The Brideshead Generation:

...Waugh's decision to become a Roman Catholic (Waugh himself said that "Conversion suggests an event more sudden and emotional than his calm acceptance of the propositions of his faith") is treated at length but in a somewhat gingerly fashion...

...After the by now obligatory look at Harold Acton and Brian Howard at Eton and Oxford, the book settles down to a fairly straightforward biography of Waugh with a few side glimpses of the other figures...

...Carpenter is sobriety itself...

...This popularity does present problems for a biographer who must find some new approach to justify yet another book on his subject...

...Of Waugh's own work, the vast majority are in print (twelve of the sixteen novels) and even some of his more ephemeral travel writing and journalism has been collected and reissued...

...Carpenter quotes with evident approval the statement by Cyril Connolly that the typical upper-class English male is "adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual...

...Increasingly, he began to act as a recruiting agent for his church and as an ideological policeman...

...Arthur J. Moore It will be twenty-four years this April since Evelyn Waugh died...

...The television dramatization of Brideshead Revisited was a huge success both in the U.S...

...These writers, in addition to Waugh, include Harold Acton, John Betjeman, Cyril Connolly, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Brian Howard, Nancy Mitford, and Anthony Powell...

...This points to the central problem faced by any Waugh biographer-how to account for Waugh's increasingly difficult personality as he grew older so that in later years he often seemed a caricature...

...In social terms, this corresponds with the postwar changes in Britain and the rise of the Labor party...

...Humphrey Carpenter, an English writer who has written biographies of W.H...

...That is no mean tribute: that generation included not only Greene himself but also Anthony Powell and Henry Green...

...Carpenter's book, unfortunately, does not really convince the reader that this is so and despite his claims at the beginning, the other writers simply fade into the background...

...The last book which attempted anything this ambitious was Martin Green's Children of the Sun, which also dealt with much the same cast of characters...

...It is almost impossible to write a dull book about these people, but between their own writings and other studies, this group of writers is in danger of being too much written about-the fate of Bloomsbury and the American expatriate writers in Paris in the twenties...

...are better understood when they are considered in relation to each other...

...He does not mention a truly horrifying letter that Waugh wrote Clarissa Churchill when she married Anthony Eden, a divorced man...

...The discussion of the later novels (for example, The Loved One), is less successful, relying a lot on the critical reception at the time of publication...

...In that time, two biographies, a volume of letters and excerpts from his diary have appeared as well as a number of literary studies...

...Auden, Ezra Pound, and J.R.R...

...By comparison, Mr...

...Carpenter is also good in his discussion of Waugh's literary influences and in his analysis of Waugh's work...

...This did not succeed but may have caused a rift between the couple...

...Graham Greene was not being conventionally polite when he called Waugh "the greatest novelist of my generation...

...Perhaps we are in that period when it is best to let their own writings speak for them...

...Graham Greene and Waugh's friendship took place when they were both mature but Waugh made no secret to Greene of his increasing unhappiness at what he regarded as Greene's growing apostasy...

...Tolkien, here undertakes what he calls "a study of several writers and their circle, whose work has certain ideas and beliefs in common, and who...

...A glittering array, that, and any book which casts new light on these people would indeed be worth reading...

...The whole question of Waugh's homosexuality while at Oxford is set in a context which demystifies it...

...Changes in the liturgy particularly offended him-"Pray God I will never apostatize but I can only now go to church as an act of duty and obedience...

...Carpenter regards this as a persona which Waugh adopted and into which he was increasingly frozen by his rejection of the role of an artist...

...Others, more psychologically oriented, see the denial of his sexually ambiguous nature taking its revenge...

...This approach has its virtues...

...To Waugh admirers, it is unfortunate that Brideshead Revisited receives so much attention since it exhibits many of his flaws and keeps readers from the other books...

...It is difficult for most Americans, lacking the tradition of all-male schools from an early age on through the university, to quite fathom the tradition of upper-class homosexuality which was very prevalent in English life up until World War II...

...and Britain...

...It is not entirely clear how much Carpenter regards this as reflecting Waugh's expressed views of the breakdown of society or more directly a reflection of Waugh's psychic wounds after his first wife left him for another man...

...Waugh himself anatomized much of this in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, the thinly-novelized account of his delusions and breakdown while on a trip to Ceylon...

...While some of the influences he cites, such as Ronald Firbank and P.G...

...He makes a great deal of Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland in connection with the early novels such as Decline and Fall...

...In any case, from the age of fifty he began to behave as an old man...

...All of this would be only a sad case, were it not for the novels, which remain glorious...

...He died in 1966 at the age of sixty-three...

...Wodehouse, are generally accepted, others, such as Hemingway and the use of cinematic techniques, are less well known...

...One must also wonder how much his prodigious consumption of alcohol and sleeping medicines was not a cause as well as a symptom of his decline...

...Green's book, although lively and provocative, had a ponderous intellectual superstructure of "dandies," "uncles," and "rogues" which soon swamped the whole enterprise...

...As Waugh more and more accepted the persona of a "Catholic" writer, his religion clearly became more and more identified with his rejection of the contemporary English scene and middle-class values...

...Distasteful as this was to Waugh, it was nothing to the disgust he felt for the changes in the church culminating in Vatican II...

...In contrast with the fate of many authors, whose work suffers at least temporary eclipse after their death, Waugh seems to be more popular now than in the last years of his life...

...Carpenter refers to Waugh's successful campaign to "bring over" Penelope Betjeman and his campaign of harassment of her husband, John, to follow her example...

...Yet others, more unsympathetic, simply see a snob and social climber who was trapped in the British class system...