Brideshead Revisited (Waugh)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 28,1903
• Where—Hampstead (London), England
• Death—April 10, 1966
• Where—Taunton, Somerset, England
• Education—Oxford University


Evelyn Waugh (pronounced Woh) was born in London, the second son of noted editor and publisher Arthur Waugh, He was brought up in upper middle class circumstances in the wealthy London suburb of Hampstead, where he attended Heath Mount School. His only sibling was his older brother Alec, who also became a writer. Both Arthur and Alec had been educated at Sherborne, an English public school, but Alec had been asked to leave early during his final year after publishing a controversial novel, The Loom of Youth, based on the homosexual relationships in his school life. Sherborne therefore refused to take Evelyn and his father sent him to Lancing College, a school of lesser social prestige with a strong High Church Anglican character. This circumstance would rankle with the status-conscious Evelyn for the rest of his life but may have contributed to his interest in religion, even though at Lancing he lost his childhood faith and became an agnostic.

After Lancing, he attended Hertford College, Oxford as a history scholar. There, Waugh neglected academic work and was known as much for his artwork as for his writing. His social life at Oxford influenced Waugh's personal conversion to a more conservative social and cultural viewpoint, and provided the background for some of his most characteristic later writing.

He left Oxford in 1924 without taking his degree. He was briefly apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and afterwards maintained an interest in marquetry, to which his novels have been compared in their intricate inlaid subplots. He also worked as a journalist, before he published his first novel in 1928, Decline and Fall. Other novels about England's "bright young things" followed, and all were well received by both critics and the general public.

Waugh entered into a brief, unhappy marriage in 1928 to the Hon. Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner, youngest daughter of Lord Burghclere and Lady Winifred Herbert, and granddaughter of Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon. Their friends called them "He-Evelyn" and "She-Evelyn." Gardner's infidelity would provide the background for Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust. The marriage ended in divorce in 1930.

Waugh converted to Catholicism and, after his marriage was annulled by the Church, he married Laura Herbert, a Catholic, daughter of Aubrey Herbert, and, like Waugh's first wife, a granddaughter of the 4th Earl of Carnarvon. This marriage was successful, lasting the rest of his life, producing seven children, one of whom, Mary, died in infancy. His son Auberon Waugh followed in his footsteps as a notable writer and journalist.

Waugh's fame continued to grow between the wars, based on his satires of contemporary upper class English society, written in prose that was seductively simple and elegant. His style was often inventive (a chapter, for example, would be written entirely in the form of a dialogue of telephone calls). His conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930 was a watershed in his life and his writing. It elevated Catholic themes in his work, and aspects of his deep and sincere faith, both implicit and explicit, can be found in all of his later work.

The essential issue, he believed, was making a choice between Christianity or chaos. Waugh saw in Europe's increasing materialization a major decline in what he felt created Western Civilization in the first place. His faith and his conviction persisted throughout all the chapters of his life.

At the same time (and perhaps because it integrated both his beliefs and his natural "dark humor"), Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust contain episodes of the most savage farce. In some of his fiction Waugh derives comedy from the cruelty of mischance; ingenuous characters are subject to bizarre calamities in a universe that seems to lack a shaping and protecting God, or any other source of order and comfort. The period between the wars also saw extensive travels around the Mediterranean and Red Sea, Spitsbergen, Africa (most famously Ethiopia) and South America. Sections of the numerous travel books which resulted are often cited as among the best writing in this genre. A compendium of Waugh's favourite travel writing has been issued under the title When The Going Was Good.

With the advent of the Second World War, Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines in 1940. Few can have been less suited to command troops. There was some concern that the men under his command might shoot him instead of the enemy. Later, Waugh was reassigned to the Royal Horse Guards. During this period he wrote Brideshead Revisited.

Brideshead Revisited (1945), is an evocation of a vanished pre-war England. It is an extraordinary work which in many ways has come to define Waugh and his view of his world. It not only painted a rich picture of life in England and at Oxford University at a time (before World War II), which Waugh himself loved and embellished in the novel, but it allowed him to share his feelings about his Catholic faith, principally through the actions of his characters. Amazingly, he was granted leave from the war to write it. The book was applauded by his friends, not just for an evocation of a time now — and then — long gone, but also for its examination of the manifold pressures within a traditional Catholic family.

It was a huge success in Britain and in the United States. Decades later a television adaptation (1981) achieved popularity and acclaim in both countries, and around the world. Another a film adaptation was made in 2008. Waugh revised the novel in the late 1950s because he found parts of it "distasteful on a full stomach" by which he meant that he wrote the novel during the gray privations of the latter war years.

Much of Waugh's war experience is reflected in the Sword of Honour trilogy. It consists of three novels, Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961), which loosely parallel his wartime experiences. His trilogy, along with his other work after the 1930s, became some of the best books written about the Second World War.

The period after the war saw Waugh living with his family at Combe Florey, Somerset, where he enjoyed the life of a country gentleman and continued to write. During this period he wrote Helena, (1953), a fictional account of the Empress Helena and the finding of the True Cross, which he regarded as his best work. He also wrote The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), which depicts its hero's steady descent into madness.

Waugh's health and literary output declined in later life. On April 10, 1966, at age 62, he died of a heart attack in his home after attending a Latin Mass on Easter Sunday. (From Wikipedia.)