On "Brief Lives: Evelyn Waugh" by Michael Barber ***

Part of a series that a friend of mine read volumes from a decade or so ago, this book gives a tad more information about Waugh's life than one would read in an encyclopedia but a good deal less than one would read in a fuller biographical expose. As such, it's a bit workmanlike, spilling out facts but not bringing Waugh quite to life the way a longer biography likely could and would. But it's a great for someone like me, who didn't really want to read a really long life study.

In Barber's hands, Waugh comes across as something of a bore to me. He had a caustic wit and seemed to treat people generally rudely, though the wit kept him semipopular. He was also obsessed with British tradition and class. These sort of things suggest to me that I would not have much cared for the man.

Waugh's life began rather rough, not in the sense that he grew up underprivileged but rather he grew up the less-liked son of a family. Alec, his brother (a novelist I've also read but did not realize was actually related), was papa's favorite. Thus, Evelyn and his father did not get along very well. Arguably this helped to create Evelyn's personality. One thing his father did do, however, was introduce him to literary culture, for his father was a literary biographer, and often he read aloud Dickens and other nineteenth-century British authors.

Evelyn graduated to the university, where he studied literature and generally drank too much. He took up with other men, since it was an all-male school. But afterward, almost on a seeming whim, he would marry a woman named Evelyn. She-Evelyn was looking to escape her family and was not really in love with Evelyn. This would prove fateful, as a year later, she would run off with someone else. Still, the marriage granted Evelyn access to the noble class, which is something he seemed to want.

Evelyn, the writer, would turn to Catholicism to address issues with regard to the modernizing of society. Like T. S. Eliot, Evelyn seemed to find in long Western tradition the means to address changes brought about by modernism. As such, he seems like a man out of his time. Indeed, his writing, well often greatly satiric, is fairly traditional; early Evelyn experimented a bit, but he came to think that traditional techniques were all that were needed.

Catholicism wouldn't really affect his sexual behavior, however. He would continue pursue and bed women, including married ones. And he would continue to drink.

And he would marry again too, to another aristocrat. He would travel a lot, in part to write about it. He would mingle with the British literary crowd, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, and others. He would live in an old estate that he'd purchase expressly for the sake that it would look as if it had been around (in the family) for generations.

While he would enjoy quite a bit of success before World War II, his reputation would begin to take a hit later. World War II itself would prove, personally, useful to him in terms of giving him experiences to write about. He set about to become part of it. He would not, however, rise far as an officer, and the three major campaigns he was a part of would each prove not to be very successful. Waugh wasn't really cut out, personality wise, for the military anyway.

Nor does it seem that he was cut out well to be a father. He tended to spend as little time as possible with his children (though that was likely also the British way at the time--he being of a generation not far from my own father, who often denotes how parents at that time did not dote on their kids). The kids themselves, generally, appreciated his humor and were not, according to the biographer, resentful.

The war would provide fodder for his trilogy, in the midst of which he would have a breakdown, which would become material for another book. He would sue and be sued for things he'd say about others and they about him. He'd grow old. And the world would change, and he'd continue on in his conservative aristocratic leanings and seem to be of another time and era.

After his death, the posthumous publication of his diaries and letters and the television production of his novel Brideshead Revisited (a rather atypical book for him) would restore his reputation and bring him back to the literary conversation.