Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years, 1939-1966.

ALL THE early reviews of this book that I have seen have made a point of distinguishing sharply between the biographical subject and his writings. The work remains (rather amazingly) praiseworthy in polite company, while Waugh himself earns obligatory condemnation as a reactionary, a snob, and a religious bigot. A number of reviewers have insisted that Evelyn Waugh was nobody you would want to entertain in your home. I disagree. I have the pleasure of knowing a few Wauvian characters, and wish I knew more. They are the only sort of people I take an interest in associating with, beyond a few game wardens, Western sheriffs, and a congenial barmaid or two. Volume II of Martin Stannard's biography is in every way superior to Volume I, which was itself a distingnished example of its kind. This is the more remarkable given that the first half of Waugh's life (1903-39) was incomparably more colorful and interesting than the second, especially after 1945 when, as Stannard says, Waugh at the age of 42 began to become an old man. Returned from the war, Waugh locked himself away behind the formidable gates of Piers Court. His sorties abroad were more conventional and less amusing than before; he went up to London less frequently and, when he did go, deliberately alienated as many old friends as possible. Usually he was in an alcoholic stupor while so engaged. He grew porcine and was unable to sleep without copious draughts of paraldehyde. With the composition of Brideshead Revisited, which he wrote during the war, he was convinced that his career as a serious literary artist had only begun; abandoning the ferocious comic destructiveness of the earlier books, he devoted himself to working what he perceived to be a more realistic and serious vein. Repelled and appalled by the democratic socialism of Britain's Labour government, he considered becoming an expatriate to Ireland. He cultivated more assiduously his public persona of irate disgruntled Tory, wore his faith on his hound's-tooth sleeve, and fought with the new literary generation descended on London from the halls of Cinderblock University. In his last years, sales of his books fell in both England and America, his favorite daughter got married and left him, and the "buggering-up of the Church" by Vatican II caused him to pray that he might not apostasize. In the last two years he wrote barely a line, was unable to eat on account of "false snappers," and longed for death. His hope was rewarded on Easter Sunday 1966, when, after hearing Mass said by his favorite priest, he disappeared shortly after the family's return to Combe Florey and was presently discovered on his face in the W.C. downstairs. Suffering a coronary thrombosis, he had collapsed, gashing his forehead on the lavatory door handle.

If this is not quite what Ford Madox Ford would have called "the saddest story," it is nevertheless pathetic enough. Despite his fears of approaching penury, Waugh died a wealthy man, leaving behind a reputation still largely intact, a long-suffering but slyly compatible wife 14 years his junior, six children, and an elegant seventeenth-century house in Somerset. His parents had both lived into ripe old age and, discounting the habitual over-eating and -drinking, a similar dotage spent in completing his memoirs, reading theology, and preparing his soul for death was an easy likelihood. Instead, he chose a kind of slowmotion suicide. Why did he do it?

Evelyn Waugh, like almost every creative artist, was a man of deep contradictions of the type that both create and sustain the intellectual tension by which a work of art is produced. In his case, the conflict was chiefly between Waugh the literary artist and Waugh the Roman Catholic. Stannard writes:

. . . at the root of [his] (admittedly selfcontradictory) pronouncements, surely, there is... the terror of babel. One thing alone, in Waugh's view, kept men sane: the sense of unified, agreed meaning. Ultimately this "meaning" was God. In temporal terms it was language. The post-structuralist notions of the (almost) infinite plurality of meaning would have been anathema to him. That way lay Picasso and Finnegans Wake. He had to see language, and the "language" of the Church's ritual, as precise instruments. And yet (did he dare confront this?) this position was logically absurd, and in his art and his worship he revolted against it. In both he wished to be free to choose his own "meanings."

Such an impasse, being the kind most artists confront without ever (fortunately for their art) resolving in their lifetimes, is unlikely to drive them toward madness. In Waugh's case, the fatal pressure, when it came, was exerted at a different stress point.

Also like many or most artists, Waugh had constructed a persona putting forward an idealized self, while creating a myth that described the age in which he lived. Waugh, a confirmed product of the English middle class, preferred to regard himself as a natural, untitled member of the aristocracy; Waugh, a writer of genius who was either a writer or nothing, fancied himself a man of action capable of an heroic career as a British Army officer defending England, Western civilization, and Christendom. Stunnard believes that Waugh was capable of penetrating the first illusion, and suggests that Laura Herbert Waugh, a genuine blueblood, was indispensable in reminding her husband from time to time, very gently and indirectly, that he did not really belong to the world of the Duchess of Devonshire and his close friend Lady Diana Cooper. Waugh could accept finally that he was not an aristocrat. However, it caused him great agony to accept the fact of his ineptness as a military officer, amounting almost to that of a character in one of his own books. The memory of his inglorious military career was certainly a cause of his determination to withdraw, after VE Day, from a world in which he felt himself incapable of playing an active part.

Again, the disappointment, terrible as it was, need not have proved fatal. Waugh could have survived the destruction of the private myth; it was the aggrandizement of the historical one on which he came to grief at last. It is really not a question of whether the modern world is as dreadful as Waugh perceived it to be; the point is rather that that is how he saw it. And, seeing it thus, the person he had created from his youth needed to find an appropriate way to respond, privately and publicly, to that dreadfulness. This way was rejection: dramatic, rude, and total. Along with sunbathing, Picasso, and jazz went friendship, conviviality, family--as in the case of his appalling callousness toward his son Auberon after the young soldiers near-fatal wounding in Cyprus--and even, almost, faith itself.

He was a man who believed that the life of this world is stupid and futile and that real existence begins beyond the grave. Why could he not then enjoy life for the bauble it is for as long as it lasts, refusing to concern himself overmuch with it, let alone agonize over it? This Waugh was supremely incapable of doing. Why? Apparently because the negative aspect of his persong in time overcame the supernaturally positive one, as it finally overwhelmed the man himself. For most of his life he was unable to pray.

Death came as he would have wished it, on the most holy day of the Christian year, with a priest in the house. Those who are not deceived by the persona will wish the soul beyond it well, whatever it may be.