The Tribune | Weekend | 13
Friday, October 29, 2021
two other volumes: Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender were published in 1955 and 1961 respectively. During these years he also published When The Going Was Good (1946), The Holy Places (1952), and Love Among the Ruins (1953). Almost fifty years old, Waugh was increasingly dependent on alcohol and drugs to relieve his insomnia and depression. Two more children, James (1946) and Septimus (1950) were born and completed his family. He became a shrewd collector of Victorian paintings and furniture and filled Piers Court with his acquisitions. He also started writing knowledgeable reviews on painting. But by 1953, his popularity as a writer was failing. He was out of step with the times and the large fees THE WAUGH family he demanded were no longer granted. His funds were decreasing and drugs and Waugh’s alcohol caused his writing to stall. He was reduced unsympato giving an interview on BBC Radio which was thetic attitude not very complimentary. His doctors were con“astonishcerned about the deterioration of his health and ing”. He was advised a change of scene. Hoping to find a cure unrepentant. he took a ship bound for Ceylon. But he comWaugh had plained about other passengers whispering about been paid well him, left the ship in Egypt, and flew on to Ceylon. for his journalFriends arranged to come out to get him but he ism, but his made his own way back, thinking he was possessed extravagant by devils. A much needed medical examinaspending left tion showed that he was suffering from bromide him seriously poisoning – a result of his drugs regime. When short of funds the medication changed his hallucinations disapwith recurring peared. The experience was fictionalised a short tax bills. He time later in The Ordeal of Gilbert Penfold (1957) formed a trust – a kind of mock-novel, an invitation to a game. fund for his Waugh called it his “barmy” novel. In 1956, Edwin children “Save WAUGH’S most famous and Newman made a short film on Evelyn Waugh and The Children enduring novel.jpg learned that he refused to drive or use the teleFund” where phone, wrote long-hand with an old-fashioned dip he channelled pen, wished that he had been born two centuries advances and sooner, expressed a view that American reporters future royalties. He also sold personal possessions were divorced at least once, and could not operate to it and kept his head above water but he conwithout a large infusion of whisky. tinued to need money. Selling himself to a BBC TV interview “Face to Face”, he was civil in his With his health restored, Waugh returned to answers to questions, although appearing worldwork and finished Officers and Gentlemen. He weary and bored. then refused to give an interview to Nancy Spain and her friend Lord Noel-Buxton from the Daily In 1960, Waugh was offered a CBE but turned Express, who arrived at Piers Court. He dismissed it down – snubbed as he thought he should have the pair and decided to sell Piers Court. He told been offered a knighthood. He produced another Nancy Mitford that it was polluted. Late in 1956, travel book, A Tourist in Africa, based on a trip the family moved to Combe Florey in Somerset. he had made in 1959. But it was panned as “the He sued the Daily Express and Nancy Spain who thinnest piece of book-making that Mr Waugh wrote that the sales of Waugh’s books were much has undertaken”. He shrugged off the insult and continued work on the final piece of his trilogy lower than they actually were (in fact over four Unconditional Surrender, published in 1961. million copies). Waugh did little work over the next two years except for a biography of his friend Ronald Knox, the theologian, who had died in 1957. His son Auberon was severely wounded in a military accident in Cyprus. However, Waugh remained detached, neither visiting him in Cyprus or when he returned to England. Critics openly called
Approaching sixty, Waugh was “fat, deaf, and short of breath”. His biographer thought he looked like “an exhausted rogue jollied up by drink.” He worked on his autobiography in 1962 – the first volume of which, A Little Learning, was published in 1964. The following year a major financial crisis emerged concerning the “Save the
Children” trust, and a large sum of back tax money was demanded by the tax authorities. His agent, AD Peters, negotiated a manageable settlement but left Waugh seriously short of funds, forcing him to sign contracts to write several books in order to glean advances. His physical and mental deterioration prevented him from doing any work and the contacts were cancelled and some of the money returned. His only activity was editing his three war novels into a single volume Sword of Honour. On Easter Day, April 10, 1966, after attending Mass with his family in a neighbouring village, Waugh died of a heart attack in Combe Florey. He was sixty-two years old and was buried in a plot outside the Anglican churchyard of the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Combe Florey. A Requiem Mass was held in Westminster Cathedral on April 21, 1960. *** Evelyn Waugh made many enemies and offended a number of people. James Lees-Milne stated that Waugh “was the nastiest tempered man in England”. Waugh’s biographer, David Wykes, described Waugh’s anti-Semitism as being “his most persistently noticeable nastiness”. When Nancy Mitford asked him how he reconciled his often objectionable conduct with being a Christian, he replied that “were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible”. Waugh also believed that class divisions with inequalities of wealth and position were perfectly natural, and that “no form of government was ordained by God as being better than any other”. He never voted in elections, and admitted to Diana Cooper that his most difficult task was how to square the obligations of his birth with his indifference to his fellow men. Nevertheless, the critic Clive James said of Waugh, “Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English” and that “a hundred years of steady development culminate in him”. Literary critic Andrew Michael Roberts commented that he had “an exquisite sense of the ludicrous, and a fine aptitude for exposing false attitudes.” Graham Greene, in a letter to The Times shortly after Waugh’s death, acknowledged him as “the greatest novelist of any generation; while Time magazine called him the grand old mandarin of modern British prose”. Nancy Mitford said of him in a television interview, “What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything. That’s what none of the people who wrote about him seem to have taken into account at all.” • Sir Christopher Ondaatje is the author of The Last Colonial. He acknowledges that he has quoted liberally from Wikipedia and Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life by David Wykes (Palgrave Macmillan 1984).
