Volume 24, Number 20 · December 8, 1977
Fabricated Man
By Nigel Dennis
The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh
edited by Michael Davie
Little, Brown, 818 pp., $17.50
Auberon Waugh says of his father's diaries: '[They] show that the world of Evelyn Waugh's novels did, in fact, exist.' The publishers have put this remark at the top of the blurb and deserve praise for seeing that it marks what is undoubtedly a striking fact about the diaries. When Waugh falls short by leaving some zany unexplained, his editor, Michael Davie, steps forward loyally and gives us the gist of the nut in the footnote or the appendix: the result, when author and editor are both straining like greyhounds in the slips, is as mad as the mysteries of the wildest religion, but with the huge advantage of being true. Waugh's problem as a novelist, one sees suddenly, was to find even standing room only for the members of a society that can never have been equaled for eccentricity in the history of the world:
Review, 3581 words
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