Waugh's Gift

Novelist, travel writer, essayist, and biographer Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), the 50th anniversary of whose death rolled around this year, celebrated by those survivors who had the misfortune of knowing him at all well, was as wretched and ornery a human being as anyone could be who was not actually moved to suicide or murder.

He also happened to be funny as hell when the mood struck him, or when he was writing his classic comic novels. Cruelty was an ever-flowing font of amusement. He started young and refined his methods into old age—which in his case began around 40. As a schoolboy at Lancing College he delivered a regular verbal flaying to classmates he called Dungy and Buttocks. His last year at Lancing he founded the Corpse Club, "for people who are bored stiff." Boredom would be a perennial affliction for Waugh, and a source of lethal animadversions against all who contributed to his unhappiness: "I am certainly making myself hateful," the Lancing sixth-former wrote in his diary.

At Oxford, eschewing all work, he ran afoul of his tutor and college dean, the historian C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, and avenged himself with rhymes about this ogre's unseemly love of animals that he sang (drunkenly) under the offender's window at night: Cruttwell dog, Cruttwell dog, where have you been? / I've been to Hertford to lie with the Dean. Miscreants, morons, and malefactors in Waugh's novels and stories would share the Cruttwell name. During a dreary spell as a schoolmaster, Waugh diverted himself by categorizing his pupils as either "mad" or "diseased," which is to say stupid or pimply. Having married, at 25, a young woman who reputedly had been engaged to nine different men, and having been divorced 15 months later when she fell in love with someone else, Waugh wrote to his friend Harold Acton: "I did not know it was possible to be so miserable & live but I am told that this is a common experience."