Literary Lives 12

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 he demanded were no longer granted. His funds were decreasing and drugs and alcohol caused his writing to stall. He was reduced to giving an interview on BBC Radio which was not very complimentary. His doctors were concerned about the deterioration of his health and advised a change of scene. Hoping to find a cure he took a ship bound for Ceylon. But he complained about other passengers whispering about him, left the ship in Egypt, and flew on to Ceylon. Friends arranged to come out to get him but he made his own way back, thinking he was possessed by devils. A much needed medical examination showed that he was suffering from bromide poisoning – a result of his drugs regime. When the medication changed his hallucinations disappeared. The experience was fictionalised a short time later in The Ordeal of Gilbert Penfold (1957) – a kind of mock-novel, an invitation to a game. Waugh called it his “barmy” novel. In 1956, Edwin Newman made a short film on Evelyn Waugh and learned that he refused to drive or use the telephone, wrote long-hand with an old-fashioned dip pen, wished that he had been born two centuries sooner, expressed a view that American reporters were divorced at least once, and could not operate without a large infusion of whisky.

With his health restored, Waugh returned to work and finished Officers and Gentlemen. He then refused to give an interview to Nancy Spain and her friend Lord Noel-Buxton from the Daily Express, who arrived at Piers Court. He dismissed the pair and decided to sell Piers Court. He told Nancy Mitford that it was polluted. Late in 1956, the family moved to Combe Florey in Somerset. He sued the Daily Express and Nancy Spain who wrote that the sales of Waugh’s books were much lower than they actually were (in fact over four 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 Waugh’s unsympathetic attitude “astonishing”. He was unrepentant. Waugh had been paid well for his journalism, but his extravagant spending left him seriously short of funds with recurring tax bills. He formed a trust fund for his children “Save The Children Fund” where he channelled advances and future royalties. He also sold personal possessions to it and kept his head above water but he continued to need money. Selling himself to a BBC TV interview “Face to Face”, he was civil in his answers to questions, although appearing worldweary and bored.

In 1960, Waugh was offered a CBE but turned it down – snubbed as he thought he should have been offered a knighthood. He produced another travel book, A Tourist in Africa, based on a trip he had made in 1959. But it was panned as “the thinnest piece of book-making that Mr Waugh has undertaken”. He shrugged off the insult and continued work on the final piece of his trilogy Unconditional Surrender, published in 1961.

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 THE WAUGH family 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 WAUGH’S most famous and that his most difficult task was how to square the enduring novel.jpg 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.”