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Waugh<-novels<-chapter 8<-contents<-position

    Evelyn Waugh was born in London and educated at Lancing and Hertford College. He was the second son of Arthur Waugh, publisher and a literary critic. He taught schools in London in 1924 and worked for some time for “Daily Express”. He wrote biography “Dante Gabriel Rossetti” in 1927. He got married in 1928, but divorced in 1930. He became a full-time writer from 1928 and published his first novel in the same year. He joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1930 and completed his biography of the Elizabethan Jesuit Martyr Edmund Campion in 1935. He traveled extensively during the 1930s and remarried in 1937. He served in the Royal Marines during the Second World War and was a member of the British Military Mission to Yugoslavia in 1944. He died in 1966.
    Waugh was mainly a satirist and his works were mainly about the polite society. Decline and Fall (1928) was his first novel that established his fame as a novelist. And then Vile Bodies (1930) was his second novel of repute. A Handful of Dust (1934) were his major achievement establishing his reputation as a writer of brilliant satirical comedy. Since he was converted to Catholicism in 1930, Catholic moral and ethical belief found expression in his later work such as Brideshead Revisited (1945). Then his popular trilogy of war novels comes out. It consists of Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961). In all his novels, Waugh showed himself to be an outstanding stylist of satirical comedy, and had created many unforgettable characters for readers.

Decline and Fall
    It is his first successful book, a comic story based on his own experience as a teacher. It is a penetrating criticism of the so-called decency of the upper-middle class. Paul Pennyfeather is dismissed by Oxford for his indecent behavior. The young innocent victim begins his picaresque adventures. First he is a teacher in a boarding school, then the tutor of the son of an extremely wealthy widow, Mrs. Margot. He becomes the widow’s lover. He is cast into jail for undertaking white slave traffic, but is secured by Mr. Margot in secret. He goes back to England and continued his study of theology at Oxford. In the book there is almost satire everywhere. Although some of the events are unbelievable and exaggerations, the reader can read it as a brightly modern comedy.

 A Handful of Dust
   It was his best novel and took the title from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Tony Last, the hero of the book, is betrayed by his wife Brenda Last, who has an affair with John Beaver. After the death of their son, Brenda leaves Tony and expects to get divorced. When Tony realizes that he will loose his country house, if he divorces, he refuses and leaves the house. Unfortunately Tony is caught by an old mad recluse Mr. Todd. He is forced to read aloud forever to Mr. Todd. Finally Brenda remarries but not to Beaver. The country house, Hetton, is inherited by Tony’s cousins. Tony Last represents the traditional morality contrasted with the modern frivolity embodied in Brenda Last; civilization in modern world contrasted with barbarism in isolated world. The novel is a bitter criticism of the moral chaos in the modern world.

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