1.2 Evelyn Waugh

Waugh, Evelyn Arthur St. John (1903-66), English author of satirical novels. He was regarded by many as the most brilliant satirical novelist of his day.

He was born in London and educated at the University of Oxford. After short periods as an art student and schoolmaster, he devoted himself to solitary observant travel and to the writing of novels, soon earning a wide reputation for sardonic wit and technical brilliance. During World War II he served in the Royal Marines and the Royal Horse Guards; in 1944 he joined the British military mission to the Yugoslav Partisans. After the war he led a retired life in the west of England.

Waugh's novels, although their material is nearly always derived from firsthand experience, are unusually highly made and precisely written. Those written before 1939 may be described as satirical. Between 1928 and 1938 he published five novels notable for their wit and pure satire on such aspects of upper-class British life as colonialism, public schools, and the manners and morals of high society. These novels are Decline and Fall («Упадок и разрушение»)(1928), Vile Bodies («Мерзкая плоть») (1930) in which the author is satirising decadent young London society between World War I and World War II, Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust («Пригоршня праха»)(1934), and Scoop (1938). Put Out More Flags (1942) is a novel about the British effort during World War II.

Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in 1930 which later affected his writing. Brideshead Revisited («Возвращение в Брайдсхед»)(1945), a serious novel probing the souls and fortunes of the Marchmains, a declining aristocratic family of Roman Catholics, is considered by many critics his finest work; it was made into a television series in 1981.

In The Loved One (1948), Waugh returned to harsh satire, as he described funeral practices for humans and pets in Hollywood, California.

Waugh's experiences during World War II as a commando in the Mediterranean led to a satirical trilogy: Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1962). In the trilogy he analyzed the character of World War II, in particular its relationship with the eternal struggle between good and evil and the temporal struggle between civilization and barbarism.

He also wrote travel books, biographies, and the autobiographical A Little Learning (1964). His brother Alec Waugh wrote novels, travel books, and short stories.

Decline and Fall was Waugh's first novel, based in part on his schooldays at and his experience as a teacher in Wales. The novel tells the story of Paul Pennyfeather, a student at the fictional Scone College Oxford who is sent down (отчислен) for running through the college grounds without his trousers, having been involved in the activities of the fictional Bollinger Club. He didn’t meet the conditions of his inheritance and so he is forced to take a job teaching at an remote public school in Wales. Attracted to the wealthy mother of one of his pupils, Pennyfeather becomes private tutor to the boy, Peter, and is eventually engaged to be married to Peter's mother, Margot, and appears in Waugh's other novels); Pennyfeather, however, is unaware that the source of her income is a number of high-class brothels in South America. Arrested on the morning of the wedding, Pennyfeather takes the responsibility on himself to protect his fiancée's honor and is sentenced to seven years at a thinly disguised prison. Fortunately, with some outside assistance he is able to fake his own death and escape. In the end he returns to where he started at Scone, his misadventures having so failed to register with the academic establishment that he can study under his own name.

It is a social satire that employs the author's characteristic black humour in displaying various features of British society in the 1920s. The novel's title makes an ironic comparison between the fall of the Roman empire and the protagonist's own tricks, while also referencing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a seminal text among a British educationalists that neatly reflects the novel's social setting. In this was the author employs the theme of the decline of the British Empire.

The title of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust is an allusion to T. S. Eliot‘s poem The Waste Land:

I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The novel is set in the 1930s, and focuses on the breakdown of the marriage of Tony and Lady Brenda Last. Tony is preoccupied with the maintenance of Hetton Abbey, a masterpiece of unfashionable Victorian Gothic architecture. John Beaver, a self-interested and impoverished social climber, is invited to Hetton, and begins an affair with Brenda.

After the Lasts' son, also called John, is killed in a riding accident, Brenda decides that she wants a divorce. In order to avoid any scandal for his wife, Tony agrees to go through the sham of creating appropriate grounds for divorce. Their agreement on the divorce falls apart when Brenda's brother reveals that Brenda's family will insist on a sum so large as to require Tony to sell Hetton; Tony then refuses to grant a divorce. Instead, he participates in an expedition to Brazil. Stranded in the jungle, Tony falls ill, and his expedition companion, Dr. Messinger, dies while attempting to retrieve help. Tony wanders, delirious, until he stumbles into an isolated tribal village. Once there, he is held hostage by a Mr. Todd, who insists that Tony remain forever, reading the works of Charles Dickens to him. Brenda's relationship with John Beaver has fallen apart and shortly after Tony is assumed dead she marries the couple's mutual friend, Jock Grant-Menzies. The novel ends with distant relatives of Tony taking over Hetton.

In a different ending for the novel, required for an American audience who did not approve of the bleakness of the original, Tony returns from Brazil and to his relationship with Brenda.

Waugh wrote of how the novel came to be written:

"I had just written a short story about a man trapped in the jungle, ending his days reading Dickens aloud. The idea came quite naturally from the experience of visiting a lonely settler of that kind and reflecting how easily he could hold me prisoner [...] eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savages at home and the civilized man's helpless plight among them".

Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder was first published in 1945. it is a combination of satire and lyrics. Waugh wrote that the novel, "deals with what is theologically termed, 'the operation of Grace' (милость господня), that is to say, the unmerited and one-way act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself". This is achieved by an examination of the aristocratic Flyte family, as seen by the narrator, Charles Ryder.

Taking into account the background of the author, the most significant theme of the book is Catholicism. Evelyn Waugh was a convert to Catholicism and the book is considered to be an attempt to express the Catholic faith in secular literary form. The book brings the reader, through the narration of the agnostic Charles Ryder, in contact with the severely flawed but deeply Catholic Marchmain family. Most of the major characters undergo a conversion in some way or another. Lord Marchmain, a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism, who lived as an adulterer, is reconciled with the Church on his deathbed. Julia, who is involved in an extramarital affair with Charles, comes to feel this relationship is immoral and decides to separate from Charles in spite of her great attachment to him. Sebastian, the charming and flamboyant alcoholic, ends up in service to a monastery while struggling against his alcoholism. Even Cordelia has some sort of conversion: from being the "worst" behaved schoolgirl her headmistress has ever seen, to serving in the hospital beds of the Spanish Civil War. Most significant is Charles's apparent conversion, which is expressed very subtly (otherwise, it would have been sentimental); at the end of the book, set 19 years after the main thread of the novel, Charles kneels down in the Brideshead chapel and says a prayer with "ancient words newly learned".

The Marchmain Family, to some, is a symbol of a dying breed — the English nobility. Many of the principal characters in Brideshead are considered by some people to be derived from notable characters in British society during the Interwar period.