Other Oxford contemporaries have spoken of him in a harsher vein: "A bitter little man" -- "A social climber."

After two years, Waugh voluntarily left Oxford without a degree, and, like Paul Pennyfeather of Decline and Fall, took a job in a school for backward boys. Later, he worked for sixteen days on Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express. His ambition was to be a painter, but a stint at art school left him dissatisfied with his talent. At this time, he has said, he was a pagan and "wanted to be a man of the world" -- a well-rounded English gentleman in the eighteenth-century tradition. He joined in the whirl of Michael Arlen's Mayfair. He "gadded among savages and people of fashion and politicians and crazy generals ... because I enjoyed them." But he was a worldling who could relish all this and still find it wanting. In 1930, after instruction from the celebrated Father D'Arcy, Waugh entered the Catholic Church.

A few months earlier, his marriage to the Honorable Evelyn Gardner had ended in divorce. In 1937, he married again. His second wife was a Catholic: Laura, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel The Honorable Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert, second son of the Earl of Carnarvon.

For nine years, Waugh had traveled often and widely, by preference to wild places. The best parts of the four travel books written during this period were later reprinted in When the Going Was Good, and they are still lively reading. One is periodically reminded, however, that Waugh's touch is surer and more sparkling when he is using these same materials in his comic novels.

With the advent of World War II, Waugh entreated ‘friends in high places’, such as Randolph Churchill - son of Winston, to find him a service commission. Though in his late thirties and of poor eyesight, he was commissioned into the Royal Marines and found more suited for intelligence duties than that of a line officer. He was promoted to Captain but found life in the Marines dull. Following a joint exercise with No.8 Commando (Army), he applied to join them and was accepted earning credit during the evacuation of Crete. Following he was placed on extended leave for three years and reassigned to the Royal Horse Guards as a result of an anti-Catholic purge in the Commandos by Lord Lovat. During this period he wrote ‘Brideshead Revisited’. He was recalled for a military/diplomatic mission to Yugoslavia at the request of his old friend Randolph Churchill. An outcome was a formidable report detailing Tito’s persecution of the clergy which was ‘buried’ by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden (who also attempted to discredit Waugh) to save diplomatic embarrassment as Tito was then a required ally of Britain and official ‘friend’.

In 1947 Waugh visited Hollywood as a guest of MGM to discuss a possible film version of Brideshead Revisited.

"We drove for a long time down autobahns and boulevards full of vacant lots and filling stations and nondescript buildings and palm trees with a warm hazy light. It was more like Egypt - the suburbs of Cairo or Alexandria - than anything in Europe. We arrived at the Bel Air Hotel - very Egyptian with a hint of Addis Ababa in the smell of the blue gums."

Hollywood saw Brideshead purely as a love story. Waugh refused to accept proposed changes and confessed in his diary that he was relieved when the project failed.

After the war, Waugh settled for many years at Piers Court in a secluded part of Gloucestershire, from which he occasionally made sorties to his London clubs. "I live in a shabby stone house," he wrote in Life, "in which nothing is under a hundred years old except the plumbing, and that does not work. I collect old books in an inexpensive, desultory way. [His major avocation was the study of theology.] I have a fast emptying cellar of wine and gardens fast reverting to jungle. I have numerous children [three girls and two boys] whom I see once a day for ten, I hope, awe-inspiring minutes."

A few years previous Randolph Churchill said of Waugh:

"He grows more old-fashioned every day. He seeks to live in an oasis."

Waugh himself affirmed with pride that he was "two hundred years" behind the times, and that there is no political party in existence which he finds sufficiently (in the strictly literal sense of the word) reactionary. He refused to learn to drive a car. He wrote with a pen which had to be continually dipped in the inkwell. And he preferred to communicate even with his neighbors by written message rather than resort to the telephone. A literary friend of Waugh's once delivered a summation which neatly reflects the tenor of the anecdotes about him. It went:

" Oh, I adore Evelyn. He's so frightfully witty and so fearfully rude. Terribly conceited, of course -- and, poor sweet, rather ridiculous. But such a good writer!"

Waugh died in 1966.

In 2001, three of his books were named as part of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the editorial board of the American Modern Library.

b r i d e s h e a d   r e v i s i t e d  :   1 9 4 5

Brideshead Revisited (1945) is a romantic evocation of vanished splendors, which brings into dismal relief the aridity of the present. In the first part, in which the narrator reverts to his youth at Oxford, Waugh's artistic sense seldom falters. Ryder's discovery of a magic world of freedom and intoxicating pleasures through his friendship with Sebastian, the younger son of a noble and wealthy Catholic family, and the accompanying contrast between the dryness of Ryder's home life and the charm of the Marchmains -- these passages are among the most memorable that Waugh has written. But, in the second part -- Ryder's unhappy marriage and love affair with Sebastian's sister; Sebastian's descent into alcoholism; Lord Marchmain's irregular and resplendent life in Venice, and his death in his ancestral home -- those failings of Waugh's which were discussed earlier run riot. And, as they take command, the characterization grows unreal, the atmosphere becomes sententious, the style turns overripe.

Charles Ryder is shaken out of his ill-mannered anti-Catholicism when the dying Lord Marchmain, who has lived outside the Church, makes a sign indicating his consent to receiving the final sacrament. But Ryder has been portrayed as so insensitive to religion and so sensitive to the prestige of great families that one is left, as Edmund Wilson has observed, with an uneasy feeling that it was not "the sign" that made Ryder kneel beside the deathbed, but the vision of this Catholic family's greatness conjured up in Lord Marchmain's earlier monologue: "We were ... barons since Agincourt; the larger honors came with the Georges ..." (and so on).

e v e l y n   w a u g h  :  s e l e c t e d   b o o k s