The Enemy Within

By John Elson

TITLE: EVELYN WAUGH: THE LATER YEARS 1939-1966

AUTHOR: MARTIN STANNARD

PUBLISHER: NORTON; 523 PAGES; $29.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: A complex master of comic prose gets the biography he deserves.

At a World War II training base of Britain's Royal Marines, the commanding officer ends his tirade against officers who had seen to their own comfort before that of their men with a purely rhetorical "Any questions?" One moderately adipose and overage (36) lieutenant does have an inquiry. "Would you not agree, sir," he asks, "that it would be ever so much nicer if there were no Marine soldiers and everyone could be an officer?"

As that anecdote suggests, Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh all too often behaved like a character from one of his evergreen comic novels. Yet as Martin Stannard makes clear in this second and concluding volume of his brilliantly definitive biography, Waugh was a sad and even tragic figure. In his youth a dandified aesthete and party animal, he evolved into an eccentric, scowling, West Country squire who wore hideous tweed suits and wielded a Victorian ear trumpet like a snickersnee against enemies, real and imagined. That noli me tangere pose barely masked the inner Waugh: a self-lacerating loner who for a time, Stannard asserts, was certifiably schizophrenic. (The experience was transmuted in Waugh's strangest novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.)

Stannard's chronicle begins with Waugh as a marine officer yearning to fight for king and country. Indubitably brave, he saw little combat, unless one counts his skirmishes with superiors who thought, correctly, that he lacked discipline. As Stannard mildly notes, "Waugh's habit of striding into offices and demanding attention irritated the military bureaucrats." By the time he died of a coronary thrombosis at 63, Brideshead Revisited (published in 1945) and the Sword of Honour trilogy (completed in 1961) had sealed his reputation as one of the century's great masters of English prose. They had also established him as an elitist, antiquarian crank who was both literally and figuratively deaf to a modern world of "plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz" that he found as alienating as prison.

Stannard does not muffle or condone Waugh's great faults. He was anti- Semitic and terminally rude, even to close friends. He was a remote, absentee father who viewed his offspring with suspicion and alarm. "My children weary me," he once confided to his diary. "I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless." Perhaps in reaction to his frugal middle-class upbringing, he became an aristocrat-toadying snob who tended to confuse proper breeding with moral worth.

Waugh could also be extraordinarily generous, both in praise for writers he admired -- most notably, Graham Greene -- and in discreet gifts to agencies of the Roman Catholic Church, which he had entered in 1930. In the end, though, he felt abandoned even by Catholicism. Pained by the populist liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council, Waugh discreetly asked a clerical friend, the Jesuit writer Martin D'Arcy, whether he might be excused from attending Sunday Mass. The answer was a firm but sympathetic no.