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Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903, allegedly near London. ("It's a great secret where I was born," Waugh said, when asked by TIME's London bureau, and hung up.) His father, a journalist turned successful book publisher, was a man of solidly middle-class taste, who reared Evelyn and his elder brother Alec (The Loom of Youth, Going Their Own Ways) in the solidly middle-class London suburb of Finchley.
At Oxford, Waugh's flight from the bourgeoisie was furthered. Evelyn became one of a mauve circle of which glittery, willowy Harold Acton was the titular Tiresias. Says Acton, who is supposed to have modeled for one of the more exotic characters in Brideshead, in his Memoirs of an Aesthete (recently published in England): "An almost inseparable boon companion at Oxford was a little faun called Evelyn Waugh. Though others assure me that he has changed past recognition, I still see him as a prancing faun, thinly disguised by conventional apparel. His wide-apart eyes, always ready to be startled under raised eyebrows, the curved, sensual lips, the hyacinthine locks of hair . . ."
In this shrilly articulate circle, Evelyn is said to have sat usually mute, but terrifyingly observant. Other contemporaries recall a more vigorous Waugh—a young sport who, like Father Rothschild, rode a motorcycle and, like Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington, drank a good deal and was sometimes noisy in public places. He was conspicuously bohemian and agnostic and enjoyed baiting Roman Catholics, for his wit already possessed a fine cutting edge.
After two years of undistinguished scholarship but steady social progress, Evelyn was sent down without his degree. Like Paul Pennyfeather, Evelyn went to teach in a school for backward boys.
Then he spent a brief, unhappy term working for Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express—a career terminated by a typically Waughlike misunderstanding. One day Editor Beverley Baxter saw Evelyn lolling in a chair in the reporters' room, and asked him his name. "Waw," was the answer that reached Baxter's ears, and, thinking that the young man was making a rude noise, the editor fired him.
Waugh was already writing Decline and Fall, and he capped that literary success by a solid social advance: he married Evelyn Gardner. Later they were divorced.
Those were the days when Waugh was being one of the Bright Young Things later satirized in Vile Bodies. But Evelyn was constantly widening his connections with the country gentry. He took up fox hunting and began to give examples of a personal courage about which he is quite bland but which amazes his friends. They still wince at the thought of the dauntless little pink-coated figure dashing at fences and ditches that would unnerve more experienced horsemen.
Today the evolution of Waugh the conservative English gentleman is almost complete. His attachments to the old families and the peerage are close. With them and with Catholic intellectuals, rather than among his literary contemporaries, he finds his friends.