An Establishment of One

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE DIARIES OF EVELYN WAUGH

edited by Michael Davie; Little, Brown; 818pages; $17.50

British literary events usually arrive in the U.S. disheveled, talked out and a year late. As Evelyn Waugh noted, however, "punctuality is the virtue of the bored," and there was little time to be that last September when 800 pages of his diaries fell on London like a V1. The buzz had been heard for some time. The Observer and the London Sunday Times had teased a few thin, gray hairs of scandal with prepublication excerpts. Christopher Sykes' authorized biography appeared soon after. It made ample use of the diaries that Waugh began in 1911 at age seven and continued, on and off, until a year before he died in 1966. The originals now lie preserved and climate controlled in a literary Forest Lawn at the University of Texas--not a small irony for the man who wreaked hilarity on the American way of death in The Loved One.

Since Waugh's own death, his reputation has been skillfully embalmed by the Joyboys of journalism and lit-crit. More precisely, there are two reputations: the artist and the man. Waugh the writer needs little touching up. Such novels as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust, Scoop and that masterpiece of World War II, the Sword of Honour trilogy, established him as one of the century's finest satirists. The Diaries underscore just how closely Waugh's fiction followed his life, from high jinks at public school to the hallucinations chronicled in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957).

The story of the man is a perennial rerun in England where it is constantly looped through a culture whose modern alterations were both feared and foreseen by the conservative Waugh. It is the story of a modest publisher's son whose intelligence, ambition and talent lofted him from the bourgeois professional class into the world of the Bright Young People, titled literati and London clubs, where a gentleman might get gloriously or morosely drunk amongst his peers.

Yet Waugh was an Establishment of one. His genius, self-knowledge and frequent self-loathing set him apart. Roman Catholicism, to which he converted in 1930, provided an intellectual and ritual framework for his deeply pessimistic view of his institutions and attachments, indeed of all mankind. It was the classical view of lost Eden --of damnation without God's grace--that could lead Waugh at the height of his fame and good fortunes to ask, "Why am I not at ease? Why is it I smell all the time wherever I turn the reek of the Displaced Persons' Camp?"

Diaries Editor Michael Davie does not presume to answer that question. His job, which he has performed with unobtrusive competence, was to provide concise background, explanations and deletions in accordance with British libel laws and his own sense of decency. Waugh himself was responsible for the most notable omission, the Oxford entries that refer to his undergraduate adventures in homosexuality. There are no diaries to cover his cuckolding and the collapse of his first marriage in 1929. For his hallucinations in 1954, one must refer back to Gilbert Pinfold.

The reader who is unaware of Waugh the artist might easily believe that the writer of these diaries was simply an overly educated snob, a widely traveled glutton and a dipsomaniac. The references to meals eaten and alcohol drunk are staggering. His class consciousness is somewhat to the right of Louis XIV. "It is impudent and exorbitant to demand truth from the lower classes," he notes after a lifetime of not really trying. His anti-Semitic remarks are too persistent to be mere blimpish affectations. Jews who cross his path are either crude, sharp, or social climbers. Postwar Nuernberg is "full of German Jews in American uniforms photographing one another in the act of giving the Nazi salute from Hitler's rostrum." He deems the war-crimes trials themselves "an injudicious travesty."

The Waugh who disliked outsiders appears to have formed early. As a 16-year-old, he examined the problem of maintaining exclusivity in his school club and decided, "the chief difficulty is "dissuading self-confident undesirables." The attraction and distaste for the roaring and fleshy '20s that propel Vile Bodies are amply demonstrated: "Everyone was wearing a new sort of jumper with a high collar rather becoming and most convenient for lechery because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like studs and ties. It also hides the boils with which most of the young men seem to have encrusted their necks."

Waugh the father of six concedes that "my children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults; feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humourless." When a daughter dies 24 hours after her birth, he writes, "I saw her when she was dead -- a blue, slatey colour. Poor little girl, she was not wanted." Turned outward, such detached cruelty could become the most savage wit. When his former comrade-in-arms and former friend Randolph Churchill came through surgery for a benign lung growth, Waugh remarked that "it was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it."

The bleakest passages of the Diaries suggest that despite his religious faith, Waugh 's true quarrel was with an unresponsive God. He was well aware that his comic genius had enabled him to vent his injured pride and hostility on his fellow man, and he knew the price he paid for it. Entry for 24 March 1962: "White's. 7 p.m. I sit alone in the hall. A member known to me by sight but not by name, older than I, of the same build, but better dressed, said: 'Why are you alone?' 'Because no one wants to speak to me.' 'I can tell you ex actly why; because you sit there on your arse looking like a stuck pig.' " The Diaries are conclusive evidence that it was a self-inflicted wound. -- R.Z. Sheppard

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