Beneath the Thorny Carapace

By Paul Gray

THE LETTERS OF EVELYN WAUGH Edited by Mark Amory Ticknor & Fields; 664 pages; $25

Before he began the task of sifting through some 4,500 surviving letters by Evelyn Waugh, Editor Mark Amory wondered if the author's handwriting was difficult to read. A friend reassured him: "No, no, you see he wrote his letters in the morning, when he was sober. He wrote his diary at night when he was drunk." On the evidence of the 840 letters collected here, Waugh sometimes tippled while he corresponded, but the contrast between this book and his Diaries (published in 1977) is as vivid as that between a buoyant raconteur and a mean lush. Here is Waugh effusively thanking Harold Acton for sending his latest book: "A work of that kind, so rich and learned, .must be studied with proper reverence." He told his diary something different: Acton's book was "unreadable."

Triumphantly boorish in public; morose, malicious and often anguished in private: the Waugh of legend has only grown since his death in 1966, and the result is not a pretty picture. His letters show him in a much more flattering light. When he was not beset by strangers or pursued by his own demons, he genuinely cared about pleasing his friends and loved ones. He entertained and consoled, advised and gently scolded. His frequent travels took him great distances from those whose company he enjoyed, so he used the mails to talk to them, to mimic "conversation as I love it, with anecdote occurring spontaneously and aptly, jokes growing and taking shape, fantasy." This collective performance was one of his most dazzling.

As a student at Oxford, Waugh referred confidently to "the biography" that would some day be written about him. He was, of course, correct, and the facts of his life are now well known. The events of three years determined almost all that was to follow. The publication of Decline and Fall in 1928 made him famous, the darling of "the bright young people" who danced and staggered through postwar England. The next year, his wife Evelyn ("She-Evelyn" to friends) left him for another man. Waugh wrote his parents: "I am afraid that this will be a blow to you but I assure you not nearly as severe a blow as it is to me." The thorny carapace that later became so famous grew out of his suffering: "I was getting into a sort of Charlie Chaplinish Pagliacci attitude to myself as the man with a tragedy in his life and a tender smile for children. So all that must stop." And in 1930 he converted to Roman Catholicism.

His faith never wavered, but neither did it save him from dipsomaniacal binges. He asked Author Nancy Mitford, a favorite correspondent: "Did I ever come to visit you again after my first sober afternoon. If so, I presume I owe you flowers." As he ruefully described the times he was "d.d." (disgustingly drunk) in his letters, Waugh made himself one of his better comic characters: "I got to my train d.d. and it was the Cheltenham Flier full of respectable stockbrokers . . . and I walked down the train picking up all the mens hats and looking inside and saying: 'People who go to such bad hatters shouldn't travel first class.' So I am ashamed to meet any neighbors now." Waugh's journeys from offensiveness to remorse were often spectacular, and no one observed them more critically than he.

Waugh remarried in 1937. To his brother Alec he coolly described his bride-to-be as "thin and silent, long nose, no literary ambitions, temperate but not very industrious." His letters to her, though, radiate warmth; he called her "my poppet" and "Whiskers" and confessed that their long separations during his service in World War II sometimes left him "near to tears." Similarly, he often abused his growing brood of six children to his friends. To Nancy Mitford: "All my children are here for the holidays--merry, affectionate, madly boring--except Harriet who has such an aversion to me that she screams when she catches sight of me a hundred yards away." But his letters to the youngsters tell the story of a doting papa. He comforted them when they grew unhappy at school, made up outrageous stories to amuse them. He described his eldest daughter's coming-out to his third child Margaret: "There were 250 pimply youths and 250 hideous girls packed so tight together they could not move hand or foot . . . and that is the last anyone has seen of Teresa. I suppose she was crushed to death and the corpse too flat to be recognized. About 100 dead girls were carried out and buried in a common pit."

Waugh partially was the curmudgeonly Blimp he invented for himself. He proudly described himself as a "snob . . . a bigot and a philistine" to various friends, but then seemed hurt when outsiders found him as obnoxious as he tried to be. He was also, as his letters reveal, generous in praising contemporaries like Graham Greene, George Orwell and Anthony Powell and encouraging to such newcomers as Louis Auchincloss and Thomas Merton. He was not entirely the Tory skinflint that his denunciations of the welfare state suggested; he assigned a number of foreign royalties to Catholic charities. His prejudices were surprisingly flexible. He enjoyed mocking the U.S. and calling its citizens "louts"; yet he told his agent to withhold publishing rights from Communist countries because they "might use Loved One as anti-American propaganda." Editor Amory does a superb job of reconstructing this complex, hidden man. The job was not easy; one nickname-filled early letter requires 31 footnotes. All the work was worth it. One of this century's greatest English prose stylists is back again, provoking outrage, thought and laughter. --By Paul Gray

Excerpts

"I went to London for a night to see a civil young man who says he is the editor of the Sunday Telegraph. He signed his letters 'Peregrine Worsthorne.' I said 'an unusual name' . . . Well, this man of mystery proposed to send me abroad for a treat. We drank heavy and I behaved rather like Randolph [Churchill] in his braver moments, calling for more and better wine, until I said: 'I presume Michael Berry is paying for this?' 'No, indeed, I am, out of my wages.' So then I felt I had behaved badly and could only atone by giving a lot of wine to the mystery man, so I took him up the street to my club and we drank heavy and I woke next day with the vague but persistent impression that I have promised to go to the war in Algiers for him. Not at all what I wanted."

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