Word: waughs
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TITLE: EVELYN WAUGH: THE LATER YEARS...
...that anecdote suggests, Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh all too often behaved like a character from one of his evergreen comic novels. Yet as Martin Stannard makes clear in this second and concluding volume of his brilliantly definitive biography, Waugh was a sad and even tragic figure. In his youth a dandified aesthete and party animal, he evolved into an eccentric, scowling, West Country squire who wore hideous tweed suits and wielded a Victorian ear trumpet like a snickersnee against enemies, real and imagined. That noli me tangere pose barely masked the inner Waugh: a self-lacerating loner...
Stannard's chronicle begins with Waugh as a marine officer yearning to fight for king and country. Indubitably brave, he saw little combat, unless one counts his skirmishes with superiors who thought, correctly, that he lacked discipline. As Stannard mildly notes, "Waugh's habit of striding into offices and demanding attention irritated the military bureaucrats." By the time he died of a coronary thrombosis at 63, Brideshead Revisited (published in 1945) and the Sword of Honour trilogy (completed in 1961) had sealed his reputation as one of the century's great masters of English prose. They had also established...
Stannard does not muffle or condone Waugh's great faults. He was anti- Semitic and terminally rude, even to close friends. He was a remote, absentee father who viewed his offspring with suspicion and alarm. "My children weary me," he once confided to his diary. "I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless." Perhaps in reaction to his frugal middle-class upbringing, he became an aristocrat-toadying snob who tended to confuse proper breeding with moral worth...
...Tutors are more effective if they develop personal relations with the students," Waugh says. "This sets them apart from the rest of the bureaucracy...