Selena Hastings Evelyn Waugh: A Biography.
Houghton Mifflin, 627 pages, $40
reviewed by Brooke Allen
Is another biography of Evelyn Waugh really necessary? Only three years have passed since Martin Stannard’s comprehensive, thousand-page life of Waugh was completed. Christopher Sykes’s version came out in 1975; a hefty edition of Waugh’s diaries was published a year later, horrifying large numbers of readers with the author’s cupidity, drunkenness, and malevolence; a kinder and gentler Waugh was revealed in the collected letters in 1980. Waugh himself wrote the first half of an autobiography, published in 1964 under the title A Little Learning. Since Waugh’s death in 1966 a good many of his friends and enemies have taken advantage of the ever-popular Waugh cult to write personal memoirs of the famous man.
Another biography of over six hundred pages, then, would not seem to be a strict necessity. Yet Stannard’s work was a bit too voluminous, Sykes’s a bit too fawning; the idea, then, of an accessible new version for the general reader is alluring, especially since this biographer is Selena Hastings, the author of a really first-rate life of Waugh’s longtime friend and partner in wit, Nancy Mitford. As an added attraction, the Waugh family has allowed Hastings access to many family papers to which previous biographers were not privy. She has been able to draw extensively upon family documents, particularly the letters and diaries of Waugh’s father, the publisher Arthur Waugh, and of his brother Alec, a
