chaplain.

His touch in these books is as light as Ronald Firbank's, but unlike that airy Edwardian, Waugh displays feelings that are as savage as Swift's; and in Black Mischief (1932), a hilarious and still timely tale of emerging Africa and declining England, his feelings find blackly humorous expression: the British hero, inquiring after his British sweetheart in an African town, is cheerfully informed that she was the principal ingredient in the stew he has just eaten.

During his 20s, Waugh's comedy was vividly physical; in his 30s, it grew rapidly more metaphysical. In A Handful of Dust, for example, he turns entirely inward and laughs at himself. He personifies himself as a hero so taken with the past that he cannot cope with the present, and then witheringly satirizes his character and his art in the famous climax--a passage in which the hero realizes in horror the futility to which his passion for the past has condemned him. He must spend the rest of his life in a jungle clearing, reading Dickens over and over and over to a madman.

The idea of a dead end, seldom in all literature so powerfully expressed, dominated Waugh's experience in this period. Sickened by the chaos of the '20s, banished from the order of his childhood, he felt desperately the need of a new center to turn on, and he found it in Catholicism. Waugh was converted in 1930, and this experience, followed by the great adventure of World War II, altogether altered his art.

Waugh was deepened by his religion, and the deepening was steeply apparent in Brideshead Revisited (1945), a lyric celebration of Catholicism that alternates pious puling with the loveliest cadences he ever came upon. He was broadened by the war, and the broadening was vigorously displayed in his masterpiece, a 972-page trilogy (Men at Anns, Officers and Gentlemen, The End of the Battle) which is now widely considered the best British novel of World War II. In the trilogy Waugh creates in Apthorpe his greatest comic character, a Falstaff as funny, as tragic, as human as the huge original; but what matters more is that here for the first time the author accommodates in a single opus all the dominant elements of his life and art: satire, language, religion, sense of tradition, instinct for milieu. The consummation is a social history of the war that in wisdom and spaciousness and easy irony rivals and resembles the work of Trollope.

The trilogy took Waugh at least ten years to complete, not principally for literary reasons. After 1948 and the splash success of The Loved One, his travesty on the California way of death, he progressively withdrew from the 20th century. Surrounded by six children, whom he saw only once a day "for ten, I hope awe-inspiring minutes," he lived in an 18th century country house 140 miles from London, where tie played the rural squire with a conservatism that soon became simply amniotic. He refused to drive a car, rarely answered the phone, harrumphed indignantly that the Times of London had gone bolshie, appeared in public with an ear trumpet two feet long, and took savage pleasure in annoying Americans--"Erie Stanley Gardner," he announced sweetly to one visitor, "is the finest living American author."

In the last ten years of his life he was a flabby old Blimp with brandy jowls and a menacing pewter complexion. Plagued by insomnia and stunned by sedatives, he suffered intermittent hallucinations, persecuting voices, recurrent depressions. About a year ago he gave up writing almost entirely. And then last week on Easter Sunday, home from a Mass sung (to his crusty satisfaction) in Latin, he climbed the stairs to his study and died of a heart attack. His novels survive and will continue to survive as long as there are readers who can savor what Critic V. S. Pritchett calls "the beauty of his malice."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.