Waugh, Evelyn Arthur St John

Waugh, Evelyn Arthur St John (1903–66), novelist, educated at Hertford College, Oxford. He worked for some years (unhappily) as assistant schoolmaster in various posts which provided material for Decline and Fall (1928), his first and immensely successful novel, which followed the publication of an essay on the Pre-Raphaelites (1926). In 1928 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. His career as a novelist prospered, with Vile Bodies (1930, set in Mayfair), Black Mischief (1932, set in Africa), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938), works of high comedy and social satire which capture the brittle, cynical, determined frivolity of the post-war generation. He also established himself as journalist and travel writer with accounts of a journey through Africa (Remote People, 1931), a journey through South America (Ninety-two Days, 1934), and Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia (Waugh in Abyssinia, 1936).

Put Out More Flags (1942) was written while he was serving in the Royal Marines, and his wartime experiences in Crete and Yugoslavia appear in his trilogy Sword of Honour (1965), originally published as Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961). In the interim appeared Brideshead Revisited (1945), and a macabre comedy about Californian funeral practices, The Loved One (1948). The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) is a bizarre novel about a famous 50-year-old Roman Catholic novelist who sets off on a cruise to Ceylon to escape growing hallucinations, but becomes increasingly paranoid, imagining himself accused of being homosexual, Jewish, Fascist, alcoholic, a social climber, etc.; it is a self-caricature which ends in salvation. He casts an equally cold eye on himself in his revealing Diaries (1976, ed. M. Davie).