Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Decline and Fall 1928
- 2 Vile Bodies 1930
- 3 Black Mischief 1932
- 4 A Handful of Dust 1934
- 5 Scoop 1938
- 6 Work Suspended 1942 (composed 1939)
- 7 Put Out More Flags 1942
- 8 Brideshead Revisited 1945
- 9 The Loved One (1948)
- 10 Helena 1950
- 11 Men at Arms 1952
- 12 Officers and Gentlemen 1955
- 13 The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold 1957
- 14 Towards Unconditional Surrender: A Recapitulation, 1941–61
- 15 Unconditional Surrender 1961 and Sword of Honour 1965
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Decline and Fall 1928
- 2 Vile Bodies 1930
- 3 Black Mischief 1932
- 4 A Handful of Dust 1934
- 5 Scoop 1938
- 6 Work Suspended 1942 (composed 1939)
- 7 Put Out More Flags 1942
- 8 Brideshead Revisited 1945
- 9 The Loved One (1948)
- 10 Helena 1950
- 11 Men at Arms 1952
- 12 Officers and Gentlemen 1955
- 13 The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold 1957
- 14 Towards Unconditional Surrender: A Recapitulation, 1941–61
- 15 Unconditional Surrender 1961 and Sword of Honour 1965
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The frontispiece shows the young Waugh in a still from his only surviving film, The Scarlet Woman – An Ecclesiastical Melodrama. Pop-eyed and irreverent, a zany in a silly wig, he's clearly having fun impersonating the (semi-fictional, gay) Dean of Scone College. Soon after, the first novel of his divine comedy opened with a disarmingly modest nudge to the reader – Decline and Fall ‘IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY’.
Few of Waugh's later novels are quite so light-hearted. Brideshead Revisited specifically contradicts the claim of his youth. His conversion to Catholicism sharpened the seriousness of his subsequent work. And yet the mischievous glint in the young Waugh's eyes is still recognizable in the ageing Pinfold's beady glare. Maverick and unpredictable, he is also the most consistent of our great English comic novelists.
Of course Waugh's temperament and even his faith developed in the course of his lifetime. His novels took an undulating path towards greater depth and complexity. His self-ironizing public persona may have hardened into a grotesque. Yet his comic impulse, his moral seriousness, and his aesthetic credo remained essentially unchanged. Uniting them was his conception of the artist's craft: to transform the chaos of his own lifetime into significant form. At the age of 26, he put it expansively:
If only the amateurs would get it into their heads that novelwriting is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smouldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by the fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables.
Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them. It is not merely a matter of filling up a dust-bin haphazard and emptying it out again in another place. (‘People Who Want to Sue Me’, May 1930, EAR 73)
In his middle age, this most eccentric of men put the same principle more succinctly:
I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as normality.
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- Evelyn Waugh , pp. 1 - 4Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016