FEW SCOOPS.

The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh
Little, Brown, $29.95, 536 pp.

In the 1980s, Auberon Waugh gave permission, on the condition that the result was never to appear in England, to collect and publish what he called scraps from his father's wastebasket in Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice: The Early Writings, 1910-27. Now eighteen stories from that volume and twenty-one previously collected and more widely known works of short fiction have been gathered in what is, according to the dust-jacket flap, "a dazzling distillation of Waugh's genius." The publicity release maintains that the stories show that Waugh "was also a master of the short form."

This is an extreme, if not outrageous, claim, but one can agree that these stories are recognizably the work of Evelyn Waugh. Waugh's persona, Gilbert Pinfold, believes that "most men harbor the germs of one or two books only; all is professional trickery...." The Complete Stories confirms this view.

Those limitations are most noticeable in the recurring characters who people what an earlier anthologist called "the world of Evelyn Waugh." For example, Alastair Trumpington and Margot Metroland appeared in Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), and intermittently, in character or cameo parts, in the subsequent novels and some of these stories, until their farewell thirty-five years later in "Basil Seal Rides Again," which collects other characters from the novels Black Mischief (1932) and Put out More Flags (1942).

More important to careful readers of Waugh's work, three of the stories are direct spinoffs from the novels. "By Special Request" is the ending for the serial version of A Handful of Dust (1934), written because key parts of the original ending had already been sold in story form as "The Man Who Liked Dickens." "Incident in Azania," though it uses the setting and some of the characters of Black Mischief, was not, from the evidence of the novel's manuscript, ever intended to be part of the longer work but is a kind of jeu d'esprit based on a story about a faked kidnapping in China. "Charles Ryder's Schooldays," written and soon abandoned in Waugh's postwar slump and based on his own schoolboy diaries, is a prequel to Brideshead Revisited (1945).

Some of the stories are linked to the novels in more subtle ways, for after the fact it is clear that they served as drafts, and sometimes parts' bins, for further and more substantial work to come. The dissolute doctor who fakes a death certificate in Waugh's undergraduate story "Edward of Unique Achievement" is resuscitated for Decline and Fall, as is the charming, vacuous young woman from "On Guard" for "Lucy Simmonds." "An Englishman's Home" borrows some of the country dialect from Scoop (1938) and anticipates the naive and complacent householders upon whom the awful refugee children are visited in Put out More Flags. "Compassion" was clearly a holding action to fix in Waugh's imagination the setting and theme for the climactic scene in the last volume of his final work, the war trilogy Sword of Honor, completed a dozen years later.

Perhaps the most interesting links between these stories and one of Waugh's more enduring works are with A Handful of Dust. The couple who drift into a low-key adulterous triangle in "Love in the Slump" anticipate the more serious issues confronted in that novel. "The Man Who Liked Dickens" is so tightly connected to the novel that carbon-copy pages of the story were used in the actual manuscript of the novel.

Other ideas must have seemed to Waugh good enough to use in the sauce but not good enough to cellar, age, and bring to the table for later delectation. On occasion he is shameless, as in "A House of Gentlefolks" (1927), when he interrupts the tale of an ingenuous young nobleman whose candor and taste undercut London pretensions with "sometimes...Nature, like a lazy author, will round off abruptly into a short story what she obviously intended to be the opening of a novel" and hurries toward the end. One could forgive the impatience and poverty of a young writer, but Waugh did much the same thing twenty years later in "Scott-King's Modern Europe," where the omniscient author frequently and awkwardly intrudes to account for elisions and suppressions.

Sometimes Waugh could get away with summary instead of scene because, as his novels show, he could abstract and summarize character and situation very well indeed. But in the novels, unlike even fairly successful stories like "On Guard" and "Winner Take All," summary was intermixed with dialogue and action to constitute an effective whole. In the stories, summary too often has to do all the work.

Still, this collection is worth reading for the prose, summary or not. Waugh liked writing in different ways about different things, and he was a master of pastiche: from the debutante argot of "On Guard" through the geopolitical metaphors of the Auden circle in "My Father's House," to the ripe, romantic strains of the opening paragraphs of "Love among the Ruins" (published in its entirety, by the way, in Commonweal), and occasionally in phrases and whole descriptions from his own work, as in the description of Basil's young rival in "Basil Seal Rides Again," lifted just short of verbatim from Black Mischief.

The real justification for publishing (or reading) this collection is that it may tempt readers, or lead them back, to Waugh's major work. In this collection, in flashes, Waugh's mastery is evident, whether in the early, largely vernacular style or in the enriched, ornate Mandarin in which he immersed himself from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. Waugh had the ability to craft language that seems first startling, then inevitable, as in the description of paintings like "those vague assemblages of picnic litter which used to cover the walls of the Mansard Gallery in the early twenties...." As this phrase shows, style is not just a command of sound and rhythm but of the temper and time of a period. And those qualities ensure Waugh's place in the literature of our century and beyond.

Much stronger evidence to support this view can be found in Douglas Lane Patey's recent biography (The Life of Evelyn Waugh, Blackwell), the fourth of Waugh. Christopher Sykes, the first biographer, knew Waugh, but did little research. Martin Stannard presents facts without sympathy in two volumes. Selina Hastings is excellent on the social background and offers some juicy posthumous gossip. But Patey's book is far more thorough and enlightening, not only on Waugh's intellectual background and religious views, but on verbal and structural patterns in the novels. And while students of Waugh will disagree with specific interpretations, wish to correct a few details, and regret that like many Waugh critics Patey is not always able to keep up with Waugh's sense of humor, both old and new readers will be grateful that Patey realizes that his subject was primarily a writer and has a keen appreciation for his command of style. If there is time to read only one biography of Waugh, this is the obvious choice.

Robert Murray Davis has written and edited ten books on Waugh, the latest Mischief in the Sun: The Making and Unmaking of "The Loved One" (Whitston, 1999).