Evelyn Waugh

“Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression”.

I was first introduced to Evelyn Waugh by Dr. Cory Rushton in my Eng 101 class. While I was an uninspired student who wrote meager essays I will always be grateful for this introduction. After reading Vile Bodies (1930) I knew I had found an author who spoke to me. In the past nine years I have read fourteen of Waugh’s novels and listened to numerous recorded interviews.

Evelyn Waugh was a British novelist, biographer and essayist. Waugh’s first major achievement as a novelist came in the form of the satirical novel titled Decline and Fall (1928)  which he followed up two years later with one of his greatest works, Vile Bodies (1930). 

Vile Bodies satirizes the “bright young things”, a group of young wealthy British individuals who spent the post WWI years partying, and basking in a decadent lifestyle. This novel explores the division between the young who missed the war and their family and friends, some only a handful of years older, who experienced firsthand the horrors of WWI. Waugh himself notes that this is the first novel where a majority of the conversations take place on the telephone. This feature illuminates the distance between the characters and their reality as well as miscommunication.

Brideshead Revisited (1945) is Waugh’s self described magnum opus. Waugh wrote the novel in six months after he was injured during a parachute jump. Wartime privations had Waugh longing for a distant past where the food spreads were decadent, the wine was plenty and the only worry for the aristocratic class was who to invite, and equally important who not to invite, to dinner. At this time the motif of Catholicism emerges in Waugh’s work as a serious topic rather than another established hierarchy to satirize. Brideshead Revisited has been adapted into a film as well as an 11-part miniseries.

Between 1952 and 1961 Waugh completed the Sword of Honour trilogy; Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961). This trilogy reflects Waugh’s personal experiences during WWII and has limited battle scenes. Post WWII Waugh’s writing becomes more conservative in tone and subject matter. Despite this newfound conservatism he does not lose his deft touch for humour poking fun at the bureaucratic mess that develops alongside the British war effort.

Special mention to Black Mischief (1932) which chronicles the misadventures of Emperor Seth and Basil Seal as they try to modernize the fictional African island of Azania. Another favourite of mine is The Loved One (1948). This short novel attacks Hollywood. Waugh had visited LA in 1947 to work out a film adaptation for Brideshead Revisited following its American success, something that Waugh viewed as a professional failure. Although an American studio feature of Brideshead was never fully developed, Waugh did write The Loved One based on his experiences in Hollywood. The Loved One was later adapted into a movie of the same name (1965) by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood.