With the completion of this two-volume biography, Martin Stannard has made an invaluable contribution to English letters. Biographical material on Evelyn Waugh is plentiful—memoirs by his family members, army acquaintances, country neighbors, and Oxford contemporaries deal with Waugh to a greater or lesser extent, and his friend Christopher Sykes published a full-length study in 1975—but until now there has been no first-rate and inclusive biography. Sykes’s book, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, is, though serious and well documented, too evidently the work of a co-religionist and a sycophant to make a convincing portrayal. It is also painfully dull, a fault inexcusable in the biography of an artist whose interest to posterity lies, above all, in his outrageous, often offensive, humor.

The virtue of Stannard’s biography is the author’s apparent detachment—difficult to maintain when dealing with a subject who has, both during his life and beyond it, consistently provoked both ire and adulation. One hesitates to employ the frequently misused term “objectivity,” but in this case there seems no better word, for though Stannard paints Waugh’s portrait with sympathy, the warts are treated as painstakingly as are the man’s finer features. The author displays no partisanship; he ventures little in the way of artistic judgment upon Waugh’s work, and his treatment of his subject’s religion is so balanced that it is impossible to tell whether Stannard is himself a Catholic.

All this being said, however, it must also be admitted that this book, too, is on occasion dull,