Biography
by Anthony Domestico
Evelyn Waugh, one of the preeminent British satirists and stylists of the twentieth century, had an uneasy relationship with modernism. One of his greatest novels, A Handful of Dust (1934), took as its title a phrase from Eliot’s The Waste Land, and much of his work explored what Eliot called the “dissociation of sensibility,” the modern uncoupling of intellect from emotion. Yet Waugh’s novels were hardly modernist in form. They employed traditional plots, largely eschewed the experimentation that we so associate with Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce, and mercilessly criticized modernism’s perceived predilection for moral relativism, primitivism, and decadence. Many contemporary critics saw Waugh’s political and religious conservatism as mere expressions of snobbery and pious sentimentality. His prose, however, still retains its ability to give pain and pleasure in almost equal measure.
Waugh was born in London in 1903 to a family of writers: his father, Arthur, was a noted man of letters and publisher, while his older brother, Alec, was a successful novelist. Indecision marked Waugh’s early life as he waffled over a possible career. In 1922, Waugh, who wanted to be a painter, began studying history (intermittently, it seems) at Hertford College, Oxford. After completing courses (and leaving before receiving his degree), he briefly served as a schoolteacher and a reporter, applied for a job with the BBC, and even studied cabinetmaking. In 1925, Waugh, a schoolteacher at the time, attempted suicide by drowning. Fortuitously and somewhat comically, he was stung by a jellyfish and swam back to shore.
Three years later, Waugh settled on a career as a writer. In 1928, he published both Rossetti, a biography of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, and Decline and Fall, his first novel. Mining his own experience as a schoolteacher and Oxford student, Decline and Fall satirized 1920s British society and was well received by the public. Over the next decade, Waugh wrote a series of satirical novels, including Vile Bodies (1930), A Handful of Dust, and Scoop (1938).
Waugh himself grew weary of being pigeonholed as a satirist, claiming that satire only “flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards,” and thus could not exist in the heterogeneous, amoral twentieth century. Still, his early novels display many of the characteristics of the best satire: black humor, irony that cut against all levels of society, and a style that preferred pithy, declarative sentences to the opacity of some modernist writing.
In 1930, Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism, and this renewed faith revealed itself in his work—he regularly wrote for Catholic publications, established contacts with fellow Catholic writers, and published a biography of the sixteenth-century martyr Saint Edmund Campion. Religion was an important concern in perhaps Waugh’s most beloved work, Brideshead Revisited (1945).
This novel, written after Waugh’s service in the armed forces during World War II, sharply departs from his earlier, satirical mode. Where before Waugh’s writing was characterized by spare, biting prose, here his writing is lyrical, at times even purplish; where irony was Waugh’s customary perspective in his early novels, here it is nostalgia, a longing for a departed time and a departed England. The novel, which concerns the Catholic, aristocratic Marchmain family, is told from the first-person perspective of Charles Ryder, a young sometime student, sometime painter who bears a striking resemblance to Waugh himself. It is Waugh’s most religiously inflected novel: he wrote that the novel was primarily an exploration of “‘the operation of grace,’ that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to himself.”
Waugh continued his prolific writing after Brideshead Revisited, describing his wartime experience in the Sword of Honour trilogy, publishing a few books of travel writing, and entering the historical fiction genre with Helena (1950), which centered around Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine. Waugh died in 1966, and his reputation remains contested. His later novels are by turns claimed as great works of twentieth-century religious fiction and criticized as reactionary in politics and supercilious in tone. William Buckley, Jr., conservative founder of the National Review, called Waugh the “greatest English novelist of the century,” while the Irish writer Sean O’Faolin described him as “a purely brainless genius, with a gift for satire.” One thing is certain: Waugh’s novels have not lost their ability to provoke.
