|
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, born October 28, 1903, was the second son of Arthur,
a
managing director of Chapman & Hall, Publishers, and Catherine Raban Waugh.
Reading and writing played a significant role in the home-life of young Evelyn, whose
older brother Alec also became a well-known writer. Waugh began writing and illustrating
short stories at the age of four, and at the age of nine he and a group of friends
produced a creative magazine for their Pistol Troop club. |
|
In addition to his youthful interest in writing, Waugh developed a strong interest
in
religion. When his brother's escapades made it impossible for Waugh to follow the
family
tradition of attending Sherbourne prep school, his father found a place for him at
Lancing, a school with a strong religious tradition. During his tenure at Lancing,
Waugh
performed well in his studies, developed into something of a social bully, decided
that
he was an atheist, and earned a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford. |
|
When Waugh entered Oxford in 1922 he found his new freedom to be intoxicating. He
soon
found himself part of a crowd similar to the one he later described in Brideshead Revisited (1945), which included
Harold Acton. He did very little studying and left after two years with many experiences
and debts, but no degree. After a brief foray into art school he took a series of
low-paying teaching positions. In 1927 he began to write steadily and launched himself
into a successful career. |
|
The critical success of his first book, a biography, Rossetti: His Life and Works (1928), and the popular
success of Decline and Fall (1928)
brought Waugh to the attention of the reading public. The financial success of Decline and Fall made it possible for Waugh
to marry Evelyn Gardner, called She-Evelyn by their friends. The marriage was short
lived, but served as a backdrop for several of Waugh's later works, including Vile Bodies (1930) and Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (1930).
Also in 1930, Waugh converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. |
|
For the next several years Waugh spent his time writing short stories, travel books,
a
biography of Edmund Campion, and several more novels including Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). He obtained an annulment of his first
marriage and in 1937 married Laura Herbert, with whom he had seven children. |
|
1939 brought the start of WWII and Waugh took the earliest opportunity to join in
the
defense of England. As part of the Home Guard in 1940 he participated in the fiasco
of
the Battle of Crete which was the basis for Put
Out More Flags (1942). Waugh was not a good leader, despite fearless action
in the face of battle, and in 1943 he resigned from his Commando unit. In 1944 he
was
sent to Yugoslavia as part of a mission to shore up Tito's partisan efforts in the
German held territory. During this mission he completed his best known and most
controversial work, Brideshead Revisited
(1945). |
|
Discharged from the military in 1945, Waugh continued to write and travel. He went
to
Hollywood in 1947 to work on a screenplay for Brideshead, which fell through when he refused to give up the final say on
the script. While he was in California he found a rich source of material: Forest
Lawn
Memorial Park. This lavish funeral home inspired Waugh to write The Loved One (1948), one of his funniest and most popular
books. |
|
Waugh continued to write, though he became increasingly reclusive. Growing health
problems, related to a lifetime of heavy drinking, smoking, and the use of sedatives
to
induce sleep, limited public appearances. On a cruise in 1956 he suffered a bout of
paranoid hallucinations which formed the centerpiece of his most autobiographical
novel,
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957).
Waugh lived until 1966, ending his writing career with the publication of The Sword of Honor Trilogy (1965). |