Volume 23, Number 1 · February 5, 1976
The Possessed
By Noel Annan
Evelyn Waugh: A Biography
by Christopher Sykes
Little-Brown, 468 pp., $12.50
Evelyn Waugh's Officers, Gentlemen & Rogues: The Fact Behind His Fiction
by Gene D. Phillips
Nelson-Hall, 270 pp., $9.95
Evelyn Waugh was the greatest novelist of his generation in England. His generous friend, Graham Greene, thought so, though some would say it of him and others might choose Elizabeth Bowen or Ivy Compton-Burnett. Waugh was fiercely English, and Americans have found his work parochial and too full of in-jokes. Indeed to Americans the whole English achievement looks slight when set beside the works of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and all the other interwar writers. Waugh weighed his own worth to a hair's-breadth. He despised those who called him a genius. But he knew himself to be a master of English prose, a craftsman who worked at his plots. He had many talents and, like the good and faithful servant in the parable, put them out to usury and doubled them by his self-discipline and sheer technical skill so that as time passes his more ambitious and wide-ranging contemporaries, so self-consciously full of social purpose, look sloppy, verbose, and naïve beside him.
Review, 5913 words
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