BRIDESHEAD REVISITED—Evelyn Waugh—Little, Brown ($2.50).
Early one morning in 1944, a flight of German dive bombers swooshed down on the headquarters of the British Military Mission to Yugoslavia. Sane Britons dashed for the slit trenches. At that moment, there appeared on a hilltop, in full view of the enemy, and dressed (as a further aid to marksmanship) in a white coat, an unruffled British officer. He was Royal Horse Guards Captain Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (rhymes with awe), whose seventh novel is the Book-of-the-Month Club's January choice.
Waugh's comrades-in-arms were not favorably impressed by his nonchalance: they expected him to draw enemy bombs. His good friend and commanding officer Major Randolph Churchill (an old-style aristocrat who now writes a column for United Feature Syndicate) cried something to the effect that this was not the Battle of Agincourt. Waugh forsook his lonely eminence, in icy rage removed his coat. "It was not your rudeness I minded," he explained to Major Churchill, "it was your cowardice that surprised me."
Brideshead Revisited is a by-product of Waugh's military career. He wrote the 351-page novel while nursing a foot broken in a parachute jump. To many U.S. readers this book will be their first exposure to one of the wittiest, most corrosively mocking and violently serious minds now writing English prose—a mind whose career is almost as exciting as the books it has produced.
The Author. At 24, Evelyn Waugh proclaimed his unflagging aversion to 20th Century technological civilization in a learned, nostalgic study of those 19th Century enemies of technology, the Pre-Raphaelites (Rossetti: His Life and Works). His dislike of the modern world and his satiric discernment of the kind of people who run and ruin it became grim in Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, two wickedly witty and iridescent novels which skewered a refined rogues' gallery of Mayfair cads and bounders. Most critics found these novels much too funny to be taken seriously. But in 1930, Waugh astonished London's literati by becoming a Roman Catholic. He crowned his conversion with a most unfunny biography of the English Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, and with his most glacially sardonic novel, A Handful of Dust (TIME, Sept. 24, 1934), a satire on aimless decay and aimless viciousness in the patriciate. Later came Put Out More Flags, a hilariously mordant comedy about Britain's Wrorld War II bureaucrats and racketeers.
At 42, Author Waugh lives in an old Gloucestershire manor house with his (second) wife, and four children whom he affects to detest. He is a connoisseur of wines and cigars, wears a bowler, takes the air swinging an old-fashioned cane. He cannot drive a car, shuns the telephone, barely accepts a telegram. Sighs his go-ahead friend Randolph Churchill: "He becomes more old-fashioned . . . every day. His favorite novelist is Trollope. . . . He seeks to live in an oasis."