Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited
by Philip Eade, Weidenfeld, £30
Great writer, unpleasant man. Such is probably the common estimate of Evelyn Waugh. “I am restless & moody & lazy & misanthropic,” Waugh himself once wrote to Laura Herbert. “I am jealous & impatient.” (He was successfully proposing marriage, by the way.)
Philip Eade, his newest biographer, wishes to make the case for Waugh’s better nature. And the young Waugh we meet in the early chapters is inventive, intrepid and physically courageous – qualities he retained into adulthood. Eade can point to friends and acquaintances who gladly testified to Waugh’s capacity for charm and kindness. His agent remembered “never a harsh word or a rebuke”. His daughter Meg clearly loved him. So did Graham Greene and several others.
