The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh

...As a public service, I will offer a modest rate reduction after the first 500,000 words...

...it numbers reigning kings among its past members...

...At his worst, which was not far from his best, he was boorish, petulant, cruel, ofpustular temperament...

...His children were a source of endless amusement...

...Always the Loved One The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh Little, Brown ~536pages /$29.95 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas T he English novelist, biographer, and travel writer Evelyn Waugh (19o3-1966) was one of the funniest men who ever lived, and he could wring a laugh out of anything: The more solemn or sacrosanct the object of fun, the better...

...He devises an ingenious scheme to murder her...

...and the answer is always, I can and I will, with pleasure...

...a pretty face, but heavy in the leg...

...On the first page of his first novel, Decline and Fall, he details the barbaric splendor of Oxford, as epitomized by the swank mayhem of the Bollinger Club, sozzled aristos on the rampage: "There is tradition behind the Bollinger...

...In his uninhibited distaste for Jews and blacks, he cannot be bothered even to be funny, and his lavish contempt is mostly just con...

...take over and the party is totally marginalized...

...a few weeks later, Ralph dumped her, and took up with someone else...

...Miles is a pyromaniacal misfit on whom the most well-intentioned efforts at rehabilitation are wasted...

...the story has the irresistible momentum of a well-told joke, and the punch line will make even ter68 Fe b r u a r y 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator minally demure readers laugh out loud...

...M arried calamity is a Waugh staple...

...The new volume is of considerable heft, comprising thirty-nine stories, among them seven he wrote while a student at Oxford, and six more he wrote while just a pup...

...His earliest effort, "The Curse of the Horse Race," which he turned out at the age of seven, closes on a note of exemplary violence and didactic severity: "Then Tom drest himself then Tom took Rupert to the puliese court Rupert was hung for killing the pulies man...

...One must be grateful to Waugh's Roman Catholic faith for enabling him to last as long as he did, and to his publishers for granting him so prosperous a posthumous life...

...Waugh had a lifelong penchant for telling stories with a lesson, though the instruction is rarely so bald as in his first story...

...Sometimes he would revel in his own brazen offensiveness...

...Waugh liked this story well enough that he incorporated a revised version into his novel A Handful of Dust, displacing the novel's original ending, which also appears as a story in this volume, "By Special Request...

...Having his way with most known varieties of foolishness, he commands an array of tones from gleeful loathing to rueful amusement...

...In '"Period Piece" an elegant lady on in years reminisces about the enmity between a pair of cousins who were rivals for a grand inheritance...

...his correspondent or listener is meant to demand...

...Here barbarism is not quite the hoot it is in Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, Scoop and Black Mischief and The Loved One...

...A young Englishman, Henty, fleeing his wife's infidelity, embarks on an ill-fated expedition to the Amazon rain forest...

...Nancy Mifford once asked him how he could be a Christian yet be so horrible: "He replied rather sadly that were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible...& anyway would have committed suicide years ago...

...That theme finds its fullest expression in Brideshead Revisited, one of the twentieth century's great novels, and a work of terribly sad wisdom...

...in return for his hospitality, Mr...

...but she is more ingenious still, and beats him to the punch, quite neatly...

...The growing number of Independents and refugees from the two major parties indeed need a political focus...

...The Reform Party is the only available candidate...

...In "Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future," a penological grandee states the case for enlightened solicitude toward wrongdoers: "In the New Britain which we are building, there are no criminals...

...That is about as funny a sentence as a man can hope to write, and such antic virtuosity abounds in Waugh's novels...

...The two major parties are steadily losing public support...

...Out of Depth" transports an American gent, Mr...

...The authorities do not suspect him, and to offset the bad publicity the deadly fire has generated-people are saying that one of the prisoners set the blaze-they decide to wage a counterpropaganda campaign, using Miles as the shining example of what benevolent incarceration can achieve...

...Kakophilos: "The entrance of the [Piccadilly Circus] Underground Station was there, transformed into a Piranesi ruin...

...Waugh had more than the customary share of human failings, but those failings were undeniably human-as against the perverse inhumanity of his mortal enemies, who would reduce man to the size of some appealing idea...

...The final chapter in the Trump saga has yet to be written...

...Released from prison--a happy place, agreeable as a posh resort, where he was sent for burning down an Air Force barracks with men inside--and assigned to a job in the Department of Euthanasia, he falls in love with a ballerina who is designated to be put down...

...IN 70 Fe b r u a r y 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator...

...A Handful of Dust is Waugh's grimmest novel, and "By Special Request" has the dead tone of a life that has been irreparably broken and that will continue to the end strictly by inertia, without hope of real happiness...

...a black aperture tufted about with fern and some crumbling steps leading down to black water...

...How could you...

...In Scoop he writes of the daring Europeans who ventured to Ishmaelia during the nineteenth century: "None returned...

...Unlimited savagery can be the mother lode for a writer with a suitably sardonic turn of mind...

...Yet the Reform Party is at a crucial juncture...

...in Brideshead Revisited he shows that life can be hard enough to understand and to bear even with God, but in most of his fiction he devotes himself to the portrayal of modern life as unholy madness...

...Waugh remarked at the time of his conversion to Catholicism in 193o that life was "unintelligible and unendurable without God...

...he examines, usually with something like a smile on his face, the pitiable wriggling of people who thought they could glide through life unscathed, only to get stepped on, hard...

...She makes the most extravagant preparations, but the only guests who show up are a pair of snobs she pointedly did not invite...

...Trump wins...

...I miss you every hour...

...Every American reader with a taste for Waugh will be tickled to find that, with The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, there is yet again an unlooked-for gift from beyond the grave...

...In his anger he torches the prison--a converted castle--where he had been an inmate...

...He put his misery to admirable literary use...

...Also during the war, while his wife was housebound in the country with nursery duties and another pregnancy, he issued a macabre invitation to join him in the big city: "If by any chance my ehildren should die, do come to London...

...His chosen specialty is the comedy of moral and emotional desolation, of lives lived badly if they are lived at all...

...They were eaten, every one of them...

...a new sterilization procedure went awry, and she has grown a luxuriant flowing beard, which puts an end to her dancing career and causes the State considerable embarrassment...

...There is the preposterous heartache of"Bella Fleace Gives a Party," in which an old dear who has come into some money decides to host a ball that everyone will talk about for years to come...

...When near relations fall out, the lady telling the story observes, "There is no limit to the savagery to which they will resort...

...his superior officers were not amused, apprehensive perhaps that the soldiers would realize just who, in the absence of sheep, would serve as the sheep...

...On a trip to Hollywood, he outraged the actor David Niven by referring to his black maid in her presence as "your native bearer...

...Billy's wife went back to Billy after a time, and in due course it was announced that she had delivered the requisite heir...

...still, one senses behind them the presence of a complete man, and one regrets that after this there will be no more of him...

...There are only the victims of inadequate social services...

...The men would laugh uproariously...

...ill, lost, and alone, he happens upon the isolated habitation of an English-speaking half-breed, Mr...

...His relentless antipathy toward ALGIS VALIUNas is a writer living in Florida...

...The Complete Stories may not show Waugh at his full reach...

...If this reviewer might offer a personal opinion, merely by running, Mr...

...After a particularly nasty row, Ralph ran off to Venice He commands an array of tones from gleeful loathing to rueful amusement...

...Waugh's most important theme is what makes for complete humanity in an age that whittles away at man until almost nothing is left of him...

...He is a monster, but he is also the closest thing to a real human being in this morally depleted new world...

...Miles is appalled at the overhaul, which has made the face he loved "something quite inhuman, a tight, slippery mask, salmon pink...

...What an evening that had been...

...Fatally disconsolate, Bella dies the next day, and only afterward is it discovered that she had forgotten one detail: She never mailed the invitations...

...It is rarer in the stories, which tend to go about their work more soberly, though of course they do offer comic pleasures of their own...

...Things would only get worse, Waugh believed, until inevitably human beings would cease to be human in any sense he eared to recognize...

...I hope this story will be aleson to you never to bet...

...McMaster, who nurses him back to health...

...Ralph Bland stood to inherit the fortune if Billy Cornphillip died childless, and Billy's marriage was not fruitful...

...There is the zany inanity of "Cruise," a series of letters and postcards in which a fluff-brained young woman recounts a giddy round of shipboard romances...

...Trump turns his back, Buchanan and his sister (how'd you like to end up in her dungeon...

...The story ends with the intimation that Miles is not finished with his fiery delights...

...The surgeon removes the skin from her face, and replaces it with "a wonderful new substance, a sort of synthetic rubber that takes grease-paint perfectly...

...Reconciling himself to his daughter Margaret's unsuitable marriage, he wrote to a friend, "She wants children & that is a thing I can't decently provide for her...

...and he was distressed by his own character, maybe even penitent...

...however, eventually she decides to return to dancing, and not only has an abortion but also takes care of her unwanted facial hair...

...A captain in the Royal Marines during World War II, he would lecture his men on the obvious advantages of deploying sheep as the first wave of invading forces to hit the beach--land mines, you know...

...Eros had gone, but the pedestal rose above the reeds, moss grown and dilapidated...

...At first she seems to want the baby...

...The few remaining Londoners dwell in a village of huts mounted on stilts: "The people were fairskinned and fair-haired, but shaggy, and they moved with the loping gait of savages...

...Trump not only wins the Reform Party nomination, but goes directly into the history books as a serious political figure...

...MeMaster, who is illiterate, asks only that Henry read Dickens aloud to him -every day for as long as they both shall live...

...The representatives of civilization are a colonizing force of black men: soldiers, traders, anthropologists who measure Rip's skull and read Shakespeare to The American Spectator _9 February 2000 69 him, a missionary who says Mass before a congregation of "dishevelled white men.., staring ahead with vague, uncomprehending eyes...

...When his first wife left him for another man after a year of marriage, Waugh wrote to Harold Acton, "I did not know it was possible to be so miserable & live but I am told that this is a common experience...

...There is the ghastly whimsy of "The Man Who Liked Dickens," perhaps the most brilliantly conceived story in the book...

...In "Tactical Exercise" a crippled World War II veteran comes to hate his wife, a welfare state bureaucrat whose job is "setting up hostile and oppressive governments in Eastern Europe," and who acquires in his "despairing mind...more than human malevolence as the archpriestess and maenad of the century of the common man...

...Miles Plastic, the hero of the story, proves him mistaken, in a dubiously glorious sort of way...

...If he stays and fights, however, Mr...

...At the last dinner, three years ago, a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles...

...some raw, others stewed and seasoned--according to local usage and the calendar (for the better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh, uncooked, in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop...

...T he barbarians whom Waugh feared most were those who would wreck civilization from within, in the name of kindness and compassion...

...He mocked his son James's stutter...

...Family life is a battleground in Waugh, and no quarter can be expected, especially when large sums of money are involved...

...His diaries and letters, published some twenty years ago, are a trove of inspired cussedness, but also a record of misery and spleen...

...Americans gets tiresome too, but does allow for bright flashes of wit: "My book [Brideshead Revisited] has been a great success in the United States which is upsetting because I thought it in good taste before and now I know it can't be...

...Of Margaret, his favorite child, he remarked, "Much prettier again after a time of looking like a toad...

...The point of contact between civilization, such as it is, and barbarism constitutes Waugh's favorite comic territory...

...Waugh has a discerning anthropological appreciation for savage customs, whether he is writing about the benighted African nations of Mania and Ishmaelia (in Black Mischief and Scoop, respectively), or about the upper reaches of English society...

...with Billy's wife, purely out of spite...

...Nowhere else in modern literature are the goods of this world-friendship, beauty, wealth, gaiety, superb food and drink-more richly evoked, only that the greatest such good, passionate love, be renounced in the end for the demands of sacred duty...

...Rip Van Winkle, to the London of the twenty-fifth century, through the black magic of the sinister Dr...

...temptible...

...although one is saddened as well to think that this time one has most likely seen the last of Waugh...

...If Mr...

...Operating as liaison to Yugoslavian partisans, he made a running joke of his insistence that Tito was in fact a woman, referring to him as "Auntie...

...But she chooses to live all the same, falls for Miles, and before long is pregnant...