Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited by Philip Eade; Henry Holt and Co., $32
When novelist Evelyn Waugh died of a sudden heart attack at 62 on Easter Sunday, 1966, his literary reputation was in decline, his work seen as nostalgic and retrograde compared to the countercultural post-modernist writers then in ascendance. But as journalist Philip Eade argues in his new biography of Waugh, "revisiting" him to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death, he is now celebrated as one of the greatest English satirical authors and novelists of the 20th century. Certainly the iconic 1981 television serialization of Brideshead Revisited, now considered Waugh's masterpiece, was a major stepping-stone in a critical reanalysis of his novels. Eade, however, is more concerned with rehabilitating Waugh's character, which because of his complexity, is a far more dubious task. Despite having the cooperation of Waugh's grandson Alexander and access to family archival unpublished material including Waugh's passionate love letters to Baby Jungman (an unrequited girlfriend in the 1930s) and a revealing memoir by Waugh's first wife, the success of this reappraisal is middling at best. Waugh may be a stunning writer, but he was not a very nice man.
Born in 1903 to a middle-class home with his father Arthur a critic and publisher, Waugh was overshadowed by his favored older brother Alec. Arthur thought Alec would be the literary star, but when Alec was expelled from the elite prep school Sherborne after a romantic entanglement with a younger boy, the more talented Evelyn was forced to attend the less prestigious Lancing. He excelled academically and proceeded to Oxford, where he led a dissolute existence, developing a life-long passion for alcohol, culminating in various homosexual affairs. According to Waugh's friend John Betjeman, "Everyone was queer at Oxford in those days."
His longest relationship focused on the gorgeous Alastair Graham, son of a baron, who became the inspiration for Bridehead' s Lord Sebastian Flyte (in the manuscript, Waugh twice accidentally wrote Alastair's name for Sebastian's). According to acquaintances, Alastair "had the same sort of features Evelyn liked in girls, the pixie look," sending Evelyn a naked photograph of himself with "his backside pointing seductively toward the camera." Even as Evelyn began turning his attention toward women, Alastair desperately wanted him back. Evelyn's marriage to the beautiful Evelyn (called Shevelyn) Gardner ended (it began with an unenthusiastic proposal: let's get married and see how it goes). It lacked bedroom chemistry, and in her memoir she thought he was "homosexual at the base," proceeding to have a very public affair with another man, humiliating Evelyn. He reunited with Alastair for awhile, but that ended when Evelyn, looking for respectability and entrance into aristocratic circles, became, in Alastair's estimation, a boring snob. From then on, Waugh focused only on women, marrying Laura Herbert, an 18-year-old Catholic daughter of an explorer, in 1937.
Eade glosses over in a scant few pages the major event of Waugh's life, his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930 (which critically impacted his later novels), after his depression following his divorce from Shevelyn and conservative rejection of his wild 1920s lifestyle of parties and decadence with his rich "bright young things." His marriage to Laura lasted and produced seven children (a daughter died at birth), probably because they demanded little of each other, she raising the family and overseeing the household so Waugh could write and travel (sometimes to get away from his kids, whom he found irritating, having little to do with their upbringing). Throughout this household drama, Waugh wrote at an astonishing output, his first novel, Decline and Fall, an uproarious bestseller, followed by Vile Bodies (its famous line, "I don't know if this sounds absurd, but I do feel that a marriage ought to go on, for quite a long time, I mean"), Black Mischief, and A Handful of Dust (another masterwork), all witty satires of the wealthy upper-class, which Evelyn craved to be a part of yet skewered for their self-centered foibles.
He wrote the more serious Brideshead about a declining English aristocratic family toward the end of WWII. It became his biggest success, though with his usual barbed banter, he remarked, "My book has been a great success in the US, which is upsetting because I thought it in good taste, and now I know it can't be." His brave war experiences encompassing Britain's disastrous retreat from Crete, as well as contempt for his military superiors, were immortalized in the Sword of Honor trilogy written in the late 1950s-early 60s. A nervous breakdown precipitated by a combination of prescription drugs, sleeping pills, and alcohol led to his hallucinatory novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, and a trip to Hollywood to discuss the possible filming of Brideshead resulted in his acid lampoon on Forest Lawn cemetery, The Loved One . Retreating to life as a country squire, he was deaf, alcoholic, depressed, and thoroughly disenchanted with the modern world, despising Britain's welfare state and the Second Vatican Council's reform of the Catholic Church.
Eade barely discusses Waugh's literary output, a strange editorial choice because Waugh's friendships and life events were intertwined with his writing. Waugh was eccentric, and in BBC television interviews he was accused of snobbery, misanthropy, and racism, though Eade thinks he deliberately self-parodied himself, playing a role to cover up his boredom and disillusionment. He could be a kind, caring friend expressing "deep humanity behind a forbidding front," but couldn't resist the cutting remark. He could be a mean bully with a cruel streak earning him many enemies, even mocking his own family, calling Alec "bald-headed because he had too much sex." As with many English biographies, the amount of name-dropping is stupefying, and the dry style of writing doesn't translate. The straight Eade, while more forthcoming about Waugh's early homosexuality than previous biographers, doesn't offer any explanation why he abandoned relationships with men. LGBT readers will be struck with how gay Waugh seemed in his attitudes and mannerisms throughout his life. It would be fascinating for a gay writer to interpret Waugh, but Eade's comprehensive book will probably be the primary biography of Waugh the man (but not the writer) for years to come.