Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited by Philip Eade, Weidenfeld, £30
Great writer, unpleasant man. Such is probably the common estimate of Evelyn Waugh. “I am restless & moody & lazy & misanthropic,” Waugh himself once wrote to Laura Herbert. “I am jealous & impatient.” (He was successfully proposing marriage, by the way.)
Philip Eade, his newest biographer, wishes to make the case for Waugh’s better nature. And the young Waugh we meet in the early chapters is inventive, intrepid and physically courageous – qualities he retained into adulthood. Eade can point to friends and acquaintances who gladly testified to Waugh’s capacity for charm and kindness. His agent remembered “never a harsh word or a rebuke”. His daughter Meg clearly loved him. So did Graham Greene and several others.
But Waugh could also, without doubt, be very cruel. Eade’s assiduous retelling of the life means the evidence of malice cannot but pile up. “I am a bully,” Waugh told Penelope Betjeman (as he bullied her).
Where did the nasty streak come from? This book is dotted with attempts to explain. While taking due note of Evelyn’s grandfather, Dr Alexander Waugh, known (with good reason) as “The Brute”, Eade rejects a hereditary cause. Instead, he singles out Waugh’s father, Arthur, and the impact of his stark preference for his older son, Alec, whom he hero-worshipped.
In an apologetic letter to Diana Guinness, Waugh ventured that his sudden coldness towards her was caused by being “ill at ease with myself”. Another outburst is attributed by Eade to Waugh’s “restlessness” while trapped on holiday with his parents and brother.
As often as he possibly could, Waugh refused to devote time to his young children. When a prematurely born daughter, Mary, died after only 24 hours, Waugh displayed colossal indifference. His grandson Alexander thinks this was Evelyn’s way of proving his immunity to what he saw as his own father’s worse fault: sentimentality.
Waugh certainly knew what he did and did not like: conversation, for instance, needed to contain “a fantasy growing in the telling, apt repartee, argument based on accepted postulates, spontaneous reminiscence and quotation”. He once wrote to his resourceful but hard-pressed wife: “There is no reason to make your letters as dull as your life.” Is this honest? Callous? Funny? All three? Some of the unpleasantness seems to ooze from the time and place. Eade’s book has a large cast of minor characters who spin in and out of the futile marriages, doomed affairs, drunken binges and brittle friendships that typified fashionable London of the 1920s and 30s.
There seems to have been a shared compulsion to make enemies and put them in a box labelled “roaring pansy” or “dreadful bore” or “second-rate”. Maybe Waugh’s mother Kate cracked it, in a casually theological way, when she said that his “quick and unkind tongue” was simply Evelyn’s “besetting sin”.
Eade’s treatment of Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism is surprisingly flimsy. Not so, however, his cataloguing of his subject’s flagrant sins. A visit to a male brothel in Paris in 1925 plumbs the depths of grim hedonism.
Even after conversion, Waugh would double back for more. In 1933, for instance, we find him writing in crude terms to friends in England about what he had been doing with 15-year-old girl prostitutes in Morocco, paid for with “10 francs and a cup of mint tea”.
Eade offers little comment on such actions, moving on to the next thing instead: a new job, a new book, a new infatuation. He doesn’t question how Waugh squared his actions, or his subsequent flippancy about them, with his faith. Perhaps it boiled down to this: brothels and red-light districts and teenage prostitutes existed and Waugh succumbed to using them. He saw no point in being anything but frank about this. If more was to be said, then it was for the confessional.
A Life Revisited zips along, packed with memorable stories, characters and very good jokes, and plumped up by some original source material. All the twists and turns that arise in the life of a man so hard to satisfy are here. The photographs are well chosen too, showing Waugh’s steady transformation from the “prancing faun” that Harold Acton was so drawn to at Oxford to the portly paterfamilias cowering from the modern world in his Somerset fastness. Eade even adopts some of the idiom of Waugh’s heyday to tell the tale: so-and-so is “hopelessly smitten”; a frequent visitor to the school library is an “habitué”; there is one “dalliance” after another.
Nothing is missing, therefore, except perhaps the truth. Igor Stravinsky couldn’t work out whether Waugh was genuinely disagreeable or preposterously arch. Diana Cooper wondered why this man did everything he could to alienate himself from the affection he was yearning for. Maurice Bowra thought it sad that Waugh had “such an urge to torture” Cyril Connolly, concluding that “it must be a form of love”. The strange case of Evelyn Waugh has not been solved yet.
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