Evelyn Waugh, who was born 100 years ago last month, could be wonderful, even when he was being obnoxious. He was once asked by the BBC about his views on capital punishment:
Interviewer: You are in favour of capital punishment?
Waugh: For an enormous number of offences, yes.
Interviewer: And you yourself would be prepared to carry it out?
Waugh: Do you mean, actually do the hangman’s work?
Interviewer: Yes.
Waugh: I should think it very odd for them to choose a novelist for such tasks.
When asked by the BBC in the same interview how he wanted to be remembered he said ‘I should like people of their charity to pray for my soul as a sinner’. But I suspect he hoped to be remembered for other things as well.
Waugh was born at Hampstead on 28 October 1903. After a more or less conventional childhood, he spent three drunken, homosexual years at Oxford, where he got a bad third class honours degree. He tried teaching (at a number of schools), journalism and trained as an artist and a carpenter. He was a failure at more or less everything.
In February 1927, at the age of 23, he was sacked again. Shortly after, he wrote in his diary:
I have been trying to do something about getting a job and am tired and discouraged. It is all an infernal nuisance … it seems to me the time has arrived to set about being a man of letters.
By 1930 he had published a biography, two novels and a travel book. He had married, his wife had an affair and he was divorced. A few months later, he was received into the Catholic Church. In the remaining pre-war years Waugh travelled widely, through North and South America, the Arctic and Africa.
His first marriage was annulled, he remarried and, after military service, settled down in the English west country and raised six children.
Along the way, he offended most of his contemporaries: he wrote of Stephen Spender, ‘to see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee’. Waugh was asked to endorse the first edition of Catch 22. He replied, ‘you may quote me as saying: “This exposure of corruption, cowardice and incivility of American officers will outrage all friends of your country (such as myself) and greatly comfort your enemies.”’
By the time of his