Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh ( ; October 28, 1903 - April 10, 1966) is an English novelist, biographer and travel book. He is also a productive journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satellites Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the Brideshead Revisited novel (1945) )) and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honor (1952-61). Waugh is recognized as one of the best prose stylist of English in the 20th century.
The son of a publisher, Waugh was educated at Lancing College and later at Hertford College, Oxford, and had worked as a principal before he was a full-time writer. As a young man, he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends, and developed the tastes of rural people. In the 1930s, he traveled extensively, often as a special newspaper correspondent in which capacity he reported from Abyssinia at the time of the Italian invasion of 1935. He served in the British armed forces during the Second World War (1939-1945), first in Royal Marines and then at the Royal Horse Guards. He is a perceptive writer who uses the experience and variety of people he encounters in his works, generally for funny effects. Waugh's detachment is such that he obscures his own mental disorder, which occurred in the early 1950s.
After his first marriage failure, Waugh switched to Catholicism in 1930. His traditionalist attitudes caused him to strongly oppose all attempts to reform the Church, and the change by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) greatly disturbed his sensitivity, especially the introduction of vernacular Mass. The blow to his religious traditionalism, his dislike for the post-war culture of the world's welfare state and the decline of his health, further darkened his final years, but he continued to write. To the public, Waugh displays a mask of indifference, but he is able to give goodness to the people he considers his friends. After his death in 1966, he gained new followers through film and television versions of his work, such as the television series Brideshead Revisited (1981).
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Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was born on October 28, 1903 by Arthur Waugh (1866-1943) and Catherine Charlotte Raban (1870-1954), into a family originally from England, Scotland, Welsh, Ireland, and Huguenot. Distinguished ancestors included Lord Cockburn (1779-1854), a prominent advocate and judge in Scotland, William Morgan (1750-1833), a pioneer of actuarial science who served the 56-year Equitable Life Assurance Society, and Philip Henry Gosse (1810- 1888). ), a natural scientist who became famous for his portrayal as a religious fanatic in his memoirs of Edmund, father and son. Among the ancestors with the name Waugh, Reverend Alexander Waugh (1754-1827) was a pastor at the Secession Church of Scotland who helped found the London Missionary Society and was one of the leading Nonconformist preachers of his day. His grandson Alexander Waugh (1840-1906) was a state medical practitioner, who oppressed his wife and children and became known in the Waugh family as "Brute". The elder of two sons, born in 1866, is Arthur Waugh.
After attending Sherborne School and New College, Oxford, Arthur Waugh began his career in publishing and as a literary critic. In 1902 he became managing director of Chapman and Hall, the publisher of Charles Dickens's works. He was married to Catherine Raban (1870-1954) in 1893; Their first son Alexander Raban Waugh (always known as Alec) was born on July 8, 1898. Alec Waugh later became a record novelist. At the time of his birth, the family lived in North London, on Hillfield Road, West Hampstead where, on October 28, 1903, the two sons of the couple were born, "in a hurry before Dr Andrews could arrive", writes Catherine. On January 7, 1904 the boy was baptized Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh but was known in the family and in the wider world as Evelyn.
Maps Evelyn Waugh
Childhood
Golders Green and Heath Mount
In 1907, the Waugh family left Hillfield Road for Underhill, a house built by Arthur on North End Road, Hampstead, close to Golders Green, then a semi-rural dairy farm, market garden and bluebell forest. Evelyn received her first school lessons at home, from her mother, with whom she had a very close relationship; his father, Arthur Waugh, is a further figure, whose close bond with his eldest son, Alec, is such that Evelyn often feels excluded. In September 1910, Evelyn began as a day student at the Heath Mount prep school. At that time, he was a boy who lived from many interests, who had written and completed the "Horse Curse", the first story. Waugh spent six relatively satisfied years at Heath Mount; on his own statement he was a "very clever little boy", who was rarely depressed or shocked by his studies. Physically fierce, Evelyn tends to bully the weaker boy; among his victims was future society photographer Cecil Beaton, who never forgot the experience.
Outside the school, he and other neighborhood kids play the drama, usually written by Waugh. On the basis of xenophobia which was fostered by Invasion literature books, that the Germans would invade England, Waugh organized his friends into the "Pistol Forces", who built a fort, maneuvered and paraded with temporary uniforms. In 1914, after the First World War began, Waugh and the other boys from Mountain Heath Scout Schools were sometimes employed as couriers in the War Office; Evelyn roamed the War Office in the hope of seeing Lord Kitchener, but never did.
Family vacations are usually spent with Waugh's aunt, at Midsomer Norton, in a house lit by oil lamps, a time Waugh remembered happily, years later. At Midsomer Norton, Evelyn became very interested in the high Anglican church ritual, the beginning of the spiritual dimension which later dominated her life perspective, and she served as an altar boy in the local Anglican church. During his final year at Heath Mount, Waugh founded and edited the Cynic school magazine.
Lancing
Like his father in front of him, Alec Waugh went to school in Sherborne, and, assumed by the family that Evelyn would follow, but in 1915, the school asked Alec to leave, after the homosexual relationship was revealed. Alec departs Sherborne for military training as an officer, and, pending confirmation of his commission, wrote The Loom of Youth (1917), a school life novel, which alludes to homosexual friendships at schools that are Sherborne recognisably. The public sensation caused by Alec's novel is so offensive that Evelyn is not likely to go there. In May 1917, much to his annoyance, he was sent to Lancing College, in his opinion, a very low school.
Waugh soon overcame his initial aversion to Lancing, settling in and establishing his reputation as an aesthetic. In November 1917 his essay "In Cubism Defense" (1917) was accepted by and published in the art magazine << Drawing and Design ; it was his first published article. Inside the school, he becomes somewhat subversive, mocking the school cadet corps and setting up the Corpse Club "for those who are bored stiff". The end of the war sees his return to a young master's school like J. F. Roxburgh, who encourages Waugh to write and foresaw a great future for him. Another mentor, Francis Crease, taught Waugh the art of calligraphy and decorative design; some of the children's work was good enough to be used by Chapman and Hall on book coats.
In his final years at Lancing, Waugh has been a successful captain of home, school magazine editor and president of the debating community, and won numerous art and literary awards. He also relinquished most of his religious beliefs. She started a school life novel, without title, but left the business after writing about 5,000 words. He ended his school by winning a scholarship to read Modern History at Hertford College, Oxford, and left Lancing in December 1921.
Oxford
Waugh arrived at Oxford in January 1922. He immediately wrote to his old friends in Lancing about the pleasures of his new life; he told Tom Driberg: "I do not work here and never go to Chapel". During the first two periods, he generally follows the convention; he smoked a pipe, bought a bicycle, and gave his first speech at the Oxford Union, opposing the motion that "This House will welcome the Prohibition". Waugh wrote a report on the Unity debate for both Oxford magazine, Cherwell and Isis, and he acted as a film critic for Isis . He also became the secretary of the debate community at Hertford University, "a heavy but disrespectful post", he told Driberg. Although Waugh tends to regard scholarship as a reward for past attempts rather than stepping stones for future academic success, he does enough work in his first two terms to pass "Previous History", an important preliminary examination.
Arrival at Oxford in October 1922 from the sophisticated Hartonston Etonians and Brian Howard changed the life of Waugh's Oxford. Acton and Howard quickly became the center of the avant-garde circle known as the Hypocrites' Club (Waugh is the secretary of the club), whose artistic, social and homosexual values ​​were adopted by Waugh with enthusiasm; he later wrote: "That is the half stamping ground of my Oxford life". He started drinking a lot, and started the first of several homosexual relationships, the most lasting being with Richard Pares and Alastair Graham. He continues to write reviews and short stories for university journals, and develops a reputation as a talented graphic artist, but formal studies largely stop. This negligence caused a fierce battle between Waugh and his history teacher, C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, dean (and later principal) of Hertford College. When Cruttwell advised him to improve his ways, Waugh replied in a manner that, he admitted later, "very arrogant", from then on, the relationship between the two became a common hatred. Waugh resumed the old feud after his Oxford days using the name Cruttwell in his early novels for the succession of a ridiculous, embarrassing or disgusting minor character.
Waugh's lost lifestyle continued into his final year at Oxford, 1924. A letter written that year to a friend of Lancing, Dudley Carew, hinted at the intense emotional pressure: "I have lived very hard for the last three weeks." For two weeks my last one has been almost insane.... I might someday tell you some things that have happened ". He did enough work to pass his final exam in the summer of 1924 with third grade. However, as he had begun at Hertford in the second term of the academic year 1921-22, Waugh had completed only eight dwellings as he sat his final exam instead of the nine required under the university law. The bad results led to the loss of a scholarship, which made it impossible for him to return to Oxford for the last term, so he left without a degree.
Back at home, Waugh started a novel, The Temple at Thatch , and worked with some of his fellow Hypocrite in a movie,
Initial career
Headmaster and author just
Waugh started at Heatherley at the end of September 1924, but became bored with his routine and soon left his studies. He spent weeks partying in London and Oxford before the urgent need for money led him to register through an agent for a teaching job. Almost at once, he secured a post at Arnold House, a boys' preparation school in North Wales, beginning in January 1925. He took notes for his novel, The Temple at Thatch, which intends to do it in his spare time. Despite the gloomy school atmosphere, Waugh did his best to fulfill his position requirement, but returning briefly to London and Oxford during the Easter holidays only exacerbated his sense of alienation.
In the summer of 1925, Waugh's views briefly improved, with the prospect of a job in Pisa, Italy, as Scottish writer secretary Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, involved in the English translation of Marcel Proust's works. Believing that the job was his, Waugh resigned from his post at Arnold House. He has sent the early chapters of his novel to Acton for judgment and criticism. Acton's answer was so calm that Waugh immediately burned his manuscript; Shortly after, before he left North Wales, he learned that Moncrieff's work had failed. Twin blows are enough for him to consider committing suicide. He notes that he goes to the nearest beach and, leaving a note with his clothes, goes to sea. The attack by the jellyfish changed his mind, and he returned quickly to shore.
For the next two years Waugh taught at schools in Aston Clinton (from where he was dismissed for attempted seduction of a school principal) and Notting Hill in London. He considered an alternative career in printing or cabinet making, and attended the evening classes in carpentry at Holborn Polytechnic while continuing to write. A short story, "The Balance," was written in an experimental modernist style, becoming his first commercially published fiction, when incorporated by Chapman and Hall in the 1926 anthology, Georgian Stories. A long essay on the Pre-Raphael Brotherhood was printed privately by Alastair Graham, using the Shakespeare Head Press agreement in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he underwent training as a printer. This led to a contract from Duckworths publisher for the complete biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, written Waugh in 1927. He also began working on a comic novel; after some temporary work titles become Reject and Fall . After giving up teaching, he had no permanent job except for a short time, failing as a reporter on the Daily Express in April-May 1927. That year he met (presumably through his brother Alec) and fell in love with Evelyn Gardner, the daughter of God and Lady Burghclere.
"He-Evelyn" and "She-Evelyn"
In December 1927, Waugh and Evelyn Gardner were engaged, despite opposition from Lady Burghclere, who felt that Waugh lacked moral fiber and made the company unsuitable. Among their friends, they were quickly recognized as "He-Evelyn" and "She-Evelyn". Waugh currently depends on a four-week pocket money from his father and a small amount he can earn from book review and journalism. Rossetti's biography was published at a generally favorable reception in April 1928: J. C. Squire at The Observer praised the elegance and intelligence of the book; Acton gave cautious approval; and novelist Rebecca West wrote to state how much she enjoyed the book. Less fun for Waugh is referencing the Times Literary Supplement ' s to him as "Miss Waugh".
When Decline and Fall finished, Duckworths objected to his "obscenity," but Chapman and Hall agreed to publish it. This is enough for Waugh and Gardner to put forward their wedding plans. They married in St Paul's Church, Portman Square, on June 27, 1928, with only Acton, Alec Waugh and Pansy Pakenham's bride present. The couple made their home in a small flat in Canonbury Square, Islington. The first months of marriage were overshadowed by lack of money, and by poor health Gardner, who survived until the fall.
In September 1928, Reject and Fall was published almost with unanimous praise. In December, the book became the third printing, and American publishing rights sold for $ 500. In the remnants of his success, Waugh was assigned to write travel articles in exchange for a free Mediterranean cruise, which he and Gardner started in February 1929, as honeymoon extended, pending. The trip was disrupted when Gardner contracted pneumonia and was taken to a British hospital in Port Said. The couple returned home in June, after his recovery. A month later, without warning, Gardner admits that their friend, John Heygate, has become his lover. After a failed reconciliation effort, Waugh was shocked and anxiously filed for divorce on September 3, 1929. The couple seemed to meet again only once, during the process for the cancellation of their marriage a few years later.
Celebrity year
Recognition
Waugh's first biographer, Christopher Sykes, noted that after divorce friends "see, or believe that they see, new hardness and bitterness" in Waugh's view. Nevertheless, although there was a letter to Acton in which he wrote that he "did not know it was possible to be so miserable and alive", he immediately resumed his professional and social life. He finished his second novel, Vile Bodies , and wrote articles including (ironically, he thought) one for Daily Mail about the meaning of the wedding ceremony. During this period Waugh began practicing living in various friends' houses; he has no fixed home for the next eight years.
Vile Bodies , an allusion to the Bright Young People of the 1920s, was published on January 19, 1930 and Waugh's first major commercial success. Despite its semi-biblical title, this book is dark, bitter, "a manifesto of disappointment", according to Martin Stannard's biography. As a bestselling author, Waugh can now earn a greater cost for his journalism. In the middle of regular work for The Graphic , City and Country and Harper's Bazaar , he quickly wrote
On September 29, 1930, Waugh was accepted into the Catholic Church. This shocked his family and shocked some of his friends, but he had been contemplating the move for some time. He had lost Anglicanism in Lancing and had lived an unreligious life in Oxford, but there were references in his diary from the mid-1920s to religious discussions and ordinary churches. On December 22, 1925, Waugh wrote: "Claud and I invited Audrey to dinner and sit until 7 am by arguing about the Roman Church." Entries for February 20, 1927 included, "I will visit Father Underhill about becoming a minister". During that period, Waugh was influenced by his friend Olivia Plunket-Greene, who had repented in 1925 and among them, Waugh later wrote, "He oppresses me into the Church." It was he who brought him to Jesuit Father Martin D'Arcy, who persuaded Waugh "on a firm but slightly emotional intellectual belief" that "the Christian revelation is genuine." In 1949, Waugh explained that his conversion follows his consciousness that life is "incomprehensible and unbearable without God."
Authors and travelers
On October 10, 1930, Waugh, representing several newspapers, traveled to Abyssinia to cover the coronation of Haile Selassie. He reported the incident as "a complicated propaganda effort" to convince the world that Abyssinia was a civilized nation that hid that the emperor had reached power through barbaric means. The next trip through British colonies in East Africa and Belgian Congo forms the basis of two books; his journey of Remote People (1931) and the Black Mischief comic novel (1932). Waugh's next long journey, in the winter of 1932-1933, was to Guyana England (now Guyana) in South America, perhaps taken to distract him from the long and unrequited desire for the socialite of Teresa Jungman. Upon arrival at Georgetown, Waugh arranged a river trip with a steam launch into the interior. He traveled through several staging posts to Boa Vista in Brazil, and then took a tricky journey back to Georgetown. His adventures and encounters found their way into two further books: his journey of ninety-two days, and the novel A Handful of Dust, both published in 1934.
Returning from South America, Waugh faces allegations of obscenity and desecration from the Catholic journal The Tablet, who object to parts of the Black Mischief . He defended himself in an open letter to the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Francis Bourne, who remained unpublished until 1980. In the summer of 1934 he went to Spitsbergen in the Arctic, an experience he did not enjoy and where he made minimal literary use. Upon returning, determined to write a major Catholic biography, he chose the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion as his subject. The book, published in 1935, provoked controversy by a pro-Catholic, anti-Protestant attitude that was straightforward but brought the author the Hawthornden Prize. He returned to Abyssinia in August 1935 to report the opening stages of the Second Italo-Abyssinian War for Daily Mail . Waugh, on the basis of his previous visit, considers Abyssinia a "barbaric place Mussolini is doing well to tame" according to his journalist counterpart, William Deedes. Waugh sees little action and is not entirely serious in his role as a war correspondent. Deedes commented on the arrogance of the older writer: "None of us are measurable enough until the company he likes to stay home". However, in the face of an Italian air strike that was imminent, Deedes found Waugh's courage "very convincing". Waugh wrote the Abyssinian experience in a book, Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), which Rose Macaulay regarded as "fascist" because of the pro-Italian tone. The more famous account is his novel Scoop (1938) where the protagonist, William Boot, is loosely based on the Deed.
Among friends who grew up in Waugh were Diana Guinness and Bryan Guinness (dedication of Vile Bodies ), Lady Diana Cooper and her husband Duff Cooper, Nancy Mitford who was formerly a friend of Evelyn Gardner, and Lygon's brother. Waugh knows Hugh Patrick Lygon in Oxford; now he is introduced to their girls and country houses, Madresfield Court, which is the closest place he has at home for years of wandering. In 1933, on the cruise of the Greek islands, he was introduced by Pastor D'Arcy to Gabriel Herbert, the eldest daughter of Aubrey Herbert's ultimate explorer. When the cruise ended, Waugh was invited to stay at Herbert's family villa in Portofino, where he first met 17-year-old Gabriel's sister, Laura.
Second wedding
At his conversion, Waugh had accepted that he would not be able to remarry while Evelyn Gardner was alive. However, he wanted a wife and children, and in October 1933, he began proceedings for the cancellation of the marriage on the basis of "lack of real agreement". The case was tried by an ecclesiastical court in London, but the postponement of a paper submission to Rome meant that the cancellation was not given until July 4, 1936. Meanwhile, after their initial meeting in Portofino, Waugh fell in love with Laura Herbert. He proposed marriage, by letters, in the spring of 1936. There was a sense of initial anxiety from Herberts, an aristocratic Catholic family; as a further complication, Laura Herbert is Evelyn Gardner's cousin. Despite the family feud, the marriage took place on April 17, 1937 at the Church of the Assumption in Warwick Street, London.
As a wedding gift the bride's grandmother bought a pair of Piers Court, a country house near Stinchcombe in Gloucestershire. The couple has seven children, one of whom died in infancy. Their first child, a daughter, Maria Teresa, was born on March 9, 1938 and a son, Auberon Alexander, on November 17, 1939. Among these events, Scoop was published in May 1938 for praise critical. In August 1938, Waugh, with Laura, traveled three months to Mexico after which he wrote the Legal Robbery, based on his experience there. In that book he spelled out his conservative credibility; he later described the book as "a little traveling and a lot of political questions".
Second World War
Royal Marine and command
Waugh left Piers Court on September 1, 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War and moved his young family to Pixton Park in Somerset, where the Herbert family sat, as he searched for military work. He also began writing novels in a new style, using the first person narrative but was left out of work when he was assigned to the Royal Marines in December and entered training at the Chatham naval base. He never completed the novel: the fragment was finally published as Working Suspended and Other Stories (1943).
Waugh's daily training routine leaves him with a "stiff spine so he feels ill to even take a pen". In April 1940, he was promoted while captaining and commanded a marine company, but he proved an unpopular officer, arrogant and rigid with his men. Even after the German invasion of the Low Countries (May 10-June 22, 1940), his battalion was not called to action. Waugh's inability to adapt to the regimental life meant that he soon lost his command, and he became a battalion Intelligence Officer. In that role, he finally saw the action in Operation Menace as part of the British troops sent to the Battle of Dakar in West Africa (23-25 ​​September 1940) in August 1940 to support efforts by the French Forces undermine the French Vichy government colonial and install General Charles de Gaulle. Menace's operation failed, hampered by fog and misinformation about the extent of the city's defenses, and British troops resigned on 26 September. Waugh's comment about the affair is this: "Bloodshed is avoided at the price of honor."
In November 1940, Waugh was sent to the command unit, and, after further training, became a member of "Layforce", under Colonel (then Brigadier) Robert Laycock. In February 1941, the unit sailed to the Mediterranean, where it participated in a failed attempt to reclaim Bardia, on the Libyan coast. In May, Layforce was asked to assist in the evacuation of Crete: Waugh was shocked by the annoyance and loss of discipline and, as he saw it, the cowards of the departing troops. In July, during a round-trip with a troop ship, he wrote Install More Flags (1942), a novel about the early months of the war in which he returned to the literary style he used in 1930 -an.. Back in England, more training and waiting followed up, in May 1942, he was transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, on the recommendation of Laycock. On June 10, 1942, Laura gave birth to Margaret, the fourth child of the couple.
Frustration, Brideshead and Yugoslavia
Waugh's excitement in his transfer soon dropped to disappointment as he failed to find opportunities for active service. The death of his father, on 26 June 1943, and the need to deal with family affairs prevented him from leaving with a brigade for North Africa as part of Operation Husky (9 July-17 August 1943), Allied invasions to Sicily. Regardless of his undoubted courage, his character is not soft and disobedient to make it effectively can not be employed as a soldier. After a lazy spell at the regiment depot in Windsor, Waugh began practicing a parachute in Tatton Park, Cheshire, but landed awkwardly during practice and broke the fibula. Recovering in Windsor, he applied for three months of unpaid leave to write a novel that had formed in his mind. His request was given and, on January 31, 1944, he left for Chagford, Devon, where he could work in exile. The result is Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & amp; The Noble Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945), the first of his explicitly Catholic novels where the biographer Douglas Lane Patey commented that it was "a book that seemed to affirm his new feelings about the author's call".
Waugh managed to extend his leave until June 1944. Immediately after his return he was recruited by Randolph Churchill to serve on a military mission to Yugoslavia, and, in early July, flew with Churchill from Bari, Italy, to the Croatian island. Vis. There, they met Marshal Tito, the Communist leader of the Partisans, who led a guerrilla war against the Axis troops who occupied with the support of the Allies. Waugh and Churchill returned to Bari before flying back to Yugoslavia to start their mission, but their plane crashed, both people were injured, and their mission was delayed for a month.
The mission finally arrived at Topusko, where he built himself in a quiet farmhouse. The group's liaison duties, between the British Army and the Communist Partisans, are light. Waugh little sympathy with the Communist-led Partisan and hate Tito. His main interest is the welfare of the Catholic Church in Croatia, which, he argues, has suffered at the hands of the Serbian Orthodox Church and will worsen as the Communists take control. He expressed these thoughts in a long report, "Church and State in Liberated Croatia". After a spell in Dubrovnik and Rome, Waugh returned to London on March 15, 1945 to present his report, which was suppressed by the Foreign Office to maintain good relations with Tito, now the Yugoslav communist leader.
Postwar
Fame and fortune
Brideshead Revisited was published in London in May 1945. Waugh has been convinced of the quality of the book, "my first novel of my last novel." This is a tremendous success, bringing fame, status and literary status of the author. Though happy with this result, Waugh's main concern when the war ended was the fate of the large Eastern European Catholic population, which was betrayed (when he saw it) into the hands of Stalin's Soviet Union by the Allies. He now sees little difference in morality between combatants and then describes it as "a war of attraction between teams that can not be distinguished." Although he took the momentary pleasure of the defeat of Winston Churchill and his Conservatives in the 1945 elections, he saw the accession of Labor power as a triumph of barbarism and the beginning of the new "Dark Age".
In September 1945, after he was released by the army, he returned to Piers Court with his family (another daughter, Harriet, born in Pixton in 1944) but spent much of the next seven years either in London, or traveling. In March 1946, he visited Nuremberg court, and later that year, he was in Spain for the 400th anniversary of the death of Francisco de Vitoria, who was said to be the founder of international law. Waugh writes his experience of the frustration of the postwar European journey in a novel, Modern-European Scott-King . In February 1947, he made the first of several trips to the United States, in the first example to discuss the filmmaking of Brideshead. The project collapsed, but Waugh used his time in Hollywood to visit the Forest Lawn cemetery, which provided the basis for his innuendo about the American perspective on death, The Loved One. In 1951 he visited the Holy Land with his future biographer, Christopher Sykes, and in 1953, he traveled to Goa to witness the final exhibition before the burial of the 16th-century Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier.
Among his journeys, Waugh worked intermittently at Helena, a long-planned novel about the inventor of the True Cross which is "by far the best book I have ever written or ever written." His success with the public was limited, but that, his daughter Harriet later said, "the only one of his books that he ever cares to read aloud".
In 1952, Waugh published Men's Arms, the first of his semi-autobiographical war trilogy in which he described many of his personal experiences and meetings from the early stages of the war. Other books published during this period include When The Going Was Good (1946), an anthology of his pre-war travel writings, The Holy Places (published by Ian Fleming- managed by Queen Anne Press, 1952) and Love Among the Ruins (1953), a dystopian story in which Waugh displays contempt for the modern world. By the age of 50, Waugh had grown old for many years, "selectively deaf, rheumatism, angry" and increasingly dependent on alcohol and drugs to relieve insomnia and depression. Two more children, James (born 1946) and Septimus (born 1950), complete his family.
From 1945 onwards, Waugh became a collector of objects, especially the Victorian paintings and furnishings. He filled Piers Court with his acquisition, often from Portobello Market in London and from the sale of home permits. His diary for August 30, 1946 records a visit to Gloucester, where he purchased "wooden lions, finely carved for  £ 25, also a bookshelf Ã,  £ 35... a charming Chinese painting Ã,  £ 10, a County horses Ã,  £ 7 ". Some of his purchases are intelligent and ongoing; he paid Ã,  £ 10 for Rossetti's "Spirit of the Rainbow" to start a collection of Victorian paintings that ultimately gained great value. Waugh also began, from 1949, to write reviews and articles on the subject of painting.
Details
In 1953, Waugh's popularity as a writer declined. He is considered out of step with the Zeitgeist , and the huge fees he asks are no longer available easily. The money runs out and progress on the second book of his war trilogy, Officials and Gentlemen, stalled. Partly because of his dependence on drugs, his health continued to deteriorate. The cash shortage led him to agree in November 1953 to be interviewed on BBC radio, where the panel took the aggressive line: "They tried to embarrass me, and I do not think they were fully successful", writes Waugh to Nancy. Mitford. Peter Fleming at The Spectator likened the interview to "bullfighting by matador".
Beginning in 1954, Waugh's doctor, concerned about his physical damage, suggested a scene change. On January 29, he took a ship that goes to Ceylon, hoping that he will be able to finish his novel. Within days, he wrote home complaining about "other passengers who whispered about me" and heard voices, including the voice of his BBC counterpart, Stephen Black. He left the ship in Egypt and flew to Colombo, but, he wrote to Laura, voices followed him. Frustrated, Laura seeks help from her friend Frances Donaldson, whose husband agrees to fly to Ceylon and bring Waugh home. In fact, Waugh returns to his own way, now believing that he was possessed by a demon. A brief medical examination showed that Waugh suffered from bromide poisoning from his drug regimen. When the medicine is changed, the sounds and other hallucinations quickly disappear. Waugh is happy, telling all his friends that he's gone mad: "Clean my onions!". The experience was fictional years later, at The Gilbert's Test of Pinfold (1957).
In 1956, Edwin Newman made a short film about Waugh. In the process, Newman knew that Waugh hated the modern world and wished that he had been born two or three centuries earlier. Waugh did not like modern transportation or communication methods, refused to drive or use the phone, and wrote with a quill. Waugh also expressed the view that American news reporters can not function without frequent whiskey and that every American has divorced at least once.
End works
Restored to health, Waugh returned to work and finished Officials and Gentlemen . In June 1955, journalist and daily traveler of Nancy Spain, accompanied by his friend Lord Noel-Buxton, arrived uninvited at Piers Court and asked for an interview. Waugh spotted the couple and wrote a wry account for The Spectator, but he was distracted by the incident and decided to sell Piers Court: "I feel it is tainted", he told Nancy Mitford. At the end of 1956, the family moved to a noble house in Somerset village, Combe Florey. In January 1957, Waugh avenged Spain-Noel-Buxton's interference by winning defamation from Express and Spanish. The paper has printed an article by Spain that states that sales of Waugh's books are much lower than they are and that its value, as a journalist, is low.
Gilbert Pinfold was published in the summer of 1957, "my barmy book", Waugh called it. The extent to which the story mocks itself, rather than true autobiography, becomes the subject of a critical debate. Waugh's next major book is the biography of his old friend Ronald Knox, the Catholic writer and theologian who died in August 1957. The research and writing was extended over two years in which Waugh did little else, delaying the third volume of his war trilogy. In June 1958, his son Auberon was seriously injured in a shooting accident while serving alongside troops in Cyprus. Waugh remains separate; he did not go to Cyprus or immediately visit Auberon on his return to England. The literary critic and literary biographer, David Wykes, called the waugh singing "extraordinary" and the family clearly accepted his behavior more than that.
Although most of Waugh's books sell well, and he is well-rewarded for his journalism, his spending rate means that money and tax bills are a recurring feature of his life. In 1950, as a means of tax evasion, he had established a trust fund for his children (he referred to it as "Save the Children Fund", after the established charity of the name) where he placed the initial advance and all future royalties from Penguin edition (pocket book) from his books. He is able to improve his personal finances by charging household costs to trust or selling his own. Nonetheless, in 1960, a lack of money led him to approve an interview on BBC Television, in the series Face to Face by John Freeman. The interview was broadcast on June 26, 1960; according to his biographer Selena Hastings, Waugh resisted his instinctive instinct and calmly answered the question posed to him by Freeman, assuming what he described as "the pose of boredom in the world".
In 1960, Waugh was offered the honor of CBE but refused, believing that he should be given superior status as a knight. In September, he produced his last travel book, A Tourist in Africa , based on visits made in January-March 1959. He enjoyed the journey but "hated" the book. Critic Cyril Connolly calls it "the thinnest part of the book making that Mr. Waugh has done". The book is completed, it works on the last war trilogy, published in 1961 as Unconditional Delivery .
Reject and die
As he approaches his sixties, Waugh is in poor health, premature, "fat, deaf, breathless", according to Patey. His biographer Martin Stannard likened his appearance around this time to a "fatigued bastard". In 1962, Waugh began working on his autobiography, and in the same year wrote his last fiction, a long long story of Basil Seal Rides Again . The rise of the protagonist of Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags was published in 1963; Times Literary Supplement calls it a "bad little book". When the first volume of autobiography, A Little Learning , published in 1964, Waugh's often tilted tone and a thoughtful name change ensured that friends avoided the shame some feared.
Waugh had welcomed accession in 1958 from Pope John XXIII and wrote an appreciative appreciation for the death of the pope in 1963. However, he became increasingly concerned with the decision that emerged from the Second Vatican Council, held by Pope John in October 1962 and continued under his successor, Paul VI until 1965. Waugh, a staunch opponent of Church reform, was deeply pressured by the replacement of the universal Latin Mass with everyday language. In a audience article on November 23, 1962, he presented the case for change in a way described by later commentators as "fairness". He wrote to Nancy Mitford that "the seizure of the Church is a deep sorrow for me.... We write to newspapers.
In 1965, a new financial crisis emerged from a clear flaw in terms of "Save the Children" trust, and a large amount of back taxes were being asked. Agent Waugh, AD Peters, negotiated a settlement with the tax authorities for a manageable amount, but in his concern for generating funds, Waugh signed a contract to write several books, including papal history, an illustrated book on the Crusades and a second volume of autobiography. Waugh's physical and mental damage prevented any work on these projects, and the contracts were canceled. She describes herself as "toothless, deaf, melancholy, shaking on my pin, unable to eat, full of drugs, quite silent" and expressed confidence that "all fate is worse than death". The only significant literary activity of 1965 was the editing of three war novels into one volume, published as a Sword of Honor.
On Easter Day, April 10, 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, at the age of 62. He was buried, with special arrangements, in a consecrated plot outside the Anglican church at St Peter's Church & amp; St Paul, Combe Florey. The Requiem Mass, in Latin, was celebrated at Westminster Cathedral on 21 April 1966.
Characters and opinions
In the course of his life, Waugh makes enemies and offends many; author James Lees-Milne said that Waugh "is the most angry person in Britain". Waugh's son, Auberon, says that his father's personality strengths are such that, despite his lack of height, "the generals and finance ministers, six-foot-six and radiate self-interest from every pore, quail [ed] in front ".
In the biography of Mad World (2009), Paula Byrne says that the general view of Evelyn Waugh as "arrogant" is a caricature; he asked: "Why would a man, so displeasing, be so loved by such a vast circle of friends?" His generosity to people and individual causes, especially Catholic causes, extends to small movements; after a court victory over Nancy Spain, he sent a bottle of champagne to him. Hastings says that Waugh's personal greatness toward strangers is not entirely serious but an attempt to "find a worthy debate partner of his own intelligence and ingenuity." In addition to making fun of other people, Waugh scoffs at himself - the buffer parent, the "crusty colonel," which he presents later on, is a comic imitation, and not his real self.
As an instinctive conservative, Waugh believed that class division, with inequality of wealth and position, was natural and that "there is no form of government [ordained] by God as better than others". In postwar "Age of the Common Man" he attacked socialism ("Cripps-Attlee Terror") and complained, after Churchill's 1951 election, that "the Conservative Party never returns the clock for a second." Waugh never voted in elections; in 1959, he expressed the hope that the Conservatives would win the election, which they did, but would not vote for them, saying "I must feel I am morally inculcated in their ignorance" and added: "I do not want to suggest I am sovereign in his maid's choice".
Waugh Catholicism is fundamental: "The Church... is a normal human state in which humans have alienated themselves." He believed that the Catholic Church was the last, a great defense against the encroachment of the Dark Ages delivered by the welfare state and the spread of working-class culture. Thorough scrutiny, Waugh admits to Diana Cooper that his most difficult task is how to link his faith obligations with his ignorance to his friends. When Nancy Mitford asked her how she reconciled her often unpleasant behavior by being a Christian, Waugh replied that "if he was not a Christian he would be even more terrible".
Waugh's conservatism is aesthetic as well as political and religious. Although he praised the younger writers, such as Angus Wilson, Muriel Spark, and V.S. Naipaul, he ridiculed the group of writers of the 1950s known as the "Movement". He said that the literary world was "drowned in a black catastrophe" and that literature probably died within thirty years. As a schoolboy, Waugh praised Cubism art but soon abandoned his interest in artistic Modernism. In 1945, Waugh said that Pablo Picasso's artistic was the result of a "mesmer trick" and that his painting "can not be discussed intelligently in terms used by civilized rulers". In 1953, in a radio interview, he named Augustus Egg (1816-1863) as a painter he greatly appreciated. Despite their political differences, Waugh came to admire George Orwell, because of their shared patriotism and morality.
Throughout his literary works, Evelyn Waugh freely declared racial and anti-Semitic prejudices, especially in the books he wrote before the Second World War. Author V.S. Pritchett says that Waugh's anti-Semitism, "like Mount Everest, is there, nonviolent, but undeniable". Wykes says that anti-Semitism is Waugh's "most persistent atrocity", adding that Waugh's racism is "an illogical expansion of his view of the nature and truth of hierarchy as the main principle of social organization." As an admirer of Waugh's writings, Orwell says that Evelyn Waugh is "almost as good a novelist as possible... while holding an unsustainable opinion".
Work
Themes and styles
Wykes observes that Waugh's novels repeat and articulate major events in his life, although in early essay Waugh writes: "No one insults a novelist more than assumes that he is incapable of anything but transcription only from what he observes". The reader should not assume that the author agrees with the opinion expressed by his fictitious character. However, in the Introduction to Short Stories , Ann Pasternak Slater says that "the description of the social prejudices and the language in which they are expressed is part of Waugh's careful observation of his contemporary world."
Critics Clive James said of Waugh: "Nobody has ever written a less elegant English language... hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him". As his talent develops and matures, he retains what literary critic Andrew Michael Roberts called "a very beautiful sense of ludicrous, and a good talent for exposing false attitudes". In the first phase of his writing career for 40 years, before his conversion to Catholicism in 1930, Waugh was a novelist of the Younger Generations. The first two novels, Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930), humorously reflect a vain society, inhabited by two dimensions, a character that is essentially non- can be trusted in a state also fantastic to evoke the emotions of the reader. The typical Waugh brand seen in early novels is a quick and unrelated dialogue in which participants can be easily identified. At the same time, Waugh wrote a serious essay, such as "War and Young Generation" in which he punishes his own generation as "mad and barren".
Waugh's conversion to Catholicism did not change the nature of the next two novels, Black Mischief (1934) and A Handful of Dust (1934), but, in the last novel, the elements the conquered joke, and the protagonist, Tony Last, is a recognizable person and not a comic cipher. Waugh's first fiction with Catholic theme is the short story "Out of Depth" (1933) about the immortality of the Mass. From the mid-1930s onward, Catholicism and conservative politics were largely featured in his journalistic and non-fiction writings before he went back to the previous way with Scoop (1938), a novel about journalism, journalism, and journalistic practice. inappropriate.
In Work Suspended and Other Stories Waugh introduces the "real" character and first person narrator, signifying the literary style he will adopt at Brideshead Revisited several years later. Brideshead, who 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 says that "You can only leave God [fiction] by making your character pure abstraction" and that his future novel will be "an attempt to represent human beings in a fuller way which, to me, means only one thing, man in relation to God. "Thus, the novel Helena (1950) is Evelyn Waugh's most philosophically Christian book.
In Brideshead , Hooper's proletarian junior officer illustrates a persistent theme in Waugh's postwar fiction: the mediocre resurrection in the "Ordinary People Period." In the trilogy of Honor Sword ( Weapon , 1952; Officials and Gentlemen , 1955, Delivery Without Terms , 1961) The social pervasiveness of mediocrity is personified in the semi-comical character of "Trimmer", a slovenly and impostor who wins by discovery. In the novel "Scott-King's Modern Europe" (1947), Waugh's pessimism about the future is in the principal's advice: "I think it would be very evil, indeed, to do whatever suits boys for the modern world." Likewise, such cynicism includes the Love Among the Ruins novel (1953), located in the dystopian state, the socially disadvantaged state of welfare that euthanasia is the most sought after of government social services. From a postwar novel, Patey says that the Trial of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) stands out? Sort of copies-novels, sly invitations for a game ?. Waugh's final fictional work, "Basil Seal Rides Again" (1962), features characters from pre-war novels; Waugh admits that the job is "dementia trying to recapture the way my youth is." This final story style begins in the same way as the first story, "Balance" in 1926, with "a collection of dialogues without a link."
Reception
Waugh's early books, Decline and Fall were praised by Arnold Bennett in the Evening Standard as the "uncompromising and evil satire". The critical reception of Vile Bodies two years later was even more enthusiastic, with Rebecca West predicting that Waugh was "destined to be a dazzling figure of his age". However, a Dust , later to be considered a masterpiece, received a more muffled welcome from critics, although the author has a high estimate of the work. The end of the book, with Tony Last being punished forever to read Dickens for his crazy forest captor, was considered by critic Henry Yorke to reduce a book believed to "fantasy". Cyril Connolly's first reaction to the book was Waugh's failed power, the opinion he later revised.
In the last 1930s, Waugh's propensity for Catholic and conservative polemics affected his position with the general public reader. Campion biography said by David Wykes "so rigid that it has no claim as history". Pro-fascist tones in some parts of Waugh in Abyssinia offend readers and critics and prevent publishing in America. There was general help among critics when Scoop , in 1938, showing the comeback of Waugh's previous comic style. Critics began to think that his intelligence had been replaced by alignments and propaganda.
Waugh retained his reputation in 1942, with Put Out More Flags, which sold well despite wartime bans on paper and printing. His public acceptance, however, was not compared to that given to Brideshead Revisited three years later on both sides of the Atlantic. Choice of Brideshead as Book of America This month flooded its sales in the US that dwarfs them in the UK, which is affected by the lack of paper. Despite the public's enthusiasm, critical opinion is split. Brideshead's Catholic stands offensive to some critics who have welcomed Waugh's previous novel with warm praise. The perceived arrogance and respect for the aristocracy was attacked by, inter alia, Conor Cruise O'Brien who, in the Irish literary magazine
In "Fan Fare", Waugh predicted that his future books would be unpopular because of their religious theme. In publication in 1950, Helena was accepted indifferently by the public and by critics, who underestimated the strange mixing of a twentieth-century schoolgirl with a reverse prose. Otherwise, Waugh's prediction proves to be unfounded; all the fiction remains in print and sales are healthy. During his successful lawsuit in 1957 against Daily Express , Waugh's adviser generated figures showing total sales of over four million books, two thirds in the UK and the rest in America. Men at Arms , the first volume of his war trilogy, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1953; the initial critical comment was lukewarm, with Connolly likening Men in Arms with beer rather than champagne. Connolly changed his views later, calling the completed trilogy "the best novel to get out of the war". Of Waugh's other great post-war work, Knox's biography is admired in a circle near Waugh, but is criticized by others in the Church for his portrayal of Knox as a victim of an unappreciated Catholic hierarchy. The book did not sell well - "like a warm cookie", according to Waugh. Pinfold surprised the critics with originality. Clearly autobiographical content, Hastings says, gives the public a permanent picture of Waugh: "handsome, indifferent, red-faced, and reactionary, a figure of mockery complete with cigars, bowler hats, and a hard suit."
Reputation
In 1973, Waugh's diary was serialized in The Observer before it was published in book form in 1976. Disclosure in his personal life, his thoughts and his attitude created controversy. Although Waugh has removed the embarrassing entries relating to the Oxford years and his first marriage, there is enough left on record to allow the enemy to project the negative image of the author as intolerant, arrogant and sadistic, with a pronounced fascist tendency. Some of these images, nurtured by Waugh supporters, emerge from bad diary editing, and the desire to transform Waugh from a writer to "character". Nevertheless, the popular conception developed from Waugh as a monster. When, in 1980, his choice of letters was published, his reputation became the subject of further discussion. Philip Larkin, reviewing the collection at The Guardian , thinks it shows Waugh's elitism; to receive a letter from him, apparently, "one must have a nursing nickname and become a member of White's, a Roman Catholic, a high-born woman or an Old Etonian novelist".
The publication of diaries and letters promoted increased interest in Waugh and his works and led to the publication of many new materials. Biography of Christopher Sykes appeared in 1975, between 1980 and 1998, three full biographies were published and other biographical and critical studies continued to be produced. A collection of Waugh's journalism and reviews was published in 1983, which revealed his ideas and beliefs. The new material provides further reasons for the debate between supporters and Waugh critics. The 1982 Granada Television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited introduces a new generation to Waugh's works, in the UK and in America. Previously there were television treatments of Waugh fiction, such as the Sword of Honor which was authorized by the BBC in 1967, but the impact of Granada Brideshead was much wider. Nostalgic depictions of disappearing forms of English attract the attention of the American mass market; Time magazine TV critics describe this series as "a novel... made into a poem", and listed among the "100 Best TV Show of All Time". There was a further Wugh cinematic adaptation: A Handful of Dust in 1988, Vile Bodies (filmed as Bright Young Things ) in 2003 and < i> Brideshead again in 2008. This popular treatment has retained the public appetite for Waugh's novels, all of which remain in print and continue to be sold. Some have been listed among the list of the world's best novels.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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