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The war experiences were later mirrored in a haunting trilogy, Sword of Honor. Waugh had always drawn his hu mor from the decadence and chaos that poke like clowns through the scrim of civilization. In Sword of Honor, war and chaos reign supreme. Civilization has become the tired comedian, trying, with scant success, to penetrate the new or der of disorder.
The three books had an autumnal, elegiac tone, reflecting Waugh's belief that the world that had amused him (and vice versa) was gone. As Sykes implies, in the years before his death in 1966, Waugh vanished into his final production: an elaborate caricature of Colonel Blimp, complete with mustache, tweeds and sclerotic opinions. He drank too much, took too many pills and, for a time described in the autobiographical The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, he suffered from hallucinations. Yet even in extremis, Waugh retained a childlike delight in gentle anarchy. Slightly deaf, he affected a giant, old-fashioned ear trumpet. At banquets he would blandly set it down when the main speaker began, then return it to his ear when the address was finished. Even the most experienced orator could be shaken by such pantomime.
Waugh's comic routines were un even, in life and art. Most of his works are triumphs; a few are disappointing. None are dull, however, and it is hard to imagine a drab biography of Waugh. Sykes has written it, complete with the slovenly arrogance of the privileged amateur. A longtime friend of Waugh's, Sykes seems to have relied more on his own recollections than on Waugh's personal papers and diaries, to which he alone has had access. Waugh's wit, of course, cannot be extinguished. But Evelyn cannot save this shoddy and ill-organized homage. Moreover, unlike some biographers, who claim too much for their subjects, Sykes ends by claiming too little for Waugh. He seems unable to recognize that the drunk who loved to put him down was also one of England's greatest 20th century novelists. The lesson paraphrases Churchill: no one should entrust his reputation to his valet — or his friend.
Gerald Clarke