EVELYN WAUGH, A BIOGRAPHY
by CHRISTOPHER SYKES 462 pages. Little, Brown. $12.50.
One of this century's funniest writers, Evelyn Waugh was also one of its most melancholy, a man submerged in private rancor. "You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic," he informed a friend. "Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being."
Waugh's youth was by no means blighted. His family was congenial—his father Arthur ran a small but prestigious publishing house—and lived comfortably in a London suburb, amid books and talk of books. The adolescent Evelyn saw Oxford as a kind of enchanted kingdom. For a time he became one of its leading fauns, an aesthete shuttling between Hamletic conversation and Falstaffian drinking. After graduation, Waugh had a desultory try at being an artist. Failing at that, he became a teacher at third-rate boarding schools. He began a book, informing the curious that he was writing The History of the Eskimos. At about this time, says Biographer Sykes, Evelyn also entered "an extreme homosexual phase which, for the short time it lasted, was unrestrained emotionally and physically." After revealing this aspect of Waugh's nature, Sykes abruptly drops it, announcing that "names and details need not and should not be given." This bowdlerizing process takes place throughout Evelyn Waugh, giving the distinct impression of a book composed with scissors.
Adrenaline World. Sykes is almost as coy about Waugh's "straight" life. Evelyn married early—only to have his wife run off with a friend. A few years later he married again, more happily, and eventually fathered three sons and three daughters.
The History of the Eskimos emerged from the printer as Decline and Fall in 1928. Waugh, at 24, had found his calling as a master of black comedy and satire. Other novels, among them Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust and Black Mischief, followed regularly throughout the '30s, always in Waugh's elegant, crystalline style. He traveled adventurously, a fascinated observer of the often comic clash between primitive and advanced cultures. From a newspaper assignment to cover the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, he got the material for Scoop, still a hilarious guide to the adrenaline world of journalism. Much of the novel's lunatic telegraphese was pure reportage. After the invasion, for example, newspaper offices heard a rumor that the Italians had bombed a native hospital, killing a beautiful American nurse. Editors demanded the story of "nurse upblown." After a vain search, Waugh cabled back: "Nurse unupblown."
In World War II, Evelyn was something of a misfit. Despite an ample display of valor in the battle for Crete, the insubordinate officer was passed from general to general. In Yugoslavia, Evelyn amused himself by circulating a story that Tito was a lesbian in drag. The story caught up with the marshal. "Ask Captain Waugh," he told the British commander, "why he thinks I am a woman." For the only time in his life, the writer was at a loss for words.