Furthermore, this knowledge about the real sources compels readers and critics relentlessly to seek the autobiographical pattern in the fictional carpet. If you are a novelist who relies on your own life to provide the raw material of your fiction, then there will be difficulties, not least for posterity.Īs Pasternak Slater brilliantly demonstrates, even Waugh’s most surreal, grotesque comic inventions have their factual counterparts and origins in his biography. His challenge was to take the “chaos” of his life and try to transform it into the order of “imperishable art”. As she points out, Waugh was a very autobiographical writer. Her new book is a thorough conspectus of Waugh’s 15 novels and, in the process, an examination of the way the life and the work interact. I think Waugh would have been amused.Īnn Pasternak Slater is a recognised Waugh expert and the editor of his short stories. The headmaster turned it down peremptorily. I happily signed, as did 60 or so other enthusiasts eager for an unexpected day off. I was 14 and at my school one of the more intellectual sixth-formers had started a petition asking for us to be granted a half-holiday in remembrance of the passing of “this great British writer”. Curiously, I remember Waugh’s death even though, then, I had never heard his name or read a word of his work.

Evelyn Waugh died just over 50 years ago (on Easter Sunday, 1966).

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh