Word: waughs
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NONFICTION: Abroad, Paul Fussell American Dreams: Lost and Found, Studs Terkel ∙ China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston ∙ Lyndon, Merle Miller ∙ The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Mark Amory ∙ The Soul of the Wolf, Michael Fox Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Ronald Steel
...student at Oxford, Waugh referred confidently to "the biography" that would some day be written about him. He was, of course, correct, and the facts of his life are now well known. The events of three years determined almost all that was to follow. The publication of Decline and Fall in 1928 made him famous, the darling of "the bright young people" who danced and staggered through postwar England. The next year, his wife Evelyn ("She-Evelyn" to friends) left him for another man. Waugh wrote his parents: "I am afraid that this will be a blow...
...save him from dipsomaniacal binges. He asked Author Nancy Mitford, a favorite correspondent: "Did I ever come to visit you again after my first sober afternoon. If so, I presume I owe you flowers." As he ruefully described the times he was "d.d." (disgustingly drunk) in his letters, Waugh made himself one of his better comic characters: "I got to my train d.d. and it was the Cheltenham Flier full of respectable stockbrokers . . . and I walked down the train picking up all the mens hats and looking inside and saying: 'People who go to such bad hatters shouldn...
...Waugh remarried in 1937. To his brother Alec he coolly described his bride-to-be as "thin and silent, long nose, no literary ambitions, temperate but not very industrious." His letters to her, though, radiate warmth; he called her "my poppet" and "Whiskers" and confessed that their long separations during his service in World War II sometimes left him "near to tears." Similarly, he often abused his growing brood of six children to his friends. To Nancy Mitford: "All my children are here for the holidays-merry, affectionate, madly boring-except Harriet who has such an aversion to me that...
...Waugh partially was the curmudgeonly Blimp he invented for himself. He proudly described himself as a "snob . . . a bigot and a philistine" to various friends, but then seemed hurt when outsiders found him as obnoxious as he tried to be. He was also, as his letters reveal, generous in praising contemporaries like Graham Greene, George Orwell and Anthony Powell and encouraging to such newcomers as Louis Auchincloss and Thomas Merton. He was not entirely the Tory skinflint that his denunciations of the welfare state suggested; he assigned a number of foreign royalties to Catholic charities. His prejudices were surprisingly flexible...