Word: waughs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Waugh himself now regards Brideshead as a failure, a task beyond his powers. But readers were perhaps more right than the critics. The book has an elegiac beauty, like a bell tolling in a solitary church, where no one comes...
...Evelyn," Editor Cyril Connolly was once heard to sigh, "has been cruel, really very cruel to me." Evelyn and Cyril were not speaking at the time. For Evelyn Waugh's well-honed tongue is as celebrated as his snobbishness, social climbing and personal courage. Says an equally cruel contemporary: "One can find Evelyn's biography in the dedications of his books, each displaying a further step in his social progress." His first book, Rossetti; His Life and Works, was dedicated to Evelyn Gardner (fourth daughter of the first & last Baron Burghclere, and later Mrs. Evelyn Waugh...
...Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903, allegedly near London. ("It's a great secret where I was born," Waugh said, when asked by TIME's London bureau, and hung up.) His father, a journalist turned successful book publisher, was a man of solidly middle-class taste, who reared Evelyn and his elder brother Alec (The Loom of Youth, Going Their Own Ways) in the solidly middle-class London suburb of Finchley...
...Oxford, Waugh's flight from the bourgeoisie was furthered. Evelyn became one of a mauve circle of which glittery, willowy Harold Acton was the titular Tiresias. Says Acton, who is supposed to have modeled for one of the more exotic characters in Brideshead, in his Memoirs of an Aesthete (recently published in England): "An almost inseparable boon companion at Oxford was a little faun called Evelyn Waugh. Though others assure me that he has changed past recognition, I still see him as a prancing faun, thinly disguised by conventional apparel. His wide-apart eyes, always ready to be startled...
...this shrilly articulate circle, Evelyn is said to have sat usually mute, but terrifyingly observant. Other contemporaries recall a more vigorous Waugh-a young sport who, like Father Rothschild, rode a motorcycle and, like Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington, drank a good deal and was sometimes noisy in public places. He was conspicuously bohemian and agnostic and enjoyed baiting Roman Catholics, for his wit already possessed a fine cutting edge...