Word: waughs
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Little, Brown's republication of Waugh's dozen best novels provides a fresh opportunity to appreciate how skillfully he balanced between satire and romance. Most important, these handsome new editions reconfirm Edmund Wilson's 1944 judgment that Waugh "is likely to figure as the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw." Characters like Lady Margot Metroland, Mayfair hostess and procuress of Decline and Fall, Mrs. Melrose Ape of Vile Bodies, the American evangelist modeled on Aimee Semple McPherson, Basil Seal, highborn wastrel of Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags...
...Waugh's first wife ran off with a future baronet, and betrayal by women is recurrent in much of his fiction. The ladies are usually charming and never malicious but they are prime examples in Waugh' natural history of thoughtlessness. Thei egoism, stupidity, conceit and self-regard become the causes for both cruelty and comedy. In A Handful of Dust, for ex ample, Brenda Last cheats on her hus band Tony. He journeys to South Amer ica and ends as the prisoner of an illiterate jungle madman who makes Tony read Dickens aloud to him for the rest...
...acquired recognition, Waugh adopted the ways and means of a country gentleman. In a big house he lived surrounded by six children, his second wife Laura, servants, heavy furniture, mullioned windows and good bindings. He was never chatty about his work. On those few occasions when he lowered the drawbridge to journalists, Waugh remained grandly indifferent to explanations of his comic genius. He insisted, "I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language...
...even more emphatic about his intentions: "An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along." As a conservative convert to Roman Catholicism, Waugh decried the aims of Vatican II, the un-Latinizing of the Mass and papal excursions too far from Rome...
...similarities between the African backgrounds in Black Mischief and Scoop and descriptions in his travel books. Military service in Britain, Crete and Yugoslavia during World War II supplied incidents for Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and The End of the Battle. In 1965, the year before he died, Waugh published an edited version of the trilogy under the single title Sword of Honour. It is a masterpiece in which the author fully joined the two sides of his nature: the detached satirist and the chivalrous, disillusioned romantic...