From the Shelves of the Paco Library

The celebrated novelist, Evelyn Waugh, was an extremely interesting character, quite aside from the many books he authored; a member of England’s “smart set” in the ‘30s, and a distinguished convert to Catholicism, he saw varied service during WWII (including much that was highly dangerous), and was well known for being something of a cantankerous reactionary in old age (in explaining why he did not vote in general elections, he once said “I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants”). His circle of acquaintance was fairly large, including everybody from literary clergymen such as Ronald Knox, to novelist (and political left-winger) Nancy Mitford.

Fortunately for us, Waugh’s many friends were not in the least shy about talking and writing about him. In Evelyn Waugh and His World, editor David Pryce-Jones has assembled a wonderful batch of recollections written by many of the people who knew him best, and the reader is afforded an opportunity to glimpse the many facets of the character and intellect of this complex man.

Waugh was a little prickly, as many writers are, on the subject of his creative process, and took umbrage at, among other things, those who believed that he simply lifted people and places out of real life and plopped them down in his novels without their being distilled through his unique imagination. Douglas Woodruff writes:

As a novelist, he very much disliked anyone who went in for crude identifications of his fictional characters with living models. Not only did this detract from the appreciation due to the novelist’s artistic skill in selecting and blending, taking one trait here and another trait there, but it could easily evoke needless enmities…Having recognized my own flat…as being described in Unconditional Surrender as ‘Bourne Mansions’, when I next wrote to him I headed my letter Bourne Mansions. Evelyn’s riposte was to send my wife an anonymous postcard, signed ‘A Wellwisher’, but in undisguised writing, saying: ‘Your aged but incontinent husband is keeping a second establishment at Bourne Mansions, a name particularly distressing to those of us who knew and revered the late Cardinal.’

Waugh’s travels in Abyssinia I have touched upon elsewhere, but the book includes mention of a brief note that he sent to a friend during his attendance at the coronation of Haile Selassie that underscores his outbreaks of exuberant facetiousness: :

I am going to a lake called Tanganyika where everyone dies of sleeping sickness. I have also caught typhus in a prison, malaria in a place called Hawash, and leprosy in a Catholic church, so I am fairly sure not to come back.

Waugh’s relationship with Randolph Churchill during a military/diplomatic mission to the Balkans during WWII was a difficult one, as the garrulous Churchill began to rub the more reserved Waugh very much the wrong way. One evening, in an effort to deflect the conversation away from literature, which bored Churchill, the latter asked Waugh what he thought of his (Churchill’s) famous father’s biography of Marlborough. The Earl of Birkenhead reports Waugh’s savage response:

’As history’, Evelyn replied with unattractive vigour, ‘it is beneath contempt, the special pleading of a defense lawyer. As literature it is worthless. It is written in a sham Augustan prose which could only have been achieved by a man who thought always in terms of public speech, and the antitheses clang like hammers in an arsenal.’

Randolph was not unnaturally outraged by this brutal and quite undeserved defilement of a shrine, and remarked angrily to me: ‘Have you ever noticed that it is always the people who are most religious who are most mean and cruel?’ Even the hungriest trout could hardly have risen to so heavily cast a fly, and I remained silent, but to my surprise Evelyn replied, not only without rancour but almost with vivacity: ‘But my dear Randolph, you have no idea what I should be like if I wasn’t.’

Evelyn Waugh and His World includes many photographs and illustrations (some of the latter by Waugh himself), and is a treasure trove of insights into the public and private life of one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century.