Waugh, Evelyn Arthur St John

Waugh, Evelyn Arthur St John (1903–1966), novelist, diarist, travel writer, journalist, and biographer.

Evelyn Waugh was born in London on October 28, 1903, the younger son of a publisher, brother of the writer Alec Waugh. Waugh was educated at Lancing College, Sussex, and at Oxford University, where he made some significant friendships, drank heavily, did little work, and fostered a loathing for his tutor, C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, whose name he bestowed on a number of absurd characters in his early fiction.

Leaving university without a degree, Waugh took a job as a schoolmaster, which provided much of the inspiration for his novel, Decline and Fall (1928), the first of the brilliantly comic social satires for which he became known. His success was repeated two years later with Vile Bodies, a dark and witty portrait of the post-war generation of “bright young things”.

In 1928 Waugh married Evelyn Gardner—“He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn”, the couple was cutely called—a granddaughter of the Earl of Carnarvon, whose family, disapproving of Waugh’s modest origins and dissolute ways, vigorously opposed the match. The marriage was brief, with Waugh filing for divorce in September 1929 on grounds of his wife’s adultery. The following year he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and in 1937, after lengthy proceedings to annul his first marriage, he married again, his second wife, Laura Herbert, pretty, well-born, and devoutly Catholic. Waugh’s faith was unquestioning and profound, although it seemed to have little influence on his quarrelsome temper. When asked by his fellow-novelist Nancy Mitford how he reconciled being so horrible with being a Christian, “he replied rather sadly that were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible”.

By this time Waugh had published two more novels, Black Mischief (1932) and A Handful of Dust (1934); a biography (1935) of the Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, which won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize; and a collection of short stories, Mr Loveday’s Little Outing (1936). Within this period he also produced three travel books: Remote People (1931) and Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) covering two visits to Ethiopia, the first to report on the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, the second on the Italian invasion of that country (see Italo-Ethiopian War); and Ninety-Two Days (1934), an account of a journey to British Guiana.

Ruthlessly self-protective as a writer, Waugh secluded himself in the country, at Piers Court in Gloucestershire, where he left all domestic duties to Laura, including the care of their six children—among them his first son Auberon (1939-2001), later also to become a noted journalist and author. At Piers Court Waugh completed one of his most admired comic novels, Scoop (1938), inspired by his own experiences on Fleet Street, with the Daily Express transformed into the Daily Beast, with its megalomaniac proprietor, Lord Copper. To reward himself after intensive bouts of writing Waugh went regularly to London, where he indulged in a glamorous, if confrontational, social life, much of it centred round the bar at White’s Club. His exploits were recounted in his copious correspondence in often hilarious detail, and, even more frankly, in his diaries, which came as a shock to many when they were published after his death.

With the declaration of war in September 1939 Waugh immediately volunteered for active service, securing a commission in the Royal Marines. After taking part in a failed attempt to support the Free French in Dakar, Waugh was transferred to the newly formed Commandos, with whom he saw action in Libya and took part in the British evacuation of Crete. Although a man of indomitable courage, Waugh was both too indolent and too subversive for successful soldiering and he was constantly at odds with the military. However, his disillusioned view of army life provided the basis for some significant works of fiction, Men at Arms (1952), featuring the famously crackpot Gen. Ritchie-Hook, Officers and Gentlemen (1955), Unconditional Surrender (1961), and in a lighter vein, Put Out More Flags (1942).

In 1944, the second half of which was spent in Yugoslavia attached to the British military mission, Waugh wrote the bestselling Brideshead Revisited (1945), “a kind of modern Arcadia”, as he described it, drawing on his youthful memories of Oxford, on his romantic view of the English aristocracy, and on his Catholic faith. A trip to Hollywood in 1947 to discuss the filming of Brideshead provided material for The Loved One (1948), a provocative send-up of the American funeral business.

Although he continued writing, for Waugh the post-war years were overshadowed by heavy drinking and depression, and by a general loathing of the modern world, a severe attack of drug-induced paranoia resulting in the uncompromising self-portrait in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). After moving to Combe Florey in Somerset in 1956, Waugh sank further into melancholia, intensified by the liturgical reforms instituted by the Second Vatican Council. Evelyn Waugh, one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, died at home on April 10, 1966.