Waugh discovers America
Elie, Paul
PINNING WAUGH TO THE WALL EVELYN WAUGH The Later Years Martin Stannard Norton, $25.95, 512 pp. Robert Murray Davis In Death in the Afternoon, the Old Lady who plays straight person to Hemingway...
...He wanted to be an insider, as Stannard observes, but when he got inside— a club, a church, a regiment—he rapidly grew disillusioned at the failure of the institution to meet his expectations or at the institution's demands that he follow its rules...
...After nearly two decades tracking down every conceivable scrap of information about Evelyn Waugh, he has completed the second and final volume of a biography which will probably be the most thorough, will almost certainly be the longest ever devoted to Waugh, and is indisputably an advance over Christopher Sykes's authorized and scandalously sloppy Evelyn Waugh: A Life (1975...
...Put another way, he was abrupt, demanding, manic and depressive, sometimes paranoid, sometimes delusional...
...His reply: "Madam, it is always a mistake to know an author...
...Far from suffering fools gladly, he worked hard to insure that fools of any age and rank, including his children, his dearest friends, and his commanding officers, suffered the lash of his wit...
...And since he defined a fool as anyone given, however temporarily, to self-pity, lapses in logic or manners, or heresy, he was a very busy man...
...Robert Murray Davis In Death in the Afternoon, the Old Lady who plays straight person to Hemingway says, "You know I like you less and less the more I know you...
...Waugh was not an easy person to like...
...Martin Stannard knows a very great deal about the external facts of Evelyn Waugh's life...
...His gestures of charity were sometimes barely distinguishable from bullying, as when he threatened John Betjeman with hellfire if he remained obdurate in heresy...
...He wanted to be one up on the whole...
...He was, by temperament, instinctively uncharitable...
...He doesn't like Waugh a bit...
...While Stannard tries at the beginning and end of this second volume to be fair, the body of the book exhibits little generosity of spirit...
Vol. 119 • August 1992 • No. 14
