Word: waughs
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...idea of a dead end, seldom in all literature so powerfully expressed, dominated Waugh's experience in this period. Sickened by the chaos of the '20s, banished from the order of his childhood, he felt desperately the need of a new center to turn on, and he found it in Catholicism. Waugh was converted in 1930, and this experience, followed by the great adventure of World War II, altogether altered...
...medieval and the delusory lay all around him in his youth. Born near Hampstead Heath in 1903, Evelyn (pronounced evil in) Waugh grew up in a nursery papered with "figures in medieval costume" and was assured by his mother that cities were "unhealthy and unnatural places of exile." His father, a publisher (Chapman & Hall) of theatrical disposition, was a sort of hearty Walter Mitty who continually pretended that he was somebody else. Evelyn himself, though somewhat daunted by Alec, an extraverted elder brother who also became a novelist (Island in the Sun), was a dreamy and credulous child who adored...
Filled with rage and outrage, Waugh in his middle 20s gave tongue to his disgust in Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930). The world these books describe is the world Eliot called the waste land and Yeats described as a "mere anarchy" in which "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity." Waugh's people are the Bright Young Things of London's high society, people who ride to hounds while the world is going to the dogs. Waugh loathes them because they have betrayed the aristocratic ethos, and he depicts...
...touch in these books is as light as Ronald Firbank's, but unlike that airy Edwardian, Waugh displays feelings that are as savage as Swift's; and in Black Mischief (1932), a hilarious and still timely tale of emerging Africa and declining England, his feelings find blackly humorous expression: the British hero, inquiring after his British sweetheart in an African town, is cheerfully informed that she was the principal ingredient in the stew he has just eaten...
During his 20s, Waugh's comedy was vividly physical; in his 30s, it grew rapidly more metaphysical. In A Handful of Dust, for example, he turns entirely inward and laughs at himself. He personifies himself as a hero so taken with the past that he cannot cope with the present, and then witheringly satirizes his character and his art in the famous climax-a passage in which the hero realizes in horror the futility to which his passion for the past has condemned him. He must spend the rest of his life in a jungle clearing, reading Dickens over...