Postwar
Fame and fortune
Brideshead Revisited was published in London in May 1945.
Waugh had been convinced of the book's qualities, "my first novel
rather than my last". It was a tremendous success, bringing its author
fame, fortune, and literary status. Happy though he was with this outcome,
Waugh's principal concern as the war ended was the fate of the large
populations of Eastern European Catholics, betrayed (as he saw it) into the
hands of Stalin's Soviet Union by the Allies. He now saw little difference in
morality between the war's combatants and later described it as "a
sweaty tug-of-war between teams of indistinguishable louts". Although
he took momentary pleasure from the defeat of Winston Churchill and his
Conservatives in the 1945 general election, he saw the accession to power of
the Labor Party as a triumph of barbarism and the onset of a new "Dark
Age".
In September 1945, after he was released by the army, he
returned to Piers Court with his family (another daughter, Harriet, had been
born at Pixton in 1944) but spent much of the next seven years either in London
or travelling. In March 1946, he visited the Nuremberg trials, and later that
year, he was in Spain for a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the death
of Francisco de Vitoria, said to be the founder of international law. Waugh
wrote up his experiences of the frustrations of postwar European travel in a
novella, Scott-King's Modern Europe. In February 1947, he made the first of
several trips to the United States, in the first instance to discuss the filming
of Brideshead. The project collapsed, but Waugh used his time in Hollywood to
visit the Forest Lawn cemetery, which provided the basis for his satire of
American perspectives on death, The Loved One (1948). In 1951, he visited the
Holy Land with his future biographer, Christopher Sykes, and in 1953, he
travelled to Goa to witness the final exhibition before the burial of the
remains of the 16th-century Jesuit missionary-priest Francis Xavier.
In between his journeys, Waugh worked intermittently on
Helena, a long-planned novel about the discoverer of the True Cross that was by
"far the best book I have ever written or ever will write". Its
success with the public was limited, but it was, his daughter Harriet later
said, "the only one of his books that he ever cared to read
aloud".
In 1952, Waugh published Men at Arms, the first of his
semi-autobiographical war trilogy, in which he depicted many of his personal
experiences and encounters from the early stages of the war. Other books
published during this period included When the Going Was Good (1946), an
anthology of his pre-war travel writing, The Holy Places (published by the Ian
Fleming-managed Queen Anne Press, 1952), and Love Among the Ruins (1953), a
dystopian tale in which Waugh displays his contempt for the modern world.
Nearing 50, Waugh was old for his years, "selectively deaf, rheumatic,
irascible" and increasingly dependent on alcohol and on drugs to
relieve his insomnia and depression. Two more children, James (born 1946) and
Septimus (born 1950), completed his family.
From 1945 onwards, Waugh became an avid collector,
particularly of Victorian paintings and furniture. He filled Piers Court with
his acquisitions, often from London's Portobello Market and from house
clearance sales. His diary entry for 30 August 1946 records a visit to
Gloucester, where he bought "a lion of wood, finely carved for £25,
also a bookcase £35 ... a charming Chinese painting £10, a Regency easel
£7". Some of his purchases were shrewd and prescient; he paid £10 for
Rossetti's "Spirit of the Rainbow" to begin a collection of
Victorian paintings that eventually acquired great value. Waugh also began,
from 1949, to write knowledgeable reviews and articles on the subject of
painting.
Breakdown
By 1953, Waugh's popularity as a writer was declining. He
was perceived as out of step with the Zeitgeist, and the large fees he demanded
were no longer easily available. His money was running out, and progress on the
second book of his war trilogy, Officers and Gentlemen, had stalled. Partly
because of his dependency on drugs, his health was steadily deteriorating.
Shortage of cash led him to agree in November 1953 to be interviewed on BBC
radio, where the panel took an aggressive line: "they tried to make a
fool of me, and I don't think they entirely succeeded", Waugh wrote to
Nancy Mitford. Peter Fleming in The Spectator likened the interview to "the
goading of a bull by matadors".
Early in 1954, Waugh's doctors, concerned by his physical
deterioration, advised a change of scene. On 29 January, he took a ship bound
for Ceylon, hoping that he would be able to finish his novel. Within a few
days, he was writing home complaining of "other passengers whispering
about me" and of hearing voices, including that of his recent BBC
interlocutor, Stephen Black. He left the ship in Egypt and flew on to Colombo,
but he wrote to Laura, the voices followed him. Alarmed, Laura sought help from
her friend, Frances Donaldson, whose husband agreed to fly out to Ceylon and
bring Waugh home. In fact, Waugh made his own way back, now believing that he
was suffering from demonic possession. A brief medical examination indicated
that Waugh was suffering from bromide poisoning from his drug regimen. When his
medication was changed, the voices and the other hallucinations quickly
disappeared. Waugh was delighted, informing all of his friends that he had been
mad: "Clean off my onion!". The experience was fictionalized a
few years later, in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957).
In 1956, Edwin Newman made a short film about Waugh. In the
course of it, Newman learned that Waugh hated the modern world and wished that
he had been born two or three centuries sooner. Waugh disliked modern methods
of transportation or communication, refused to drive or use the telephone, and
wrote with an old-fashioned dip pen. He also expressed the views that American
news reporters could not function without frequent infusions of whisky and that
every American had been divorced at least once.
Late works
Restored to health, Waugh returned to work and finished
Officers and Gentlemen. In June 1955, the Daily Express journalist and reviewer
Nancy Spain, accompanied by her friend Lord Noel-Buxton, arrived uninvited at
Piers Court and demanded an interview. Waugh saw the pair off and wrote a wry
account for The Spectator, but he was troubled by the incident and decided to
sell Piers Court: "I felt it was polluted", he told Nancy
Mitford. Late in 1956, the family moved to Combe Florey House in the Somerset
village of Combe Florey. In January 1957, Waugh avenged the Spain–Noel-Buxton
intrusion by winning libel damages from the Express and Spain. The paper had
printed an article by Spain that suggested that the sales of Waugh's books were
much lower than they were and that his worth, as a journalist, was low.
Gilbert Pinfold was published in the summer of 1957, "my
barmy book", Waugh called it. The extent to which the story is
self-mockery, rather than true autobiography, became a subject of critical
debate. Waugh's next major book was a biography of his longtime friend Ronald
Knox, the Catholic writer and theologian who had died in August 1957. Research
and writing extended over two years during which Waugh did little other work,
delaying the third volume of his war trilogy. In June 1958, his son Auberon was
severely wounded in a shooting accident while serving with the army in Cyprus.
Waugh remained detached; he neither went to Cyprus nor immediately visited
Auberon on the latter's return to Britain. The critic and literary biographer
David Wykes called Waugh's sang-froid "astonishing" and the
family's apparent acceptance of his behavior even more so.
Although most of Waugh's books had sold well, and he had
been well-rewarded for his journalism, his levels of expenditure meant that
money problems and tax bills were a recurrent feature in his life. In 1950, as
a means of tax avoidance, he had set up a trust fund for his children (he
termed it the "Save the Children Fund", after the
well-established charity of that name) into which he placed the initial advance
and all future royalties from the Penguin (paperback) editions of his books. He
was able to augment his personal finances by charging household items to the
trust or selling his own possessions to it. Nonetheless, by 1960, a shortage of
money led him to agree to an interview on BBC Television, in the Face-to-Face
series conducted by John Freeman. The interview was broadcast on 26 June 1960;
according to his biographer Selina Hastings, Waugh restrained his instinctive
hostility and coolly answered the questions put to him by Freeman, assuming
what she describes as a "pose of world-weary boredom".
In 1960, Waugh was offered the honor of a CBE but declined,
believing that he should have been given the superior status of a knighthood.
In September, he produced his final travel book, A Tourist in Africa, based on
a visit made in January–March 1959. He enjoyed the trip but "despised"
the book. The critic Cyril Connolly called it "the thinnest piece of
book-making that Mr. Waugh has undertaken". The book done, he worked
on the last of the war trilogy, which was published in 1961 as Unconditional
Surrender.
Decline and death
As he approached his sixties, Waugh was in poor health,
prematurely aged, "fat, deaf, short of breath", according to
Patey. His biographer Martin Stannard likened his appearance around this time
to that of "an exhausted rogue jollied up by drink". In 1962,
Waugh began work on his autobiography, and that same year, he wrote his final
fiction, the long short story Basil Seal Rides Again. This revival of the
protagonist of Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags was published in 1963; the
Times Literary Supplement called it a "nasty little book".
However, that same year, he was awarded the title Companion of Literature by
the Royal Society of Literature (its highest honor). When the first volume of
autobiography, A Little Learning, was published in 1964, Waugh's often oblique
tone and discreet name changes ensured that friends avoided the embarrassments
that some had feared.
Waugh had welcomed the accession in 1958 of Pope John XXIII
and wrote an appreciative tribute on the pope's death in 1963. However, he
became increasingly concerned by the decisions emerging from the Second Vatican
Council, which was convened by Pope John in October 1962 and continued under
his successor, Pope Paul VI, until 1965. Waugh, a staunch opponent of Church
reform, was particularly distressed by the replacement of the universal Latin
Mass with the vernacular. In a Spectator article of 23 November 1962, he argued
the case against change in a manner described by a later commentator as "sharp-edged
reasonableness". He wrote to Nancy Mitford that "the buggering
up of the Church is a deep sorrow to me .... We write letters to the paper. A
fat lot of good that does."
In 1965, a new financial crisis arose from an apparent flaw
in the terms of the "Save the Children" trust, and a large sum
of back taxes was being demanded. Waugh's agent, A. D. Peters, negotiated a
settlement with the tax authorities for a manageable amount, but in his concern
to generate funds, Waugh signed contracts to write several books, including a
history of the papacy, an illustrated book on the Crusades, and a second volume
of autobiography. Waugh's physical and mental deterioration prevented any work
on these projects, and the contracts were cancelled. He described himself as "toothless,
deaf, melancholic, shaky on my pins, unable to eat, full of dope, quite
idle" and expressed the belief that "all fates were worse than
death". His only significant literary activity in 1965 was the editing
of the three war novels into a single volume, published as Sword of Honor.
On Easter Day, 10 April 1966, after attending a Latin Mass
in a neighboring village with members of his family, Waugh died of heart
failure at his Combe Florey home, aged 62. He was buried, by special
arrangement, in a consecrated plot outside the Anglican churchyard of the
Church of St Peter & St Paul, Combe Florey. A Requiem Mass, in Latin, was
celebrated in Westminster Cathedral on 21 April 1966.
Character and opinions
In the course of his lifetime, Waugh made enemies and
offended many people; writer James Lees-Milne said that Waugh "was the
nastiest-tempered man in England". Waugh's son, Auberon, said that the
force of his father's personality was such that, despite his lack of height, "generals
and chancellors of the exchequer, six-foot-six and exuding self-importance from
every pore, quail[ed] in front of him".
In the biography Mad World (2009), Paula Byrne said that the
common view of Evelyn Waugh as a "snobbish misanthrope" is a
caricature; she asks: "Why would a man, who was so unpleasant, be so
beloved by such a wide circle of friends?" His generosity to
individual persons and causes, especially Catholic causes, extended to small
gestures; after his libel-court victory over Nancy Spain, he sent her a bottle
of champagne. Hastings said that Waugh's outward personal belligerence to
strangers was not entirely serious but an attempt at "finding a
sparring partner worthy of his own wit and ingenuity". Besides mocking
others, Waugh mocked himself—the elderly buffer, "crusty colonel" image,
which he presented in later life, was a comic impersonation, and not his true self.
As an instinctive conservative, Waugh believed that class
divisions, with inequalities of wealth and position, were natural and that "no
form of government [was] ordained by God as being better than any other". In
the post-war "Age of the Common Man", he attacked socialism
(the "Cripps–Attlee terror") and complained, after Churchill's
election in 1951, that "the Conservative Party has never put the clock
back a single second". Waugh never voted in elections; in 1959, he
expressed a hope that the Conservatives would win that year's election, which
they did, but would not vote for them, saying "I should feel I was
morally inculpated in their follies" and added: "I do not
aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants".
Waugh's Catholicism was fundamental: "The Church ...
is the normal state of man from which men have disastrously exiled
themselves." He believed that the Catholic Church was the last, great defense
against the encroachment of the Dark Age being ushered in by the welfare state
and the spreading of working-class culture. Strictly observant, Waugh admitted
to Diana Cooper that his most difficult task was how to square the obligations
of his faith with his indifference to his fellow men. When Nancy Mitford asked
him how he reconciled his often-objectionable conduct with being a Christian,
Waugh replied that "were he not a Christian, he would be even more
horrible".
Waugh's conservatism was aesthetically objectionable and
religious. Although he praised younger writers, such as Angus Wilson, Muriel
Spark, and V. S. Naipaul, he was scornful of the 1950s writers' group known as "The
Movement". He said that the literary world was "sinking into
black disaster" and that literature might die within thirty years. As
a schoolboy, Waugh had praised Cubism, but he soon abandoned his interest in
artistic modernism. In 1945, Waugh said that Pablo Picasso's artistic standing
was the result of a "mesmeric trick" and that his paintings "could
not be intelligently discussed in the terms used of the civilized
masters". In 1953, in a radio interview, he named Augustus Egg
(1816–1863) as a painter for whom he had particular esteem. Despite their
political differences, Waugh came to admire George Orwell because of their
shared patriotism and sense of morality. Orwell, in turn, commented that Waugh
was "about as good a novelist as one can be ... while holding untenable
opinions".
Waugh has been criticized for expressing racial and
anti-semitic prejudices. Wykes describes Waugh's anti-semitism as "his
most persistently noticeable nastiness", and his assumptions of white
superiority as "an illogical extension of his views on the naturalness
and rightness of hierarchy as the principle of social organization".
Works
Themes and style
Wykes observes that Waugh's novels reprise and fictionalize
the principal events of his life, although in an early essay, Waugh wrote: "Nothing
is more insulting to a novelist than to assume that he is incapable of anything
but the mere transcription of what he observes". The reader should not
assume that the author agreed with the opinions expressed by his fictional
characters. Nevertheless, in the Introduction to the Complete Short Stories,
Ann Pasternak Slater said that the "delineation of social prejudices
and the language in which they are expressed is part of Waugh's meticulous
observation of his contemporary world".
The critic Clive James said of Waugh: "Nobody ever
wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English ... its hundreds of years of steady
development culminate in him". As his talent developed and matured, he
maintained what literary critic Andrew Michael Roberts called "an
exquisite sense of the ludicrous, and a fine aptitude for exposing false
attitudes". In the first stages of his 40-year writing career, before
his conversion to Catholicism in 1930, Waugh was the novelist of the Bright
Young People generation. His first two novels, Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile
Bodies (1930), comically reflect a futile society, populated by
two-dimensional, basically unbelievable characters in circumstances too
fantastic to evoke the reader's emotions. A typical Waugh trademark evident in
the early novels is rapid, unattributed dialogue in which the participants can
be readily identified. At the same time, Waugh was writing serious essays, such
as "The War and the Younger Generation", in which he
castigates his own generation as "crazy and sterile" people.
Waugh's conversion to Catholicism did not noticeably change
the nature of his next two novels, Black Mischief (1934) and A Handful of Dust
(1934), but, in the latter novel, the elements of farce are subdued, and the
protagonist, Tony Last, is recognizably a person rather than a comic cipher.
Waugh's first fiction with a Catholic theme was the short story "Out of
Depth" (1933) about the immutability of the Mass. From the mid-1930s
onwards, Catholicism and conservative politics were much featured in his
journalistic and non-fiction writing before he reverted to his former manner
with Scoop (1938), a novel about journalism, journalists, and unsavory
journalistic practices.
In Work Suspended and Other Stories, Waugh introduced "real"
characters and a first-person narrator, signaling the literary style he would
adopt in Brideshead Revisited a few years later. Brideshead, which questions
the meaning of human existence without God, is the first novel in which Evelyn
Waugh clearly presents his conservative religious and political views. In the
Life magazine article "Fan Fare" (1946), Waugh said that "you
can only leave God out [of fiction] by making your characters pure
abstractions" and that his future novels shall be "the attempt
to represent man more fully, which, to me, means only one thing, man in his
relation to God." As such, the novel Helena (1950) is Evelyn Waugh's
most philosophically Christian book.
In Brideshead, the proletarian junior officer Hooper
illustrates a theme that persists in Waugh's postwar fiction: the rise of
mediocrity in the "Age of the Common Man". In the trilogy
Sword of Honor (Men at Arms, 1952; Officers and Gentlemen, 1955; Unconditional
Surrender, 1961), the social pervasiveness of mediocrity is personified in the
semi-comical character "Trimmer", a slob and a fraud who
triumphs by contrivance.[219] In the novella Scott-King's Modern Europe (1947),
Waugh's pessimism about the future is in the schoolmaster's admonition: "I
think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern
world". Likewise, such cynicism pervades the novel Love Among the
Ruins (1953), set in a dystopian, welfare-state Britain that is so socially
disagreeable that euthanasia is the most sought-after of the government's
social services. Of the postwar novels, Patey says that The Ordeal of Gilbert
Pinfold (1957) stands out as "a kind of mock-novel, a sly invitation to
a game". Waugh's final work of fiction, "Basil Seal Rides
Again" (1962), features characters from the prewar novels; Waugh
admitted that the work was a "senile attempt to recapture the manner of
my youth". Stylistically, this final story begins in the same fashion
as the first story, "The Balance" of 1926, with a "fusillade
of unattributed dialogue".
Reception
Of Waugh's early books, Decline and Fall was hailed by
Arnold Bennett in the Evening Standard as "an uncompromising and
brilliantly malicious satire". The critical reception of Vile Bodies
two years later was even more enthusiastic, with Rebecca West predicting that
Waugh was "destined to be the dazzling figure of his age”. However,
A Handful of Dust, later widely regarded as a masterpiece, received a more
muted welcome from critics, despite the author's own high estimation of the
work. Chapter VI, "Du Côté de Chez Todd", of A Handful of
Dust, with Tony Last condemned forever to read Dickens to his mad jungle
captor, was thought by the critic Henry Yorke to reduce an otherwise believable
book to "phantasy". Cyril Connolly's first reaction to the
book was that Waugh's powers were failing, an opinion that he later revised.
In the late 1930s, Waugh's inclination toward Catholic and
conservative polemics affected his standing with the general reading public.
The Campion biography is said by David Wykes to be "so rigidly biased
that it has no claims to make as history". The pro-fascist tone in
parts of Waugh in Abyssinia offended readers and critics and prevented its
publication in America. There was general relief among critics when Scoop, in
1938, indicated a return to Waugh's earlier comic style. Critics had begun to
think that his wit had been displaced by partisanship and propaganda.
Waugh maintained his reputation in 1942 with Put Out More
Flags, which sold well despite wartime restrictions on paper and printing. Its
public reception, however, did not compare with that accorded to Brideshead
Revisited three years later, on both sides of the Atlantic. Brideshead's
selection as the American Book of the Month swelled its US sales to an extent
that dwarfed those in Britain, which was affected by paper shortages. Despite
the public's enthusiasm, critical opinion was split. Brideshead's Catholic
standpoint offended some critics who had greeted Waugh's earlier novels with
warm praise. Its perceived snobbery and its deference to the aristocracy were
attacked by, among others, Conor Cruise O'Brien, who, in the Irish literary
magazine The Bell, wrote of Waugh's "almost mystical veneration" for
the upper classes. Fellow writer Rose Macaulay believed that Waugh's genius had
been adversely affected by the intrusion of his right-wing partisan alter ego
and that he had lost his detachment: "In art so naturally ironic and
detached as his, this is a serious loss". Conversely, the book was
praised by Yorke, Graham Greene, and, in glowing terms, by Harold Acton, who
was particularly impressed by its evocation of 1920s Oxford. In 1959, at the
request of publishers Chapman and Hall and in some deference to his critics,
Waugh revised the book and wrote in a preface: "I have modified the
grosser passages but not obliterated them because they are an essential part of
the book".
In "Fan Fare", Waugh forecasts that his
future books will be unpopular because of their religious theme. On publication
in 1950, Helena was received indifferently by the public and by critics, who
disparaged the awkward mixing of 20th-century schoolgirl slang with otherwise
reverential prose. Otherwise, Waugh's prediction proved unfounded; all his
fiction remained in print, and sales stayed healthy. During his successful 1957
lawsuit against the Daily Express, Waugh's counsel produced figures showing
total sales to that time of over four million books, two-thirds in Britain and
the rest in America. Men at Arms, the first volume of his war trilogy, won the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1953; initial critical comment was lukewarm,
with Connolly likening Men at Arms to beer rather than champagne. Connolly
changed his view later, calling the completed trilogy "the finest novel
to come out of the war". Of Waugh's other major postwar works, the
Knox biography was admired within Waugh's close circle but criticized by others
in the Church for its depiction of Knox as an unappreciated victim of the
Catholic hierarchy. The book did not sell well—"like warm cakes",
according to Waugh. Pinfold surprised the critics with its originality. It's
plainly autobiographical content, Hastings suggests, gave the public a fixed
image of Waugh: "stout, splenetic, red-faced and reactionary, a figure
from burlesque complete with cigar, bowler hat and loud checked suit".
Reputation
In 1973, Waugh's diaries were serialized in The Observer
prior to publication in book form in 1976. The revelations about his private
life, thoughts, and attitudes created controversy. Although Waugh had removed
embarrassing entries relating to his Oxford years and his first marriage, there
was sufficient left on the record to enable enemies to project a negative image
of the writer as intolerant, snobbish, and sadistic, with pronounced fascist
leanings. Some of this picture, it was maintained by Waugh's supporters, arose
from poor editing of the diaries and a desire to transform Waugh from a writer
to a "character". Nevertheless, a popular conception developed
of Waugh as a monster. When, in 1980, a selection of his letters was published,
his reputation became the subject of further discussion. Philip Larkin,
reviewing the collection in The Guardian, thought that it demonstrated Waugh's
elitism; to receive a letter from him, it seemed, "one would have to
have a nursery nickname and be a member of White's, a Roman Catholic, a
high-born lady or an Old Etonian novelist".
The publication of the diaries and letters promoted
increased interest in Waugh and his works and caused the publication of much
new material. Christopher Sykes's biography had appeared in 1975; between 1980
and 1998, three more full biographies were issued, and other biographical and
critical studies have continued to be produced. A collection of Waugh's
journalism and reviews was published in 1983, revealing a fuller range of his
ideas and beliefs. The new material provided further grounds for debate between
Waugh's supporters and detractors.
The 1981 Granada Television adaptation of Brideshead
Revisited introduced a new generation to Waugh's works, in Britain and in
America. There had been earlier television treatment of Waugh's fiction, as
Sword of Honor had been serialized by the BBC in 1967, but the impact of
Granada's Brideshead was much wider. Its nostalgic depiction of a vanished form
of Englishness appealed to the American mass market; Time magazine's TV critic
described the series as "a novel ... made into a poem", and
listed it among the "100 Best TV Shows of All Time". There
have been further cinematic Waugh adaptations: A Handful of Dust in 1988, Vile
Bodies (filmed as Bright Young Things) in 2003, and Brideshead Revisited again
in 2008. These popular treatments have maintained the public's appetite for
Waugh's novels, all of which remain in print and continue to sell. Several have
been listed among various compiled lists of the world's greatest novels.
Stannard concludes that beneath his public mask, Waugh was "a
dedicated artist and a man of earnest faith, struggling against the dryness of
his soul". Graham Greene, in a letter to The Times shortly after
Waugh's death, acknowledged him as "the greatest novelist of my
generation", while Time magazine's obituarist called him "the
grand old mandarin of modern British prose" and asserted that his
novels "will continue to survive as long as there are readers who can
savor what critic V. S. Pritchett calls 'the beauty of his malice' ". Nancy
Mitford said of him in a television interview, "What nobody remembers
about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything. That's what
none of the people who wrote about him seem to have taken into account at
all".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Waugh
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