Waugh Stories

By Gerald Clarke

EVELYN WAUGH, A BIOGRAPHY

by CHRISTOPHER SYKES 462 pages. Little, Brown. $12.50.

One of this century's funniest writers, Evelyn Waugh was also one of its most melancholy, a man submerged in private rancor. "You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic," he informed a friend. "Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being."

Waugh's youth was by no means blighted. His family was congenial--his father Arthur ran a small but prestigious publishing house--and lived comfortably in a London suburb, amid books and talk of books. The adolescent Evelyn saw Oxford as a kind of enchanted kingdom. For a time he became one of its leading fauns, an aesthete shuttling between Hamletic conversation and Falstaffian drinking. After graduation, Waugh had a desultory try at being an artist. Failing at that, he became a teacher at third-rate boarding schools. He began a book, informing the curious that he was writing The History of the Eskimos. At about this time, says Biographer Sykes, Evelyn also entered "an extreme homosexual phase which, for the short time it lasted, was unrestrained emotionally and physically." After revealing this aspect of Waugh's nature, Sykes abruptly drops it, announcing that "names and details need not and should not be given." This bowdlerizing process takes place throughout Evelyn Waugh, giving the distinct impression of a book composed with scissors.

Adrenaline World. Sykes is almost as coy about Waugh's "straight" life. Evelyn married early--only to have his wife run off with a friend. A few years later he married again, more happily, and eventually fathered three sons and three daughters.

The History of the Eskimos emerged from the printer as Decline and Fall in 1928. Waugh, at 24, had found his calling as a master of black comedy and satire. Other novels, among them Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust and Black Mischief, followed regularly throughout the '30s, always in Waugh's elegant, crystalline style. He traveled adventurously, a fascinated observer of the often comic clash between primitive and advanced cultures. From a newspaper assignment to cover the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, he got the material for Scoop, still a hilarious guide to the adrenaline world of journalism. Much of the novel's lunatic telegraphese was pure reportage. After the invasion, for example, newspaper offices heard a rumor that the Italians had bombed a native hospital, killing a beautiful American nurse. Editors demanded the story of "nurse upblown." After a vain search, Waugh cabled back: "Nurse unupblown."

In World War II, Evelyn was something of a misfit. Despite an ample display of valor in the battle for Crete, the insubordinate officer was passed from general to general. In Yugoslavia, Evelyn amused himself by circulating a story that Tito was a lesbian in drag. The story caught up with the marshal. "Ask Captain Waugh," he told the British commander, "why he thinks I am a woman." For the only time in his life, the writer was at a loss for words.

The war experiences were later mirrored in a haunting trilogy, Sword of Honor. Waugh had always drawn his hu mor from the decadence and chaos that poke like clowns through the scrim of civilization. In Sword of Honor, war and chaos reign supreme. Civilization has become the tired comedian, trying, with scant success, to penetrate the new or der of disorder.

The three books had an autumnal, elegiac tone, reflecting Waugh's belief that the world that had amused him (and vice versa) was gone. As Sykes implies, in the years before his death in 1966, Waugh vanished into his final production: an elaborate caricature of Colonel Blimp, complete with mustache, tweeds and sclerotic opinions. He drank too much, took too many pills and, for a time described in the autobiographical The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, he suffered from hallucinations. Yet even in extremis, Waugh retained a childlike delight in gentle anarchy. Slightly deaf, he affected a giant, old-fashioned ear trumpet. At banquets he would blandly set it down when the main speaker began, then return it to his ear when the address was finished. Even the most experienced orator could be shaken by such pantomime.

Waugh's comic routines were un even, in life and art. Most of his works are triumphs; a few are disappointing. None are dull, however, and it is hard to imagine a drab biography of Waugh. Sykes has written it, complete with the slovenly arrogance of the privileged amateur. A longtime friend of Waugh's, Sykes seems to have relied more on his own recollections than on Waugh's personal papers and diaries, to which he alone has had access. Waugh's wit, of course, cannot be extinguished. But Evelyn cannot save this shoddy and ill-organized homage. Moreover, unlike some biographers, who claim too much for their subjects, Sykes ends by claiming too little for Waugh. He seems unable to recognize that the drunk who loved to put him down was also one of England's greatest 20th century novelists. The lesson paraphrases Churchill: no one should entrust his reputation to his valet -- or his friend.

Gerald Clarke

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