Evelyn Waugh: Neo-Tory

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Introduction. In ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (Polemic, October 1945) Orwell wrote about what he calls Neo-Toryism. It was, he wrote:

Exemplified by such people as Lord Elton, A. P. Herbert, G. M. Young, Professor Pickthorne, by the literature of the Tory Reform Committee, and by such magazines as ‘The New English Review’ and the ‘Nineteenth Century and After’. The real motive force of Neo-Toryism, giving it is nationalistic character, and differentiating it from ordinary Conservatism, is the desire not to recognize that British power and influence have declined. Even those who are realistic enough to see that Britain’s military position is not what it was, tend to claim that ‘English ideas’ (usually left undefined) must dominate the world. All Neo-Tories are anti-Russian, but sometimes the main emphasis is anti-American. The significant thing is that this school of thought seems to be gaining ground among youngish intellectuals, sometimes ex-Communists, who have passed though the usual process of disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The Anglophobe who suddenly becomes violently pro-British is a fairly common figure. Writers who exhibit this tendency are F.A. Voigt, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Kingsmill, and a psychologically similar development can be observed in T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and various of their followers.

In previous articles on this website I looked at the other writers who Orwell labelled Neo-Tories but Evelyn Waugh is worth an entire article. His links with Orwell were covered in Richard Lance Keeble’s excellent article Orwell in the Waugh Zone (August 2020). I will not duplicate it but rather look at Evelyn Waugh’s life. He is best known today for Brideshead Revisited but there was more to him than that.

Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh was born on 28 October 1903 in Hampstead. His father Arthur Waugh was born in 1856, the oldest of the five children of Dr Alexander Waugh a GP. Arthur Waugh studied at Sherborne and New College, Oxford, became a writer and rose to be Managing Director of Chapman and Hall a London publisher whose authors had included Charles Dickens.

In 1893 Arthur Waugh married Catherine Charlotte Raban. They were to have two sons. Evelyn Waugh’s older brother Alexander Raban Alec Waugh was born in Hampstead on 8 July 1898. Evelyn Waugh’s mother taught him to read and write. He then attended Heath Mount a Hampstead Prep School. He would have attended Sherborne but his older brother Alec left there in 1915 under a cloud. to quote the Dictionary of National Biography.

Alec Waugh’s first novel The Loom of Youth was published in 1917. It looked at public school homosexuality, and Sherborne struck him off its Old Boys Roll, despite him then being a Dorset Regiment Officer serving on the Western Front. Alec Waugh had a successful writing career dying in 1981, aged eighty three. He married three times and fathered three children by his second wife.

Evelyn Waugh studied at Lancing College, Sussex. The discipline was harsh and the food bad but he became House Captain and edited the School Magazine. He then attended Hertford College, Oxford. For two terms he studied hard but he then got mixed up with a fast set. He became an active homosexual and a heavy drinker. He got a third in 1924 but did not take his degree. His large debts were cleared by his father.

After briefly studying at an art school Waugh taught at two private schools and a state school. In April 1928 Duckworth published Waugh’s first book Rossetti: his Life and Works about the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His brief study at art school had given him a good knowledge of painting technique. Most of its reviews were good but it made Evelyn little money.

On 27 June 1928 Evelyn Waugh married Evelyn Gardner the granddaughter of the 4^th Earl of Caernarvon. Her family were horrified. In September 1928 Chapman and Hall published his first novel, Decline and Fall. Again it brought him critical acclaim but little money.

Duckworth commissioned Waugh to write a travel book and a shipping line paid for him and his wife to take a belated Mediterranean honeymoon cruise, during which his wife developed double pneumonia and was invalided home. She began an affair and they divorced in 1930.

In 1930 Waugh’s bestselling novel Vile Bodies was published, and he became a Catholic. He continued writing pessimistic, satiric Catholic novels. To counter Catholic criticisms of his writing style, in 1935 his biography of the Elizabethan Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion was published. Waugh also wrote travel books and reviews.

Augustus Dudley Peters was one of Britain’s leading literary agents. He took Evelyn Waugh onto his list and Waugh began to make a good living by writing. A. D. Peters as he was usually known had many famous clients including Evelyn Waugh’s brother Alec, J. C. Squire, Hilaire Belloc, Edmund Blunden, J. B. Priestley, Rebecca West, Sheila Kaye Smith, Terence Rattigan, and C. S. Forester.

Evelyn Waugh twice visited Ethiopia: first in 1930 for The Times to report Haile Selassie’s coronation; and then in 1935 for the Daily Mail to report the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. His experiences there led him to unfashionably sympathise with Mussolini.

After many affairs and crushes Evelyn Waugh got his first marriage annulled and on 17 April 1937 he married his ex-wife’s cousin, Laura Laetitia Gwendolen Evelyn Herbert. They were to have seven children. Her grandmother brought the couple Piers Court a Gloucestershire county house. Even so, he lampooned his new in-laws in his description of the fictional Boot Magna Hall in his 1938 novel Scoop.

Waugh visited Hungary in May 1938 to report the 34^th International Eucharistic Congress for the Catholic Herald. Eucharistic Congresses are Catholic events involving large open air masses and other devotional events. More than a hundred thousand people including fifteen cardinals and 330 bishops attended this one. While travelling through Austria Waugh witnessed Nazi brutality in the aftermath of the March 1938 Anschluss when Nazi Germany annexed Austria.

Waugh visited Mexico and his book Robbery under Law: the Mexican Object Lesson was published in 1939. It attacked the Mexican government’s expropriation of Catholic Church property although his criticism was much tamer than that of another Catholic convert Graham Greene, who had visited Mexico in 1938; and whose novel The Power and the Glory, published in 1940, famously featured a whiskey drinking immoral priest who becomes a Catholic martyr.

Waugh may have respected Mussolini but Hitler was another matter. Evelyn Waugh served as a British Army officer in the Second World War with the Royal Marines, the Commandos, and the Household Cavalry; but broke a leg while learning to parachute. The actions Waugh took part in included the failed attempt to take Dakar from the Vichy French and install Charles De Gaulle there in August 1940; an abortive raid on Bardia in Libya in April 1941; and the evacuation of Crete in May 1941. He served in Yugoslavia with Randolph Churchill in 1944 and took a dislike to Tito’s Communist Partisans. Waugh’s factual war reporting did not endear him to the military.

Brideshead Revisited, Waugh’s most famous novel, was published in 1945. The money rolled in but taxes were high and so were his expenses. He was a dandy and a sybarite and was married with seven children. A visit to the USA where he had become a celebrity aroused mixed feelings in him when a film script of Brideshead Revisited was banned as immoral. He refused to censor it.

In 1950 Waugh’s novel Helena was published. It was about St Helena the mother of Constantine the Roman Emperor who legalised Christianity in AD 313. She allegedly found the True Cross on which Christ was crucified and it was preserved as a relic for many centuries. Fragments of it are still venerated in many Catholic churches. The novel did not sell well.

In 1952 Waugh’s novel Men at Arms a frank book about his war experiences was published. It was the first volume of his Sword of Honour Trilogy. Officers and Gentlemen followed in 1955 and Unconditional Surrender in 1961 completed the trilogy.

Evelyn Waugh was violently hostile to Communism and particularly hated Tito the Yugoslav communist dictator. Tito split from Stalin, visited Britain in 1953, and was lionised by the Conservative second Churchill government. Evelyn Waugh savagely criticised this visit.

For some years Waugh used a bromide, chloral and crème de menthe mix as a sleeping draught. He began hearing imaginary voices mocking him. Everything he said was repeated in his ear. Fearing demonic possession he consulted a Jesuit scholar the Reverend Philip Caraman, who referred him to a Catholic psychologist Dr Eric Benjamin Strauss who diagnosed bromide poisoning. Waugh stopped taking it and recovered. His autobiographical novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) looked at this case.

As a Catholic traditionalist Waugh bitterly opposed the Second Vatican Council’s decision in 1962 to replace the Latin Mass with masses in vernacular languages. He became disillusioned with the Catholic Church and rarely attended church. He died on 10 April 1966 of a heart attack aged sixty two. He left £20,068.

Evelyn Waugh aroused mixed feelings. Some critics saw him as a redundant elitist but others as one of the greatest English twentieth century writers. His admirers included Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Arnold Bennett, Cyril Connolly, David Lodge, Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis. His detractors included some equally famous names notably J. B. Priestley. For the general public his most famous work remains Brideshead Revisited which was televised in 1982.

Evelyn Waugh’s second child and oldest son Auberon Alexander Bron Waugh was born on 28 November 1939; studied at Downside a Catholic School; and won a scholarship to Christ Church College, Oxford. Before going there he did his National Service. In June 1958 while serving on Cyprus his machine gun jammed. He grasped it by the muzzle and shook it until it fired six rounds into him. He lost a lung, several ribs and a finger and never fully recovered his health.

Auberon Waugh studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics for a year at Oxford and then left, becoming a journalist, editor, novelist and literary critic. He posed as a reactionary, disliked the working class, despised politicians, opposed the death penalty and hated war. In 1979 he stood as the Dog Lover’s candidate against the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. Jeremy Thorpe was bisexual and Thorpe’s homosexual lover’s dog had been killed in suspicious circumstances. This gave rise to the slogan Vote Liberal or we will shoot your dog.

Auberon Waugh was married with four children. He died on 17 January 2001 of heart failure aged sixty one. He left more than £2,000,000.

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Noticing that both George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh were born in 1903 David Lebedoff wrote his composite biography, The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War, which was published in 2008. It was reviewed for the Orwell Society by Douglas Kerr here.