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...ESSAYS, ARTICLES AND REVIEWS OF EVELYN WAUGH Edited by Donat Gallagher; Little, Brown; 662 pages...
Posthumous disclosures about Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) have proceeded like a striptease in reverse. First came the Diaries (published in the U.S. in 1976), a revealing look at Waugh's private, sometimes drunken and usually unflattering thoughts about his contemporaries. Next arrived the Letters (1980), in which the writer appeared in the less scathing demeanor he put on for his correspondents. Now this massive selection of Waugh's journalism displays him fully dressed for his reading public. There are thus no naked surprises in this volume, but it is fascinating all the same: a chronicle both of tumultuous...
...common misconception about Waugh holds that he was a liberal young man who turned into a middle-aged fogy. He was, given the temper of his times, a reactionary all along. The faintly scandalous success of the comic novels Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930) made their author the most prominent spokesman for the Bright Young People of his generation. London newspapers offered fees for his thoughts on youth. He did not give them exactly what they expected. "I admire almost anything about old people," he wrote in 1930. Waugh, as it turned out, was not kidding about...
...Catholic and a conservative, Waugh occupied an underpopulated area in the spectrum of British public opinion. He filled it vigorously, both because he needed the extra money that papers and magazines provided to supplement his earnings from fiction and because he wanted to whip his countrymen into shape. During the 1930s he watched "the pitiable stampede of the 'LeftWing Intellectuals' in our own country" and tried to head it off through ridicule. He mocked the socialist sympathies expressed in Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly: "He seems to have two peevish spirits whispering into either ear: one complaining...
Unfortunately, Waugh's argument against rating books according to their ideology fell on deaf ears, including his own. He praised J.F. Powers' Prince of Darkness in parochial terms: "The book is Catholic. Mr. Powers has a full philosophy with which to oppose the follies of his age and nation." A novel by Antonia White spurred him to greater extravagance: ";She knows that man is in the world for quite another purpose than teaching Greek or winning the war or marrying well or even writing admirable novels. He is here to love and serve God, and any portrayal...