Boys Will Be Boys

...As he wrote in the war trilogy of his autobiographical hero, Guy Crouchback, he "had no wish to persuade or convince or to share his opinions with anyone...

...He seemed to regard the Church as an extremely exelusive club that barred not only heretics who did not go to the right schools but all other Catholics as well...

...Though Waugh claimed that without his faith "I would hardly be a human being," he often made his religious zealotry a weapon in a one-man auto-da-fe...

...This obsession with the English nobility is often fatal to Sykes' syntax, my favorite solecism being "his mother Lady Curzon's doctor...

...His cultivated and generous parents-his father was a respected book publisher-gave Evelyn, by his own account, a remarkably sunny childhood...

...But as Philip Mason splendidly demonstrates in Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire (Harper & Row, 334 pp., $8.95), one must not judge the work of so prolific and protean a writer entirely through the spy-glass of biography...

...Born in Bombay, Kipling spent his earliest years in the care of gentle, affectionate and indulgent servants...

...the huge success of the comedies that paradoxically ridiculed and celebrated the "bright young things" of the jaded '30s, with their macabre fun-and-games...

...No one was safe from his needling, not even old chums like Christopher Sykes...

...Sykes relies with largely uncritical indolence on Waugh's erratic diaries and an unfinished autobiography that ended when Waugh's attempt to commit suicide by drowning at the age of 22 was foiled by a jellyfish...

...Five years later, Ruddy was sent to the boarding school for Army sons that provided him with the savage and vengeful adolescent experiences of Stalky & Co...

...Sykes prissily lowers the blind because "names and details need not and should not be given...

...There followed the artistically invaluable failures at schoolteaching and journalism...

...Writers &Writing BOYS WILL BE BOYS BY PEARL K. BELL EVELYN WAUGH was a rude and vindictive bully whose finest novels-Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust and the World War II trilogy Sword of Honour-are among the comic glories of 20th-century literature...

...Within the superpatriot coining pinchbeck slogans of the Boer War out of his sententious pomposity, there was a fabulist so uncannily attuned to the symbolic familiarities of folk legend that he at times felt himself to be transmitting messages from the collective unconscious, which he called his "Daemon...

...Any other biographer would linger on this aspect of his subject's youth...

...Along with the cocky and boastful swagger of the Victorian imperialist, there was the adroitly intuitive story-teller-keenly alert to the animistic subtleties of Eastern culture-who seemed to have made "permanent natural contact with the oldest and deepest layers of human consciousness...

...Yet the man so greatly blessed became increasingly nasty, bigoted, reactionary, uncontrollably bloodthirsty in his public and private behavior...

...Mason contends that Wilson's portrait and critical judgments were excessively hostile, and that he used biographical evidence too simplistically as a blunt instrument for attacking the books...

...But when he was six, his parents brought him and his three-year-old sister to England and left them, without explanation, in a house run by a violently punitive and fanatically Evangelical shrew...

...Under Mason's own persuasive guidance (he spent 20 years in the Indian Civil Service) we realize that Kipling's work is far more paradoxical and inconsistent than Wilson allowed...

...In 1941, in the midst of the long period when Kipling lay under a cloud of scorn and neglect, Edmund Wilson took him on with characteristically resolute thoroughness, arguing in a lengthy essay...

...Even in his religion he felt no brotherhood...

...Mason soberly shows us a forgotten author, the last of such great 19th-century naturals as Dickens...

...Sykes depicts his friend as a man possessed and clawed by the blackest despair, and he attributes this to Waugh's lifelong self-hatred...

...At Oxford, where Evelyn was an indifferent student and a hell-raising drinker, he went through what Sykes describes as "an extreme homosexual phase" that "was unrestrained emotionally and physically...

...Kipling's imagination, free of the anxious self-consciousness of modern writing, absorbed his environment so completely-the mean and the shoddy along with the virtuous and exciting-that the work he left us seems less an act of individual creation than a mythical leap of transcendence...

...Sykes' grab-bag of unassimilated anecdotes dimly suggests, however, that neither the elegant comic writer nor the disagreeable reactionary who abhorred "plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz -everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime"-had ever outgrown the gleeful bullyboy who stuck real pins in weak schoolmates...

...Unhappily, this intransigent romanticism went ludicrously against the grain of his tough and very clever schoolboy imagination...

...Against all odds, this dubious feat is what Christopher Sykes, a close friend of long standing appointed to his biographical task by the novelist's family, has contrived in Evelyn Waugh (Little, Brown, 462 pp., $12.50), a book written with shabby incompetence and loaded with snobbish and resentful irrelevancies...

...Out of his rejection of a world that was too Communist, too Protestant, too egalitarian, and too permissive, a world that was weak and decadent and remorselessly boring, Waugh conceived a sentimental nostalgia for a pre-Reformation England with its fixed church, fixed aristocracy, and no democratic nonsense from the lower orders...

...And if the War provided an incomparable new arena for Waugh's sense of the ridiculous, it also reinforced his muddled snobberies, and exacerbated the conflict between the incongruous seductions of martyrdom and entertainment that he never succeeded in resolving down to his death in 1966...

...It would seem patently impossible to produce a dreary study of the man, who was chronically outrageous, or the author, who was almost never dull...

...Only toward the end of his life, after his son was killed in World War I, was Kipling's obsession with cruelty and weakness, his contempt for the "pore benighted 'eathen 'Fuzzy Wuzzy,' " replaced by a more compassionate and charitable response to human suffering and folly...

...THERE HERE WAS A side of Rudyard Kipling that also failed to grow up, and like Waugh, he had a broad streak of public-school bullyboy in him that fed a splenetic contempt for liberals and "arty" intellectuals and anything that smacked of democratic socialism...

...his happy and fruitful second marriage...

...Beyond all doubt, Waugh was born into an uppermiddle-class London family in 1903...

...In the course of his reassessment...

...A person of arrested development, cocooned in self-pity, Waugh blamed everyone else for his own insufficiencies of mind and heart...

...But obviously a man whose instinct habitually led him into the hilarious extremes of farce, into mocking exaggerations and caricatures, cannot be taken literally when he writes about himself...

...The result was the failure of his most ambitious novel, Brideshead Revisited...

...Sykes' chronicle is primly reticent about the very matters that demand intelligent candor-Waugh's homosexual fling at Oxford, the character of his second wife-but floridly informative about such trivia as who sat where at luncheon parties and which lords and ladies were related to which major and minor figures...

...Waugh's conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930...

...At 13 he went off to a "minor" public school (in later life it seems to have rankled that he was not an Etonian and was thus deprived of the old-school tie with the upper classes that can have such sacred importance for an ambitious Englishman...

...His politics may have been detestable, yet his enormous popularity with children and other unliterary readers is undeniable, and for all his hardness, Kipling paid tribute to a code of honor, courage and heroism that, as Steven Marcus once suggested, has not been relinquished by a more democratic society without moral cost...

...Yet he makes no attempt to account for this poisonous emotion, to ask how a happy childhood could have yielded such aggressive misanthropy...

...Mason's fresh and balanced reading of Kipling's fiction in tandem with the facts of the life is especially welcome now, since the Kipling revival that has been under way for approximately a decade is turning into a stampede: Three collections of essays by the most estimable critics of our day have recently appeared, and biographies by Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis are forthcoming...

...The Kipling That Nobody Read," that a horrifying childhood had produced the vindictive imperialist whose career and books were "shot through with hatred...