In honour of Evelyn Waugh's birthday this month, 28 October, I have compiled a collection of books about his life and works. An English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust and the novel Brideshead Revisited, which became one of my favourite books after discovering the 1981 series.
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
"Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War.
The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit." Enchanted first by Sebastian Flyte at Oxford, the moments that Charles and Sebastian spent during that time together has captured many imaginations since its first publication in 1945, "provoking an intense and pleasurable nostalgia for that none of its audiences has had."
Evelyn Waugh's
Oxford
"Oxford held a special place in Evelyn Waugh’s imagination. So formative were his Oxford years that the city never left him, appearing again and again in his novels in various forms. This book explores in rich visual detail the abiding importance of Oxford as both location and experience in his literary and visual works. Drawing on specially commissioned illustrations and previously unpublished photographic material, it provides a critically robust assessment of Waugh’s engagement with Oxford over the course of his literary career.
Following a brief overview of Waugh’s life and work, subsequent chapters look at the prose and graphic art Waugh produced as an undergraduate together with Oxford’s portrayal in Brideshead Revisited and A Little Learning as well as broader conceptual concerns of religion, sexuality and idealised time. A specially commissioned, hand-drawn trail around Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford guides the reader around the city Waugh knew and loved through locations such as the Botanic Garden, the Oxford Union and The Chequers. A unique literary biography, this book brings to life Waugh’s Oxford, exploring the lasting impression it made on one of the most accomplished literary craftsmen of the twentieth century."
Decline and Fall
Evelyn Waugh
"Sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly unsurprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at Llanabba Castle. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, rascals and fools, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and Captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). A great lark; its author has an agreeable sense of comedy and characterisation, and the gift of writing smart and telling conversation, while his drawings are quite in tune with the spirit of the tale."
Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939
"Evelyn Waugh is now recognised as the finest novelist of his generation. At the end of his life, though, he appeared an enigma: malicious, yet capable of extraordinary kindness, an apparently selfish Christian, an articulate aesthete with strong, often negative tastes, an anarchist defending conservatism. He wanted nothing to do with the modern world and few penetrated his facade. In this important new biography, Martin Stannard gives the most detailed account ever published of Waugh and his work. Years of research have unearthed a great deal of new material.
The author rejects the stereotyped image of Waugh as a the brilliant clown and in its place, we see a more complex and sympathetic character and above all, the serious artist. Martin Stannard provides a picture of a man torn between two conflicting ambitions: the desire to establish himself as a serious craftsman and the desire to be a man of the world. It is, too, the story of an escape from suburbia to Mayfair, of the bright little boy from Golders Green who turned himself into a landed gentleman and whose sensitivity to class distinction became an integral aspect of his writing. This biography is especially important for the light it throws on the interdependence of Waugh's life and work. By drawing on over thirty interviews and research into the manuscripts, unpublished letters, diaries, broadcasts and journalism, the author provides significant new findings on Waugh's childhood, his years at Oxford, his first marriage, and his expeditions to Africa, Spitzbergen and Guiana. In his account, Martin Stannard shows that Waugh's life was full of wit, bravado and colourful escapades, but that it was also, in Waugh's phrase, a 'sad story'."
Vile Bodies
Evelyn Waugh
"Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny and formally daring satire, Vile Bodies reveals the darkness and vulnerability that lurks beneath the glittering surface of the high life.
In the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of twenties' Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade - whether promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports cars. In a quest for treasure, a favourite party occupation, a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the fulfilment of unconscious desires."
Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited
"The much mythologised author of Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited was hailed by Graham Greene as 'the greatest novelist of my generation', yet reckoned by Hilaire Belloc to have been possessed by the devil. Evelyn Waugh's literary reputation has continued to rise since Greene's assessment in 1966. Fifty years after his death, Philip Eade draws on extensive unpublished sources to paint a fresh and compelling portrait of this endlessly fascinating man, telling the full story of his dramatic, colourful and frequently bizarre life."
A Handful of Dust
"After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set. Brilliantly combining tragedy, comedy and savage irony, A Handful of Dust captures the irresponsible mood of the 'crazy and sterile generation' between the wars. This breakdown of the Last marriage is a painful, comic re-working of Waugh's own divorce, and a symbol of the disintegration of society."
I hope you have found something of interest amongst this collection of books, but if not, there may be something more to your tastes in the Compendium's Library.
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