Word: waughs
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Virginia Woolf once divided writers into two categories: those she would have liked to have dinner with, and those with whom she would have preferred not to. Now that Christopher Skes has written what will remain for the foreseeable future the definitive biography of Evelyn Waugh, it is clear that Waugh falls into the disinvited category. The man was a social sadist; he drove a war cripple into psychoanalysis in the course of a single weekend by verbal brutalization. Waugh knew it himself. "Without supernatural aid," he said, "I would hardly be a human being...
...dictum that grows more frequent as the book progresses, "that biography and literary criticism are separate activities which must never be associated." The biography, certainly, is all there. But I, at least, would have liked even more lit crit than Sykes provides. There is precious little serious comment on Waugh, and when Sykes does turn to the nuts and bolts of criticism he proves himself both competent and perceptive...
Sykes tends to tell his story from inside; he knew Waugh well and, was, indeed, among his closest friends in the later years. He figures, under various disguises, in several of Waugh's novels. On the whole this problematic relationship between author and subject is exploited only for good reasons. Sykes's indentifications of the real identities of Waugh's characters (and almost all his books have a large dose of roman a clef in them) are much more convincing as he makes it clear that he knew them all personally. The only area of restraint caused by his close...
Sykes himself, the reader comes to feel, is just the sort of decent, humane, gentlemanly, put-upon hero-victim of Waugh's fiction. Waugh is the kind of absurd caricature, impossible in real life, who people these books. So the biography reads strangely like one of Waugh's own novels, with the same absurd dialogue, incredible anecdotes, and moments of high pathos...
Sykes never shies away from ethical judgments, and sometimes seems to be writing a Victorian headmaster's report on a wayward but talented boy. The really nagging questions about Waugh--Why does he seem to have been such a reprehensible snob? and Why were his political views so crustily troglodytic?--are fully and fairly dealt with. Waugh is not exonerated, but is saved from the coarser kind of misinterpretation. "His belief in the right kind of people was very much weaker than his belief that there are wrong kinds," Sykes says mournfully. Waugh identified himself wholeheartedly with an old order...