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Sykes was way too close to Waugh to worry much about sniffy concepts like objectivity, literary greatness or author-text relativity. So that leaves us with the 700-odd page, radial-bone-fracturing tome by Selina Hastings, which has at long last been reissued.
It was a triumph when it first appeared in 1994 (alas, I was only 14; Decline and Fall, however, should be read by all 14-year-olds), and changing the colour of the cover has made it no less triumphant now. Hastings has what so few biographers possess — the air of a subjective confidante — but she achieves a strangely objective result. Her book is the best of both worlds (Waugh himself lived in two worlds, socially and emotionally, most of his life). Unclear? Well, Hastings is like a silver-permed librarian who has taken you aside to tell you everything she thinks and knows about Waugh the man and his works and his life; yet, as the information novelistically pours forth, we detect the stamp of true scholarship.
The book grips from the start. Evelyn’s father, Arthur Waugh, displays a cloying fascination for his first-born son Alec: a paternal love affair with the boy who would be his lifelong favourite. Alec can do no wrong, even when he actually does quite a lot wrong — writing a scandalously homoerotic schoolboy yarn called The Loom of Youth, which ends the Waugh family’s relationship with Sherborne public school.
Even then, Alec somehow ‘looms’ away unscathed, and it’s the pointy-eyebrowed loner and observational elf, Evelyn, who cops the consequences. He’s packed off to antediluvian Lancing for icy baths, slimy porridge and character-building depravations of every sort (the postwar element of this is exquisitely evoked. You can taste the fake bread and eggs).
Hastings inveigles you into Waugh’s world like a master storyteller, weaving into his life and works in a novelistic way; at times she appears to be a sort of Maeve Binchy on footnote cocaine. Ironically, a baggy, facty novel is the very opposite of a Waugh story, in which masoned characters gleam beneath limpid pools of icy prose.
For me, Hastings’s suturing of the life, Waugh’s beloved faith and his works is the real success. The novels themselves are allowed to breath without being chloro-formed by biographical detail. The Brideshead chapter is particularly spiffing:
There are two main themes in Brideshead Revisited; the first, the working out of a divine plan, the restoration and creation of faith, encompassing the second, the infatuation of Charles Ryder for an entire noble family, the Flytes. In Brideshead Waugh engages with the issues that lay nearest to his heart.
It’s in that last sentence that Hastings shows her game. We know Waugh was practising his new-found faith with a convert’s typical geeky zeal. We know he romanticised the aristocratic Other, fleeing from his middle-classness like a toddler from a grandma’s kiss. We know all that, but it never overawes the assessment of the text itself — nor the audit of the novel’s critical reception.And it’s fascinating to read how wrong some of Waugh’s contemporary critics were. Hastings is particularly good on the fêted-but-damp-squibby Harold Acton, who liked Evelyn but must have been bitterly conflicted and jealous when it came to his literary success.
She pulls off this melding again and again, whether we’re at Oxford, vomiting on the lawn of Hertford College, or dragging rheumatic legs up the steps of the BBC for an abortive face-off on the telly with a myopic twonk. The blend of literary forensics and biographical detail is something Hastings nails, utterly.
This book doesn’t do a psycho-anal hatchet job on the literature, nor does it do ‘a Byrne’ and make biography king. It simply takes you by the hand from start to finish, stopping at each work to spread its moist pâté, sup its crisp champers and linger on its timeless treats.
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