Abstract
From an early age, Evelyn Waugh was a fluent, prolific and gifted writer. Even his schoolboy writings seem unusually sophisticated: it's hard to imagine anyone of 17 today writing with such elegant ease. At Oxford he came into his own, doing no academic work but turning out enjoyable pieces, such as sketches of Union debates, not to mention his remarkably accomplished drawings.
This volume takes Waugh up to the age of 30. It is edited by Donat Gallagher, an Australian academic who more than 30 years ago edited the excellent Essays, Articles And Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, and is part of The Complete Works, a huge edition now under way. The critical apparatus is provided with astonishing meticulosity. So every speaker in a Union debate in 1924 who received a short, sometimes derisive mention by Waugh gets a biographical footnote (“Mr CR de Gruchy: chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club, de Gruchy unsuccessfully contested the seat of Ilford at a by-election in 1928. He became assistant editor, then, after the death of John Strachey, editor of the Socialist Review.”)
Some of the editorial byways are admittedly most amusing. Harold Acton denounced Graham Greene's 1925 book of verse Babbling April as “the slender banjo-tunes of an adolescent hysteria”, and Greene, in turn, mocked lines such as “languid dappled damson dawns” from Acton's own versifying and, his “comic” pretensions to be a “professor of Manliness”.
In A Little Learning, the only volume of memoirs Waugh published before his death at 62 in 1966, he describes his enmity with his Oxford tutor, CRMF Cruttwell, dean of Hertford College, and it's fascinating to read an unsigned profile of him in the Isis, well-written, back-handed and almost defamatory. To give a flavour of the editorial zeal behind this production, Waugh's piece of 1,221 words is accompanied by a 516-word note on attribution, which disappointingly says that the piece after all may or may not be by Waugh or by him alone, and by 37 footnotes, totalling 1,341 words.
But there is more to this volume than yet another saunter round the Brideshead generation and the Bright Young Things. The volume ends with Waugh aged 30, having published Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, and been briefly married and then divorced in humiliating circumstances, the first of the experiences which would embitter and harden him.
He tried to salve the pain by travelling, to Africa where in 1930 he covered the coronation of Haile Selassie of Abyssinia (one headline reads “Dusky Emperor Greets the Duke of Gloucester”, and perhaps the learned editors should have mentioned here that it was because of this occasion that the Rastafarians still revere the late duke, the Queen's uncle, as their John the Baptist).
Some years later Waugh returned to Abyssinia to cover the Italian invasion, which he supported, and the two visits helped inspire Black Mischief and the wonderful Scoop, every journalist's favourite novel. An arduous journey to British Guiana gave Waugh the germ for the ending of A Handful of Dust, where Tony Last is trapped in the jungle.
An anthology of “The politically correct Evelyn Waugh” would be one of those slim volumes, like “Great Norwegian Humourists”. At the centenary of William Wilberforce's death in 1933, Waugh writes “Was He Right to Free the Slaves?” and describes the descendants of the freed slaves as he found them on his travels: “They have proved quite unfit for retail trade: they are clumsy mechanics, a superstitious and excitable riff-raff hanging round the rum shops and staring listlessly at the Chinese, Madeiran, and East Indian immigrants, who outstrip them in every branch of life.” No, not one for The Guardian today.
Writing constantly for money about everything from cocktail parties to royal weddings, Waugh gives personal asides - “The question of entertainment is one on which I am not qualified to speak, since all music is abhorrent to me” - and he was a busy book reviewer, praising Anthony Powell's third novel From a View to a Death as the only book of the moment worth reading.
Here are his likes and dislikes, the latter usually the more pronounced. A piece on “This Sun-Bathing Business” anticipates his alter ego Gilbert Pinfold's hatred of “Picasso, plastics, sun-bathing and jazz - everything in fact that was of his own age”.
Then there is a taste for shameless self-promotion, which has proved an hereditary Waugh family trait. Not only self-promotion: among his early journalism are anonymous, admiring reviews of his brother Alec's books. And of course there is always the unsleeping sardonic humour: he relishes a children's book of jingles about history and kings and queens, in particular the succinct description of George IV: “Last royal patron of the Arts / He was, alas, too fond of tarts.”
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a journalist and author, and former literary editor of The Spectator. His books include The Strange Death of Tory England and Yo, Blair!.