Evelyn waugh

"Literature is mostly about having sex and not about having children.” So said the British novelist, occasional screenwriter and literary critic David Lodge, who died at the beginning of 2025 at the age of eighty-nine. Lodge, who had suffered from encroaching deafness for several decades, had not, in truth, been a major literary figure for a considerable period before his death. This retreat into obscurity had not been helped by a trio of memoirs, beginning with 2015’s Quite a Good Time To Be Born, which perplexed critics — including this one — with their dour, downbeat and decidedly un-humorous tone. Few would have known, from reading them, that their author had once been regarded as one of the late twentieth century’s most accomplished comic novelists.

T.S. Eliot once made the significant point, in an essay on Philip Massinger, that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Eliot knew exactly what he was talking about (himself). However, change “poets” to “novelists” and the same pertinence applies. In fact, this wholesale, covert purloining may be true of all artists in all ages in all the seven arts. Let’s start with some backstory. Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), as they say, needs no introduction. William Gerhardie (1895-1977) is almost wholly forgotten today, but in the 1920s he was the luminous young wunderkind of English literature — a kind of Donna Tartt or Sally Rooney of his times.

I am convinced that the sweet-smelling tycoons that run candle-making companies must have read too much Proust when they were younger. With scents like “Inspire,” “Bohemia,” and “Sunny Daydream,” they cannot be aiming for something as cheap and transitory as mere tawdry olfactory pleasure. They must have become all but obsessed by À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and be aiming for something akin to his narrator’s nostalgic odyssey upon tasting a madeleine: “and at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory.” Rather pretentious, oui — but what other excuse can there be for a candle that proclaims it can smell like a cool library at midnight, or the depths of some dreamy reverie?

The English author and curmudgeon Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) is today best known for his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. A luxuriant evocation of the beauties of pre-World War Two Oxford, coupled with a cautionary narrative about the destructive power of Catholic guilt, it has remained a constant favorite with everyone from college students to literature scholars. It was memorably filmed for British television in 1981, and it launched the careers of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews as, respectively, the novel’s narrator Charles Ryder and the flamboyant aesthete Sebastian Flyte.

Evelyn Waugh is popularly known today as a comic author, despite the fact that Brideshead Revisited, made famous by the eponymous 1981 television series, is certainly not a comedy. Not everyone agrees. Years ago, a well-read friend of mine remarked to me that he was not fond of Waugh’s work. When I asked why, he replied, ‘Because I don’t think he’s that funny.’ I answered that the way to appreciate the exquisite wit of Evelyn Waugh is to approach him in the expectation of something other than humor, in which case the absurd incongruities, outrageous juxtapositions and ludicrous extremes that occur throughout the novels are in fact supremely funny. Waugh never set out to write comedic stories in the manner of P.G.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Encapsulations of a particular art-world demographic nearly always fall wide of the mark. Just as there were plenty of people on hand in the 1950s to protest that the Angry Young Men were neither especially angry nor exclusively male, so countless chroniclers of interwar social life complained that the Bright Young People were neither bright nor young. But the critic Peter Quennell’s phrase ‘Lost Girls’ to describe the gang of female twenty-somethings who worked on the magazines and populated the parties of Blitz-era literary London carries an unmistakable tang of conviction.