The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
Reviewed by Roger Gathman, Fri., Sept. 17, 1999
The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
by Evelyn Waugh
Little, Brown and Company, $29.95 hard
Evelyn Waugh was a cruel, faddish, reactionary snob -- a pattern, in other words, to succeeding English satirists like Martin Amis and Will Self. Reading his short stories, the striking thing is how the fashionable stories have faded. Stories like "Love in the Slump," "Mr. Loveday's Little Outing," or "Winner Takes All," which at the time glittered with the sinister charm of an invitation to have tea with Aleister Crowley, now seem merely thuggish, Saki trimmed out with Jazz Age flourishes. The best stories are from the period just before Brideshead Revisited -- just before, that is, ornamentation crept over the sense, like ivy creeping over a brick wall. The two chapters of Work Suspended are about the best Waugh could do -- for once the contrast of high rhetoric with the invariable viciousness of interwar life (which seems, viz. Anthony Powell, George Orwell, et al., to have been an extremely bitchy low point in English intellectual life) works on all levels. The story of a mystery writer's plan to seduce his best friend's wife really does point to the vacuousness of all human relations, invariably shored up by vanity and, as the writer of Ecclesiastes pointed out long ago, undone by accident. We all realize this, on some level, and repress it. Waugh is at his strongest when he trumps us with it.
