Evelyn Waugh

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (1903–1966) was born on 28 October 1903 in Hampstead, London. His father, Arthur Waugh, was a publisher and literary critic; his elder brother Alec was also a novelist (whose The Loom of Youth caused a scandal in 1917). Evelyn attended Lancing College and Hertford College, Oxford, where he drank heavily, accumulated debts, made important social connections, and left without distinction in 1924.

Life and Career

Waugh’s early career was chaotic. He worked briefly as a schoolmaster (an experience savagely transmuted into Decline and Fall), attempted suicide by swimming out to sea (turning back, he later claimed, when stung by jellyfish), and drifted through journalism and carpentry before finding his vocation. Decline and Fall (1928) was an instant success: a short, savage, brilliantly constructed satire of English society that announced a comic genius of the first order.

Vile Bodies (1930) satirized the Bright Young Things of 1920s London. Black Mischief (1932) and A Handful of Dust (1934) extended his range: A Handful of Dust, in which Tony Last’s decent, bewildered conventionality is destroyed by his wife’s adultery and a series of grotesque coincidences that leave him reading Dickens aloud to a madman in the Brazilian jungle, is Waugh’s masterpiece of the dark satirical mode — one of the greatest English novels of the century.

Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in 1930, following the collapse of his first marriage (to Evelyn Gardner — “She-Evelyn,” as friends distinguished them). The faith became the centre of his life and increasingly of his fiction. He married Laura Herbert in 1937; they had seven children.

During the Second World War, Waugh served with distinction — and considerable personal difficulty — in the Royal Marines, the Commandos, and the Special Air Service. He saw action in the Battle of Crete and was attached to the British military mission in Yugoslavia. His wartime experiences provided the material for Sword of Honour (1965), the revised trilogy comprising Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961), his most ambitious work and a profound Catholic meditation on war, honour, and the death of chivalry.

Brideshead Revisited (1945), written during a leave from military service, was Waugh’s first explicitly Catholic novel and by far his most commercially successful. Its lush, nostalgic evocation of Oxford in the 1920s and of the aristocratic Flyte family’s grand country house made it a perennial favourite, though Waugh himself came to regard its style as too ornate.

His later years were marked by increasing conservatism, isolation, and physical and mental decline — he was overweight, drank heavily, and suffered a period of paranoid delusion in 1954 (fictionalised in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 1957). He died on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1966, after attending Mass.

Major Works and Themes

Waugh’s fiction divides into two modes: the early satires, which are cold, ruthless, and brilliantly funny; and the later Catholic novels, which are warmer, more complex, and suffused with a sense of grace operating in a fallen world.

A Handful of Dust (1934) is the summit of the satirical mode: Tony Last’s world collapses with a precision that is both comic and devastating. The novel’s final pages — Tony trapped in the jungle, condemned to read Dickens to Mr. Todd for eternity — is one of the most chilling endings in fiction.

Brideshead Revisited (1945) is the great popular success: Charles Ryder’s love for Sebastian Flyte and the Marchmain family is also his encounter with the “twitch upon the thread” — the operation of Catholic grace in the lives of sinners.

Sword of Honour (1952–1961) is Waugh’s finest sustained achievement: Guy Crouchback’s journey from naive idealism through the compromises and betrayals of war to a final, modest act of charity is the most complete expression of his mature vision.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Waugh is now universally recognised as the finest English comic novelist since P.G. Wodehouse and one of the greatest English novelists of any kind in the twentieth century. His prose style — economical, precise, and capable of devastating irony — is one of the glories of English literature. His political and social views were reactionary in the extreme, and his personal behaviour was often atrocious, but neither has prevented the recognition of his genius.

Key Works

• Decline and Fall (1928)
• Vile Bodies (1930)
• Black Mischief (1932)
• A Handful of Dust (1934)
• Scoop (1938)
• Brideshead Revisited (1945)
• The Loved One (1948)
• Men at Arms (1952)
• Officers and Gentlemen (1955)
• The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)
• Unconditional Surrender (1961)

Collecting Waugh

Evelyn Waugh is one of the most collected English novelists of the twentieth century, with a well-documented bibliography of Chapman and Hall (and later Penguin) editions.

Decline and Fall (1928, Chapman and Hall, London) is the first novel and the primary collectible. The first edition, in cream boards with blue cloth spine and the original dust jacket, was published in a modest run. Fine copies in the jacket bring $5,000–$15,000.

Vile Bodies (1930, Chapman and Hall) first editions in the jacket bring $2,000–$8,000.

A Handful of Dust (1934, Chapman and Hall) is a major collecting title. Fine copies in the jacket bring $3,000–$10,000.

Brideshead Revisited (1945, Chapman and Hall) was published during wartime paper shortages; the first edition is in austere wartime binding with a plain jacket. Fine copies bring $1,000–$4,000.

Scoop (1938, Chapman and Hall), Waugh’s Fleet Street satire, is a popular and accessible title at $1,000–$3,000.

Waugh was a moderately willing signer, and signed copies carry a good premium. Inscribed copies to friends — particularly to members of the Bright Young Things circle, to his wartime associates, or to fellow writers like Greene, Powell, and Mitford — are the prizes. His autograph letters are lively, often acid, and increasingly sought after: $1,000–$5,000 for routine items, significantly more for letters of literary substance.