BOOKS

Genius and saint?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

EVELYN WAUGH: A BIOGRAPHY by Selina Hastings Sinclair-Stevenson, f20, pp. 723 ost genuine artists would prefer that no biography be written,' W. H. Auden said. 'Such an account throws no light whatsoever upon the artist's work.' Would Evelyn Waugh have agreed? He believed in 'liberty, diversity, privacy', he made a public fetish of being a private citi- zen, his alter ego Mr Pinfold regarded 'his books as objects which he had made, things external to himself, and thus unlikely to be elucidated by the author's life and person- ality. Rash and imprudent in so many ways, Waugh was not given to self-revelation, and he was surprisingly prudish for some- one who moved in the least prudish circles. He couldn't get to work on the second vol- ume of his memoirs: they would have dealt with the agonising subject of his brief and unsuccessful first marriage, about which he was always reticent. He would have hated (as much as Auden) the detailed investiga- tion of sex lives which is now part of liter- ary biography. All the same, he wrote one biography himself, the brilliant, polemical and ten- dentious life of Ronald Knox, written with admitted curiosity and lack of discretion. Knox had 'regarded the attention of a biog- rapher as an inevitable concomitant of death, like that of the coffin-maker and grave-dig- ger', and Waugh too must have realised that biographers would be following his own cortege. He also admitted to himself that his claim to be an entirely private man was a pose. In 1947 he set out in his diary the reasons why he had thought of migrat- ing to Ireland, and the reasons why he had not done so: `If I am to be a national figure I must stay at home'. A national figure he became. Although his friend Graham Greene complained about the way 'journal- ists have been intent on transforming a fine writer into a "character", Waugh can scarcely be exonerated. His personality was one of his own more remarkable creations, and is a valid subject for biography. He has already received two at full length, by Christopher Sykes in 1975 and Martin Stannard's two volumes in 1986-92. Each had merits and defects. Sykes had the matchless advantage of close personal friendship with Waugh, and was shrewd in some of his judgments (though not about the novels). Mr Stannard's book is a formidable work of research, which discov- ered much that Sykes had overlooked, failed to discover, or deliberately ignored. And yet both biographers were — in entirely different ways — out of sympathy with their subject, while, in different ways also, neither wrote with much distinction, which is a pity if your subject is the greatest prose-writer of his age. The latest biographer has great advan- tages of her own, quite apart from the fact that Waugh would have loved to have a biographer called Lady Selina Hastings (a real Plantagenet name, that, not one of your jumped-up Cavendishes or Cecils). As readers of her earlier biography of Nancy Mitford will know, she writes extremely well, with a nice dry wit. She is neither in awe of Waugh, as Sykes was, for all his intermittent censure, nor resentful like Mr Stannard, who too often gave that 'hint of the underdog's snarl which Mr Pinfold recognised from his press-cuttings'. She has had access to a great deal of untouched sources controlled by the Waugh family. She is firm but fair. And she paints what is in some ways a bleaker portrait than any before.

Not at the beginning: the home life of Arthur and Catherine Waugh and their children Alec and Evelyn was warm and affectionate. Evelyn was strikingly preco- cious, his literary gifts displayed while he was a quite small boy. So were other, less loveable characteristics, especially the vin- dictive bullying which became pronounced later. Waugh's grandfather had a frighten- ing streak of cruelty: he once crushed a wasp onto his wife's forehead, so that it stung her, and when the unfamiliar word `sadist' was explained to Arthur Waugh, he said, 'I believe that is what my father must have been'. Evelyn Waugh related this; it didn't occur to him (nor has it to any other descendant of Dr Alexander Waugh) that this trait might be hereditary.

Psychiatric theory has arcane names for a young man's rebellion against his parents. It might more simply be called growing up. The process was complicated in Waugh's case by a sense of rejection from which, despite his later claims to have had a happy childhood, he may never have got over. His father was always closer to the outgoing elder brother Alec, with whom he had much more in common than with Evelyn, not least a shared love of sport (when father wrote to elder son at Sherbome to warn him of the dangers of self-abuse, he advised him, 'if the idea attacks you' on a Saturday night, to 'put it from you at once. Think of cricket, of the day's game, of the probable team next week'). And as writers, Arthur and Alec shared, in Selina Hast- ings's words, 'the fatal facility of the second-rate', which also put Evelyn apart from them.

Shortly after Evelyn's death in 1966, his son Auberon Waugh wrote an article for The Spectator denouncing those who had called his father a snob and social climber. It was a spirited piece, but when it claimed that Waugh had never felt 'anything except the greatest affection about the kind of intelligent, educated professional back- ground from which he came' it was also disingenuous. Evelyn was much too acute not to see through his father, charming but deeply embarrassing, theatrical and fraudu- lent, with literary tastes which were fusty even for an Edwardian and an incurable propensity to write verse extolling the bicy- cle (privately published as Legends of the Wheel), or prose hymning cricket: (With the dawn of May that merry monarch, Wil- low the King, returns to his own again, and all his loyal subjects rise to pay him the salute of welcome . . .'). Waugh can scarce- ly be blamed for reacting against this, and once he began to mix among the elegant and sophisticated he realised how painfully inelegant and unsophisticated his own family were. By now we know the story as well as any prime minister's: the years at Oxford and immediately after, with their debauchery and despair, the humiliation of Waugh's desertion by his flibbertigibbet first wife, his travels to escape, his brilliant early suc- cess, literary and social (are young novelists lionised and lunched by London hostesses nowadays? Are there any London hostess- es?), his conversion to Catholicism at 26. Selina Hastings has more detail than ever before about Waugh's passionate homo- sexual affairs at Oxford — and after? it isn't quite clear when he changed tracks. Some women found him physically unattractive, among them his friends Diana Cooper, Penelope Betjeman and Diana Mosley, and presumably his first wife also. But others did not, and there is new mate- rial about his affairs during the long wait for his first 'mock marriage' to be annulled in Rome. When it was, he was at last able to marry again and find in family life what not even religion had fully provided, 'the moral stability of a great artist' which he thought Rossetti lacked.

He married for love, but he was also looking for 'that secure and desirable world inhabited by the English upper class'. Although the latest biographer is scarcely a snarling underdog she is unflinching on the subject of his social ambition. Both Waugh's mothers-in-law patronised him socially. Lady Burghclere told him that he wasn't a gentleman (having also conducted extensive researches into his character and conduct, `ces vices' and `ces moeurs atroces', as she called them, after being told by one informant that 'Evelyn Waugh did much worse than drink! and anyone seen with him lost his reputation at Oxford at once!'). While his Herbert in-laws, though admiring his talents, with the traditional snobbery of privilege for actual achievement, looked down on his pro- fessional background, and found distressingly vulgar his exaggerated admiration for the upper classes.

The author is far from sharing such an admiration. She is sharp about the circle of friends Waugh found for himself, and in the case of another Lady she puts the stilet- to heel right in. Diana Cooper was 'physi- cally cold, voracious for admiration, indifferent to sexual love', with an 'impene- trable carapace of self-regard', a 'thin, petulant whine of self-pity', and a 'devour- ing vanity, richly nourished by a permanent and doting chorus of sycophantic admirers'. Selina Hastings is clear-eyed also about other cronies of Waugh's, notably the gang of Etonian drunks and wastrels who officered 8 Commando, whom Waugh idolised to begin with, but whose military inadequacy he was forced to recognise with a bitterness made worse by his own igno- minious departure from Crete and his sub- sequent enforced resignation from the Special Service Brigade. The author's account of the grandeurs et miseres (mostly the latter) of Waugh's military career is admirable. She sees that,

for all his intelligence and powers of percep- tion, Evelyn seemed unable to grasp the direct connection between his indiscipline and the refusal of his superiors to entrust him with responsibility,

a cognitive dissonance which applied to many of Waugh's dealings with other peo- ple.

But if his troubles were often self- inflicted, he still suffered. 'Genius and sanctity do not thrive except by suffering', he wrote of Ronald Knox. Waugh was a genius (as Knox was not), and Malcolm Muggeridge thought he was 'a saint', which is not quite absurd paradox-mongering. Like many saints, he passed through tor- ment, but he did not achieve the final calm which is, I take it, the point of sainthood. Reading this book, the strongest impres- sion I formed was of pain and rage close to mental unbalance.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and Waugh had a streak of madness in him long before the Tinfold' episode. It was demonstrated in acts of cruelty and violence in weird contrast to the generosity and tenderness of which he was capable. This was the side of Waugh which once stubbed a lit cigarette into a girl's hand, which smashed open locked cigar cabinets in his club or sealed windows in a New `Search me — I can't tell a succes d'estime from a flash in the pan.' Orleans hotel, which was wildly insulting to strangers, film producers and American publishers. Lady Selina has combed the files of A. D. Peters, who was Waugh's agent and, in a hotly-contested field, perhaps the single most long-suffering person in his life. Peters continually admonished his client, suggesting he showed the smallest civility to people in New York and Hollywood who had put themselves out for him.

The request was ignored. 'After spread- ing insult from east coast to west', where he was, in his American agent's words, 'consis- tently arrogant and rude' to everyone, Waugh was so offensive at a banquet given in his honour by Time-Life — from whom he was receiving huge sums of money — that the senior management departed in protest. On the same American visit Waugh thought it amusing (as David Niven did not) to refer to Niven's black house- keeper in her presence as 'your native bearer'. And so on. Of course Waugh was a martyr to boredom and saw rudeness as a game designed to tease the bores. But there is more to it.

`The tiny kindling of charity that came to him' — Pinfold aka Waugh — 'through his religion, sufficed only to temper his disgust and turn it into boredom.' Another way of putting it is that the faith in which he believed with passionate sincerity couldn't alleviate his accidie. Though not a Catholic, I personally find his brand of Catholicism more sympathetic than other heartier, more sociable or Greenelandish versions. He saw the Church in very con- crete terms as something which existed to do the job it had done since its foundation. Since this job did not depend on the char- acter or ability of its priests and bishops, he could be surprisingly anticlerical. And yet his endless polemics on behalf of the Church weren't always convincing. In an essay on Knox he once wrote that Catholics 'are often embarrassed by the methods of doughty champions on our own side' and that

some modern Catholic controversialists assume an arrogant confidence in their cause and are content to turn aside a serious argu- ment with a jolly verbal 'score',

words whose unconscious irony must have struck some of his co-religionists. Not only in public but in private he ceaselessly harangued friends about religion, whether recalcitrant Anglicans or wavering papists. But he forgot Johnson's saying that exam- ple is always more efficacious than precept. The quality which non-Catholics most often admire and envy in Catholics is serenity, and there has never been a man to whom that word less applied than Waugh. Selina Hastings has written an admirable and riveting biography, though it has one conspicuous imbalance. Of its 625 pages, 290 take Waugh to the age of 30, 480 to the age of 42, but the last ten years of his life are covered in fewer than 60 pages. It is almost as though the author had been under some pressure to finish more quickly than she wished, and the result is to make the book seem lop-sided. Admittedly the last decade was uneventful, and also sombre. In that Spectator article, Bron Waugh insisted that his father's last ten years 'were probably the most mellow and tranquil of his life', but that is not easy to reconcile with the account here. In his 1950 review of Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees, a brilliant and generous piece, he wrote, once again with uncon- scious irony, that although the hero of the novel is 51,

when the civilised man is just beginning the most fruitful period of his life, he is done for, a `beat-up old bastard'.

Waugh was 46 when he wrote this, though (much like his father before him) already acting the part of an old man. The Pinfold debacle took place shortly after he turned 50. He recovered, but during what should have been the most fruitful period of his own life his literary output was compara- tively exiguous. Masterly as the war trilogy is, it should be remembered that he had intended it to be in four or even five parts, and I wish that it had been.

He was only 62 when he died, but by then in a state of physical and moral col- lapse; no longer considering himself fit for any society; 'drowning in melancholy, aim- less and miserable,' Selina Hastings says, and undisguisedly longing for death. This may be partly explained by his hair-raising self-indulgence and neglect of his health. But the seeds of the misery were there much earlier. Waugh was complex to an almost psychopathic degree: brilliant but boorish, scintillatingly funny but fathomlessly depressive, astonishingly gen- erous and kind but abominably rude, devout but full of despair and self-hatred. Maybe it's a wonder he didn't go mad sooner than he did.

Should we know all this, should we read about him as much as we do, should he have become a great English eccentric, or ogre? He once wrote that no one should read biographies of another novelist 'for — the pity of it — the more we know of Dick- ens, the less we like him'. That is not quite true of Waugh. I did not like him less after reading this book, and in some ways I admired him more. Just as Beethoven over- came his deafness with superhuman hero- ism; Waugh did his best to master his inner demons, and he transmuted hurt and humiliation into art, the mock marriage into A Handful of Dust, the wartime miseries into the trilogy. Perhaps Auden was right and literary biography sheds no light on the work. Per- haps we should accept Waugh's life for what it is a fascinating story on its own. Or perhaps the deeper truth remains that, as Hans Keller once wrote in these pages, great artists have always been less and done more than the public wishes to believe.