Evelyn Waugh: A Man At Bay
Richard Jones
Despite the Palladian gracefulness of the style and the high spirits and charm of many of his novels, Evelyn Waugh's reputation is under a cloud. His strange behavior and opinions alienated many admirers during his lifetime; since his death in 1966, the ongoing social and moral revolution has so isolated the areas of Waugh's deepest concern that it becomes increasingly problematical how much to read into him. Cyril Connolly's description of Waugh's "bloated, puffed-up face ...the beady eyes red with wine and anger, his cigar jabbing as he went into the attack..."is still the official portrait. It has hidden the earlier, attractive man whose special gift, we have been told, was to make everything seem fresh and exciting. The nearly eight hundred pages of Waugh's recently published Diaries do little to restore that young man; they merely strengthen the impression that behind the writer of capriccios and romantic elegies there lurked a monster, whose rages were only partly softened by the teachings of the Church. All the same, the volume is essential reading for connoisseurs of a certain kind of English eccentricity, but it is also sad. Through these haphazard notes and jottings we watch a brilliant career turn sour and a man of originality and distinction peter out in misanthropic emptiness.
The general outline of the life is well known; we do not lack books about Waugh, including two by himself. The first, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, contains a searching self-portrait lightly disguised as fiction. Waugh referred to the book as a "novel," in inverted commas; and it is striking to see the early stages of the delusions that afflicted Waugh-Pinfold recorded matter-of-factly among his social engagements. Nearer the
