–The religious/political website First Things has reposted its 1993 review of Martin Stannard’s two-volume biography of Evelyn Waugh. This is by George Weigel who opens the review with this:
Many great novelists have had intricate, even prickly, personalities. But in Evelyn Waugh, nature and grace worked overtime to produce an extraordinary character, a full understanding of whose complexities would require the combined skills of an archaeologist, a psychiatrist, and a Jesuit confessor of the old school. Martin Stannard, a lecturer in English at the University of Leicester, doesn’t quite fit that bill. Still, and with far more acuity than was evident in Christopher Sykes’ earlier study, the multiple levels of Waugh’s persona are laid bare and, in some instances, gracefully, even insightfully, explored in Stannard’s recently completed two-volume biography. (The latter volume, which avoids the excessive Freudianism of the former, is in most respects the superior effort.)
Who, or what, was Evelyn Waugh? He was, touching but the surface of the man and his art, a brilliant satirist—one of the funniest writers of the century. But the humor was combined with a literary craftsmanship unsurpassed among his contemporaries (although Waugh himself would protest here in favor of Wodehouse). To take but one local comparison: Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanitiesis a splendid dissection of contemporary American manias—race, sex, money, status; but for all its wit and insight, the scalpel of Wolfe’s wit in his massive Bonfire cuts nowhere near the heart of American materialism’s peculiar darkness so cleanly as did Waugh in his little novella, The Loved One. Nor does it involve any diminution of Wolfe’s accomplishments to suggest that the difference between these two wildly funny authors is rather easily stated: Wolfe is a brilliant writer, but Waugh was a genius, and (at least at his work) a disciplined genius to boot. Indeed, Waugh was a master craftsman of English prose, arguably the finest since Henry James…
The full review is available here.
–Another Waugh biographer and member of the Evelyn Waugh Society is interviewed on the website Flashbak.com. This is Duncan McLaren but the interviewer is not identified. The interview is entitled “Waugh, Waugh, Not Jaw, Jaw: An Introduction to Evelyn Waugh’s Best Books” and a text is posted here.
–An enterprising literary poster printmaker has produced a poster for Brideshead Revisited. The poster may be reviewed at this link and is available for sale. The details are provided on the website
