Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) is a writer who will be read as long as there is anyone interested in English literature. His early novels have a comic spirit all their own. In contrast, Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Sword of Honour (1952–61) capture England at a time in her history when peace was giving way to war and the old social order was vanishing. Waugh was a voice speaking for the past, going against the grain of modernity, and this brought into question what kind of a man could he be.

Literary reputations are a form of higher gossip, dictated by all sorts of imponderable factors, and one of the more imperative is to have people talking about you and your work. Waugh took care to present himself as a crusty old buffer, and even unfriendly critics like Edmund Wilson and J. B. Priestley couldn’t decide if he was being sincere. The interview he did on television with John Freeman, a socialist bigwig, later the British High Commissioner in India and British Ambassador to the United States, left a particularly lasting mark. Freeman asked Waugh why he was appearing on television when he evidently hated the medium. Waugh was enjoying a cigar, and he puffed a cloud of smoke into Freeman’s face and answered, “For the same reason as you, Mr. Freeman, for the money.” When Auberon, Waugh’s son, revealed that his father had eaten all the bananas provided for the family in the years of post-war rationing, Waugh’s reputation could hardly go any lower. Based on common knowledge of his reactionary opinions and antisocial behavior, a caricature of him took hold. And just because he wrote well, why should the public not think the worst of a believing Catholic, a man snobbish and rude, and one who was a bad father as well?

David Fleming, in his new book Hellfire, goes as far as he dares to humanize Waugh. Three years at Oxford showed Waugh how to get on in the world. Typical of the university, there was a club called the Hypocrites Club whose members were a self-elected elite.

Why should the public not think the worst of a believing Catholic?

The club closed in the 1960s, and the special humor of the name has long been lost. Drink was the only thing the club had to offer, though some members made facetious suggestions of debauch. The actor Emlyn Williams, for instance, had a turn of phrase about the club, “They’re supposed to eat newborn babies cooked in wine.” There were a few budding scholars, such as the historian A. L. Rowse, who boasted all his life of his proletarian origin, the anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard, and the Byzantinist David Talbot-Rice. Fleming gives walk-on parts to a good many undergraduates who were making their way, “an awkward squad taking nothing at face value,” drinking too much and mostly broke. Waugh was just one among the others.

What Waugh was discovering in the club, however, was that literary reputations depend on being talked about. One had to draw attention to oneself; one had to find a role. Fleming is a keen gossiper who knows a pose when he sees one and makes a story out of it. The Hypocrites Club was some sort of testing ground for those members whose ambition was to get themselves heard. Harold Acton wrote novels that were a great deal worse than Waugh’s, but he was much talked about as an outrageous aesthete par excellence. Taking the opposite position, Brian Howard made sure to be lamented as the poet who never quite finished the poem. Both of them caught Waugh’s imagination enough to figure in his fiction. Under the pseudonym of Frank Pitcairn, Claud Cockburn edited a communist news sheet that notoriously put out lies to suit the Soviets, but surprisingly he is described here as one of the greatest English journalists of the twentieth century. Exhausting visits to Mount Athos, Russia, and Tibet earn Robert Byron a similar compliment as the “most admired English travel writer of the century.” But he was also known as a one-man campaigner against Nazism. In his passport, Byron said, he would give his occupation as warmonger, and at a white-tie dinner he leaned across the table to ask a Conservative Member of Parliament who was advocating giving Hitler what he wanted, “Are you in German pay?” Another surprise is to find Tom Driberg held up with enthusiasm as an example of how to get on. Not a member of the Hypocrites Club, he has been dragged into a book in which he doesn’t belong. A suspected traitor and Soviet spy, Driberg also had time for sexual pick-ups that left him in the hands of the police, as well as time for being in Parliament and the chairman of the Labour Party. Waugh found him sinister.

Waugh left Oxford without a degree. He wanted to be an artist in Paris but instead became a schoolmaster. As Fleming says, there was something unhinged about him, some sort of depression that may well be the dark side of the comic spirit of the early novels. But by then he had found the role he would play for the rest of his life, a role which took him over and made him so distinctive. I can vouch for it. I was at Oxford and so was Teresa, Waugh’s eldest daughter. She invited me to spend the weekend at Combe Florey, the family house in Somerset. The drive from Oxford took three hours. As we arrived at the front door, a window on the first floor shot up and Waugh then leaned out shouting, “Go away, go away!” Teresa said to me, “When Papa is like that I think we ought to go.” We spent the next three hours driving back to Oxford. Reading this book, I understood that I’d been handed a part in his charade and that the right thing to do would have been to walk into the house and greet him as though I hadn’t heard the shouting. He would have wanted someone like me to give as good as he got.