Not Unworthy of Evelyn

THE EARLY YEARS OF ALEC WAUGH by Alec Waugh. 312 pages. Farrar, Sfraus. $6.

"If I were not myself," writes Alec Waugh, "and if I were to pick up the autobiography of Alec Waugh, the first name that I should look for in the index would be Evelyn Waugh." Sadly, he would be right. Alec, 65, is a skilled journeyman writer of novels (Island in the Sun) and travel books (Hot Countries), but he has the misfortune of having a younger brother who is a comic genius. Happily, for most of his autobiography he manages to forget that fact and concentrate on his own story--which often reads like an extension of his fiction.

Mild Blighty. Son of a distinguished London publisher, Alec went to his father's school, Sherborne, where he was everything a public-school boy should be: a star batsman at cricket, a fine forward at rugby, a winner of the English verse prize. What changed that Kiplingesque image was a mild flirtation he had with a younger boy. When it was discovered, the experience soured his last months in school but inspired the novel that brought him early fame --The Loom of Youth.

Waugh wrote it during 7 1/2 weeks in 1916 while he was waiting for his army commission. It was a time, he recalls, when women gave white feathers to men not in uniform and every schoolboy dreamed of going to France and getting a mild "blighty"--a wound that would send him back to England uncrippled but with a gold stripe on his sleeve. Loom of Youth told only what all but the most naive schoolmasters already knew--that homosexuality was not uncommon in a system that "herded together monastically children of thirteen and men of eighteen for two-thirds of the year." Nevertheless, it shocked the sensibilities of a nation brought up on The Brushwood Boy and Tom Brown's School Days.

Nomadic Novelist. Waugh's description of the tedium and terror of trench warfare is excellent, but The Early

Years loses some of its momentum when it reaches the postwar era--presumably because Waugh's life also lost a good deal of its glamour. He drifted into and out of an unsuccessful marriage, took a job in publishing, and kept turning out studiously Galsworthian novels. By the early '30s, Evelyn had become by far the more famous of the two writing Waughs. Alec confesses that he has not seen Evelyn "twenty times in the last twenty years," and he has little to say of his brother beyond the fact that he regards him as "incomparably the finest novelist of our period."

Waugh ends his autobiography at the close of his 32nd year. He had already adopted the nomadic way of life that has furnished him with the materials for most of his books. He regards himself as "a very minor writer," and in his fiction at least he is all of that. But as a chronicler of his times, Evelyn can be proud of him.

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