The Soul of Waugh

...Tony Last of A Handful of Dust, Waugh's second post-conversion novel, is emblematic...

...Joyboy, believes the body contains what is most important in life: personality...

...Pointing out the contradiction, Nancy Mitford drew from him the famous rejoinder, "You have no idea how much nastier I David Skinner is an associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Lottie Crump would be a perfect Edwardian, were it not that she runs a cathouse...

...His assistant, Aimee Thanatogenous, asks Dennis Barlow, who has come to make burial arrangements for a deceased English acquaintance, "Shall I put him down as 'serious and philosophical' or 'judicial and determined...

...Assessments of Waugh's humorous works have almost entirely missed the stunning moral darkness that stands at their center...

...that the anarchic elements of society are so strong that it is a whole-time task to keep the peace...

...The former is a coming-of-age adventure, in the first few pages of which the dull young Paul Pennyfeather loses his place at college, his inheritance, and his dignity...

...The book was a success...

...Although Laura Herbert would bear him seven children, he was never much of a family man...

...That is, it has taken away death's harshness and finality, leaving in their place sugary sentiments...

...Thus, in Scoop and Black Mischief, politics is a doomed enterprise...

...Both the elegance and the ugliness are on display in the new Little, Brown edition of Waugh's books...

...To have been born into a world of beauty," he wrote in his unfinished autobiography, "to die amid ugliness, is the common fate...

...a nose to take the thoughts of English manhood back to its schooldays, to the doughy-faced urchins on whom it first squandered its affection, to memories of changing room and chapel and battered straw boaters...

...The heart of the novel is Waugh's presentation of Whispering Glades, a decadent big-production Hollywood cemetery that has removed morbidity from the funeral business...

...Along with repackaging Brideshead and five of the comic novels (though not, unfortunately, the hard-to-find Black Mischief), the publisher has assembled Waugh's complete short stories in one volume...

...His suitcase, made of "imitation crocodile hide," bears someone else's initials and carries his own false beard...

...He also contributed numerous reviews to Catholic publications and gave money generously to the Church...

...These books do not satirize manners...

...He soon dies, but the event proceeds as if he had suffered only a slight sprain...

...Almost halfway through the story, Last's son dies in a riding accident...

...Work Suspended" suggests that even loving marriages may inspire animosity...

...The result, however, is the same: In the end, everyone loses...

...Here we come as close as we ever get in Waugh's comic novels to a Catholicism expressed by negative example...

...The error enthroned at Whispering Glades isn't merely that Dr...

...Yet in his comic novels— both those before and those after conversion—one searches long and hard for evidence of a distinctly Catholic mind at work...

...would be if I was not a Catholic...

...He had an older brother, Alec, also a writer, whose most notable achievement came when, at the precocious age of seventeen, he penned an autobiographical novel shocking for its frank description of public-school homosexuality...

...His biographer Martin Stannard claims that after his conversion, Waugh "always wrote as a Catholic...

...It is, unfortunately, the skepticism that informs his satires...

...In 1930, "on firm intellectual conviction but with little emotion," as he told his Jesuit instructor, he was admitted to the Church...

...Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies—the only novels Waugh wrote before his conversion—express an entirely secular outlook...

...Everyone similarly loses in the short stories...

...Their father, Arthur Waugh, was a book reviewer and an editor at Chapman and Hall, which published technical manuals as well as novels (including almost all of Evelyn's...

...Wordsmiths, particularly those with a taste for the put-down, credit him as one of the few twentieth-century writers to have given the English language its due...

...Where Stannard and others believe Waugh to be saying that man is sometimes terrible and should be otherwise, Waugh was actually saying man is invariably terrible and there is little to be done about it...

...But Waugh's ultimate evocation of marital anti-bliss is found in "Tactical Exercise...

...To be sure, his serious fiction is distinctly and explicitly shaped by a Catholic point of view...

...In April 1937, shortly before the publication of his most popular novel, Scoop, Waugh married again...

...that his chances of happiness and virtue, here, remain more or less constant through the centuries and, generally speaking, are not much affected by . . . political and economic conditions...

...Waugh's urge to make himself useful in the world found a better outlet in his work for the Church...

...the marriage was not...

...A difficult person to be around, Waugh spent months at a time away from his wife and children, writing...

...But he was not noted for a Christian temperament...

...I believe," he wrote in a book review in 1939, "that man is by nature an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth...

...It opens with a classic Waugh formulation: "John Verney married Elizabeth in 1938, but it was not until 1945 that he came to hate her steadily and fiercely...

...In Decline and Fall, a student lining up for a footrace is accidentally shot by the starting gun...

...he was merely reducing man to his basest elements...

...Even while decoding the books' thinly disguised literary gossip, critics have tended to ignore graver questions that come up between reader and author...

...In several of the novels, characters suffer horrible fates without anyone so much as noticing...

...The divorce, it seems, renewed Waugh's interest in religion...

...Though Waugh the man disapproved of society's corruption of the innocent, Waugh the humorist did not set out to judge it...

...He wrote religious biographies, of his friend the Jesuit Ronald Knox and of the Tudor martyr Edmund Campion...

...One lady made her leave-taking holding a telephone...

...By turns, Pennyfeather is tormented by decadent aristocrats at university, would-be aristocrats at the corrupt, third-rate boys' school where he is forced to teach, and scheming socialites...

...The books expose our folly and wickedness—and only our folly and wickedness...

...To use a word Waugh favored, there is an "architectural" quality to his works, by which elegant structure is made to contain all the ugliness of life...

...But in his humor, he created fictional worlds alien to that point of view...

...Vile Bodies, Waugh's all-out attack on jazz, tabloid culture, and the whirl of modern society, opens with a sketch of a gossip-minded Jesuit...

...If Tony Last was too nice for his own good, Millicent Blade in "On Guard" is too pretty...

...In his declining years, Waugh felt financially and artistically impoverished, despite his fame...

...Viewing himself as a defender of Christianity and Western civilization, he maneuvered himself into the army despite a medical finding that he was unfit for service...

...The novel is dotted with impostors...

...Aside from Waugh's mastery of language, the novel has only one virtue, and that is its continually shifting, wildly veering picture of English life in the 1930s: a circus of bright young things, Evangelicals, blowhards, cheats, and con men in one soul-killing romp...

...His flight to South America ends with him in the hands of an Indian chief who won't let Tony leave because he needs the Englishman to read Dickens aloud to him...

...Perhaps only The Loved One offers evidence that Waugh the satirist occasionally wrote as a Catholic...

...The only way to bring this unhappy business to a conclusion is to kill a great number of Germans," he wrote his friend, the poet John Betje-man...

...Despite its vague promise of another world, Whispering Glades actually seems quite content with this one...

...The truth underlying Paul Pen-nyfeather's life is that being decent and competent affords no protection...

...Joyboy and his underlings would make the tragic sweet, but that they would ignore the tragic altogether, pretending it does not exist...

...Seemingly the most transparent writings, these comic novels have rarely been the subject of serious moral inquiry...

...He could, however, be public spirited...

...At twenty-four, a few years up from Oxford and just months before his debut as a published writer with Decline and Fall in 1928, Evelyn Waugh married Evelyn Gardner...

...In the plots of A Handful of Dust and the later comic works, individual choice looms larger...

...Waugh had always seen existence as a miserable state of affairs...

...From this experience came fodder for his major works of serious fiction, Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Sword of Honor trilogy (1952-1961...

...The depravity of Englishmen outside England is of a piece with Waugh's pessimism about the entire human race...

...words, identity, are so many masks that circumstance removes to expose barbarity...

...In Scoop and Black Mischief, foreigners prove even more devious than Englishmen...

...Vile Bodies is populated by shallow people with shallow aims...

...Man's natural savagery is as evident in remote, uncivilized settings as it is in polite English society...

...It is this man's "happy knack to remember everything that could possibly be learned about everyone who could possibly be of any importance...

...And then there are the readers who see in Waugh a master storyteller, yet leave his books with the vague feeling of something wrong...

...Twisted desire and social turpitude leave humans little more than vile bodies, flesh and blood devoid of spirit—so much so that Stannard and other critics misread Waugh when they claim to find a moral and religious kernel in which the author, by "negative example," is condemning what he describes...

...He is, Waugh sneers, a man who "might be expected to acquit himself with decision and decorum in all the emergencies of civilized life"—and he is wronged by every person with whom he comes into contact...

...In Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, custom and prejudice set events in motion...

...Callousness about life, dignity, and fairness is the quality that abounds and the catalyst for catastrophe...

...Travel exposes the flaws of Waugh's characters, some of whom seem to go abroad mainly for the purpose of committing adultery unobserved...

...A dark distrust of human inclination pervades Waugh's comic works...

...Her face inspires in men a fraudulent affection...

...When Millicent tries to break her promise of devotion to a young man who has gone abroad, her dog bites off her nose to make sure no one else will have her...

...But all of Waugh's humorous works, not just the pre-conversion novels, are set in a moral wasteland...

...The director, Dr...

...In the post-conversion A Handful of Dust, a boy is stomped to death by an out-of-control horse, but no one blames the horse's owner, and the child's own mother doesn't show up for his funeral...

...His son Auberon's recent memoir depicts the literary giant as a selfish and cold-hearted father...

...His wife leaves him for an out-of-work mama's boy and, in the divorce proceedings, attempts to gouge him while an approving society looks on...

...As in so many farcical stories, chance moves the plot, tossing Pennyfeather around like a rag doll...

...Waugh, who converted at the age of twenty-six, is often thought of as a Catholic writer...

...As in so many of Waugh's satires, life with others is presented as a kind of hell—not damnation exactly, but an experience fraught with animosity growing from a lack of sympathy so profound that John discovers the only thing stopping him from killing his wife is her plan to kill him...

...Unfortunately, World War II saw Waugh shuttled in and out of a series of administrative offices, of little use to anyone...

...Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being...

...This includes several items of interest absent from other collections: the tantalizing novel fragment "Work Suspended," the anti-modern "Scott-King's Modern Europe," and the strange little futurist story "Love Among the Ruins...

...In this carefully worded profession,Waugh begins sounding like a Catholic, moves to sounding like a conservative, and ends sounding like a raving skeptic...

...In his satires, he wasn't exaggerating man's awfulness to shame readers into bettering themselves...

...Whispering Glades embodies the opposite of the Catholic Church's understanding of life and death...

...He died in 1966, at home, shortly after attending Easter Mass...

...Waugh was born in 1903, just as the art-for-art's-sake movement was closing shop, though he would share many of its aesthetic concerns...

...If man by himself, even when acting without malice, is liable to land in the worst possible situations, man in concert with others will create widespread calamity...

...In his last published article, Waugh described death as a "significant emancipation," adding, with characteristic disdain for the chores of his public and private life, "It is just that I do not much like living...

...The fifteenth Marquess of Vanburgh makes his living by writing a gossip column...

...Meanwhile, his reputation as a writer was growing, with books of travel journalism and the satirical novels Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust...

...In A Handful of Dust, one detects a certain philosophical shift...

...Good intentions are misunderstood...

...they attack humanity...

...In Vile Bodies, Agatha Runcible dies in a racing-car crash, but again the death goes unnoticed...

...With or without free will, man is unable to achieve happiness...

...His fiction evokes a deteriorating world peopled by moral midgets, a society shredding its traditions, a physical world degraded...

...After just a year, his wife left him, cuckolded, as he was working on Vile Bodies...

...Counterfeit affection, fruitless careers, and the hypocrisy of Englishmen abroad are all packed into this vicious meditation on the American way of death...

...She has, Waugh explains, "a nose that pierced the thin surface crust of the English heart to its warm and pulpy core...

...This story draws on not one but two characteristic themes: the misery of military life and the misery of marriage (a combination also seen in Brideshead and the Sword of Honor series...

...A harmless fellow, Last refuses to see ill will in others...

...Is there any individual trait you would like portrayed...

...Waugh, an orthodox Catholic, wrote his satires as if human beings had no soul...

...Sheer misfortune will make life hell, if family doesn't get there first...

...Readers of serious fiction revere his masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited, popularized by a faithful BBC television movie...

...Sometimes the Waiting Ones like to see a pipe in the Loved One's mouth...

...For the first twenty years of his career, Waugh wrote mainly ferocious and hilarious satires...