Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited

by Philip Eade

Overview

An “entertaining and meticulously researched” biography of the author of Brideshead Revisited (Harvard Review).

Graham Greene hailed Evelyn Waugh as “the greatest novelist of my generation,” and in recent years Waugh’s reputation has only grown. Now, half a century after Waugh’s death in 1966, with Evelyn Waugh, Philip Eade has delivered a hugely entertaining biography that is both authoritative and full of new information, some of it sensational.

Drawing on extensive unseen primary sources, Eade’s book sheds new light on many of the key phases and themes of Waugh’s life: his difficult relationship with his embarrassingly sentimental father; his formative homosexual affairs at Oxford; his unrequited love for various Bright Young Things; his disastrous first marriage; his momentous conversion to Roman Catholicism; his unconventional yet successful second marriage; his checkered wartime career; and his shattering nervous breakdown. Along the way, we come to understand not only Waugh’s complex relationship with the aristocracy, but also the astonishing power of his wit, and the love, fear, and loathing that he variously inspired in others. Waugh was famously difficult, and Eade brilliantly captures the myriad facets of his character, even as he casts new light on the novels that have dazzled generations of readers.

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and the Financial Times

Praise for Evelyn Waugh

“A brisk, lively, and wonderfully entertaining account of the life of a strange, tormented, and unique creature.” —John Banville, The New York Review of Books

“Thoughtful and intimate. . . . Drawing on previously unavailable letters, manuscripts and diaries, Eade illuminates connections between Waugh’s much-lauded fiction and the author’s concealed emotional life. . . . A convincing portrait of a flawed but gifted artist.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Well crafted. . . . Eade focuses on Waugh's colorful personal life and exploits with the “smart set” of his time. . . . Eade’s treatment reveals a man of astonishing awareness of his gifts and failings, great sincerity, and wit.” —Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780805097610
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Philip Eade has worked as a criminal barrister, English teacher, and journalist. His first book, Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters, was runner-up for the Biographers' Club Prize, and a New York Times' Editors' Pick; his second, Prince Philip, became a Sunday Times bestseller. He lives in London.

Read an Excerpt

Evelyn Waugh

A Life Revisited

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By Philip Eade

Henry Holt and Company

Copyright © 2016 Philip Eade
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9761-0

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CHAPTER 1

Second Son

In A Little Learning, the autobiography published two years before he died, Evelyn Waugh maintained that his childhood memories were suffused with 'an even glow of pure happiness'. This was possibly designed to thwart what he called the 'psychological speculations' and 'naive curiosity' of nosy interviewers and biographers, who seemed to be always 'eager to disinter some hidden disaster or sorrow'. In any event, there is plenty of contrary evidence that from an early age he occasionally felt both alienated and unloved, excluded above all from the extraordinarily gooey bond between his father, the publisher and critic Arthur Waugh, and his elder brother Alec – the 'popular novelist' as Evelyn later disparaged him. Nothing approaching an equivalent relationship existed between the father and his more exceptional younger son, who remembered that 'at the height of the day's pleasure his [father's] key would turn in the front door and his voice would rise from the hall: "Kay! Where's my wife?" '. The arrival of this intruder would mark the end of his mother's company for the day and confine him to the nursery. 'The latch-key which admitted him imprisoned me. He always made a visit to the nursery and always sought to be amusing there, but I would sooner have done without him.'

Alec remained very obviously his father's favourite throughout Evelyn's childhood. 'Daddy loves Alec more than me,' Evelyn once said to his mother. 'So do you love me more than Alec?' 'No,' she tactfully replied. 'I love you both the same.' 'In which case,' concluded Evelyn, 'I am lacking in love.' 'I was not rejected or misprized,' he later told his friend and biographer Christopher Sykes, 'but Alec was their firstling and their darling lamb.'

When Alec returned home from school for the holidays, a notice would be hung over the face of the grandfather clock in the hall, declaring 'Welcome Home to the Heir of Underhill!' – eventually prompting Evelyn to ask his father: 'When Alec has the house and all that's in it, what will be left for me?'

Underhill was the house that Arthur had built for his family at North End, Hampstead, in 1907, when Evelyn was four. Its construction was paid for by a small inheritance from Arthur's father, Dr Alexander Waugh (1840–1906), an exceptionally gifted country doctor who had won all the major student prizes at Bristol and Barts and invented Waugh's Long Fine Dissecting Forceps – still used by obstetricians today. Publicly jovial and popular with his patients in Somerset, Dr Waugh nonetheless came to be known by his family as 'the Brute' because of his tyrannical behaviour at home. Geneticists might wonder whether certain of his foibles explain the more demonic traits of his grandson Evelyn, who was only three when he died.

Barely a hint of the doctor's less wholesome characteristics found their way into his son Arthur's cloying memoir One Man's Road, however family tradition has it that when the word 'sadist' was first explained to him, Arthur responded: 'Ah yes, I believe that is what my father must have been.' Subsequent Waugh memoirists, notably Evelyn and his grandson Alexander Waugh, have been less reticent, hence we learn that Arthur's rowdier younger brother Alick was regularly thrashed by his father while timid Arthur was deliberately frightened – ostensibly to toughen him up – by being sent downstairs to kiss his father's gun-case in the dark (the Brute was mad about shooting but Arthur, although a good shot, was never keen), or violently swung on five-bar gates, or mounted on a rockinghorse while it reared on its back rockers, or left on high branches for hours on end and then surprised by the blast of his father's shotgun just behind him. After a bad day, Dr Waugh was apt to lash out at the drawing-room ornaments with a poker, or fly into a ludicrously disproportionate rage, as when he came home to find his family using his sacred whist cards to play snap.

Despite the ordeals of his childhood, Arthur made no mention of these explosions in his autobiography, partly, it seems, out of some residual filial piety and partly out of deference to his sisters, who despite being badly bullied themselves remained curiously loyal to their father's memory. He merely recorded that 'the great lesson of our childhood was undoubtedly discipline ... day after day, week after week, discipline, discipline and discipline'.

Evelyn, though, already knew all about the Brute from his mother, who hated her father-in-law with a passion after witnessing his tantrum over the game of snap and eagerly disseminated many of the least flattering stories about him. Later in life Evelyn would entertain his own children with cartoons depicting the Brute's misdeeds and, as his grandson Alexander records, 'the arresting images he produced – snorting nostrils, flaming devil's eyes, lascivious mouth and snapping black-dog teeth – never failed to set their imaginations aflame'.

Arthur grew up asthmatic – a condition often associated with 'nerves' – and a worrier. His mother Annie, a talented watercolourist, was a great worrier too; as her grandson Alec recalled, she was 'infinitely apprehensive ... her imagination pictured dangers everywhere'. Yet however watchful, she could not escape her husband's extraordinary and unpredictable cruelty. Evelyn recorded how one day when his grandmother was sitting opposite his grandfather in a carriage and a wasp settled on her forehead, he 'leant forward and with the ivory top of his cane carefully crushed it there, so that she was stung'.

The Brute derived his nickname partly from stories such as this, and partly to distinguish him from his grandfather, known in the Waugh family as 'Alexander the Great and Good'. Born in 1754 at East Gordon in Berwickshire, where the Waughs had been yeoman farmers for several generations, this Alexander Waugh was ordained a minister of the Secession Church of Scotland before moving south to London – thereby anglicising the family – where he became one of the most celebrated Nonconformist preachers of his day, a vigorous campaigner for the abolition of slavery and founder of the London Missionary Society. His popularity was never more evident than during the remarkable scenes at his funeral in 1827, when his horse-drawn hearse was followed from Trafalgar Square to Bunhill Fields cemetery by more than fifty carriages and a vast crowd of people stretching over half a mile – according to Arthur Waugh 'one of the longest processions that had ever attended a private citizen through the streets of London to his last resting-place'.

Alexander the Great and Good had ten children, among them Evelyn's great-grandfather James, who with his brother George used his inheritance (they each inherited £30,000 from their mother's brother, John Neill, who had made a fortune trading corn during the Peninsular War) to establish a smart chemist's in Regent Street, with exclusive rights to import the mineral waters of Vichy, Seltzer, Marienbad and Kissingen. Still more lucratively, they invented Waugh's Curry Powder – which is still made today – Waugh's Lavender Spike, an ointment for aches and pains, and Waugh's Family Antibilious Pills, which Queen Victoria was known to favour as a palliative. After experiencing a religious calling, James eventually sold his share to George, who further acquired a large house in Kensington, a country villa at Leatherhead and blocks of property in and around Regent Street. Of George's eight beautiful daughters, Alice married the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor and poet Thomas Woolner, and Fanny married his friend Holman Hunt. Ten years after Fanny died in childbirth, Holman Hunt flouted convention and the law as it then stood to marry her younger sister Edith. Evelyn rarely spoke about his heredity but he often expressed fascination with his connections with the Pre-Raphaelites, which helped inspire the choice of subject for his first book, a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

James meanwhile became an Anglican clergyman and at his own expense built a large vicarage at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, which he later bequeathed to the parish when the Marquess of Bath offered him the living of Corsley in Somerset – near to where most of Evelyn's other forebears had by then somehow converged. There the Rev. James Waugh, a tall, striking figure with a long white beard, 'lived well in mid-Victorian style,' Evelyn recorded, 'with long, abundant meals and an ample installation of servants and horses'. His theatricality would be inherited by subsequent Waugh generations, however his apparent joylessness and high regard for his own dignity and reputation were such that his less reverential descendant Auberon deemed him 'mildly ridiculous'. By Evelyn's reckoning he was fundamentally benevolent, but the same could scarcely be said for his son Alexander.

* * *

Born in 1840, Alexander 'the Brute' Waugh was sent to Radley, where he excelled at almost everything – academic, sporting and theatrical. His subsequent successes as a medical student promised a glittering career in London, however the lure of country life with its endless possibilities for shooting and fishing took him instead to the then remote village of Midsomer Norton, near Bath, where at the age of twenty-four and already sporting fashionable Dundreary whiskers he set up as a GP. He remained there for the rest of his life, tending to patients as far afield as his dog-cart would carry him – including Downside Abbey and school, whose monks later recalled him as always smartly turned out, 'with a button-hole and a jolly word of greeting'. He married Annie Morgan, descended from an ancient but impoverished family of Welsh gentry, 'unambiguously armigerous' according to Evelyn, and granddaughter of William Morgan (1750–1833), the clever, club-footed and acerbic associate of Thomas Paine who later earned a small fortune as a pioneering actuary to the Equitable Life Assurance Company. Annie's father, John Morgan, one of the earliest eye surgeons, died when she was six, and she was brought up by her mother Anne, one of the Gosse family of fundamental Christian Plymouth Brethren movingly if unreliably portrayed by her cousin Edmund Gosse in his classic memoir, Father and Son (1907). Years later Evelyn's grandmother would recall 'with a recurring shiver, the sound of Philip Henry Gosse's [Edmund's father] knock at the door, his austere appearance at the portal, and his solemn but confident question, as he unwound an interminable worsted scarf from his neck: "Well, Cousin Anne, still looking daily for the coming of dear Lord Jesus?"'

Annie doubtless saw marriage as a way of escaping the oppressive solemnity of her childhood, however she quickly found herself bound by a new set of constraints, her well-being according to Evelyn 'entirely subject to [her new husband's] will and his moods'. While pregnant with their first child, Evelyn's father Arthur, she became terrified lest his arrival interfere with her husband's first day of partridge-shooting. To the relief of everyone, he was born a week before the start of the season, on 24 August 1866. After Arthur came his ill-fated younger brother Alick and three girls, Connie, Trissie and Elsie, who were never properly educated and were regularly reduced to tears by their father's outbursts. It is possible that they were all put off men for life and Evelyn later hazarded that 'so far as there can be any certainty in a question which so often reveals surprising anomalies, I can assert that my aunts were maidens'. Though not without suitors, none of them married, Evelyn later explaining that within 'the stratified society of North Somerset they were part of a very thin layer, superior to farmers and tradesmen, inferior to the county families'. After their parents died, the sisters all stayed on at the family home at Midsomer Norton, where Evelyn spent many of his childhood summer holidays, about two months a year. Save for decay, the house had hardly changed since his father's childhood and Evelyn relished its dark hidden corners and assorted interesting smells. Behind the creeper-clad façade lay a rambling interior in which the only bathroom featured a stuffed monkey that had, improbably, died of sunstroke after being brought to England from Africa by a great-uncle. Its grinning teeth were all that could be seen when the room filled with steam. Other curiosities included a collection of fossils in the library that the local coalminers used to bring Evelyn's grandfather, and a glass phial of 'white blood' that he had morbidly preserved from a patient dying of acute anaemia. Evelyn would always be fascinated by the macabre, and when the last of his aunts died in 1952 and he came to oversee the disposal of their property he 'sought vainly for this delight of my childhood'.

For Evelyn the house at Midsomer Norton 'captivated my imagination as my true home never did'. As a boy he explained his preference to his parents on the basis that 'people had died there' – a pointed contrast to the sterile newness of Underhill where he grew up. 'The bric-a-brac in the cabinets, the Sheffield plate, the portraits by nameless artists quickened my childish aesthetic appetite as keenly as would have done any world-famous collection and the narrow corridors stretched before me like ancient galleries. I am sure I loved my aunts' house because I was instinctively drawn to the ethos I now recognise as mid-Victorian; not, as perhaps psychologists would claim, that I now relish things of that period because they remind me of my aunts.'

For Arthur, childhood at Midsomer Norton had held less happy memories. He recalled being 'perpetually haunted by vague apprehensions, fermented by the mysterious talk of the younger servants' – favoured topics included the brutal murder of a local cripple and the wicked activities of a cross-dressing highwayman. Aged eight he was sent to board at a 'dame-school' in Bath, from where he wrote plaintively to his mother: 'Dear Muz, I will try to be a dutiful son and put cold cream on my lips at night.' He later went to Sherborne, where he was teased for being swotty and unathletic. The nightly expeditions to kiss his father's gun-case had failed to arouse any enthusiasm for field sports and the only interests they ultimately shared were amateur theatricals and cricket, which Arthur adored despite being regularly outplayed by his sisters – he eventually scraped into the Sherborne second eleven. To the added disappointment of his father, he showed no desire to enter the medical profession, and instead began to incline towards a literary career, editing the school magazine and winning the Senior Poetry Prize. At New College, Oxford he managed only a double Third in Mods and Greats but won the prestigious Newdigate Prize (past winners of which included John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde) for his poem on 'Gordon in Africa'. A great surprise to everybody, this triumph laid the foundations of what was to be a remarkable literary dynasty, Arthur's descendants having since produced some 180 books between them.

By now resigned to his son's calling, the Brute told Arthur that he had 'nearly cried with joy' when he heard the news. 'You have made us very very happy and it is such a good thing for you in connection with any literary career you may take up & I am so glad because you have had disappointments and have borne them so nobly and now you have gained this great distinction – & one I know you will prize ... God bless you my own darling son & make your career worthy of your best endeavours & then I know it will be a glorious one.' If subsequently irked by the 'self-satisfied atmosphere of puffed success' surrounding Arthur, the Brute affected equal magnanimity when he learned about Arthur's third-class degree: 'Do you imagine that I look upon my sons as machines for the gratification of my self-esteem? You did your best and that is more than enough.'

After he came down from Oxford, Annie Waugh sent her son's prize-winning poem to her cousin Edmund Gosse, the family's only literary contact, hoping he might open doors. Edwardian England's pre-eminent man of letters, whom Evelyn later shuddered to recall as the worst of the 'numerous, patronising literary elders who frequented our table', Gosse began asking his young cousin to his Sunday literary soirées, where a star-struck Arthur met the likes of Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker, J. M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett and others. He also introduced him to Wolcott Balestier, the dazzling if slightly shambolic American publisher who had recently arrived from New York to woo English authors on behalf of John W. Lovell & Co.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Evelyn Waugh by Philip Eade. Copyright © 2016 Philip Eade. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations xv
Family Tree
Preface xxv

1. Second Son 1
2. The Sadism of Youth 15
3. Serving Lord Kitchener 30
4. A Lesser Place than Eton 40
5. Watertight Compartments 53
6. All That One Dreams 66
7. His Poor Dead Heart 80
8. Pure as Driven Slush 90
9. Becoming a Man of Letters 103
10. Shevelyn 114
11. A Common Experience, I’m Told 125
12. Perversion to Rome 140
13. The Dutch Girl 150
14. Off to the Forest 170
15. I Can’t Advise You in My Favour 184
16. Goodness She is a Decent Girl 200
17. A War to End Waugh 215
18. Head Unbloodied but Bowed 238
19. A Book to Bring Tears 252
20. The Occupation 267
21. Off My Rocker 288
22. Suitably Sequestered 302
23. Decline and Fall 319

Epilogue 333

Notes 337
Select Bibliography 375
Index 383

Editorial Reviews

The year 2016 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Evelyn Waugh, one of the greatest English writers of the twentieth century and, according to quite a few contemporaries, the most disagreeable man they ever met. Waugh has already been the subject of three important full-scale biographies and countless critical studies, and has played a signal role in a number of histories and memoirs, including Philip Eade's Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited. Aside from having been suggested by Evelyn Waugh's grandson, Alexander, as an anniversary commemoration, the ostensible reason for the book's existence is that its author has been able to draw on material not previously seen by earlier biographers, chiefly Waugh's letters to Teresa "Baby" Jungman — for whom he entertained an unrequited passion — and a brief, unpublished memoir written by his first wife, Evelyn, or "She-Evelyn," as people liked to say.

Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh was the second son of a publisher, a man who preferred his firstborn son, Alec, over the younger Evelyn to a grotesque extent; and in time Waugh returned the favor by despising his father as a sentimental clown. His schooldays were more unhappy than otherwise, but he found joy at Oxford, where he came into one of his personas — that of the homosexual wit, high liver, wine bibber, friend to the great, and entertaining guest at grand country estates. Eade spends more time than previous biographers poring over questions of whom Waugh slept with, what he did in that regard with whom, when, and for how long. To this end, he includes a photograph of the nude person and nice bottom of Alastair Graham, Waugh's "friend of [his] heart" and one of the models for Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited.

Waugh left Oxford with a discreditable Third and a devotion to drink ("There is nothing like the aesthetic pleasure of being drunk . . . That is the greatest thing Oxford has to teach"). With no real plans for making a living, Waugh took a stab at becoming an artist but was finally forced by penury to take a position teaching at a ghastly boys' school in Wales (the model for Llanabba of Decline and Fall). After a year at the place, his future seemed so bleak that — he claimed — he swam out to sea intending to drown himself, but, encountering jellyfish, promptly swam back to shore. He then took up two further teaching posts, a stint of learning cabinetmaking and writing for a newspaper, Waugh published a well-received biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, married Evelyn Gardner, and emerged as England's most celebrated young novelist with the publication of Decline and Fall — one of the funniest novels ever written. His marriage lasted only a little over a year before his wife went off with another man. It was a shaming, scarring experience Waugh never got over, and it clearly contributed to his vision of the world as a place of the damned. Indeed, the betrayal occurred as he was writing Vile Bodies, and Eade notes, as others have, that the darker hue of the novel's second half reflects this. Its effect is even more directly evident in to A Handful of Dust, which some consider his greatest work.

As a young person, Waugh had shown a religious streak that faded in and out of sight through the years, but, after the breakup of his marriage, it concentrated itself in his decision to become a Roman Catholic in 1930. With regard to more earthly matters, he traveled as a newspaper correspondent to Abyssinia for the coronation of Haile Selassie (and later to cover Mussolini's invasion), to South America, to the Mediterranean, and to Norway for some unsuccessful glacier climbing, all of which eventually produced travel writing and elements of novels (Black Mischief, Scoop). Meanwhile he was pursuing Baby Jungman and besieging her with billets-doux. Though these letters have not been used by previous biographers, it must be said that they do not really add anything and, judging by the snippets included here, they are pretty dull, especially by Waugh's standards.

After securing an annulment of his first marriage, he married Laura Herbert, thirteen years his junior, with whom he eventually had seven — six surviving — children. Although he had, in his obnoxious way, supported Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, he gave up his Fascist sympathies with the declaration of war in 1939 and after much trouble and string-pulling managed to join a commando unit, taken on, it transpires, because he was entertainingly funny, and, according to his commanding officer, "could not fail to be an asset in the dreary business of war." The unit was part of the famous "Layforce," which, among other things, was forced to evacuate from Crete in 1941. This event has given rise to hot controversy over whether Waugh and his commanding officer, Robert Laycock, jumped the queue in escaping the island, reprehensibly leaving a good number of troops behind to be captured or killed by the Germans. Eade shines in his examination of the affair and convincingly exonerates Waugh and Laycock of dishonorable conduct. It is clear from this biography and from the others that while Waugh possessed many vices and failings — snobbery, spite, cruelty, ire, sloth, arrogance, gluttony, boozery, and pigheadedness, to mention only a few — he was no coward. Still, as Eade also notes, Waugh clearly felt a "sense of moral unease" over the whole thing, which unreconciled feelings found expression in his depiction of Ivor Claire's ignoble flight in Officers and Gentlemen.

Waugh managed to take some time off from military service to devote himself to writing Brideshead Revisited, the novel he considered his masterpiece at the time, a view he later discarded, though it made him a pile of money, dollars especially. After the war, Waugh's physical and mental condition began to decline badly, propelled by alcohol, bromides, and barbiturates, one result of which was the wildly funny novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Somehow, during these years of despair and disintegration, he also managed to come up with what many, myself included, consider his masterpiece, The Sword of Honor trilogy. Evelyn Waugh died at home after Mass on Easter Sunday, 1966.

How does this biography stack up against the previous ones? It is far less tactful than Waugh's friend Christopher Sykes's and necessarily less detailed than Martin Stannard's rather plodding 1,000-plus-page, two-volume behemoth. It is not written with the pitch-perfect tone, alertness to irony, and all-around panache of Selina Hastings's 1994 Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, but that book, like Sykes's, is out of print. So, this one will have to do. There's nothing really wrong with it except that, with the exception of Eade's straightening-out of the Crete affair, there is nothing new. The best parts are, as in every biography of Waugh, the quotations from the letters of the great man himself.

Thus I shall conclude with a famous passage from one of them, quoted by Eade, that perfectly conveys Waugh's sense of the black comedy of life in this vale of tears. Waugh, now with the Royal Horse Guards in 1942, was stationed in Scotland under the command of Col. Dornford-Slater ("Col. D.S. D.S.O.") with his unit near the estate of Lord Glasgow, whose favor the colonel wished to curry by having his men blow up an old tree stump. Lord Glasgow said he'd be grateful but begged that they not "spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye." They reassured him.

Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. D.S. D.S.O. said you will see the tree fall flat at just that angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.

So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet in the air taking with it ½ acre of soil and the whole of the young plantation.

And the subaltern said Sir I made a mistake, it should have been 7 ½ lbs not 75.

Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn in the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every piece of glass in the building was broken.

So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry & ran to hide his emotion in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosed by the explosion, fell on his head.

Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963.

Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers

The Barnes & Noble Review

07/25/2016
Noted British biographer Eade (Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters) draws a well-crafted, slightly frothy portrait of the complex, difficult literary icon Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966). Undeterred by several previous accounts, Eade focuses on Waugh’s colorful personal life and exploits with the “smart set” of his time. The cameo appearance of dozens of glamorous figures throughout the book approaches literary name-dropping. Eade includes Harold Acton, Rebecca West, and many other English characters who range from the louche to the distinguished and are sometimes both at once. Enthusiastic tales of house parties and high-end adventures crowd out Waugh’s prolific work, some of which goes almost unmentioned. However, Eade does show how Waugh’s Oxford years inspired his most highly regarded novel, Brideshead Revisited, and how his trip to 1940s Hollywood led to his acid satire The Loved One. Despite the book’s crowded canvas, its narrative trajectory is straightforward. A bad first marriage preceded a long second union with seven children, fame, physical decline, and early death at 62. Waugh’s cruel streak, evident all his life, made him many enemies. With appreciation and empathy, Eade also points out Waugh’s many kindnesses, and his intense loyalty to the Catholic Church after converting. Eade’s treatment reveals a man of astonishing awareness of his gifts and failings, great sincerity, and wit. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Philip Eade has written a brisk, lively, and wonderfully entertaining account of the life of a strange, tormented, unique creature. Through page after page one finds oneself laughing aloud." —John Banville, New York Review of Books

"Although there have been several other excellent biographies of Evelyn Waugh, this is perhaps the most penetrating and insightful one to date.....For all the value of the newly available sources and the good use to which Mr. Eade has put them, in the end it is his biographical skills and crisp way with words and phrase that make this such a valuable tool for understanding the perplexing figure." —Martin Rubin, Washington Times

“Any biography of Waugh is entertaining because he was so witty a man, and Mr. Eade does not fail to entertain. He is not only fair to Waugh, moreover; he evidently likes him. It’s good to read an admiring rather than a debunking biography.” —Wall Street Journal

“This crowded, witty biography follows Waugh from the ancestral home in Somerset…to the jungles of Brazil…. Eade plunges into correspondence and unpublished family papers to explore the writer’s obsessions with social status and Catholicism, his jackknife turns from affection to contempt, and his torturous ambition.” —The New Yorker

"Eade recounts Waugh’s life in an admirably economic, straightforward manner, with a nice sense of measure and in a prose style free of jargon and cliché. He neither Freudianizes Waugh nor condemns his lapses into social savagery. Without a trace of tendentiousness, free of all doctrine, the biographer seeks to understand the strange behavior of his subject through telling the story of his life without commenting censoriously on it. The task is far from a simple one." —Joseph Epstein, The Claremont Review

"Entertaining and meticulously researched....Eade approaches his subject with empathy and an archaeologist’s determination to excavate the past…. [He] skillfully narrates the ups and downs of the writer’s life, from his conversion to Catholicism to his determined work on Brideshead Revisitedduring wartime. Waugh’s episodes of outrageous behavior, heavy drinking, and generosity to fellow writers are all examined with admirable evenhandedness." — Harvard Review

"Unlike some of Waugh’s biographers, Eade does not start from the premise that the twentieth century’s great master of English prose was a fiend in human form: a wise decision that allows him to see, and portray, a complex personality in full." —George Weigel, First Things

"One gets the sense throughout his work that Eade has set his hounds to sniff out the documents and interviews that give the truth, even if unsensational, rather than the racy or amusing anecdote; yet in the end his evenhandedness serves to sharpen rather than blur the likeness he has crafted. In sum, Eade succeeds in giving a convincing picture of a complex man—one more interesting, in human terms, than the portrait the artist gave us of himself." —Paul V. Mankowski, First Things

"[Eade’s] new biography deconstructs the monster and reattaches the man to the human race." —David Pryce-Jones, National Review

"For even more laughs, Philip Eade's Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited demonstrates that Waugh's life, already done by divers hands, really is worth another visit." —John Banville, GUARDIAN Best Books of 2016

"Eade's new biography draws on unpublished letters, diaries and memoirs to explore the eccentric larger-than-life story of one of the most acclaimed novelists of the 20th century. Will send readers back to the novels in droves." —FINANCIAL TIMES Books of the Year

"Anyone with the slightest interest in Evelyn Waugh - and who has not been intrigued by his steady return to favour? - should buy, and keep, Philip Eade's Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited. Why? Because it is packed with brand new, fascinating information about Waugh, his family, his friends and lovers. As well, it “rebalances” a number of entrenched, skewed perceptions of man and soldier. And it is irresistibly readable." —Donat Gallagher, editor of THE ESSAYS, ARTICLES AND REVIEWS OF EVELYN WAUGH

"Essential . . . compelling . . . Eade's pacey new biography delivers the raw material of Waugh's life. . . . Treat the Waugh aficionado in your life." —SUNDAY TIMES Books of the Year

“Eade is a gifted narrator and a master at providing the right quote at the right time at just the right length.” —The Washington Free Beacon

"Thoughtful and intimate.... Drawing on previously unavailable letters, manuscripts and diaries, Eade illuminates connections between Waugh's much-lauded fiction and the author’s concealed emotional life.... A convincing portrait of a flawed but gifted artist.” —Booklist (starred review)

"Well crafted.... Eade focuses on Waugh's colorful personal life and exploits with the 'smart set' of his time.... Eade's treatment reveals a man of astonishing awareness of his gifts and failings, great sincerity, and wit." —Publishers Weekly

"If you like your Waugh fast, furious, and funny, there is much to enjoy in Philip Eade's sparkling Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited.... Waugh's letters are a joy to read, and Eade's coup is his access to a hitherto unpublished cache of them." —The Times (London)

"[Eade] is an assiduous researcher with a considerable narrative gift. He also, crucially, likes his subject. Waugh never much cared what anyone thought of him, but Eade does, and time and again he finds justification for what previous biographers have considered questionable behavior.... This is an exemplary piece of work." —The Daily Mail (London)

"Brisk and entertaining.... intelligent and illuminating.... the best single-volume life of the author available. To read [this book] is to experience a reckoning with a man whose life, like his work, is both a solace and a stimulus." —Irish Times

"A bright, breezy, and sympathetic portrait." —The Mail on Sunday (London)

"Read this book.... Eade is excellent on tracing the sources of Waugh's delights and horrors, from his life to his work and back again: the failures, the successes, the disappointments, the endless grist to the authorial mill." —Literary Review (U.K.)

"There isn't a single dull page in the whole book, and it could easily be twice as long without overstaying its welcome." – The Irish Independent (Dublin)

"It is the force of Waugh's energy— – creative, sexual and social— – that crackles through the pages of Philip Eade's meticulous and wildly entertaining biography…. . . . Eade supplies an astonishing wealth of detail… . . . and is sympathetic to Waugh's many failings without being sycophantic." ­– Daily Express

"A splendid treat. Eade's exploration of the most significant episodes in the life of this fearless, deeply melancholic comedian is a most worthwhile addition to the bowing shelf of Waughiana." – iNews

From the Publisher

10/01/2016
The best parts in former barrister Eade's (Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters; Prince Philip) biography of English satirist and writer Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) are when he allows his subject to speak via correspondence. The least successful segments are third-, possibly fourth-person accounts of the author's early life. Waugh is shown to be complex: a cad and a creep, but also a man of strong Catholic beliefs and acts of bravery during World War II. But Eade's extensive research doesn't quite bring his subject to life. Much is made of Waugh's schoolboy affairs with other schoolboys, his Oxford escapades, and his disdain for his father and coldness toward his children. All but the most devoted British literary scholars will lose their way through the thicket of name- and title-dropping and mentions of friends and acquaintances whom Waugh lampooned in his novels. Additionally, Eade lauds nearly every Waugh endeavor as a masterpiece, making it difficult to separate the good from the very good. VERDICT Prurient and arid at the same time, this portrait of a difficult but talented literary figure will perhaps increase interest in the author on the 50th anniversary of his death. Suggested mainly for Waugh completists, but a dip into the author's oeuvre would be more fruitful and enjoyable. [See Prepub Alert, 4/3/16.]—Liz French, Library Journal

Library Journal

2016-08-03
A softer, kinder, gentler Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966).Since there are already numerous biographies of Waugh, is there need for another? Englishman Eade (Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters, 2014, etc.) thinks so. For one thing, it’s the 50th anniversary of Waugh’s death; for another, Eade accessed some previously unavailable key primary resources. One is an unpublished memoir by Eade’s first wife, Evelyn (friends called her “Shevelyn”). After knowing her for a few months, Waugh proposed with the line: “Let’s get married and see how it goes.” The other was a large cache of letters from a young woman, Teresa, with whom Waugh had an affair in the 1930s. Waugh was a prolific writer of stories, novels, and travel books. Though he is better known in England than in the United States, two of his novels—Brideshead Revisited, which he called his “magnum opus,” and The Loved One, which he described as a “study of the Anglo-American cultural impasse with the mortuary as a jolly setting”—have earned him a readership in America. Early on, writes Eade, Waugh developed a “cruel streak.” His father was bad-tempered, and Waugh hated his older brother—though he said his early years were “happy enough.” When his novel Vile Bodies (1930) established him “as one of the country’s most celebrated young novelists,” his father complained about his son’s “vulgar self-publicising”—even though he ran the press that published it. Eade eschews discussing Waugh’s writings in any depth, preferring to focus on how they relate to the people in his life. The book is brimming with society-page stuff: tales of dalliances and social dinners; quotes commenting on who’s smitten with whom; who is/isn’t a homosexual; etc.—all of which grows tedious eventually. The author admits Waugh was probably something of a snob, but charges of his being a bully may be a stretch. Eade offers up a softer portrait of Waugh that might help bring him some new readers, which he deserves.

Kirkus Review