Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We have a stack
of research on the desk today that is, quite
frankly, difficult to categorize. It really is.
We are looking at a man who, I mean, he spent
his entire life building a fortress around himself.
A fortress made of tweed, cigar smoke, and some
of the most lethal wit in the English day. We
are talking about Evelyn Waugh. Yeah. And if
you know the name... you probably have a very,
very specific image in your head. Oh, I'm sure.
You're likely picturing the crusty colonel, the
older Wa. Right. The man who looked like an angry
bullfrog in a three -piece suit, who, you know,
hated the Beatles, hated plastic, refused to
drive a car. And treated the telephone like it
was an instrument of torture devised by the devil.
Exactly. That is the caricature. Absolutely.
The grand old man of letters who just seemed
to exist solely to grumble about the decline
of Western civilization. But the fascinating
thing about this deep dive, and I think the reason
you're going to be surprised, is that this persona,
it wasn't who he really was. Or at least it wasn't
who he started out as. That's the hook for me.
It really is. Because when you dig into the biography.
You don't find a conservative curmudgeon in the
beginning. Not at all. No. You find a rebel.
You find a heavy drinking, sexually fluid, wild
bohemian running around 1920s London with the
bright young things. It's almost like looking
at two different people. It really is. So how
does that happen? Well, it creates this central
tension that runs through his entire life. On
one hand, you have the prose stylist, widely
considered one of the greatest writers of the
20th century. I mean, a man capable of writing
English sentences that are so elegant, so precise,
and so funny that they make other writers want
to just snap their pencils in half. And on the
other hand? On the other hand, you have this
reputation as the nastiest tempered man in England.
A bully, a snob. A monster. Some people called
him that. Yes, a monster. So the mission today
is to bridge that gap. We need to figure out
how the bullied son of a publisher transformed
into this literary icon and then into the monster
of his later years. We want to understand the
mask. Was the nasty persona real or was it a
performance art piece that just got out of hand?
I think to understand the mask, you have to look
at the face underneath it. And that face was
formed in Hampstead, London in 1903. Let's start
there. The family dynamic. Yeah. Because reading
through the early biography, it feels like the
script for a psychological drama. It does. Evelyn
Waugh was born into a very literary household.
His father, Arthur Waugh, was a publisher and
a well -known critic. On paper, it sounds like
the perfect environment for a budding writer.
On paper, yes. In reality, it was a battlefield.
There was a very specific and I'd say very painful
geometry to the Waugh family. What do you mean
by geometry? Well, Evelyn was incredibly close
to his mother, Catherine. He was a mummy's boy
in those early years. She taught him to read.
She nurtured him. But he was almost completely
excluded by his father. And this wasn't just
a case of a distant Victorian father, was it?
This was active favoritism. Oh, it was flagrant.
Arthur Waugh had a profound, almost obsessive
bond with his elder son, Alec. Alec Waugh. Alec
was five years older. He was the golden boy.
He was the athlete, the cricketer, the one who
could do no wrong. Arthur doted on him. Wow.
And there are these heartbreaking stories of
Evelyn sitting in the corner, literally watching
his father fawn over Alec, feeling like a ghost
in his own house. The spare to the air dynamic,
but played out in a middle class drawing room.
Exactly. And psychologists and literary biographers,
for that matter, they point to this as the foundational
trauma of Waugh's life. That feeling of exclusion.
That feeling of exclusion of being the lesser
son, the outsider looking in. It didn't make
him withdraw, though. That's the key thing. It
made him pugnacious. It lit a fire. It did. He
realized early on that if he couldn't be the
favorite, he would be the most noticeable. He
had to fight for attention. So he develops this
wit as a weapon. A sharp attacking wit. as a
defense mechanism. Even as a child at his prep
school, Heath Mount, he described himself as
a clever little boy, but he also admitted, quite
candidly, that he was a bully. A self -admitted
bully. Yes. There's a specific anecdote about
this that I love, simply for the sheer celebrity
irony of it. What? He went to school with Cecil
Beaton. No way. The Cecil Beaton. The future
society photographer. The man who would go on
to photograph the queen and define the aesthetic
of the mid -20th century. And Evelyn Waugh, this
small, aggressive child. Bullied him mercilessly.
That's incredible. It's a clash of titans before
they were titans. It is. But it shows that Waugh
was already asserting dominance, using his wit
and his cruelty to establish a pecking order.
He was also writing, of course. Even then. Oh,
yes. He wrote a story called The Curse of the
Horse Race as a child. You can already see the
dark humor, the cynicism bubbling up. He wasn't
writing sweet stories about bunnies. No, he was
writing about c - curses, and betting, but the
real turning point, the moment that really solidified
his status as the outsider, involved his brother
Alec again. We have to talk about the Alec scandal.
This sounds juicy. This is a crucial piece of
context that often gets overlooked. The plan,
the expectation, was that Evelyn would follow
the family tradition. His father went to Sherbourne
School. Alec went to Sherbourne School. So Evelyn
was supposed to go to Sherbourne School. It was
his birthright. And Alec blew it up. Completely.
Alec was expelled from Sherbourne for a homosexual
relationship. Wow. Now, in the context of British
public schools at the time, this kind of thing
happened. But it was usually handled with quiet
discretion. You were sent home and no one spoke
of it. Alec Waugh did not do discretion. He wrote
a book about it. He wrote a book about it. The
Loom of Youth. He wrote it while waiting for
his military commission, and it was a sensation,
a bestseller. What was in it? It exposed the
reality of public school life, the cruelty, the
sports obsession, and yes, the romantic friendships
between boys. It was scandalously explicit for
the time. And the fallout for the family was
nuclear. The headmaster of Sherbourne was so
offended that he basically blacklisted the entire
Waugh family. He told Arthur Waugh that no son
of his would ever be welcome at Sherbourne again.
So Evelyn is punished for his brother's sins.
He was collateral damage. He was forced to go
to Lansing College instead. And Lansing was?
Lansing is a perfectly fine school, but in Evelyn's
mind, in that class -obsessed, hierarchy -obsessed
mind, It was inferior. It was second rate. He
felt he had been downgraded. It was a humiliation
that he blamed on his father and his brother
for the rest of his life. But this is where we
see the pattern that defines his life. When he's
put in a situation he hates, he doesn't just
endure it. He subverts it. He absolutely does.
He arrives at Lansing and instead of trying to
fit in with the sporty types, he goes the complete
opposite direction. He creates a counterculture.
He becomes an esthete. He becomes an esthete.
He mocks the school's cadet corps, which was
taken very seriously during the war years. And
he founds a club. And the name of this club is
just, it's pure Evelyn Waugh. The Corpse Club.
The Corpse Club. I love that. And the membership
requirement was that you had to be board stiff.
That is fantastic. It's so teenage, so angsty,
but also genuinely funny. It is. It's performance
art. He's taking his boredom and his disdain
and turning it into a badge of honor. And he
also loses his faith around this time. He sheds
his religious beliefs completely. He went into
Lansing as a boy with a vague faith and came
out a devout atheist. He wanted to shock. He
wanted to be the smartest, most cynical person
in the room. But he survives Lansing, he gets
the grades, and he heads to Oxford. Hertford
College, 1922. Right. And this is the era we
associate with Brideshead Revisited. But the
reality of Woz Oxford wasn't initially the champagne
-soaked nostalgia trip we might expect. No, not
at all. He started off trying to be a serious
student. He smoked a pipe, he rode a bicycle,
he spoke at the Oxford Union debates on political
history. He's trying to be the good student.
The good student his father wanted. But then,
the bright young people arrived. The influencers
of the 1920s. Exactly. Pictures like Harold Acton
and Brian Howard. These were Etonians. They were
wealthy. They were sophisticated. They wore makeup.
They recited poetry through megaphones. They
were avant -garde and aggressively modern. And
Waugh was drawn to that. It was mesmerized by
them. And he didn't just watch them. He joined
them. He dove in headfirst. He became the secretary
of the Hypocrites Club. The Hypocrites Club.
The names are just perfect. Again, the name tells
you everything. The Hypocrites Club was the epicenter
of the bad crowd. It was artistic, socially fluid,
and sexually fluid. Waugh later wrote that this
club was the stamping ground of half my Oxford
life. When we say sexually fluid, we should be
specific. This was a period of intense experimentation
for him. It was. He embarked on several homosexual
relationships. The sources highlight Richard
Pears and, most significantly, a man named Alistair
Graham. Alistair Graham. That name is important,
isn't it? It's a name that literary detectives
always circle because he's a prototype. He is
widely considered the primary inspiration for
Sebastian Flight in Brideshead Revisited. So
beautiful, aristocratic. Charming and doomed.
Waugh was infatuated with him. This wasn't just
experimentation for him. It was deep emotional
attachment. But while he's having this intense
social and romantic life, his academic life is
just... imploding he completely stopped working
he spent all his money on clothes and alcohol
and this led to a feud that is honestly one of
the funniest and most petty chapters in literary
history oh is this a tutor the feud with his
history tutor crmf crutwell we have to unpack
the crutwell feud because most people if they
don't like a teacher they complain to their friends
and then move on Waugh did not move on. No. Crutwell
was a serious academic. He saw Waugh as a wasted
talent, a drunk, and a nuisance. He tried to
advise Waugh to pull himself together, and Waugh
responded with what he later called fatuous haughtiness.
So they despised each other. They did. But Waugh
played the long game. The very long game. For
the rest of his writing career, I mean decades
later, whenever Waugh needed a name for a truly
detestable, odious character, he named them Crutwell.
Give us some examples. I need to hear this. Okay.
In his novels, the name Cretwell appears as a
burglar, a fake tan salesman, a fake tan salesman,
a homicidal maniac, even a minor character who
exists solely to be humiliated in some way. It
was this running joke that only Waugh and his
friends really got, but it was his way of getting
the last laugh over and over again. The level
of grudge holding is almost admirable. It's a
commitment. It really is. But the grudge didn't
save his degree. No. The partying caught up with
him. He received a third class degree, which
was a disaster for a scholarship boy. He lost
his funding. He couldn't return for his final
term. He left Oxford in disgrace. No degrees.
No degree. Mountains of debt and absolutely no
prospects. In his mental state at this point,
what was that like? Fragile. Extremely fragile.
His letters from this time talk about severe
emotional pressures and feeling nearly insane.
He felt he had completely blown his chance at
life. This ushers in what you'd call the lost
years, right? The mid -1920s. Exactly. He's bouncing
around trying to find a footing. He tries art
school fails. He takes a series of teaching jobs
in terrible schools. Hates them. And gets fired
from one in spectacular fashion, I read. Oh,
yes. He was dismissed from a teaching post at
a place called Aston Clinton for the attempted
drunken seduction of a school matron. You can't
make this stuff up. It sounds like a scene from
one of his later novels. It's pure slapstick,
but with a really dark undercurrent. And that
darkness bottoms out in 1925. This is the jellyfish
incident. Okay. This is the story I was waiting
for. This is the moment where tragedy and comedy
collide perfectly. Wah is depressed. He feels
like a complete failure. He decides to commit
suicide. So walk us through the scene. Where
is he? He goes down to the beach near his school.
He leaves a suicide note with his clothes on
the sand, like something out of a Victorian melodrama.
Very dramatic. And he walks into the water and
begins to swim out to sea, fully intending to
drown himself. He's ready to die, and then he
gets stung by a jellyfish. A jellyfish. A jellyfish.
The pain was sharp and immediate, and being Evelyn
Waugh, a man who hated discomfort even more than
he hated life at that moment, he decided that
being stung was simply too unpleasant. So the
sting snapped him out of it. Completely. It broke
the trance. He turned around, swam back to shore,
put his clothes on, and tore up the note. It's
incredible. The sheer absurdity of it saved him.
If it had been a shark, he might be a tragic
figure. But a jellyfish makes it a funny story.
It's the perfect Waugh anecdote. It undercuts
the romance of suicide with the stinging reality
of nature. He couldn't even kill himself without
it turning into a farce. So he survives. And
shortly after this, things seem to stabilize
a bit. He meets a woman, Evelyn Gardner. Yes.
And because her name was Evelyn and his name
was Evelyn, their circle, which, you know, loved
a good joke, called them he Evelyn and she Evelyn.
That's cute. But the foundations were rotten
from the start, weren't they? They were. They
married in 1928, but it was against her family's
wishes. Her mother, Lady Burclare, thought Waugh
was bad news. And looking at his resume at the
time. She wasn't wrong. Failed degree, debts,
the drinking. She said he lacked moral fiber.
But professionally, this is the moment he breaks
through, isn't it? He publishes Decline and Fall.
Yes. 1928. It's an instant classic. It's hilarious.
It's biting. It captures the madness of the era.
Suddenly, Waugh isn't the failed teacher anymore.
He's the hottest young writer in London. He has
money. He has fame. He has a wife. Things are
looking up. And then the rug gets pulled out.
The betrayal. This is the event that I think
really hardens him. While Waugh was away in the
country writing travel articles, you know, working
to support them, Evelyn confessed that she was
having an affair. And not just with anyone. No.
with their mutual friend, John Haygate, a man
they socialized with, a man Waugh trusted. That
double betrayal must have been devastating. It
broke him. He filed for divorce in 1929. But
the psychological wound went deep. Biographers
argue that this betrayal is the root of the misogyny
and the deep cynicism about human relationships
that pervades his later work. He decided people
couldn't be trusted. And specifically women in
his mind. He just shut down that part of himself.
So he's alone again. He's heartbroken. The bright
young thing party is over. And in 1930, he makes
a move that completely baffles his bohemian friends.
He converts to Roman Catholicism. This was headline
news in his circle. Why would the cynical, modern,
debauched Evelyn Waugh join the most traditional,
rigid institution on Earth? It made no sense
to them. It wasn't an emotional born again experience,
was it? It was something else. No, not at all.
It was intellectual. He took instruction from
Father Martin Darcy, a brilliant Jesuit. Waugh
approached it like a logic problem. A logic problem.
He looked at the world, the chaos, the betrayal,
the lack of moral fiber, and he decided that
without a structure, without God, life was meaningless.
He wrote that life is unintelligible and unendurable
without God. Unintelligible and unendurable.
That is a terrifying phrase. It implies that
without the church, he felt like he was staring
into an abyss. Exactly. He needed the rules.
He needed the order. There's a famous story.
It's maybe apocryphal, but it rings so true.
Where a friend asked him years later, Evelyn,
you're so mean. You're so nasty. How can you
call yourself a Christian? And the response?
Was said, you have no idea how much nastier I
would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural
aid, I would hardly be a human being. Wow. That
is profound self -awareness. He's admitting that
the religion isn't a cure. It's a leash. It was
the cage for the monster. He believed that without
the sacraments, without confession, he would
be a moral vacuum. So we enter the 1930s. He's
now Catholic, divorced, and famous. And he decides
to see the world. But he doesn't go on luxury
cruises. He goes to the rough spots. He does.
The 1930s were his era of the traveler. He became
a special correspondent for newspapers. He wanted
to go where the trouble was. In 1930, he went
to Abyssinia, modern -day Ethiopia, to cover
the coronation of Emperor Hael Selassie. Now,
most of the world press treated this as this
majestic, exotic event, the Lion of Judah. The
pageantry. Well, hated it. He hated it. He saw
it as a sham. He saw a brutal, disorganized regime
trying to put on a costume show for the West.
He viewed it with utter cynicism. He called it
a propaganda effort. And this trip gave us the
novel Black Mischief. But he went back a few
years later in 1935 when Mussolini invaded. And
this is where we have to talk about his politics,
which were complicated. Complicated is a very
generous word. They were controversial then,
and they are definitely controversial now. Waugh
supported the Italian invasion. He supported
the fascists. He did. Now, it wasn't because
he was a card -carrying fascist, but because
he was obsessed with the idea of civilization
with a capital C. So how did he rationalize that?
He viewed Abyssinia as savage and chaotic. He
viewed the Italians, who were fellow Catholics,
heirs to the Roman Empire, as the bringers of
order and roads and structure. He wrote a book,
Wall in Abyssinia, that was so pro -Italian that
critics at the time called it a fascist tract.
It's important to understand this, not to judge
him, but to see how his obsession with order
could blind him to the brutality of the invasion.
Precisely. His fear of chaos was so strong that
he would side with the dictator if he believed
it meant maintaining structure. But looking at
the silver lining of his journalism career, his
frustration with the press pack gave us one of
the greatest comic novels ever written. If you
haven't read Scoop, you are missing out on something
wonderful. It is the ultimate satire of journalism.
It came directly from his experience in Abyssinia,
watching reporters lie, cheat, and just invent
stories because they were too lazy to find the
truth. He skewered the fake news of his day before
the term even existed. He then went to South
America, right? British, Guyana, and Brazil.
Yes, and it was a miserable trip. He was bored,
hot, and lonely. but his misery is our game because
it inspired his novel A Handful of Dust. We have
to talk about the ending of that book. We won't
spoil the whole plot, but the ending is iconic.
It's legendary. It is a pure nightmare scenario.
The protagonist, Tony Last, is this civilized
English gentleman who ends up trapped in the
Amazon jungle, held captive by an illiterate
settler who forces him to read the complete works
of Charles Dickens aloud over and over again,
forever. That's chilling. It's the ultimate hell
for a man like Wa trapped in squalor, forced
to consume sentimentality. And the crazy thing
is, Wa wrote that ending as a short story first.
He liked it so much, he basically said, I have
to write a novel just to get to this ending.
He built the whole book around that one nightmarish
image. During all this wandering, all this travel,
he was effectively homeless, wasn't he? He was.
He was sleeping on sofas, staying at clubs. He
was a nomad. But he eventually found a new anchor.
laura herbert laura herbert and in true wa fashion
it wasn't simple no laura was young she was from
an aristocratic catholic family which was perfect
on paper for him but she was the first cousin
of his first wife she evelyn the family tree
is a wreath that is so awkward it made things
very awkward but wall was determined He spent
years petitioning the Catholic Church to annul
his first marriage so he could marry Laura in
the church. And he got it. He finally succeeded.
They married in 1937. Her grandmother bought
them a manor house, Pierce Court. So he finally
has the country estate. He has the Catholic wife.
He has the religion. He's playing the part of
the English gentleman. And then, 1939. Hitler
invades Poland. And Wa, at age 36, decides he
must fight. This is one of the most baffling
parts of his life to me. Here is a man who is
physically unfit, hates authority, is rude to
subordinates, and is generally impossible to
work with. And he joins the Royal Marines. Why?
He was a terrible soldier. Let's be absolutely
clear. He was brave. He had no fear of death.
But he was a management nightmare. The training
almost broke him physically. He said his spine
was so stiff he couldn't even hold a pen. But
the real problem was his personality. He treated
his platoon like they were servants. Worse. He
was haughty, sarcastic, and cold. He refused
to bond with the men. It got so bad that when
he was stationed in Scotland, his commanding
officer had to transfer him to an intelligence
role. Why? Because the officer was genuinely
terrified that if they went into combat, Wa's
own men would shoot him in the back. That is
a staggering level of unpopularity. You have
to move you so you don't get fragged by your
own troops. That's how bad it was. But he did
see action. He was at the Battle of Dakar, a
failed operation, and he was in Crete during
the evacuation. The retreat from Crete was a
disaster. It was chaos. Officers fleeing, soldiers
surrendering. Wa maintained his composure, but
he was disgusted. He saw cowardice and disorder.
It shattered any romantic illusions he had about
the glory of war. So he realized war was just
another form of modern chaos. Exactly. And amidst
this disillusionment, after he breaks his leg
in a parachuting accident, he takes leave. He
goes to a hotel in Devon. And while the world
is burning, he writes a book about a teddy bear
and a stately home. Brideshead Revisited. This
is the pivot point. This is the big one. It's
the book that changed his life and his legacy.
Up until this point, Waugh was known for satire.
Decline and fall, vile bodies, they were sharp,
jagged, cynical. Brideshead is different. How
so? It's lush, it's emotional, it's sentimental.
He called it a love letter to a vanished age.
He genuinely believed that the English aristocracy
was going to be wiped out by the war and the
socialist government that he was sure would follow.
He wanted to preserve that world in amber. It's
also his first explicitly Catholic novel. It's
about the operation of grace on a group of sinners.
The public reaction was massive. Especially in
America. It became a book of the month club selection.
It made him genuinely wealthy for the first time.
But the critics. They turned on him. He thought
he had gone soft. They thought he had gone snobbish.
Connor Cruz O 'Brien famously attacked the book
for its mystical veneration of the upper classes.
They said he was worshipping the rich. Do I agree?
Later in life, he kind of did. He admitted he
had overdone it. He said he had been on a simplistic
food diet during wartime rationing. So when he
wrote the book, he gorged himself on rich language.
He compared the book to eating too much whipped
cream. But whipped cream or not, it stands as
a masterpiece of style. Absolutely. The sentences
are perfect. You can't deny the beauty of the
prose. There is one last chapter to his war,
the Yugoslavia mission. This is a fascinating
historical footnote. Waugh was recruited by Randolph
Churchill Winston's son to go to Yugoslavia and
act as a liaison with Marshall Tito's communist
partisans. A conservative Catholic meeting a
communist revolutionary. What could go wrong?
It was a disaster waiting to happen. Wall hated
Tito. He saw the partisans not as liberators,
but as the next oppressors. And he became obsessed
with the fate of the Catholic Church in Croatia.
He saw that the communists were going to persecute
the priests. So he wrote a report about it. A
very detailed report warning the British government
that their new ally, Tito, was going to destroy
the church. And the government buried it. The
foreign office suppressed it. It was real politic.
Britain needed Tito to kill Nazis. They didn't
care about a few priests in Croatia. So he felt
betrayed. Totally betrayed. He felt that the
war, which was supposed to be a crusade against
evil, had just traded one evil Nazism for another
communism. This betrayal sets the stage for the
post -war war. The monster emerges fully formed.
He returned to England a bitter man. The Labor
Party won the 1945 election. The welfare state
was born. The age of the common man. Wa hated
it. He absolutely loathed it. He felt like a
stranger in his own country. He retreated to
his country house and basically put up the drawbridge.
He did. He became an eccentric collector. He
started buying Victorian paintings, narrative
art, fairy paintings, which in the late 40s were
considered absolute junk. Really? Oh, yeah. He
bought a Rossetti painting for 10 pounds. That's
like buying a Van Gogh at a garage sale today.
People laughed at him, but he loved that era.
He wanted to live in the 19th century. He surrounded
himself with the past to block out the present.
But the walls he built couldn't keep out his
own demons, could they? In 1954, the fortress
collapsed. The breakdown. This is the story of
the ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. By the 1950s,
Waugh was in bad shame physically. He was drinking
heavily, and he was taking a massive amount of
chloral and bromide to help him sleep. A dangerous
cocktail. A very dangerous cocktail. He decided
to take a cruise to Ceylon, what's now Sri Lanka,
to recover his health. But as soon as he got
on the ship... Things got weird. He started hearing
voices. Vivid, distinct voices. He thought the
other passengers were whispering about him. He
thought there was a mutiny on board. He heard
a jazz band playing that didn't exist. He heard
the voice of a BBC interviewer mocking him from
the ventilation ducts. So he was having full
-blown hallucinations. Full -blown psychosis.
He wrote these letters home to his wife, Laura,
detailing these persecutions as if they were
fact. The captain is against me. Things like
that. He eventually got off the ship, flew back
to London, and was diagnosed with bromide poisoning.
He was poisoning himself with his sleeping meds.
Yes. Once he stopped the drugs, the voices stopped.
But what makes this deep dive worthy is what
he did next. Most people would hide this shame.
Waugh wrote a novel about it. The Ordeal of Gilbert
Pinfold. He fictionalized his own madness. He
called it his barmy book. He told friends, I
went clean off my onion. It was a way of reclaiming
control. Turning his vulnerability into art.
Exactly. And it's arguably his most revealing
book because it shows us the paranoia that was
always lurking just beneath the surface of that
crusty exterior. We're nearing the end of the
timeline. We're in the 1960s. Waugh is now the
grand old man. He's interviewed on that famous
BBC show Face to Face. If you look it up on YouTube,
you see the mask in full effect. He sits there
looking like a grumpy toad, answering questions
with monosyllables, treating the interviewer
with utter disdain. He played the part to perfection.
Oh, completely. He even refused a CBE, a Commander
of the British Empire award, because he felt
he deserved a knighthood. I am not a commoner.
I deserve a sir. Pure entitlement. But tragic
in a way. He was holding on to a hierarchy that
no longer existed. And then the final blow. The
one thing that had sustained him. The church
changed. Vatican II. Right. The Catholic Church
decided to modernize. They moved from the Latin
mass to the vernacular. Mass in English. Handshakes.
Guitars in church. For a traditionalist like
Waugh, this was heresy. It broke his heart. It
truly did. He wrote, The buggering up of the
church is a deep sorrow to me. He felt that the
church had surrendered to the modern world. The
mystery was gone. The mystery was gone. The Latin,
which linked him to history, to the saints, to
that sense of order, was gone. It's almost poetic
that he didn't live long in that new world. No.
He died on Easter Sunday, 1966. He had just come
home from hearing a Latin mass, one of the few
places that still offered it. He went into his
library and passed away. He was buried at his
home in Cum Flore. So we look back at this whole
stack of research. The bullied boy. The Oxfordist
thete. The traveler. The soldier. The monster.
Who was he? It's the question that biographers
still fight over. Was he a monster? There are
so many stories of him being incredibly cruel,
telling his own children they were boring, insulting
guests at his dinner table. But then there are
also stories of him giving huge amounts of money
to poor friends, visiting the sick, anonymously.
I think the key is the mask. Paula Byrne, a wonderful
biographer, suggests that the Krusty Colonel
was a character he created. A suit of armor.
A defense mechanism. A very effective one. If
he acted like a monster, people would keep their
distance. And he couldn't be hurt. He couldn't
be betrayed like he was by his first wife or,
you know, by his father. But it came at a cost.
It came at a huge cost. He died a lonely man
in many ways. And yet... The books survive. The
books survive. And that is the ultimate redemption,
isn't it? You can hate his politics. You can
hate his snobbery. You can hate the way he treated
his kids. But you cannot read a paragraph of
Scoop or Brideshead or a handful of dust and
deny the genius. Clive James said, nobody ever
wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English. That's
it. In an age where we communicate in emojis
and broken sentences, Waugh's obsession with
the right word, the perfect cadence, the precise
insult, it's a masterclass. He predicted that
literature might die. He thought the modern world
would kill the attention span required for art.
And maybe that's our final thought. Maybe that's
why we need to read him now more than ever. To
prove him wrong. Or maybe to realize he was right
and appreciate what we've lost. So if a listener
has never read a word of Waugh, where do they
start? I'd say if you want to laugh until your
sides hurt, read Scoop. If you want to be swept
away by beauty and sadness and nostalgia, read
Brideshead Revisited. You can't go wrong with
either. A complex man. A difficult life. But
an incredible legacy. Thanks for walking us through
the life of Evelyn Waugh. My pleasure. It was
fascinating. And thank you for listening to The
Deep Dive. We'll see you next time.