Volume 3, Number 8 · December 3, 1964
Waugh Revisited
By John Gross
A Little Learning
by Evelyn Waugh
Little, Brown, 234 pp., $5.00
English novelists seldom produce first-rate autobiographies, and even when they do the results tend to be pretty unrevealing. Perhaps they feel that they have already given away more than enough in their fiction. At any rate, the first volume of Evelyn Waugh's memoirs keeps well within the reticent tradition of Trollope in his Autobiography or Kipling in Something of Myself. Waugh's manner has always been that of a man ready to set the dogs on trespassers; and if the mood of A Little Learning is surprisingly mellow, at no point can it be said to take us very far into the author's confidence. It is a book which lives down to its title: for the most part it deals with Waugh's schooldays and his undergraduate years at Oxford, but it contains little about education, either literary or sentimental, while the 'brief history of my religious opinions' is brief indeed (three pages). The tone throughout is relaxed and bantering. Some memorable characters wander across the stage, but they are invariably seen through the wrong end of the telescope; while it is all of a piece that the darkest moment in the book should quickly be turned into farce. While teaching at a prep school in North Wales, the young Waugh fell prey to suicidal gloom. One night he could bear it no more; he went down to the beach and started swimming out to sea, leaving behind his clothes and a scrap of paper on which he had copied a line from Euripides (in Greek) about the ocean washing away all human sorrows. After a few yards, however, he was forced to turn back. He had been stung by a jelly-fish.
Review, 3051 words
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