Evelyn Waugh Overview

In 1925, while he was teaching at a boy's school in Wales, the young Evelyn Waugh attempted suicide by swimming out to sea. After getting fairly far from shore, he was forced to turn back: a shoal of stinging jellyfish had... [more]

In 1925, while he was teaching at a boy's school in Wales, the young Evelyn Waugh attempted suicide by swimming out to sea. After getting fairly far from shore, he was forced to turn back: a shoal of stinging jellyfish had beset him. Macabre, comic, and ironic, this incident epitomizes Waugh's entire career. A downtrodden young man kept from suicide by jellyfish? Wouldn't their stings hasten the cause? Is this courage or cowardice? In his work and life, Waugh was a master of the topsy-turvy. This satirical novelist turned English society upside-down, revealing its modern course as a slide into mediocrity rather than ever-upward march toward imperial glory. As a former teacher, he naturally located the source of the rot in the educational system. With the aptly titled "Decline and Fall" (1928), he showed what really went on behind the scenes at the boarding schools that were supposed to produce England's finest: pederasty, pandering to rich parents, sports instead of learning. Waugh's subsequent work skewered the high society of the '20s and '30s. "Vile Bodies" (1930) is full of upper-class twits partying on yachts while war looms ahead; "A Handful of Dust" (1934) depicts a well-to-do couple attempting to straddle both the entrapments of the past (their unwieldy manor, complete with servants and decaying infrastructure) and the future (corporate careers, newfangled appliances, and a complete dissolution of the old moral structure). In order to reveal society's contradictions, Waugh developed a uniquely jaundiced eye for detail and an innovative way with plots. His black and biting depictions of contemporary social life built the foundation for the Realist British novel and opened the way for the Angry Young Men's "kitchen sink" realism. His plots meanwhile combined the absurd with the mundane. In a typical twist, he might introduce a pair of nuns, lead them down a street, then promptly drop them, never to speak of them again. This inclusion of inconsequential characters obviously ups the comic effect of the work. But it also imbues Waugh's satires with deeper meaning, as it presents a world ruled by chaos, loss, and ambiguity. Waugh's pessimism reverberates like a distant, warning chime throughout "Brideshead Revisited" (1945). Considered by many to be Waugh's finest book, it marks a deviation from his usual acidic humor. Here Waugh reveals a warm nostalgia for England's past, for the refined haven that was Oxford, for class distinctions that meant something. He also expresses an almost sycophantic admiration for the Catholic Church, an institution he saw as safeguarding true values. Waugh had converted in 1930 after the shock of being divorced by his first wife. He went on to remarry and produce seven kids, despite his early tendencies toward homosexuality and heavy drinking. At the time of his death in 1966, Waugh was known as a cantankerous man decrying the modern world while clad in loud tweeds and pretending to need an ear trumpet. What he writes in "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold" could just as easily apply to himself: "His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz -- everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime." His reputation as a novelist had also waned -- but as we look back on the last century, Waugh holds a place as one of its most unique and uncompromising voices. [show less]