Word: waughs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Piqued by the sort of obituary notices his father, Novelist Evelyn Waugh, had received, young Auberon Waugh, 26, displayed some of the malicious wit that he inherited, writing a series of parody obits for London's Daily Mirror, in which he buried some of the "dead" who are still quite quick. He took special delight in his "scabrous epitaph" for Critic Malcolm Muggeridge, 63, who had done one of the obits offensive to Auberon. "In an unsavoury and fashion-obsessed period of history," wrote Evelyn's lad, himself a novelist and journalist, "he taught us all how disgusting...
...VIOLETS NOW? by Auberon Waugh. 252 pages. Simon & Schuster...
...Auberon Waugh is the son of the late Evelyn Waugh and a facile satirist in his own right (The Foxglove Saga, Path of Dalliance). The hero of Violets is an epicene idealist who ghostwrites advice columns for a woman's magazine and comforts his faltering ego in a spare-time campaign for world peace. He also campaigns to seduce the white mistress of a Negro extremist, but before he can succeed, he meanders his motorcycle euphorically, and fatally, into the path of a passing automobile. So much, says Author Auberon, for epicene idealists. He has obviously inherited his father...
...Waugh was deepened by his religion, and the deepening was steeply apparent in Brideshead Revisited (1945), a lyric celebration of Catholicism that alternates pious puling with the loveliest cadences he ever came upon. He was broadened by the war, and the broadening was vigorously displayed in his masterpiece, a 972-page trilogy (Men at Anns, Officers and Gentlemen, The End of the Battle) which is now widely considered the best British novel of World War II. In the trilogy Waugh creates in Apthorpe his greatest comic character, a Falstaff as funny, as tragic, as human as the huge original...
...trilogy took Waugh at least ten years to complete, not principally for literary reasons. After 1948 and the splash success of The Loved One, his travesty on the California way of death, he progressively withdrew from the 20th century. Surrounded by six children, whom he saw only once a day "for ten, I hope awe-inspiring minutes," he lived in an 18th century country house 140 miles from London, where tie played the rural squire with a conservatism that soon became simply amniotic. He refused to drive a car, rarely answered the phone, harrumphed indignantly that the Times of London...