Evelyn Waugh: A Biography.

A Biography Selina Hastings Houghton Mifflin, $40, 724 pp.

The general outline and many of the details of the life of Evelyn Waugh are known well enough for him to assume his place in the pantheon, or rogues' gallery, of English eccentrics. It would seem that Martin Stannard's two-volume biography, totaling over a thousand pages, should have satisfied the most voracious appetite. When Selina Hastings's biography was announced, even the most devoted Waugh scholars wondered if her book was really necessary.

As if aware of these sentiments, Hastings announces at the beginning of the book her intention "to give as close an impression as possible of what it was like to know Evelyn Waugh, even something of what it was like to be Evelyn Waugh." This, coupled with the strongly implied contrast between her book and Stannard's "full-scale critical biography," sounds ominously like the elegant and superficial kind of work done for hire by a journalist.

Fortunately, Hastings has written an entirely different kind of book. She has interviewed a great many people, has had access to a large body of unpublished material, much of it previously inaccessible, and has consulted much of the growing body of material published about Waugh.

From these various sources she has constructed a clear and admirably concise picture of his human and physical milieu. She is particularly good on places: the house where he grew up; Lansing College, his public school; his rooms at Oxford; the two houses he owned. In these matters she is obviously better informed than Stannard. For example, in his sole reference to Pixton Park, where Waugh courted his future wife, Laura Herbert, he calls it an "elegant country house." Hastings describes it as "a handsome Georgian house, spacious and comfortable, solidly built rather than architecturally distinguished. The high-ceilinged rooms are well proportioned, the furniture good, but the Herberts were unaware of appearances and indifferent to physical comfort" and lived in "a homely shabbiness."

Hastings also presents the sharpest portraits known to me of people important in Waugh, not only literal, with photographs not previously published, but, more important, verbal. These include his parents; his first wife; John Heygate, for whom she left Waugh; Olivia Plunket Greene, his first heterosexual romance; and even Ernest Oldmeadow, the Catholic editor who attacked Black Mischief. Detail after detail adds to our sense of the world in which Waugh lived: how much his first wife paid for her flat, the name of his second wife's dog, and his method of writing ("in longhand with a Relief nib on sheets of lined foolscap paper"), even the names of his neighbors at Oxford across New College Lane. Best and Chetwynd, who, with the addition of terminal e's, were combined for the name of the heroine in Decline and Fall.

Although Hastings drew upon a much larger body of material than had Stannard, her book is over 30 percent shorter. Since she is not an academic, she is more inclined to summarize than to quote. (To be sure, less quotation, in the case of Waugh, does not necessarily make a book more readable.) Instead, she picks out scattered quotations and places them, gracefully, in a pattern. And she is not, like Stannard, developing or creating a case against Waugh, taking personal and lengthy offense at almost everything he thought or did or could have done, with the slenderest evidence, have imputed to him. Perhaps the difference is that Hastings, from an upper-class background, understands perfectly why someone from Waugh's class would want to associate with hers. Or perhaps she doesn't take things personally. Or, as is often the case, she draws upon more than one source in describing events and is able to present a balanced account. At any rate, she imputes motives more complex and often far more creditable to Waugh than Stannard was willing to do.

Still, this is neither a whitewash nor a hagiography. Hastings is quite aware of Waugh's childish side, of his desire for attention and affection, and of his tendency to bully people, sometimes in the hope that they would stand up to him. But she is also very clear about the attractive side of Waugh, socially and sexually, and, though there are indications that she is not Catholic, the sincerity and depth of his faith. She may overestimate the influence of Ronald Knox, who, "with his elitist and anachronistic view of the church, did Evelyn a great deal of harm," especially in dealing with changes occasioned by Vatican II. Waugh did read books by other contemporary priests, including those by Martin D'Arcy, S.J., who received him into the church.

The book is weakest on Waugh's undeniable strength: his writing. Hastings offers competent summaries of his novels and other works, but she is no literary critic. Her one original idea is that "as a novelist he was always most engaged, always at his most true, subtle and profound when depicting members of his own society," thus dismissing large parts of Black Mischief and Scoop and the Brazilian section of A Handful of Dust, the last on the grounds that the alternative, serial ending is "artistically much more complementary."

These judgments are at least arguable, but Hastings's lack of attention to Waugh's creative work is revealed by a number of factual errors. The Prince of Wales does not make "homosexual advances to the pope" in Waugh's film, The Scarlet Woman; the central character attempts suicide by poison, not drowning, in "The Balance"; the character of Archon in Black Mischief is not based on Lej Yasu; Tony Last's bedroom at Hetton is Morgan le Fay, not Galahad (reserved for the least welcome guests); only Lord Marchmain, of the Flyte family in Brideshead Revisited, can be described as a recent convert.

Nevertheless, Hastings has written a very readable and on the whole quite believable account of what it was like to know Waugh, if not to be him. She has also written a life of Nancy Mitford, whose love of gossip and sense of mischief matched Waugh's and who could certainly stand up to him. Mitford reported of one visit that "Most of the time he was sweet, twice he was bloody, and all the time funny. About what one can expect." This is roughly the proportion that Hastings preserves, so that, if her readers do not see the books or the writer more clearly, they do have a more accurate view of the man.