Long ago, I read a few books by Evelyn Waugh. Though I liked some of them, I did not take to him. Here is an interesting article about him Evelyn Waugh: The Best and the Worst by Charles J. Rolo. A sample excerpt:
"This core of tragic awareness gives to Waugh's comic vision the dimension of serious art. The paradox, in fact, is that when Waugh is being comic, he makes luminous the failures of his age, confronts us vividly with the desolating realities; and when he is being serious, he is liable to become trashy. For without the restraints of the ironic stance, his critical viewpoint reveals itself as bigoted and rancorous; his snobbery emerges as obsessive and disgusting; and his archaism involves him in all kinds of silliness."
That was from 1954. A more recent article Two of a Kind , a review of book which compares George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh. The provocation for looking at Evelyn Waugh is a quote of his in CT: "It is a marvel of medical science that they could first locate the one part of Randolph that was not malignant, and, having found it, immediately remove it."
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2 comments:
I'm a fan of Evelyn Waugh's early stuff, not so much his serious stuff (the only one of the latter that I completed was Brideshead Revisited). I think the first article you link was spot-on. His work is characterised by a sort of casual cruelty. Apart from the examples in that article, there's "Decline and Fall" where a schoolboy is wounded in the leg by a teacher's starting-gun during a race. Initially we are informed that it is a scratch; the boy asks "Am I going to die?", his mouth full of cake. Then we are told that the leg has swollen up and turned black (which is the only time another character expresses sympathy). Then we are told, in passing, that the leg is being amputated. Then we are told that the funeral has taken place. All of this is entirely incidental to the story of the book, but contributes to the impression that Waugh hates humanity.
There's another story that during the second world war, he sent his rare books to his country home, but kept his children in London, on the grounds that the children were replaceable but the books were not.
All in all, not a nice man. And, though a master of the English language, he was most successful when not trying to be serious.
RS,
Thanks for the comments. I too thought that the first article was spot on. I too remember "Decline and Fall" and the horror story towards the end which sometimes is included in collections of horror stories and the hilarious "The Loved One". I was partly reminded of him by some telugu writers, many of whom turn to writing new versions of Ramayana, Mahabharata and seem to be nostalgic about mythical old days. I keep wondering whether that is the sort of reason behind Pakistan's problems now and why Indian science did not take off. People like Aryabhatta and Madhava seemed to have done great stuff but large number of them, perhaps most, were still trying to reconcile puranic accounts of the origin of the world and astronomy. Most seemed more interested in astrology than real sciences. EW seemed to be a bit like them.
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