On October 28, 1903, Evelyn Waugh was born. Waugh was an English novelist who wrote primarily satirical comedies in the 1920s and 1930s; his novels became more serious, and often focused on Catholic themes, after World War II.
At his local elementary school, Waugh was a fine student, though his teachers reported that he was a bit of a bully. He had expected to spend his teenage years at Sherborne, a respected boarding school, but in 1915, Waugh’s older brother, Alec, who also became a novelist, was expelled from Sherborne after he was discovered to have a homosexual relationship with another student. Alec wrote a novel, The Loom of Youth, that alluded to the incident; he changed the name of the school, but it was clearly recognizable as Sherborne, and the school was so embarrassed that Evelyn was no longer welcome there.
Instead, Waugh attended Lancing College, a good school in its own right, but one which he saw as a step down from Sherborne. He got over his resentment fairly quickly and became a popular student. He was editor of the school magazine and president of the debate club and did well enough in his classes to earn a scholarship to Oxford.
Waugh arrived at Oxford midway through the school year, in January 1922. He was not a disciplined student, and only barely passed his exams at the end of his second year. His performance was poor enough that he lost scholarship, and left Oxford without a degree in 1924.
He enrolled briefly in art school before taking a teaching position at a boys’ school. While working there, Waugh began work on a novel. In 1925, he sent the first chapters to one of his Oxford classmates to read. His friend was so unimpressed that Waugh burned the manuscript. At about the same time, he learned that he had lost a job he had expected to get. He was so distraught that he attempted suicide by walking into the ocean, but returned to shore when he was stung by a jellyfish.
Waugh resumed work on his discarded novel and finished it this time. Decline and Fall, published in 1928, was a satire drawn very much from his own life about a young man’s experiences at boarding school and at university. The critical response was glowing, drawing comparisons to P. G. Wodehouse. His 1930 follow-up, Vile Bodies, was another satire, this time about London’s “bright young things,” young socialites who spent most of their time partying. The tone was darker than that of Decline and Fall, and the book was Waugh’s first major commercial success.
Throughout his career, Waugh often supplemented his income with travel writing for a variety of London newspapers and magazines; the trips he made usually found their way into his fiction. A 1930 visit to several of Britain’s colonies in East Africa led to the 1932 novel Black Mischief, in which a young Oxford-educated African emperor attempts to modernize his country. Reporting from South America led to A Handful of Dust, in which a well-intentioned but naive British gentleman joins an excursion into the Brazilian jungle. Waugh returned to Africa in 1935 as a war correspondent, reporting on the Second Italo-Abyssinian War; the fictional result was Scoop, a satire about foreign correspondents.
In 1939, as World War II began, Waugh was commissioned into the Royal Marines. He was briefly promoted to captain but wasn’t a very good commanding officer. In fact, his personality made him generally ill-suited to military life. He found it difficult to take orders and to conform to a regimented lifestyle, and spent much of the war in frustration, being transferred from one position to another.
In 1945, Waugh published Brideshead Revisited, which is perhaps his best-known novel today. It was a more serious novel than his earlier work, and followed the life of Charles Ryder, focusing on his relationships with the wealthy Flyte family. Waugh was very pleased with the book, referring to it as “my first novel, rather than my last,” It was an enormous success, both in England and in the United States.
There was even talk of a film adaptation, and Waugh visited the United States in 1947 to discuss those plans. The movie was never made, but his time in Los Angeles provided—as just about everything in Waugh’s life did—inspiration for his next novel. In particular, he was inspired by a visit to Forest Lawn Cemetery to write The Loved One, a comic novel about the Hollywood film industry and the funeral industry
Waugh’s popularity began to decline in the 1950s. His only historical novel, Helena, is about the Roman Empress; Waugh often said that he thought it was his best work, but it’s not read much today. Men at Arms was the first volume of the “Sword of Honour” trilogy, based loosely on Waugh’s experiences during World War II. It was followed by Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender.
Now in his 50s, Waugh was often in financial trouble, and in generally ill health from years of too much alcohol and abuse of drugs, prescription and otherwise. His doctors encouraged him to travel, thinking a change of scenery might do him good. While en route to Ceylon, now called Sri Lanka, he began to have hallucinations. He managed to get home safely, and his doctors realized that he was suffering from bromide poisoning from the various medications he had been taking. The hallucinations ended when his prescriptions were changed, and Waugh turned the experience into what he called his “mad book,” The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.
In the early 1960s, Waugh wrote several articles in opposition to the changes made by the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council; he was particularly upset by the decision to allow the Mass to be performed in English instead of in Latin.
Waugh died of heart failure on April 10, 1966. He returned to the public eye in 1973 when his diaries, which were being prepared for book publication, were serialized in a London newspaper. They led to a widespread perception of Waugh as an intolerant bully with strong fascist sympathies. His friends defended him, saying that even as he wrote his diaries, Waugh was aware that they might well be published someday, and that he had always constructed a public persona that was deliberately abrasive, as a way of maintaining his privacy. As Nancy Mitford put it, “What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes.”
It is true that even by the standards of his era, the racism and anti-Semitism in Waugh’s writing are troubling, and his novels, especially after the war, became more harshly elitist, focusing on what Waugh saw as the rise of mediocrity in British society. Still, Waugh’s stories are entertaining, and he is widely recognized as one of the most graceful and elegant writers of the mid-20th century. Graham Greene described him as “the greatest novelist of my generation.”
Waugh’s novels have frequently been adapted for film and television. A serialized adaptation of Brideshead Revisited was one of PBS’s most popular series of the 1980s. Two adaptations of Waugh’s work are available for streaming at hoopla—a 2017 BBC miniseries version of Decline and Fall; and Bright Young Things, a 2003 film based on Vile Things.
Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited is a biography by Philip Eade. More of Waugh’s writing is available at Overdrive.
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