AN UNGENTLEMAN GENTLEMAN

...He was a choleric man: "never," says Sykes of one occasion, "have I seen envy, hate and rage so effortlessly conjoined in a human face...

...But of course it has to be read, if only for the richly comic anecdotes, often very well told...

...We also have Waugh on politics...

...But in a sense he knows too much and so, paradoxically, cannot tell us enough...

...Anecdotes about him have been circulating for years, especially in Catholic circles, but the most startling revelations came in the spring of 1973 when the London Observer published extracts from his private diaries, and Waugh emerged as an extraordinarily rancorous and vindictive figure...

...Apart from the stiff, uneasy love-stories each one tells (that is another matter) the difficulty stems from Waugh's willed, unreal evocations of aristocratic new-Catholicism among the Marchmains and aristocratic old-Catholicism among the Crouchbacks as a center of value...

...Waugh made a Black-Mischief style joke out of it, often getting himself up in grotesquely exaggerated versions of the "correct" clothes, making himself into a pastiche reactionary, and mooching about in an elegant country-house stuffed with mid-Victorian bric-a-brac...

...Here is the latter's (not of course totally unmalicious) picture of Evelyn Waugh at that time: "A little faun called Evelyn Waugh...

...No doubt he was drunk at the time...

...his preferred protagonist is a "civilised" victim at bay among contemporary "savages," and he certainly cultivated the image of himself as laudator temporis acti and the rest of it...

...Nor is it the antipathy (shared by Sykes) towards doctrinaire Left-wing ideologues in England...

...Sykes gives us all that to contemplate...

...With a dark grey suit I found this rather becoming, and thus clad I went to White's...

...Here is the anecdote most likely to be generally remembered: an American woman, wife of a well-known theatrical producer, addresses him at a dinner party as follows: "Oh Mr...

...But the tales betray him...

...Here it is not so much the pro-Franco stance in the Spanish Civil War that offends (after all most Catholics took this position in the thirties...

...But his account of Italian intervention in Abyssinia-civilized Romans enlightening the savages-and his insistent praise for Marshal Graziani, notorious for his atrocities in that country, an admiration that persisted beyond the end of the Second World War when all the facts were available-this seems perverse and ugly...

...Some version of this struggle appears in most of his fiction, sometimes wonderfully transmuted in his comic imagination, as in Put Out More Flags, where the homosexual aesthete, Ambrose Silk becomes the civilized victim of the heterosexual philistine Basil Seal...

...he often was...

...Rose Ma-caulay was surely right in calling his thirties travel-book, Waugh in Abyssinia, a "fascist tract...

...But Sykes does not attempt such things...

...It's a Dorian Gray effect-a face destroyed...

...but it is not easy to talk about them as satires...

...And he was often very nasty indeed...

...Paul Claudel met him once and afterwards made the accurate, though hopelessly French comment: "il lui manque failure d'un vrai gentleman...

...First, one cannot ignore the implications of what Sykes rightly calls a "ruthless and superb" essay in self-criticism that Waugh offers in the first chapter of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold...

...The latter (a country-house habitue) seems to win the battle hands-down, yet Waugh leaves the air full of ambiguities...

...He lept to his feet on my entrance, his eyes blazing and haggard with that concentrated look of jealousy I remembered from Tatton Park...

...He has no distance and, worse, no critical edge to bring to bear upon the man or the work...

...Waugh, I have just been reading your new book, Brides-head Revisited, and I think it's one of the best books I have ever read...

...he was, Sykes tells us, "horribly adept at putting people he met ill at ease as regards then-social manners and position," and he enjoyed doing it: 'To the naturally weak he was as merciless as he had been in his bullying schooldays...

...The story takes place in the dark, clothes-rationed days immediately after the war...

...And he also quotes convincing examples of Waugh's unobtrusive good works, notably his generous and affectionate efforts to rehabilitate the alcoholic Alfred Duggan, who with his help became a successful novelist...

...And then back to what Waugh forty years later had made of himself in that other photograph...

...The truth is surely more complicated, though Sykes never seems to get down to dealing with it, beyond remarking upon it...

...Most satirists are, like Waugh, conservatives...

...To which Waugh replies: "I thought it was good myself, but now that I know that a vulgar, common American woman like yourself admires it, I am not so sure...

...I look back at the picture Sykes prints of Waugh in his twenties, a young man astride of motor-bike, gay and insouciant, his faun-like face glancing from under the hyachinthine locks...

...When those Observer extracts came out, an arresting photograph of the novelist in his last years stared from the covers of the magazine section...

...He never hesitated to take advantage of the fact that while he was a highly educated man, most of them were barely litera-ate...

...Sykes is, reasonably and rightly, inhibited by loyalties to the living, and perhaps as a result at least two subjects that have endless resonances in the fiction are quite inadequately treated: one is the breakdown of Waugh's first marriage -a family-and-friends account only is furnished...

...But the impulse towards self-destructive aggression - nastiness - seems to have been quite uncontrollable...

...Waugh was immediately welcome in this world...

...it probably only intensified Evelyn Waugh's self-hatred and self-disgust...

...but then, unlike him, they turn out to be Appollonian as well, moral celebrators of an established order...

...We can also admire Waugh's wholehearted devotion to his own vo-action as a writer...

...I told him that it came from Lock's in St...

...These books seem to be fine satiric achievements...

...he cried...

...The most "Catholic" of the novels, Brides-head Revisited and the war-trilogy, Sword of Honor suffer in this way...

...Again, unattractive though most of his political views were, one admires in retrospect Waugh's honorable struggle to draw attention to British acquiescence in the persecution of Croatian Catholics under Tito during the complex years immediately after World War II...

...The left-wing British novelist and essayist J. B. Priestley, a declared enemy of Waugh, once suggested that he was "an author pretending to be a Catholic landed gentleman...

...At Oxford in the twenties, he had fallen in with the clever, witty, bourgeoisie-defying, anarchic group of aesthetes who borrowed their attitudes and life-styles from France and avant-garde Europe -flamboyant figures like Brian Howard and Harold Acton (both from cosmopolitan Catholic backgrounds) with their host of followers and imitators, who made the amoral aesthete's life exciting and glamorous...

...Waugh might at first seem to belong to this company...

...Finally, he was a man of simple piety...

...As an official, authorized biographer he seems overwhelmed by the need for discretion...

...Christopher Sykes's biography does little to relieve this impression...

...One day, looking through my half-forgotten wardrobe I came across a rather dandyish piece, a grey bowler hat...

...Waugh was a bully...

...A good biography of Waugh should probe some of these tensions...

...Yet the dissatisfaction was valuable to the writer...

...Give me that hat...

...James's Street...

...So he did have various virtues, but it is the misanthropic Waugh who sticks in the mind...

...the other is his active homosexuality as a young man-the topic and its implications are quite startlingly introduced, but then simply disappear from consideration...

...He knows what he knows in the wrong way...

...The tiny kindling of charity which came to him [Pinfold] through his religion sufficed Only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom...

...Waugh's fiction goes most seriously wrong when this exteriorized inward battle is too easily won, and when we are offered, not an outrageous iconoclastic victor like Basil Seal, but a victim-hero like Guy Crouchback...

...We are also left in the dark about his Graham Greene-like youthful attempt at suicide, and questions about his conversion to Catholicism ("little can be known") get only a dusty answer...

...And Sykes tells us that in real life Waugh wanted to belong to the world of Tony Last (the victim-hero of A Handful of Dust), the dowdy upper-class world of English gentry, but that in fact he never much liked country life, was bored by it, and instinctively felt more at home chez Lady Metroland, i.e., in the anarchic, reality-denying universe of the smart and witty aesthetes...

...As late as 1930 he published a biography of the Pre-Raphaelite, Dante Gabriel Rossetti...

...Waugh knew and judged himself...

...Sword of Honour, intermittently brilliant and sometimes moving in its anarchic vision of war's ineptitudes and ironies, is dangerously undermined by the author's fond, uncritical dwelling upon his romanticized oldest of English Catholic families...

...Gratitude to an author who has given endless pleasure makes me want to urge Waugh's redeeming qualities...

...The same day Evelyn went to Lock's shop who in due time sent him from their stores 'one white Coke hat.' This he wore frequently from then on, not only in summer for which such hats are designed, but at all seasons...

...Here is Christopher Sykes at his curious best, catching convincingly the tone of his own relationship wtih Waugh, and also offering a quick glimpse of that serio-comic clubman at work on his image...

...More positively, Sykes presents him as a devoted husband and the loving father of a large family...

...Significantly enough, Waugh's meticulously disciplined prose deserts him in these situations and a lush unfamiliar language creeps in...

...Yet once there had been another view of Evelyn Waugh...

...Surely this prancing faun is the figure most evidently behind Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, Scoop, Put Out More Flags, novels in which wonderfully outrageous, anarchic comic fantasy is allowed free play in a brilliant glassy prose...

...Bridgeshead, accomplished as ever when it tells the story of Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Blanche and evokes the Oxford aesthete's world again, seems to me preposterous when it is trying to do what Waugh thought it was doing: demonstrating "the operation of divine grace...

...Sitting on the leather-seated fender, glaring at every member who came in, was Evelyn...

...In his later years, Waugh admired Wodehouse extravagantly, in itself an interesting development in a serious novelist...

...Waugh the artist is happiest as a gay, Dionysian celebrator of comic anarchy, in the world of such free puppets as Margot Beste-Chet-wynde and Miles Malpractice, or, an interesting variant, of Basil Seal...

...A quick explanation of Waugh's misanthropy might be made in terms of his dissatisfaction with this chosen role, and all the rejections that it implied...

...I see him as a prancing faun, his wide-apart eyes, always ready to be startled, under raised eyebrows, the curved sensual lips, the hyacinthine locks of hair, I had seen in marble and bronze at Naples, in the Vatican museum, and on fountain heads all over Italy...

...We are appalled of course, and perhaps also, hypocrites lecteurs, secretly delighted...

...And he went in for seemingly quite gratuitous unkindnesses...

...He was a snob who, for example, as an army officer had to be kept away from the men because of his habit of showing open contempt for them...

...A grey bowler hat worn with the right sort of clothes can have dignity, but not when worn with the sort of suit Evelyn ordered shortly after...

...Sykes's manner is pure Wodehouse, that is to say, very stylish English Public School-boy prose...

...At school he had been a delicate draughtsman and had first wanted to pursue a fin-de-siecle sort of career in calligraphy and illustration...

...I refused, saying it was a hat I valued and loved...

...The whole country-squire business seems to have been a sort of game...

...so, despite all those scandalous anecdotes, there is a stultifying atmosphere of hints, and nudges to read between the lines...

...No doubt Sykes is right, up to a point (as Lord Copper's employees at the Daily Beast memorably say), but these figures become more interesting and certainly more significant if they are seen as embodiments of warring impulses in Waugh himself...

...Where did you get it...

...This biography is simply premature...

...But Catholicism did not help much...

...Sykes here, as everywhere else in his biography, confidently names the models Waugh used: Ambrose is largely based on the aesthete Harold Acton, Basil on the man-of-action Peter Rodd...

...His Belloc-style view of the Freemasons as the sinister force behind the Mexican revolution could be tolerated as an eccentricity, and his admiration for Spanish-Colonial rule in Central America can be taken as a quirk...

...that self-assertive, apoplectic, blood-shot mask angrily glaring-but with terrible misery in the eyes...

...he basked in its delights, and it was Acton who first sponsored him and his work...

...an important dynamic of these novels is a struggle within Waugh between the anarchic aesthete that he had been, and the authoritarian conservative that he was becoming...

...He was a close friend and confidant and he has had access to all Waugh's private journals...