Evelyn Waugh - Character and Opinions

Character and Opinions

In the course of his lifetime, Waugh made enemies and offended many people; writer James Lees-Milne asserted that he was "the nastiest-tempered man in England". He had been a bully at school and retained an intimidating presence throughout his life; his son Auberon remarked that the force of his father's personality was such that, despite his lack of height, "generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six foot six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quail in front of him."

However, according to Paula Byrne, whose partial biography Mad World was published in 2009, the common view of Waugh as a "snobbish misanthrope" is a caricature; she asks: "Why would a man who was so unpleasant be so beloved by such a wide circle of friends?" His generosity to individuals and causes, particularly Catholic causes, extended to small gestures; after his libel court victory over Nancy Spain, he sent her a bottle of champagne. Hastings suggests that his outward belligerence to strangers was not entirely serious but, rather, an attempt at "finding a sparring partner worthy of his own wit and ingenuity". He mocked himself as well as others; Byrne believes that the elderly buffer, "crusty colonel" image he presented in his later life was a comic impersonation, rather than his real self.

As an instinctive conservative, Waugh believed that class divisions, with inequalities of wealth and position, were natural and that "no form of government ordained by God as being better than any other". In the postwar "Age of the Common Man," he attacked socialism (the "Cripps–Attlee terror") and complained, after Churchill's return to power in 1951, that "the Conservative Party have never put the clock back a single second". He never voted in elections; in 1959 he expressed a hope that the Conservatives would win the General Election but would not vote for them since "I should feel I was morally inculpated in their follies". He added: "I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants."

Waugh's Catholicism was fundamental: "The Church... is the normal state of man from which men have disastrously exiled themselves." He believed the Church was the last great defence against the encroachment of the Dark Age being ushered in by the welfare state and the spread of working-class culture. Strictly observant, he admitted to Diana Cooper that his most difficult task was how to square the obligations of his faith with his indifference to his fellow men. When asked by Nancy Mitford how he reconciled his often objectionable conduct with being a Christian, he replied that "were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible".

Waugh's conservatism was aesthetic as well as political and religious. Although he praised younger writers such as Angus Wilson, Muriel Spark and V.S. Naipaul, he was scornful of the 1950s writers' group known as "The Movement". He expressed a belief that the literary world was "sinking into black disaster" and that literature itself might die within thirty years. Waugh, who as a schoolboy had praised Cubism, soon abandoned his interest in artistic modernism. In 1945, he was writing that Picasso's standing was the result of a "mesmeric trick"; his paintings "could not be intelligently discussed in the terms used of the civilised masters". In his 1953 radio interview, he named Augustus Egg (1816–63) as a painter for whom he had particular esteem. He came to admire George Orwell because of their shared patriotism and sense of morality.

Waugh's racial and antisemitic prejudices are freely expressed in his works, particularly in those written before the war. The writer V.S. Pritchett observes that Waugh's antisemitism, "like Mount Everest, is there, nonviolent but undeniable"; Wykes calls it Waugh's "most persistent nastiness". The events of the Second World War may, Wykes observes, have modified Waugh's attitudes, though not to an extent discernible in his social behaviour. Waugh's racism, Wykes further asserts, was "an illogical extension of his views on the naturalness and rightness of hierarchy as the principle of social organisation". Orwell, an admirer of Waugh's writing, concluded that Waugh was "almost as good a novelist as it is possible to be ... while holding untenable opinions".