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Al-Neelain University 

Graduate College 

English Language Department 

 

 

The Wandering Modern World: The Pessimistic 

Vision of Evelyn Waugh 

A Study of Selected Novels 

 

 

A Thesis Submitted in Fulfillment of the Requirement  

for a P.H. Degree in English Literature 

 

 

Prepared by: 

Jameel Ahmed Khalaf  

 

Supervisor: 

Prof. Eiman El-Nour  

 

 

February, 2019  

 



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Dedication 

To My 

Parents, Wife, and Children 

Who Were Very Patient and Helpful 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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Acknowledgements 

All praise and thanks are due first and foremost to Allah the 

Almighty, who has showered me with His favours of knowledge, 

health and patience, and enabled me to finish this project in the best 

way I can do. 

My deepest thanks to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education & 

Scientific Research, and Ministry of Education who have facilitated 

and gave me the chance to get such higher studies. The same thanks 

are extended to the Iraqi Cultural Office in Al-Khartoom for their help 

and support through all the period of my study. 

There are no proper words to convey my deep gratitude and 

respect for the guidance, support, caring and encouragement of my 

research guide, Prof, Dr. Eiman Alnour, whose attention to detail, and 

patient gentleness made this thesis possible. I would like to extend my 

thanks to Al-Neelain University, the Post Graduate Section and the 

English Department for all the facilities and help they have provided 

me throughout my work.  

I would also like to offer special thanks and appreciation to the 

staff members of the central library of Baghdad University, Al-

Mostansiriya University, and the Central Library of Iraq, and the 

librarians of the College of Education for their assistance in providing 

me with the important books. The same and more thanks are extended 

to the staff members of the central library of Al-Neelain University for 

their valuable help, patience and the library facilities during my stay 

over there. 

 



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Abstract 

   

This research aims at discussing beyond the insights of the 

critics views regarding the wandering modern world and the causes 

behind the pessimistic vision of the novelist, Evelyn Waugh, about the 

future of Modern life. After analyzing what other critics have seen in 

the different novels of Waugh, efforts have been made to research 

upon the modern generations. In fact, the research examines the effect 

of the two World Wars on humanity and literature that leads to the 

decline of values, faith, anxiety, loss, despair and death. The writer 

brings out the history and destiny of the common man and mocks at 

the behaviour of the English people, especially the upper and the 

middle class, their ways of life, decline of moral values, corruption, 

chaos, loss of faith and identity. He reflects the conflict between order 

and chaos, in which brutality and incivility or discourtesies are 

allowed to proceed uncontrolled by authority.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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 مستخلص البحث

 

بشال  لااو ولىاا انءباا   جييا  انججىيا  يالحربين العااليييين لىاا ال أثر البحث  هذا تناول

ءت الا  مسرح لأحداث ومآسي شنيعة ومرلبة أبشل  خاص حيث في تىك الفيرة اصبح العالم 

هااذا الفياارة . ججىياا   بشاال  خاااصلاااو وان تغياارات رذة ااة فااي سااى ا الفاارء انوةبااي بشاال 

 ليب ا ح ل انحداث اليي ظهرت بعاد الحارب وخاصاة ماا رعىت كثيرمن اللياب اليعاصر ن 

اهيهاا ها  . انقيصاء ة والسياساة, بعد الحرب العاليية انولا واثاةها لىا الحياة انرييالية 

ر ا ضااا ماان اجحاااام القاايم  سااواللاتاا  . ياا و والياا ت القىااح حاا ل اليساايقب  والوساااةة وال

ا ضا الصراع بين النظاو من رهاة والف ضاا  و ص ة لنا. ن يان واله  ةواليباء   وضياغ ا

 .مان رهااة اخار  فااي مجييا  ساااءت فياا ال حشااية الياء اة واصاابحت خااة  ساايارة الحل مااة

يهاا خيبة ام  اللاتا  فاي الحيااة الحد ثاة الياي فابات ف الأسباب وةا  لىاالبحث ا ضا  و رك 

لا اليفلك العائىي واليجييعاي ك  اليقاليد العر قة واليباء   السامية وانخلاق الحييدة اضافة ا

مان , لنا اللات  ا ضااو عرض . انجسان الحد ث لىدخ ل في ءوامة اللابّة ومى  الحياة الذ  قاء

للان فاي  ر ة في مجيي   دلي اجاا مجييا  مثقا الوياجة ال ورية واجيشاة البرب ,خلال ةوا اتا

أصابح انجساان الغرباي .   ةوابا  ء نياة أو لائىياةالحقيقة ه  مجيي  وحشي لقيم خالي مان أ

بويبة ام  اجعلست في   وباليالي اصي . معاجي الحياة انجساجية  يينا الياضي الذ   حي  ك 

  فضا  اليا ت بادن مان العاي  فاي  وأخاذ .الحياة الد نية وانرييالية وانقيصاء ةك  ر اج  

لااالم ماااء  خااالي ماان الج اجاا  ا فااي والف ضاا ي لاام  جااد فيهااا ساا   اليىاا الحياااة الحد ثااة الياا

 . الروحية والعامفية

 

 

 

 

 

 



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Table of Contents 

Titles                                                                                                         Page No 

Dedication …………………………………………………………………….I                  

Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………. II                 

Abstract ………………………………………………………………………III              

Abstract (Arabic) …………………………………………………………….IV                

Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………V              

Chapter One  

Introduction P - 1  

1.0 Overview…………………………………………………………...……. 2 

1.1 Statement of the problem  ……………………...………………………...2 

1.2 The Objectives of The Study …………………………………………… 4 

1.3 The Hypothesis …………………….………………………………….... 4 

1.4 Questions of the study ………..………………………………………… 5 

1.5 Methodology of the study ………………………………………………. 6 

1.6 The Significance of the Study ...………………………………………… 6 

1.7 The Impact of The Two World Wars on Humanity and  Literature ..…… 7 

1.8 Evelyn Waugh's Life ……….…………………………………………… 20 

1.9 Evelyn Waugh's literary Career …………………………………………. 24  

1.10 Waugh's War Experience & Works ……………………………………  33 

Chapter Two 

Literature Review and Theoretical Frame Work P-41 

2.0 Modern Literature and Modernism ……………………………………… 42 

2.1 The Previous Studies about the Topic ...…………………………………. 47 

2.2 The Theoretical Study ...…………………………………………………. 54 



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Chapter Three 

The Author's Views of Modern Life & 

A Brief Summary of the Novels under Study P-62  

3.0 Evelyn Waugh's Views of Modern Life ………………………………. 63 

3.1 A Brief Summary of the Novels under Study ……………………….... 66 

3.1.1 Decline and Fall (1928) ……………………………………………... 66 

3.2  A Handful of Dust (1934) ……………………………………………... 70 

3.3 Love Among the Ruins (1953) …………………………………………. 77 

Chapter Four 

Analysis of The Novels P-80 

4.0 The Century of The Common Man ..………………………………….. 81 

4.1 A Gothic Man at the Hands of Savages ……………………………… 105 

4.2 The Modern man's Image …………………………………………….. 133 

4.3 The Image of Death …………………………………………………... 144 

4.4 The Image of Love ………………………………………………….... 152 

Chapter Five  

Conclusion P-157 

5.0 Conclusion .…………………………………………………………… 158 

5.1 Inferences and recommendations …………………………………….. 162 

 

Bibliography P-171  

 

 

 

 



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Chapter one 

Introduction  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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Chapter One 

Introduction 

1.0 overview 

Evelyn Waugh ( 1903 – 1966 ) was born in London into a 

comfortable middle class literary family. In his fiction, Waugh shows 

the diverse difference between the old and new values in his own 

society, and reveals in stark reality a society and culture rotting from 

inside. He sees modern life as one in which all values have cheapened 

and collapsed. That is why he is considered a prophet of the same 

spirit of disillusionment that can be seen not only in the fiction of his 

contemporary novelists but in most poetry of T.S. Eliot especially in 

his pioneer poem The West Land.  

His fame continued to grow between the two world wars. His 

novels were based on sharp satires of disorderliness, chance events, 

and the collapse of values and meaning in modern life. He saw the 

struggle as quite simply between truth, order and civilization, and their 

opposite, disorder and barbarism. 

By using the element of extravagant farce and caricature in his 

works, Waugh, can drive comedy from the cruelty of tragedy. To him 

the world is not a composite of visible facts; it is a "bodiless 

harlequinade" , where individual is still swamped in the mob and 

swept along by circumstance over which he has no control.  

 

1.1 Statement of the problem   

Waugh's art in general, and his refusal to the bitter facts of the 

decline of values in his society in particular, is submitted to study and 

analysis. This thesis will attempt to focus on the purpose and motive 



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behind Waugh's pessimistic vision where he presents a world unable 

to be corrected, especially when the Catholic God and the Kingdom of 

heaven have been ignored and abandoned by the modern secular 

society embodied in the absence of moral standards in the modern 

world!  

Anyone can wonder, is not such a world, described by such 

talented, genius and prophetic writer, is perfectly and unfortunately the 

world we are living now? Even his warnings, about the cultureless 

modern world and the appearance of a new class of educated but 

rootless people, are clear and tangible not only in the period of 

postwar world but also in the time we live in nowadays! In fact, the 

writer saw not only his own time, but ours also; both of them were 

afraid and anxious about the future because he imagined the possibility 

of continuation of the evil of his own time to the next. Waugh 

understood how the moral relativism had brought the bad people and 

the totalitarians to power!!! 

Waugh portrays the modern world as anarchic and incoherent 

represented by what are called the Bright Young People who are 

wandering aimlessly in their destructive lifestyle. Waugh expresses his 

frustration and disgust with all the parties, sterility, futility, and 

shallowness of  the modern English society. He shows his respect for 

the past and revealed his ill-feeling towards the modern world and he 

portrays modern life as hopelessly violent and absurd, while the 

vanished past is introduced as the most ordered and reasonable one. 

 

 

 



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1.2 The Objectives of The Study 

1- The study aims at clarifying Waugh's realistic, satirical, and 

pessimistic vision of modern life which can be achieved through a 

precise analytical study of selected novels which often feature an 

empty-headed society. 

2- The study concentrates on the spiritual truth which is considered as 

the highest one for a world in which people are spiritually dead though 

they are physically alive. For instance the socialites represented by the 

Bright Young People were wandering in a  destructive lifestyle that 

suggests unending chaos in the aftermath of the Great War.  

3- The study also tries to show the reasons behind the writer's 

pessimistic vision of a world full of sterility, futility, and boredom  

which is represented by the characters of the novels and how they 

indulged in their numberless parties, immoral love affairs and 

infidelity. Waugh expresses his frustration and disgust with all the 

parties and shallowness of these people and he tries to reflect the 

degeneration of moral values, the dullness of life, and the 

disintegration of the social relations among those Bright Young People 

in particular and the modern English society in general.  

 

1.3 The Hypothesis  

This study goes forward from the assumption that Evelyn 

Waugh is concerned so much with the decay of culture and the loss of 

the individual identity in the modern western world due to the hard 

impact of the Two World Wars. According to Waugh, the trouble 

about the world today is that there's not enough religion in it . So, on 

this account, and as a result of the futile and absurd life of the period, 



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after the Great War, the decline of moral values, the loss of faith and 

identity, the boredom of life, the sterility of the social relations and the 

disintegration of the English family, Waugh directs his sharp satire 

against these modern phenomena.   

Therefore, Waugh completely believed that the best cure for 

these phenomena is the restoration of the old traditions. He believed 

that the individual, without tradition and without guidance, will be lost 

and at every moment he will try to reinvent himself. Such philosophy 

is clear and tangible in the life of Paul Pennyfeather the hero of 

Decline and Fall who is suffering from the lack of any traditional tools 

without which they cannot achieve any self–restraint. The world that 

has been portrayed in most of Waugh's works is a degenerative one; 

scene after scene Waugh satirically tried to evoke indiscipline, 

infidelity and self-indulgence in the form of illegal sex, drinking, drug-

taking, self-serving hypocrisy and theft. 

Waugh tried to convey a sense of modern disorder and explain 

its causes. He believed that modernity became the main danger to 

individuality which cannot be apart from the roots of traditional 

morality and religious conventions. Without such roots, no real 

personality can flourish. 

 

1.4 Questions of the study 

1- In what way has Evelyn Waugh presented the impacts of the two 

world wars upon the western world in general and the English society 

in particular? 

2- How are religious values dealt with by Evelyn Waugh in his 

novels? 



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3- To what extent has Evelyn Waugh portrayed the absurdity and 

shallowness of the modern world in his novels? 

4- In what way has Evelyn succeeded in picturing out the bitter fact of 

the decline of values in his society? 

5- What are Evelyn's views on morality and socioeconomic status of 

the western and other contemporary communities? 

 

1.5 Methodology of the study 

In the current study, the analytical descriptive and evaluative 

method will be used to critically mark out the dimensions of the 

criteria represented in Waugh's philosophical statements embodied in 

the behaviour of different characters in the select novels which have 

been selected for analysis. 

 

1.6 The Significance of the Study 

 The study will bring out an accurate multidimensional sketch of 

the loss of faith and values in modern life. I hope it would be a helpful 

guide to any researcher who wants to study the real dimensions behind 

Waugh's depressed vision. 

 

 

 

 

 



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1.7 The Impact of The Two World Wars on Humanity and  

Literature  

On August 4, 1914, clouds gathered in the Island on which the 

sun never sets. The doorstep was the First World War, "the war [which 

was] assumed to be short lived, adventurous and a kind of moral 

purgative rather than a physical blood-letting"(Bell, 1980: 83). People 

were enthusiastic, driven by a high sense of patriotism, and men 

rushed to enlist in a rightful war between good and evil.  

Armies were mobilized and the war started. After fighting for a 

number of months, both confronting armies were introduced to trench 

warfare, "an almost entirely new method in which all old theories of 

war were discarded"(Girling, 1978: 547) which lasted until the end of 

the war. Soon, men, seeing their comrades massively slaughtered and 

experienced the horrors of unprecedented destructive war, started 

doubting their cause and felt to have been cheated and trapped into an 

action that would be man's inhumanity. It had been a war which turned 

all traditional concepts, views, and values upside-down.  

The First World War was different from all previous wars. It 

witnessed enormous destructiveness of the newly invented and 

perfected weapons like combat planes, tanks, machine guns, modern 

artillery, armored vehicles, and the use of poison gases. The extent to 

which all these means were highly destructive can be measured 

through many examples of battles that had taken place during the First 

World War, one of which the battle of the Somme—the most furious 

battle in which over "20,000 British soldiers were killed,"(May, 1995: 

358) on its first day only, let alone the German casualties. "The 

technologized slaughter of that war revealed the immense capacity for 

destruction,"(Boehmer, 1995: 127)  which had shaken the sense of 



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security and an over optimistic hopeful view of the promising future of 

the twentieth century. 

That war had involved almost everyone; armies, non-combatant 

civilians, and even neutrals that were targeted far behind the front lines 

by submarines and aerial attacks. "The war exceeded, in the scale of 

its operation, the number of its casualties, and the total of its costs, any 

previous known human conflict"(Girling,1978: 568). It was a global 

war that developed into a world conflagration. The First World War 

was dissociated from geography and culture, involving populations of 

many nations over different continents into a war in which all weapons 

and means were allowed.  

Starting with army men who were, and usually are, the first to 

experience and understand what war could mean, the trenches, front 

experience, and battles had changed men, who survived the war, 

completely. Those men, from both conflicting sides, were horrified by 

the disgusting methods of war conducting, where they suffered from 

living in grave-like trenches among dead decaying corpses of their 

comrades that they loved and shared life together. The tough horrors 

of the trenches did their work perfectly on those men killing them 

psychologically and mentally. The obscenity of death, the false ideals 

and morals, and the lost hopes, all helped to draw clearly the gloomy 

future of an insecure man and domineering pessimistic shadows 

spreading their wings over many generations to come. 

Living in danger, violence, battle chaos, death, the endless 

casualties, and the loss of friends, men were unable to endure any 

more. All that emotional stress created and shaped men with a variety 

of psychological and mental diseases like shell-shock, neurasthenia, 

nervous breakdown, and emotional disturbance as well as the large 



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numbers of soldiers that were suffering and had to be hospitalized for 

a long time for frostbite, pneumonia, and trench foot, the latter having 

"put more men out of action than mortars, or machine-gun fire," 

(Ambrose, 1998: 260) leaving them disabled physically with a great 

feeling of indignation and hatred watered by the war's red rain to 

everything around them even themselves, pushing lots of them to 

commit suicide. 

However, it did not take those men more than a year to feel 

disillusioned and misled, that governments were compelled to order a 

compulsory conscription, when the voluntary system proved to be 

inequitable, forcing "men to join the army whether they wanted or not" 

(McDowall, 1989: 160). The war was so immense that it gave way to 

the writers to write about the political, social, ideological, intellectual, 

and artistic concepts, making the 1918 world emerge entirely different 

from the one before 1914. 

Actually, the destruction caused by the First World War was, by 

all means, disastrous and terrible. It affected man and nature alike. 

And when the armistice was announced in November 1918, people 

cheered up and congratulated each other believing that the Great War 

has ended, and that there will never be another, Since it was a war to 

end all wars. May be they either believed or wanted to believe so. 

Whatever the truth was, they were soon to face what they feared and 

prayed not to happen again. 

The period after the First World War was burdened with a 

number of tragic memories due to the severe and horrible scenes of 

death and destruction. In July 1917, the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens 

visited the battlefields of north–eastern France to examine the need for 

making a monument to immortalize the huge number of war-dead. 



17 
 

After he had seen the place, he described it to his wife in a tone of 

horrible surprise: 

What humanity can endure and suffer is beyond 

belief’…‘the battlefields – the obliteration of all human 

endeavour and achievement and the human achievement of 

destruction is bettered by the poppies and wild flowers that 

are as friendly to an unexploded shell as they are to the leg 

of a garden seat in Surrey. (Quoted in Sanders, 2000: 506) 

At last the world was back in peace and the time supposed to be 

an eternal one. All were full of hope for a bright future to come after 

long years of agony caused by the loss of the dear loved ones, sons, 

fathers, brothers, and friends. Finally, the servicemen, who survived 

the war, came back home with a lot of dreams to be fulfilled in a land 

fit for heroes, as the ruling Labour Party promised the desperate 

British people, and the exhausted servicemen who were "a 

generation… who, even though they may have escaped the war shells, 

were destroyed by it" (Sanders, 2000: 506). "The post-war period was 

haunted by long memories, some tender, some angry, most sickening" 

(Sanders 506). The memory of the trench and the front of fighting, to a 

large extent, effected on servicemen's minds who were obsessed by 

nightmares of battles up to the Second World War, visualizing 

idealism and the bright future had turned into a bitter disillusionment. 

At the same time, the matter was not different to those who were born 

in the early years of the century "that the shock of the war, impinging 

on them in their adolescence, and the disillusion of the post-war years, 

[had] turned them against the large claims and confident certainties" 

(Hewitt, 1988: 198).  

Families were scattered and separated, "thrown into poverty by 

the loss of a principal breadwinner to the armed forces,"(Lawrence, 



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1994: 157)  either by going off to war and getting killed or by 

preferring to stay at home and getting hanged. Besides, "the cost of the 

war had led an enormous increase in taxation," (McDowall,1989: 

167)which caused in turn, an increase in the cost of living, making life 

harder, that there was a threat of famine in many areas as it happened 

in Russia. 

It is worth mentioning that the major difference between the 

world before 1914 and that after 1918 was security. Actually, a lot of 

people "developed doubts about the methods and results of the First 

World War, [and] became concerned that new technology [in the form 

of chemical warfare and military aviation] would make another such 

war even more destructive" (Ceadel, 2008: 221). That, of course, was 

not the end, and population in all over the world had to go through 

another traumatic experience that was unemployment. By that, 

unemployment had become widely spread in many places, especially 

in most of the industrial areas. "The futility of the Great War now 

seemed ever more apparent, and the post-war generation felt… [much 

more] betrayed" (Bradbury, 1994: 142). 

However, that was not the ideal picture of the Utopian world 

that a large range of people had in mind for the post-war world. 

Therefore, strikes became common and frequent. Distaste and distress 

were the general dominating mood.  

"It was only natural that men should protest against such 

conditions. On the Armistice Day 1922 some 25,000 

unemployed Londoners attached themselves to the official 

ceremony. They carried at their heads a large wreath 

inscribed: 'from the living victims — the unemployed — to 

our dead comrades, who died in vain' (May, 1995: 376). 



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The years of the Great Depression, like the years of the Great 

War, had been an intense experience that had imposed numerous 

forms of living and shook the modern man's social, psychological, 

economic, and political standards. Army men, after suffering every 

minute of hard times in their service days, came back home in post-

war world to suffer unemployment and poverty, "seeing post-war hope 

turned into hopelessness as government failed to grapple effectively 

with slump and unemployment" (Blamires, 1983: 115). 

Undoubtedly, unemployment had made a great effects upon 

different aspects of society. Those effects "were marked on the faces 

of unemployed people and their families and [were] in a wide range of 

fictional and documentary sources"(Ceadel, 2008: 203). As years 

passed, unemployment pushed populations deeper and deeper into 

post-war chaos and confusion "undermining wartime promises of a 

land fit for heroes" (Ceadel 227). Thrown into poverty, living 

standards for many families deteriorated, like the deterioration of the 

health of the unemployed and their families, who were leading a hand-

to-mouth existence. In fact, "it is particularly the women, the wife with 

a number of young children, who[usually] reacts most tragically to… 

[such] situation[s]" ( May, 1995: 376). This deterioration could be 

obviously displayed by the changes in infant and maternal mortality 

rates.  

However, the number of unemployed men on the dole were 

increasing every day. Eventually, when many people were left 

workless, children had to skip education, which is an important stage 

in their life, to be exploited at work, instead of getting enough learning 

to provide them with the best future occupations. Moreover, constant 

need, hunger, disease, and poverty turned a lot of people into 



20 
 

criminals, greedy, selfish, and violent. Consequently, unemployment 

was undoubtedly a powerful cause of the psychological breakdown 

that the post-war modern man was frequently undergoing. 

A number of years later, when the Wall Street American stock 

exchange collapsed, the Depression was confirmed. The 1930—

described as the devil's decade, the decade of the Great Slump, or the 

dislocated, lost decade—was the hardest decade according to which 

"Europe entered an era of new and terrible disorder"(Bradbury, 1994: 

143). That disorder led to great political changes in the world, like the 

powerful new Nazi and Fascist governments which were taking over 

in Germany, Italy, Austria, and Spain that led to a second world war. 

The Great Depression as it came to be known in the United 

States was the biggest economic crises in history. It lasted for about a 

decade and led to poverty, hunger and unemployment all over the 

world. In September 1929 the prices of goods began to fall and on 

October 29, 1929 they completely collapsed on this day which is 

known as the Black Tuesday. It was a worldwide economic downturn 

and the largest and most severe economic depression in the 20
th

 

century. Many European countries did not have enough money. They 

had to pay a lot back to the USA because the Americans helped to win 

the war. Under such a critical economic situation the British people 

suffered much as the others in the Continent. Sherman and Salisbury 

states that: 

One British woman echoed the feelings of many: “these 

last few years since I've been out of the mills … I've got no 

spirit for anything”. Masses of people sank into poverty, 

and malnutrition and diseases spread. Families suffered 

from new tensions as men lost their traditional role as 



21 
 

breadwinners … Scenes of despair could be found 

everywhere. (Quoted in Sherman and Salisbury, 2004: 784) 

The First World War had left a deep wound on the body of all 

humanity. Therefore, the age following this war was really an age of 

loss and despair. It was an important turning point from certainty to 

uncertainty, from order to chaos. For example Evelyn Waugh once 

sighed for "Something that went out of the world in 1914, at least for 

one generation." (Waugh, Diaries: 147). While W. H. Auden called it 

an age of Anxiety, as he makes that clear in his last longest poem The 

Age of Anxiety which begins in fear and doubt, and its four 

protagonists sharing some comfort in their catastrophe. Then, the rise 

to power of Mussolini and Fascism, and of Hitler and Nazism 

increasingly led people to think that the danger of a new world war 

was inevitable; the Spanish Civil War of 1937 gave credit to that 

threat. Consequently, at such critical period of the appearance and 

clashing of different ideologies, society looked tired, sick and ailing 

and man looked hopelessly for peace and content. "The real 

circumstances between the wars were shockingly unkind. Violence on 

a grand scale, the loss of identity, and the increasing mechanization of 

society left the modern individual in a dilemma" (Lisa Colletta, 2003: 

9). 

On the other hand, Communism and Catholicism were 

increasingly singled out as the suitable cures for the sufferings and 

sickness of the generation. Therefore, many novelists and poets of the 

thirties saw in Communism the practical solution for the ailments of 

the age. Step by step, the concept of the ideal society and revolution 

gripped the literary imagination of the young generation, like George 

Orwell, Auden, and Stephen Spender; while Catholicism was the less 

popular alternative mostly due to crisis of belief and loss of faith. But, 



22 
 

Graham Greene was one of the famous novelist of this period who 

asserted the validity and the necessity of religious belief; sharing the 

same beliefs with his friend Evelyn Waugh. 

After the painful loss of German in the First World War, 

Germany was depressed and powerless. This change left the German 

people with a severe injured pride. They were oppressed and betrayed 

by the victors. Accordingly, most of the Germans lost their money and 

property. Then, they were forced to endure high taxes to repay the 

Allies. They were in a state of anger and despair. As a result and due 

to a lot of problems whether politic, economic or social, the German 

government of that time was unstable and unable to deal with these 

problems. Such difficult and critical circumstances with the bitterness 

of defeat in the First World War encouraged Hitler to move against 

Poland. On 1st September 1939, German troops invaded Poland which 

was considered the signal for the beginning of the Second World War. 

Tragically, this war continued for six long years and covered the globe 

as never before. Sherman and Salisbury points out that: 

 At dawn on September 1, the German launched on all – 

out attack on Poland by land, sea and air. Hitler remained 

convinced that France and Britain would not go to war over 

Poland. He was wrong. Two days later, Great Britain and 

France declared war on Germany. In a poem titled 

“SEPTEMBER 1, 1939,” poet W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973) 

moaned that:   

                      The unmentionable odor of death  

                      Offends the September night  

                      World War II had begun  

                      (Sherman and Salisbury, 2004: 794).  



23 
 

The supposed peace was interrupted and troubled again, and the 

twenty long years of starvation, mass misery, mass unemployment, 

and mass fear had to stop for a while on the same door–step. It was 

war again and it was more destructive and horrible than the previous 

one. In fact, this war, the World War II, was different than its 

predecessor. This war was more dangerous to the lives of people and 

more destructive because it was more advance in the use of technology 

and the weapons of mass destruction. The whole world had become 

the war zone.  

In fact, the use of modern technology and modern weapons has 

changed the concept of war zone. In this war, as in most modern wars, 

there is no limited battlefield; the whole world is a battlefield for such 

wars. "The Great War of 1914–1918 can seem more like a European 

Civil War in comparison"(Mackay, 2009: 1). This war stressed the 

relationship between technology with barbarism as it was thought by a 

lot of historians and psychologists in the middle of the twentieth 

century; such relationship has become highly charged mark of a 

psychological, moral, and the occurrent paralysis of thought. The 

philosopher Simone Weil who wrote out of the experience of being 

inside a war; stressed that: 

The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all 

capacity to so much as look outward … The Second World 

War, perhaps more than any war before it, raises the 

question of how war can be held in the mind when the 

mind itself is under siege; of what it means to experience a 

trauma so unrelentingly forcefully that cannot be grasped 

consciously. (Quoted in  Stonebridge, 2009:  194) 

The Germans launched massive air attacks in July 1940, to 

destroy and shatter the British forces and its infra-structures, and 



24 
 

bombing London every night for two months. (Sherman and Salisbury 

794 – 795). Describing the difficult British situation and Churchill's 

plans Martin Gilbert states that: 

In the disastrous summer of 1940, with the evacuation of 

the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk 

(accompanied by a massive loss of equipment) and with the 

intensification of German bombing of factories and 

airfields throughout Britain, Churchill and those in the 

inner circle of government knew the precise details of 

Britain's weakness on land, sea, and air. Despite every 

effort being made to increase war production, Churchill 

knew that it was only through a massive contribution by the 

United States to every facet of Britain's war – making 

arsenal that Britain could remain effectively at war. From 

the first to the last days of his premiership, the link to the 

United States was central to Churchill's war policy.  

(Gilbert, 2003: 45) 

Accordingly, as the war machine continued; the sufferings, 

horrors, miseries, hunger, emotional stress, death, physical and 

psychological diseases increased everywhere, whether they were the 

military men or the civilians all became the scapegoat of the 

adventures of the statesmen; in addition to the mass pressure of the 

war propaganda. The globe became a theater of the most disgust 

bloody show, where millions of people suffered, tortured or killed in 

three major theaters: the Soviet Union, Western Europe and the 

Mediterranean, and the Pacific. It is said that one of the largest, 

bloodiest battles occurred in the Soviet Union in which nine millions 

soldiers were involved on August 1942. The soldiers of the two world 

wars may have been largely conscripts, but they were soldiers 

nonetheless; World War II, on the other hand, was very substantially a 



25 
 

civilian experience, and, in the eloquent words of the historian Tony 

Judt, "experienced not as a war of movement and battle but as a daily 

degradation, in the course of which men and women were betrayed 

and humiliated, forced into daily acts of petty crime and self-

abasement, in which everyone lost something and many lost 

everything" (Mackay, 2009: 7). 

However, one of the most disgusting, and most horrible fact 

about the Second World War was the wholesale killing of prisoners of 

war. In his non-fiction book Citizen Soldiers: The U S Army from the 

Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany June 7, 

1944-May 7, 1945, published in 1997, Stephen E. Ambrose tells the 

real story of World War II from the viewpoint of the men and women 

who fought it. Ambrose portrays grotesquely the atrocity and the 

absurdity of such bloody war; for example, through the following 

conversation between a Polish and an American officer, one can 

imagine how brutal and tragic that war was. 

Polish Captain: "Here are your prisoners." 

Waters (an American Captain): "I don't want them." 

Polish Captain: "But I must leave them, with you.  

Those are my orders." 

Waters: "I still don't want them. Get them out of here." 

(Waters' orders were to accept them, but he had been 

told to expect 1,500; in fact there were only a couple 

of hundred). 

Polish Captain: "But I must still leave them with you." 

Waters: "Well, you were supposed to have 1,500 prisoners. 

 Where are they?" 

Polish Captain: "They are dead. We shot them.  

These are all that are left." 



26 
 

Waters: "Then why don't you shoot these too?"  

A pause then 

Waters corrected himself: "No you can't do that." 

Polish Captain: "Oh, yes we can. They shot my countrymen." 

He took Waters by the arm and escorted him away 

from the others. Then he said, "Captain, we can't shoot 

them. We are out of ammunition."   (Ambrose, 1998: 105) 

As a matter of fact, "both the American and the German armies 

outlawed the shooting of unarmed prisoners. Both sides did it 

frequently, but few court-martials were convened for men charged 

with shooting prisoners," (Ambrose 352). These are the consequences 

of wars no matter when or where. Justice can never be monitored for 

such similar cases. Actually, the Second World War was more 

destructive than the First World War because the military industrial 

progress and the invention of more destructive weapons. "The 

weapons used by the forces were more complicated than those used 

between 1914 and 1918", (May, 1995: 402) like aerial weapons, 

submarines, and U-boats which were used much more actively for the 

first time.  

Moreover, war was more savage in the second conflict than it 

was in the first one, because there was no distinction between civilians 

and army men by those mass destructive means, especially air-power. 

The two world wars had, in unprecedented way, involved armies and 

population alike, though in "the Second World War… civilians were 

involved every bit as much as members of the armed forces" (May, 

1995: 400). The most obvious example of the involvement of civilians 

was the bombardment of Hiroshima when "USAAFB 29, Enola gay, 

dropped the first atomic bomb, nicknamed 'Little Boy' on the Japanese 



27 
 

city of Hiroshima [on 6 Aug., destroying 10 km of the city, to be 

followed by the] second atomic bomb, nicknamed 'Fat Man', [which 

was] dropped on Nagasaki [9 Aug. 1945]" (Cook and Stephenson, 

1998: 281) at which about 110,000 people died immediately and a 

number of thousands later, because of the after effect. 

The period of modern life has been the setting of two great and 

deadly events: the First and the Second World Wars. These wars 

brought anxiety, loss, despair and death. The different ages of human 

life have witnessed different changes and developments, each period 

has left special imprint, on all aspects of life with distinguished 

characteristics. Many writers emerged during each period and penned 

their feelings and ideas about the war and its impact on humanity in 

general. 

1.8 Evelyn Waugh's Life 

Evelyn Waugh Arthur St. John Waugh (1903 - 1966) was born 

in the London suburb of Hampstead (Crabbe, 1988: 2). He came from 

a successful middle class – his paternal grandfather had been a 

prosperous doctor; his mother belonged to an old family of 

professionals and military men. Both parents came from rural families 

who were associated with, but were not of aristocracy. Since early 

childhood, Evelyn Waugh showed symptoms of literary talent. In 

Waugh's writing of earliest surviving example, 'the Curse of The 

Horse Race'  written in 1910, one can see, despite the spelling 

mistakes, the beginning of clarity, understanding, and the ironic tone 

which became his landmark: 

" I bet you 500 pounds, I'll win.  The speaker was Ruport a 

man of about 25 he had  a  dark bushy mistrash and 



28 
 

flashing eyes.  I should not trust to much on your horse said 

Tom for he had not the sum to spear" (Crabbe, 1988: 3). 

A second impulse, that effectively played a considerable role in 

Waugh's life, was religion. This was due to the family's observance of 

religious duties, and the influence of his deeply religious nurse whom 

he loved and imitated. Besides, Waugh himself was a regular attendant 

of church and its ceremonies until he became an altar boy and turned 

his bed room to a small altar (Crabbe, 3). This interest in religion and 

its rituals came to occupy an important position in Waugh's life, not 

because it marked the beginning of his sense of the significant of the 

supernatural or the mysterious, but also determined eventually the 

choice of his public school (Crabbe 3-4) . 

In fact, Waugh's relationship with Acton was very interesting. 

Acton added many good literary devices to Waugh’s writing, extended 

his horizons and encouraged his talent to depend more on his artistic 

judgment. "A year younger than Waugh, Acton brought to Oxford a 

much more fully formed knowledge of the arts and commitment to 

modernism." (Patey, 2001: 10). Acton encouraged Waugh to read and 

study the works of Ronald Firbank (1880–1926), Edith Sitwell (1887–

1964), T. S. Eliot (1888– 1965), Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Lewis 

Carroll (1832–1898), and Earnest Hemingway (1899–1961). Due to 

his influence and the close relationship Waugh dedicated his first 

novel Decline and Fall (1928) to Acton ‘in homage and affection’. 

"Waugh was enchanted: ‘Harold led me far away from Crease to the 

baroque and the rococo and the Waste Land’." (Patey 11)  

In the early times at Oxford Waugh made good use of his 

friends who wrote gossip columns like Tom Driberg (1905-1976), 

Patrick Balfour (1904-1976), and reviews such as Peter Quennell 



29 
 

(1905-1993), Peter Fleming (1907-1971), Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), 

Henry Green (1905-1973), Anthony Powell (1905-2000), Maurice 

Bowra (1898-1971), Christopher Hollis (1902-1977) and his lover and 

close friend Alastair Graham. After leaving Oxford without a degree 

Waugh had to do a job of school master in 1925, at Arnold House 

Preparatory School in North Wales which was a bad experience for the 

rebellious young Waugh who refused to live an orderly life. In his 

diary, Waugh expressed his disgust of being in Wales which seemed to 

him as if it were Africa "Everyone in Wales has black spittle and 

whenever he meets you say “borra–da” and spits. I was frightened at 

first but after a time I became accustomed to it." (Diaries 201). In a 

letter from Wales Waugh mentioned to his friend Acton, in Feb. 1925, 

that "… a bad school as schools go but it is a sorry waste of time & 

energy. I do not think that I am good at teaching–at any rate I have not 

succeeded so far in getting any idea into anyone's head." (Letters 31). 

 However, Arnold House was the original episode of Llanabba 

School in his first novel Decline and Fall. In A Little Learning Waugh 

portrayed himself as a detested schoolteacher at Arnold House, 

depressing and alienated. He hated everything even himself. "Waugh 

felt like a criminal transported to an output of civilization." (Stannard, 

1986: 108). Now he was fully depressed and disillusioned, he saw no 

light at the end of the tunnel. The future looked even darker than 

before, so he started thinking of destroying himself. Suicide seemed 

the only logical option to put an end for such a depressed life, 

especially after he received the news from Italy saying that there was 

no hope for the job he was waiting for. But though most critics agreed 

that no one knew how serious was Waugh’s intention to kill himself, 

but he was making it look perfectly clear in his last autobiography, A 



30 
 

Little Learning. Patey remarked that "This story is not really quite true 

but I have recounted it in so many letters that I have begun to believe 

it." (Patey 19). In a brilliant literary passage and comically ironic way 

Waugh mentioned in his last book, A Little Learning: The First 

Volume of an Autobiography, how the suicide was let down by a 

jellyfish: 

One night, soon after I got the news from Pisa, I went down 

alone to the beach with my thoughts full of death. I took off 

my clothes and began swimming out to sea… I left a note 

with my clothes, the quotation from Euripides about the sea 

which washes away all human ills...I swam slowly out but, 

long before I reached the point of no return, the Shropshire 

Lad was disturbed by a smart on the shoulder. I had run 

into a jelly-fish. A few more strokes, a second more painful 

sting. The placid waters were full of the creatures….I 

turned about, swam back…to the sands….With some 

difficulty I dressed and tore into small pieces my 

pretentious classical tag, leaving them to the sea….Then I 

climbed the sharp hill that led to all the years ahead. 

(Waugh, A Little Learning: 229-230)  

Henceforth, he left his job in Wales and tried working in 

another school. In March 1927 he joined school in Notting Hill, but he 

stayed there for a very short time, because he did not like it. He 

described it in his Diaries, on 28 February, as a very bad place to work 

in "The School in Notting Hill is quite awful. All the masters drop 

their aitches & spit in the fire and scratch their genitals. The boys have 

close cropped head & steel rimmed spectacles wound with worsted. 

They pick their noses & scream at each other in a Cockney accent." 

(Diaries, 281). So his new career as a schoolmaster came to an end in 

April 1927. Finally, Evelyn got a job as a reporter for the Daily 



31 
 

Express, but it also seemed that he was not satisfied with it, as he 

commented "I don't know how much I shall like that,’ but it will be 

worth trying." (Sykes, 1985: 111). Acton described the four years of 

Waugh's life from 1924 to 1928 as Waugh's ‘Destoievski period’, in 

the sense that through these years Waugh led "an aimless round of 

occasional employment, parties in London, weekend trips back to 

Oxford…afternoons whiled away in the cinema, and, drunkenness." 

(Patey 16).  

Hence, after focusing on Waugh's early life, one can feel that, 

though, he had been born into a comfortable middleclass family, but 

when he became a man he moved among the British upper classes. He 

financed his pleasures by becoming one of the best–paid authors of his 

generation. He appeared to be an example of success in the press 

circles. Though he was well known as a funny man but, only his 

closest friends knew of his depression and fear of failure. 

 

1.9 Evelyn Waugh's literary Career  

In July 1927, he started writing his first work, a life of Dante 

Gabriel Rossetti. In fact, Rossetti, His Life and Works, is the first real 

attempt for Waugh in writing literary books. It is a book in which 

Waugh reflects his fascination and appreciation for the Pre–

Raphaelites; praising their approach as painters, scribes, writers and 

craftsmen. Through this book Waugh early declared his admiration for 

traditional Arts. The book was published in the Spring of 1928. In a 

letter to Waugh, after reading this book, his friend Acton encouraged 

and praised Waugh observing: 

I can now say that I have read and honestly enjoyed your 

Rossetti. Your maturity of mind alarms and terrifies me, it 



32 
 

is so tremendously able and considered….As it is you have 

written in your own genuine and agreeable style, and dealt 

quietly and eloquently with your subject….All my 

congratulations. I am sure it will get the success it deserves, 

and it must have been hard work writing. (Acton,2002: 69) 

With the publishing of Rossetti in 1928 Waugh's name appeared 

now as a writer to be taken seriously. Commenting on Waugh’s style 

of writing this book, Sykes remarked that "The style shows a leap 

towards maturity, though he had not yet attained mastery. He was 

always to use occasionally the grand manner, the purple patch, but 

with more discipline than he showed in Rossetti." (Sykes, 1995: 123). 

In one of the parties of the Bright Young People, he was introduced to 

Evelyn Gardner. She was young of the same age of Waugh, beautiful 

and a frivolous girl, from the Herberts, the high class family. They 

married on June 27th 1928. As a new married couple, they travelled 

together in a four– month Mediterranean tour to Paris, Monte Carlo, 

Malta, Haifa, Port Said in Egypt, Cairo, Algiers, Barcelona, Gibraltar, 

Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Athens, Turkey, Soviet Union and other 

countries.  

By mid–April 1929, they returned to England, and Waugh felt 

that he came back richly loaded with travel experiences and material 

for his writings. The result of this Mediterranean journey is a travel 

book, under the title Labels (1930), with a description of his travels 

and comments on the places he visited. In this book Waugh portrays 

different types of modern travellers and different places from Europe 

to the Middle East and North Africa; from Egyptian pyramids and 

Italian churches to Maltese sailors and Moroccan merchants; places 

that seem to be the archetype of a remarkable old civilization. After 

this as he sailed around the Mediterranean Waugh’s pen put down 



33 
 

beautiful description for everything he saw in addition to a lot of 

camera pictures to give an entertaining portrait of a long lost world of 

traveling we are longing for nowadays. His tales depict beautiful 

pictures of a lost world that has gone, where the places he visited 

already "fully labelled" in people's minds as he said. "With 'Labels,' 

Mr. Waugh has definitely established his reputation as a minor critic 

and master of modern manners and a very amusing and intelligent 

writer." (Unsigned Review, ‘New Statesman’18 October 1930 in 

Stannard, 2002: 116). While Sykes remarked that what made this book 

a unique one among the other six books of Evelyn’s travel books was 

that he fictionalized it: "It was the first of the six travel books he 

wrote, and unique among them for its artful mixture of factual record 

and fiction." (Sykes, 1985: 151). 

Waugh noticed that a lot of things in the Londoners social life 

were changing. He found scenes of disorderly social extravagance, and 

society had become the main topic of news for the gossip column. 

New design clothes had appeared. It was the period of short skirts, 

cloche hats, and shingled hair. The cocktail and bottle parties were 

common and modern fashions elaborate fancy–dress parties became 

widespread. Negro jazz singers ran a chain of illegal clubs. The parties 

became more aggressive and wilder, the drinking heavier and the 

divorce rate became much higher. A class of rich people appeared who 

were willing to do anything even about sexual affairs and would talk 

openly which was contrary to the conservative time of the Victorians. 

New bohemian life became familiar, there was drugs abuse among the 

Bright Young People
1
, their disorderly life was the material of 

                                                           
1
  The Bright Young People is a nickname given to a group of young aristocrats and socialites who 

constituted the ’lost generation‘ of the period between the Two World Wars 1920s and 30s in 
London.  



34 
 

Waugh's next novel Vile Bodies. Waugh’s wife fell in love with one of 

his friends named John Heygate an active member of the Bright 

Young People. 

Consequently his marriage failed and it was a great turning 

point in his life. "He felt lost again in a world where he believed that, 

at last, after a painful struggle, he had found safety. He fell into a state  

of absolute despair. Some of his friends even feared for his sanity." 

(Sykes, 1985: 139-140). David Wykes observed that "the collapse of 

this marriage was the most important event of his life….Certainly it 

was a trauma that left a mark on everything of any importance that he 

wrote thereafter"(Wykes, 1999: 63-64).  

On the other hand due to such difficult circumstances, Evelyn 

Waugh had to stop working on his next novel Vile Bodies for a while; 

and so he took to journalism. Hence, though he succeeded in gathering 

up the remaining part of his shattered self-esteem, but such hardness, 

bitterness and disillusionment was never absent from his next books. 

Ian Littlewood noted that "It was probably the most painful experience 

of Waugh's life, and its shock waves can be felt through successive 

novels for the rest of his career." (Littlewood, 1983: 11). Thus, Evelyn 

had to start a new life and to regain some of his lost dignity, at least 

through completing the novel which he had postponed. So, the 

publication and success of his second full-length work of a comic 

fiction Vile Bodies on January 1930 gave him a strong push. Now, he 

became widely read and began to be more famous. His social life was 

more restrained than before.  

Waugh resumed his travels, in early October 1930, starting with 

a visit to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) as a special correspondent of The Times 

to cover the celebration of the coronation of its ruler Negus Ras Tafari 



35 
 

who wanted to crown himself as Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia; 

in a hope that this experience would enhance his literary career and 

expand his vision. He arrived at Addis Ababa at the suitable time 

before the ceremonies of the coronation in November. He travelled 

many places in Ethiopia and from there to Djibouti, Aden, Harare, 

Sudan, Zanzibar, Kenya, Belgian Congo, and Cape Town. In early 

March of 1931, Waugh came back home loaded with very interesting 

experiences and good material he needed for his next works. 

Thus, the result of his first experience of this journey was 

recorded in his next book, Remote People (1931). It is a sympathetic 

one, filled with boredom and disillusionment. It is relished in a tone of 

mockery to reflect the savage nature of the Africans and the gap 

between civilization and barbarism. In this book Waugh calls a series 

of seemingly absolute twofold oppositions between primitive Africans 

and civilized Europeans to confirm the distance between the European 

Catholicism and the magical Ethiopian Christianity. Through that 

Waugh tries to depict the religious practices of the Ethiopian 

Christians which are filled with an air of mystery that contrasts with 

the clarity of European Catholicism where their darkness is opposed to 

European light. For instance, Waugh harshly criticizes the African 

priests in Debra Lebanos which was considered the centre of the 

Abyssinian spiritual life. He says that they do not look like religious 

men; they do not go to Church, most of them carried rifles and swords, 

and all of them have mistresses and children. Wykes remarked that 

"Remote People was Waugh’s first book as a Catholic and he made 

clear in it that henceforth he would be a Catholic author…. The 

moment of revelation he gave himself at the monastery should have 



36 
 

left no one in doubt of the religious commitment of his work." 

(Wykes, 1999: 91). 

The second result of this journey was the writing of his third 

satirical novel Black Mischief (1932). The novel is set in the fictional 

kingdom of Azania based on Waugh’s personal experiences in 

Abyssinia. It is a satirical comment on the West's naive attempts to 

civilize Africa as the country lurches from one upheaval to another. 

There is clear conflict between civilization and barbarism through 

creating wild and anarchic scenes. "Azania is a place where the savage 

and the civilized come into collision every day." (Littlewood, 1983: 

47).  

After a long conflict of unrestlessness in London, Waugh 

decided to another travel abroad. He decided to go to South America 

in the Winter of 1932 in search for an ideal home. His first destination 

was the Brazilian city Boa Vista. At the beginning of this visit he 

showed his admiration for the city, but sooner his vision changed after 

"He heard dismaying details from the few people he met who knew 

the place, but the vision persisted until at last he reached this run– 

down hopeless wreck of a place." (Sykes, 186) Hence, the unhappiness 

coloured the whole of his journey to South America where he spent 92 

days in British Guiana. This experience produced a travel book called 

Ninety– Two days, in which Waugh portrayed his escape from Boa 

Vista. It is a fine and painful comedy, in addition to Waugh's 

masterpiece A Handful of Dust which was published in early 

September 1934. In this novel an honest man, Tony Last, has been 

drawn as a victim. Most critics observe that this novel marked a new 

development in Evelyn's writing, and it was considered his best book 

to date. On Ninety– Two Days critics observe that it is less important 



37 
 

travel book than Remote People; it is a book of memories rather than 

of strong narrative, though it contains some of Evelyn's best travel 

writing and description of scenery. About this book and Waugh’s 

journey Wykes remarks that: 

It had been ‘a journey of the greatest misery’… The 

journey he had chosen to make would supply exactly the 

wrong kind of experience for his writing….And British 

Guiana had little in the way of culture or history. 

Interesting people were an absolute requisite, and on this 

trip he met mostly boring, ordinary, nice people, and found 

himself again and again in situations of frustration and 

tedium….In Ninety– Two Days Waugh took his sensibility 

on an exhausting and frustrating cross-country slog, and 

came close at times to making his reader wonder why he 

ever left home. (Wykes, 100) 

On the other hand Patey states that: both Waugh’s trips to South 

America and the book (Ninety–Two Days) that emerged, proved a 

disappointment to the readers. Many readers of this book have 

described Waugh's trip as ‘penitential’ as if he were actually seeking 

to punish himself in the jungle. (Patey, 1998: 106). While in his 

Diaries Waugh mentions that "The journey to Brazil on which he 

embarked in the winter of 1932…contains a hint of penance." (Diaries 

354).  

On 7 August 1934, Waugh left to Ethiopia as the Daily Mail 

war correspondent to report the invasion of Italy to Abyssinia. On his 

way back to England, he visited Jerusalem, Baghdad; and before his 

coming back home in January 1936 he visited Rome where he met the 

Duce, Mussolini, giving him a very gloomy account of the difficulties 

facing his army in the battle field but at the same time Evelyn showed 

his admiration of the Duce who had a very impressive personality as 



38 
 

Evelyn said (Stannard, 1988: 225–226). Concerning, the European 

presence in Africa, Waugh asserts that colonies appear in too many 

ways, under too many forms, for politicians and economists to 

generalize about them. Colonialism's supporters may often be cruel 

racialists among whom Anglo–Saxons are perhaps worse than any. 

However, Waugh sees the colonial project as inevitable and doomed, 

romantically appealing but a lost cause. Therefore, according to 

Waugh's point of view, the European powers are seen to be keen to 

exploit and are engaged in a network of codes and espionage. 

However, the literary result of Waugh's second visit to Ethiopia 

was the publishing of another travel book Waugh in Abyssinia. In this 

book Waugh recounts his experiences as a war correspondent and 

impressions he got from his second journey to Abyssinia under the 

Italian occupation. In one of his letters from there he wrote to 

Katharine Asquith in August 1936 remarking that "I am sick of 

Abyssinia and my book about it. It was fun being pro-Italian when it 

was unpopular and (I thought) losing cause. I have sympathy with 

these exultant fascist now." (Letters, 126). Because of this, Rose 

Macaulay has called this book ‘a fascist tract’. But Littlewood argued 

that Waugh’s romanticism in this book "was not essentially political; it 

was, like his humour, an aspect of the refusal to accept a world that 

was grey while he still had the resources to make it vivid." 

(Littlewood, 1983: 84).  

Directly, after the publication of Waugh in Abyssinia in 1936, 

Waugh began writing his fifth novel Scoop. It was published in May 

1938. In this novel Waugh portrayed in a cold–blooded irony the 

mission of William Boot, a journalist who wrote the Lush Places 

column for the Daily Beast. Boot is sent by mistake to report a Civil 



39 
 

War in the Negro State of Ishmaelia where Civil War is expected to 

break out. In spite of being the most popular of Waugh's novels by the 

sales figure but Waugh disliked this novel because the book took too 

much time to get completed. And also, "One of Waugh's more sensible 

critics suggests that the ‘shallow imaginative roots’ of this novel are 

owed to its ‘lack of strong autobiographical impulse’." (Wykes, 1999: 

115). However, Scoop carries an ingenious plot and a cracking of 

jokes only a little less good than those of his first novel Decline and 

Fall. In this novel Waugh gives full rein to his fanciful humour. So he 

re–established himself as a popular humorist, satirizing the methods of 

modern sensational journalism, though some reviewers for Scoop 

stated that Waugh's job is to provide laughter, and he does it in a good 

way, but he is not a satirist. Stopp remarked that "Scoop depicts some 

of the more incredible activities of the international group of 

journalists planted for the war in Addis Ababa by their respective 

employers, set against an international backcloth of the rival 

ideologies of Communism and Fascism." (Stopp, 1958: 83). 

In 1938, though Waugh was pessimistic about the future but he 

was full of hope and believed that the Church Militant might secure 

order. However, life in general was better for Waugh. He became well 

known in the literate circles as a considerable satirical comic novelist. 

He and Laura Herbert were married on 17 April 1937. In March 1938 

Waugh and his wife visited Mexico on a request, to write a book on 

Mexico, from Clive Pearson who represented the Cowdray Estate 

which had massive financial interests in Mexican oil. At that time 

there was a crisis between the Mexican government and the oil 

companies working there. Among them was a British company, the 

Mexican Eagle which was prominent among the companies 



40 
 

expropriated. Waugh visited Mexico and after coming back he wrote 

Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object– Lesson; a short but dull 

book about Mexico. In this book he recounts his experience in Mexico 

describing the outrageous treatment of the Mexican Government 

towards the English oil company and portraying an impassionate 

history of the State's persecution of the Church. "He cannot forgive the 

Mexicans for having seized the oil industry, for having dispossessed 

the Church. His book, as he himself admits, is a collection of ‘notes on 

anarchy’." (Nicolson, 2002: 203). 

 

1.10 Waugh's War Experience & Works 

Waugh was too young to fight in the First World War, now in 

1939 he was old enough to join the Second World War. But, despite 

he regarded the imminent conflict as an adventure, he was determined 

to prove himself and to feel the Test of Manhood in such an 

honourable service as most of English people believed. "With the 

same traditional enthusiasm, Waugh welcomed World War II as a 

heroic renaissance for himself and for England." (Darman,1978: 166). 

So he succeeded to be enlisted in the Royal Marines as an officer and 

commissioned immediately as a second–lieutenant, though he was 

physically unfit, inactive, overweight, out of condition and very short–

sighted. Happily he celebrated his entry into the army. His friend 

Sykes remarked that "Evelyn's career as a solider… left him deeply 

disillusioned, a fact which tended to increase his disposition towards 

melancholy." (Sykes, 1985: 278). Waugh believed that his military 

service would offer him a new experience of war life about which he 

would be able to write. In fact he had got such experience but he was 

not a successful solider. He saw cowardice and the breakdown of order 



41 
 

everywhere. Such facts and atmosphere play a considerable role in 

Waugh's next literary life; Wykes observed that: 

He did not know that his anarchic and in some ways 

defensive personality would make his military service an 

experience of frustration, bitterness, and disillusionment, 

and that it would push the changes he was effecting in his 

literary personality in unexpected and difficult directions. 

Waugh's experience of the Second World War was skewed 

from the start by his interpretation of the nature of the 

conflict. (Wykes, 1999: 124) 

Wykes adds that "Wartime put Waugh into a mood of 

retrospection, sometimes rising or sinking to nostalgia that endured to 

the end of his career." (Wykes 133). While he was in the army, Waugh 

wrote a fragment novel called Work Suspended, which was published, 

incomplete, in a limited edition at the end of 1942. Waugh commented 

that it was his best writing up till then. It is a novel of two chapters. 

Chapter one describes how the protagonist, John Plant, a young man 

who wrote detective fiction; came back to England from Morocco 

after the death of his father. Chapter two describes how Plant fell in 

love with Lucy, the wife of his writer friend Roger Simmonds who 

was a professional humorist. This novel is written in different 

innovative style and different narrative method than Waugh's previous 

fiction. It is told in the first person narration by Plant.  

In an article, on December 1946 in Horizon 371, Rose 

Macaulay remarked that "It [Work Suspended] is carefully composed; 

it lacks the earlier sparkle; it has a seriousness of tone…. The style is 

quiet and full. That it was not finished one feels a loss" (Macaulay, 

2002: 232). While Stannard remarks that "Work Suspended is the most 

enigmatic of Waugh's writings." (Stannard, 1986: 490) In his next 



42 
 

novel Put Out More Flags (1942) Waugh portrays the world at war. It 

is a satirical novel describing the influence of war on society. It was 

written on board ship from 12 July to 3 September 1941 when 

Waugh's military unit was coming back from Africa. Marina Mackay 

remarked that "Put Out More Flags describes how creative dissidence 

is victimized by political expediency masquerading as patriotic duty." 

(Mackay, 2007: 121). This novel can be considered as Waugh's 

farewell to comic fiction. It also seems that Waugh had lost the ability 

to see people funny and instead he began to loathe and express real 

fear of the modern world and modern people which was going to 

constitute the main theme of his next writings. "He knew in 1939 that 

he was finished as solely the comic novelist, but he was not yet clear 

in his mind as to what he would fully become when he next returned to 

fiction." (Wykes, 1999: 119). Confirming this impression, George 

Dangerfield observed that: 

Put Out More Flags comes less close to tragedy than do 

some of his earlier books, because the characters are no 

longer involved in a personal dilemma. The joke was 

always on them, but now they have no answer; and when 

they have no answer they cease to be persons. The world is 

at war in this novel, and-wriggle as they will—they can 

find no place for themselves in it. They are not persons any 

more, but just unhappy examples of a bad and silly society. 

They are out of date and therefore dead. (Dangerfield, 

2002: 217) 

Most of the critics agreed that Put Out More Flags can be 

considered as a literary turning point in Waugh's writings. In this 

novel there is clear change in the terms of the narrative technique. It is 

narrated through the use of omniscient narrator who knows everything 

and his voice is heard everywhere. In this novel one can feel that 



43 
 

Waugh brought the world of his comic fiction to an end. It was 

successful and very well received. At this time Evelyn Waugh was in a 

strong position in the world of contemporary literature. He started to 

see the world with a different vision; a vision which reflects the new 

spirit of the new world, as full of fear and miseries, where Waugh has 

lost the ability to see people as funny. He wrote Brideshead Revisited: 

The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder; which 

was finished by June 1944 and published in May 1945.  

Actually, It was another turning– point in Waugh's career. It is a 

novel with a religious theme; it deals with two interrelated things: the 

world and the spirit. In this novel, as most critics agree, Waugh 

completed the development in his novels from disorder to repentance. 

It is considered as a shift from the youthful recklessness to gravity, in 

which his own Catholicism came to the forefront. As a productive 

writer Waugh did not stop writing; he published his next book Scott– 

King's Modern Europe, in 1947, it is slim, almost not more than a 

short story about a harmless schoolmaster caught in the hardship and 

restrictions of the modern world. Through it Waugh portrays an 

imaginary image of dictator state of Neutralia. Though a lot of comic 

situations permeate this story but it is described by Stopp as "a sad 

little story" (Stopp, 1958: 136).  

Due to some sharp critical reviews accusing Waugh of being ill-

humored in writing such a weak story, he showed his anger in a letter 

to his close friend Nancy Mitford by ironically criticizing them saying 

that "All the reviews of Scott-King, instead of being about the book, 

have been about me saying that I am ill-tempered and self-

infatuated…. All my most valued books have been eaten by tiny 

spiders." (Letters 303). While Wykes remarks: "In Scott-King’s 



44 
 

Modern Europe (1949), the protagonist expresses Waugh's view that 

the war had ‘cast its heroic and chivalrous disguise and become a 

sweaty tug- of- war between teams of indistinguishable louts’" 

(Wykes, 1999: 124).  

Then, Waugh wrote The Loved One, in 1948, after his visit to 

America in 1947. During this visit Waugh was fascinated by the 

fabulous cemetery in Whispering Glades, as he was to rename it Forest 

Lawn, in Southern California. He was fascinated by the ritual for 

disguising death which is big business there. In this novel, Waugh 

depicts the city and the cemetery with irony as a kind of leisure resort 

where "The images of Art and Death and Love are to be located in the 

Eden of Whispering Glades in a state of sterility and up rootedness."  

(Bradbury, 1973: 177). Ironically, Waugh tries to show how the 

people of the twentieth century pay much attention to glorify the dead, 

decayed physical body while they neglect the immortal soul. About it 

Waugh said that "The Loved One is being well received in intellectual 

circles. They think my heart is in the right place after all. I’ll show 

them." (Letters 313). In his study Ironic Vision of Modern Life in 

Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One Harbir Singh Randhawa argued that: 

His novel The Loved One throws light upon the modern 

life. Though on first reading the novel could easily be 

divided into two parts- the satirical treatment of America’s 

communalized burial system by Waugh and secondly the 

shattered hopes of British expatriates who came to 

Hollywood with their American dream and later found 

themselves bewildered with the changing circumstances. 

But in its depth the novel deals with the decaying modern 

world where the survivors are the emotionally deprived 

people like Dennis and Mr. Joyboy and the idealistic 



45 
 

people like Sir Francis and Aimee who had no other option 

but to commit suicide. (Randhawa, 2007: 241-2) 

In this novel Waugh strongly criticizes the way of modern 

people dealing with their dead through the mortuary business, when 

people fail to love, respect and reward a person while he is alive but 

after his death, they spend thousands on his mummifying just to make 

him presentable for maintaining their status in the society, which is 

exactly what is happening nowadays in our age. Not only people, but 

government also rewards the distinguished people only after their 

death; whoever they are: writers, artists, athletes…etc. especially 

sometimes things become more difficult, a lot of them become poor, 

old, physically weak and sick at the end of their lives and they do not 

have the cost of their medicine. However, through such behaviour of 

rewarding the dead body of their beloved; they are rewarding death 

itself but not their beloved due to the fear from it because they become 

hypocrite, faithless and faraway from God. McCartney reflects the 

core of Waugh’s philosophy by saying "Below, the fake warmth of 

pseudo-traditional architecture and decoration, aged wood and soft 

carpeting; above, the chrome-cold intelligence that has contrived this 

travesty of funeral customs to profit from the public’s exorbitant fear 

of death." (McCartney, 1987: 65).  

In March 1950 Waugh finished Helena on which he had spent 

longer time than on any other novel. In one of his letters to Nancy 

Mitford after coming back from a visit to America Waugh wrote 

"Home, now, thank God, and at work again on Helena which is to be 

my MASTERPIECE. [and ironically said that] No one will like it at 

all." (Letters 357). It is deceptively simple. In this novel Waugh 

portrays the world as his own which opens as timeless, historical and 

like a fairy tale. Waugh depicts the same conflicts which arise in the 



46 
 

main body of his contemporary fiction. It reflects Waugh’s 

disillusionment, in which the atmosphere is one of darkness, 

confusion, arbitrary violence produced by a progressive culture. 

Through Helena, Waugh tries to return to a dream of a historical 

fiction in which artistic and social values could be maintained only by 

an effort of the imagination. Rome is disordered with apartment 

houses peopled by an ambitious, materialist middle class; the artists 

have lost the skills of representation and are sliding into a chaos of 

pure abstraction. Murder is commonplace and spiritual values are 

neglected; marriage and divorce have become a solely material 

concern. The journey, Helena makes, from the interior to the coast, is 

like the one Waugh made as a soldier carrying his burden of guilt 

away from the massacres of war. Praising Waugh's style of writing 

this novel, Sykes says that "I find Helena a very difficult book to 

judge. All Evelyn's merits are present in it, his wit, his broad humour, 

his irony; in addition it contains some of the best pieces of evocative 

writing that he achieved at any time" (Sykes, 1985: 428).  

In 1953, Waugh published Love Among the Ruins. It is a fantasy 

novella of the future, with a hero called Miles Plastic who fell in love 

with a lady of ‘a long, silken, corn-gold beard’ living in the 

glorification of the nanny state where people are fed with lies. It is a 

short nightmare on the issue of the idealistic social state which offers 

free euthanasia for its citizens and the abnormal behaviour of modern 

man. In his last two years, Waugh published A Little Leaning: The 

First Volume of an Autobiography in 1964, and later in 1965 he 

revised the three novels of his war trilogy to be published in one single 

volume entitled Sword of Honour. Shortly, in the trilogy Waugh 

examined the individual of the Second World War, his relationship 



47 
 

with the eternal struggle between good and evil in particular, and the 

earthly struggle between civilization and barbarism in general. "With 

the completion of trilogy Evelyn's career as a serious writer of fiction 

drew to an end." (Sykes, 1985: 569). In April 1966 Waugh died 

suddenly at his home.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



48 
 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Two 

Literature Review and Theoretical Frame 

Work 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



49 
 

Chapter Two 

Literature Review and Theoretical Framework  

 

2.0 Modern Literature and Modernism 

Actually, modern English Literature can be considered to fall 

into four phases; the first one is from the beginning of the First World 

War 1914 to 1923. One of the most distinguished trends of this period 

was the desire of writers to go back to the old; the fabric of intellectual 

life of London appeared to have deteriorated. The modern England 

was no longer a place for civilized men and women; it was divided 

between a fading vision of classical order and the lively nihilism 

which widely invaded and darkened the modern world. Such a period 

was against the classical standards with which that the artists measured 

the world. The spirit of the old London collapsed, in some way, 

vanished from being a heart of the world, and became wandering in a 

broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and horrors. The artists started to 

feel as if they were strangers in their country. Therefore, in this period, 

a lot of literary works which revealed a nostalgia to the old past days 

were appeared where there was clear dissatisfaction with the present. 

It was also a retreat from the industrialization and the city into natural, 

authentic and rural past. In his Modern Nostalgia Robert Hemmings 

comments: 

David Lowenthal identifies nostalgia’s appeal as the 

celebration of ‘an ordered clarity contrasting with the chaos 

or imprecision of our own times’. [But] Other recent critics 

demonstrate that for nostalgia to take root, certain socio-

historical conditions must prevail. Societies must be 

governed by a linear, not a cyclical conception of time, 

without the redemptive imperative of the future salvation of 



50 
 

afterlife. That is, they must be secular. (Hemmings, 2008: 

3-4) 

The second period between 1923 and 1929 can be called "The 

Jazz Age". Though it particularly took place in the United States but 

Britain, France and other European countries were also a part of it. 

Martin Stannard remarked that Oxford in 1924-5 "was changing 

beyond recognition….The Jazz Age had arrived and….Under graduate 

motored noisily from College to College for drinking parties and 

roared down to London at eighty miles an hour" (Stannard,1986: 103). 

This period played an important role in the social and cultural changes. 

It is usually connected with the phenomenon of breaking traditions, 

like sexual transgression, change in gender roles, misuse of alcohol 

and drugs. Most of these things had been practiced by Evelyn Waugh 

and his friends through the period of their study in Oxford. 

Consequently, there was a disposition to get rid of, deny, and 

mock the older morality and faith which was totally anti-Victorianism. 

About these great changes which affected all the aspects of life in 

general and literature in particular, David Ayers remarks that:  

Sex and sexuality do not only have a crucial structural role 

in the literature dealing with war and social change, they 

also generate a whole literature of their own in the 1920s 

which is variously cynical and progressive. The treatment 

of sex reflects both social realities and a renewed 

intellectual interest in sex, and plays a key part in the 

notion of this decade as ‘jazz age’…young women were 

connected not merely with Bolshevism but with sexuality 

itself. They seemed to undermine traditional gender roles at 

the level of appearance and behavior, sporting short 

haircuts such as the famous bobo and wearing shorter skirts 

which showed an amount of leg considered indecent before 



51 
 

the war. Many young women took to smoking in public, 

another sign of modernity and independence, and began to 

mix with men on a much more informal basis (Ayers, 2004: 

136). 

The third period starts from 1929 to 1939, which can be called 

the years of despair, pessimism and the great depression. The fourth is 

the postmodern period; it is the period of the Second World War and 

its continuing aftermath, The Cold War from 1945 to the present time. 

The period which witnessed the end of modernism, Michael H. 

Whitworth observes that "A large number of critics…including 

Graham Hough, Robert Graves, and Karl Shapiro, identified 1957 as 

the year in which modernism died" (Whitworth, 2007: 273). 

Henceforth, the developments and problems of modern society like 

The Industrial Revolution, The appearance of Marxism, The Aesthetic 

Movements, The spread of Colonialism, The Rise of Mass Culture, 

The decline of religious faith and the human values, health, education, 

poverty, all these, need to be represented and reflected; therefore 

modernist literature, and modernist art in general, often takes Man as a 

point of reference to display an awareness of the complexity of the 

mind and the identity, it is considered to be one of the best tools that 

reflects and focuses on such problems and developments 

Though many critics believed that the terms modernism and 

modernists appeared to be in use since 1908 onwards, Whitworth 

argued that they did not refer to themselves as modernists nor to their 

movement as modernism; they "defined themselves by creating 

distinctive groups and by contrasting their practices with those of a 

previous generation…they emphasized the technical innovations 

necessary to realize their vision of modernity" (Whitworth, 2007: 39). 

Gary Day also remarks that:  



52 
 

Modernist literature is an attempt to find new forms of 

representation for a new kind of society, one that seems to 

be constantly changing. It uses a variety of techniques to do 

that, from myth to stream of consciousness. But modernist 

literature is not just an attempt to find a more accurate form 

of representation, one that is true to individual experience, 

it also aims to diagnose the ills of modern society and to 

suggest a cure. (Day,2010: 7)  

Writers like Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia 

Woolf, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Graham Greene, Evelyn 

Waugh gained an early reputation for directly translating, satirizing 

and ironically underscoring the chaos, complexity and the unstable 

conditions of modern life reflecting the fast social changes which 

appeared in the wake of the deadly historical events of the two World 

Wars and gave modern life its new shape. It is as Georg Simmel 

observes that: 

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt 

of the individual to maintain the independence and 

individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers 

of society, against the weight of the historical heritage, and 

the external culture and technique of life. This antagonism 

represents the most modern form of the conflict…man 

must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence. 

(Simmel, 2008: 12) 

Waugh was influenced by some writers among them was Harold 

Acton (1904-1994) who became close, lifelong friend and mentor of 

Waugh. He founded a new undergraduate magazine called The Oxford 

Broom. This magazine played an important part in young Evelyn's life. 

"Waugh used his influence in Oxford journalism to provide an easy 



53 
 

market for his own contributions to Acton's campaign–short stories 

and, much more important, drawings." (Stannard, 1986: 87).  

While discussing the context of Waugh's early novels, and what 

Waugh adopted or took from the work of his predecessors, Davis 

states that there are a lot of similarities among the works of the 1920s, 

like, Carl Van Vechten, The Blind Bow– Boy: A Cartoon for a Stained 

Glass Window (1923), Aldous Huxley: Antic Hay (1923), Michael 

Arlen: The Green Hat (1924), Van Vechten: Firecrackers (1925), 

Earnest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises(1926), Beverly Nichols: 

Crazy Pavements (1927), Vechten: Spider Boy (1928), Evelyn Waugh: 

Decline and Fall (1928), Waugh: Vile Bodies (1930), and, Vechten: 

Parties (1930). And the fact is that Evelyn Waugh not only knew these 

novels but, he also had literally clear ideas about their methods, and 

the strong sense of particular patterns in character and form. Davis 

argues that: 

All of these novels are set in London or Paris or New York; 

all present highly sophisticated characters whose major 

occupation is amusing themselves; all not only reflect 

disillusion with conventional morals but indicate that new 

styles of behaviour are not entirely satisfactory. All 

demonstrate an overt awareness not only of new modes of 

behaving but of new forms in which to describe them. All 

of them describe worlds in which, to use Dr. Fagan's 

words, “taste and dignity…go unhampered”.… All 

consciously embody a new approach to fiction as well as to 

life. (Davis, 31– 32) 

Waugh was also influenced by some of his predecessors of the 

English novel, such as Ronald Firbank, Hilair Belloc, Harold Bloom, 

Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Edward Gibbon. He considered 

Gibbon's greatest value as a model historian, a model adoptable by a 



54 
 

novelist. Waugh also appreciated Gibbon's position against the Church 

when he blamed Christianity for the decline and fall. His friend Sykes 

remarks that "Evelyn was always prepared to learn from other people, 

unlike conceited writers of less assured talent, I never knew him to 

show envy of other writers' achievements or success." (Sykes, 1985: 

422). To reflect the confusion of his age Waugh found in Firbank's 

objectivity the suitable way to do that. Such style gave him the ability 

"to avoid both the restrictive conventions of realism and the 

psychoanalytic excesses of modernism." (McCartney, 1987: 71). This 

method of writing enabled Waugh to reflect the contemporary lack of 

certainty without cramping him in the traps of subjectivity.  

 

2.1 The Previous Studies about the Topic 

In his study of Waugh's personality and life, Stannard concludes 

that: "There was a streak of mild sadism in him. But it was only mild. 

He enjoyed the struggle, the competition of life, and was intolerant of 

those who backed away from it…he was gifted with a sensitive, 

contemplative intelligence, and was acutely self– critical" (Stannard, 

1986: 166). While Berberich remarked that what Waugh saw in others 

behaviour he did not see it in his. "Waugh was consequently a double 

standard: he expected and encouraged perfect behaviour in others; but 

displayed an altogether different one himself." (Berberich, 2007: 133). 

In such an atmosphere, all the powers that would reduce the individual 

to nothingness were transformed into a source of pleasure by making 

different jokes out of chaos, loneliness, powerlessness, stupidity, 

authority, nihilism, pain and death; as with Clara, the heroine of 

Waugh's novella Love Among the Ruins, where the central joke is that 

Clara has ‘a long, silken, corn– gold beard.’ Due to the drastic changes 



55 
 

in the system of life of his age, Waugh was under great depression and 

disappointed. He felt alienated and he wanted to be gone; to anywhere, 

from his home in Piers Court, from England or even from life to death. 

Therefore, under such critical moments, he believed that he had to be 

careful enough because if he continued to get enjoyment from hurting 

others through satirizing them, so, no one would love him; but, the 

biggest problem he felt, if he could not feel sorry for his lack of 

compassion, even God could not love him which was very painful.  

Consequently, Stannard argued that Waugh could not stop 

himself from hurting others. "Evelyn Waugh was a tormented man. He 

hurt people and somehow could not stop himself from doing it.…‘I am 

a bigot and a philistine’, he wrote to Lord David Cecil." 

(Stannard,1994: 247). Sykes commented that "Certainly Evelyn had 

hurt more people than he should have done, but this belated revenge 

did not credit to the injured" (Sykes, 1985): 594). While McCartney 

remarks that it must first be said that Waugh's: 

…satiric objective was not moral but metaphysical and it is 

on this ground his work achieves consistency of 

purpose….He fully expected people would behave badly 

with or without moral standards and had no hesitation in 

admitting his feelings. In his view, the real issue was the 

general disillusionment with the notion of the absolutes, 

whether moral or metaphysical. (McCartney, 2004: 2) 

In fact, Waugh sees the contemporary world as futile and 

anarchic; a world without principles. Therefore the absence of 

authentic conservers provokes him to express his own philosophy that 

"man is, by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or 

complete on this earth" (Sykes, 1985: 256). Justifying Waugh's 

disillusionment, Bradbury remarks that:  



56 
 

…his view [Waugh] that man is by nature an exile, that his 

chances of improving his condition are small, that there is 

no form of government ordained by God as being better 

than any other, that men naturally arrange themselves into 

system of classes, that government is necessary because of 

the anarchic impulse in mankind, and that Art is a natural 

function of man which can exist in any social system….his 

historical picture seems , in fact, to be founded on the view 

that, by schism and political activity, European Catholic 

civilization went into decline which has gradually brought 

about a lapse into anarchy, paganism and meaningless 

action. (Bradbury, 1964: 12)         

Although, Waugh admired and was fascinated by old and past 

morals but he believed that man is inherently corrupt and wicked 

therefore there had never been a period of relatively moral behaviour. 

Reflecting this philosophy Wykes observed accurately that "The 

eternal war of civilization against the chaos and anarchy that originate 

in man’s originally corrupt nature is the foundation theme of all of 

Waugh’s fiction." (Wykes, 1999: 80). For that reason, though his 

adherence to traditionalism he is not considered as a traditional satirist, 

in the sense that traditional satire seeks to correct morals and manners 

in a stable society. Accordingly Waugh himself denied in one of his 

articles in 1946 that he was writing satire at all; he argued that: 

Satire is a matter of period. It flourishes in a stable society 

and presupposes homogenous moral standards - the early 

Roman Empire and 18th Century Europe. It is aimed at 

inconsistency and hypocrisy. It exposes polite cruelty and 

folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All 

this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where 

vice no longer pays lip service to virtue. The artist's only 

service to the disintegrated society of today is to create 



57 
 

little independent systems of order of his own. (Gallagher, 

1984: 251) 

One can find Waugh's literary energy sprang from anger, in the 

sense that when he had something to complain about, he could only 

write amusingly to extend the range of his enemies. He taught his 

children never to be humble, always to attack, always to scorn with wit 

and to be funny. He had an extraordinary power to make people 

pleasing him. What makes many critics praise Waugh's style of 

writing is its economy, or in other words ‘not a word is wasted’ in his 

writing. "Waugh was greatly concerned with language…. He wrote 

with purity because he owed it to himself and to God to do his best at 

what he did best." (Lebedoff, 2008: 205–6). In fact, Waugh himself 

made a grand announcement of his love for the English language when 

style has become a main concern and writing a pleasure; saying that "it 

is the most lavish and delicate which mankind has ever known….I 

have never, until quite lately, enjoyed writing"(Wykes, 1999: 205).  

Critics also stressed that, in all Waugh's writing, especially at 

the time of his later works, he was infatuated by craftsmanship and by 

the relationship between language and class. He had been fascinated 

by any complex; like the internally coherent social system with its 

own language and the correct and expected way to behave. He 

believed that a good novel should reflect this; that is why he admired 

Hemingway's style for instance and adopted Dickens' style in writing 

autobiographical fiction. Though Waugh believed in the idealism of 

Art-for-Art's-sake, but he refused to separate it from the artist's 

responsibility to communicate, preserve and enrich tradition. Waugh 

said of his work: "I regard writing not as investigation of character but 

an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have 

no technical and psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events 



58 
 

that interest me." (Quoted by Penguin Books in the introduction of 

Waugh's Decline and Fall, 2003). About Waugh's artistic abilities 

Wykes observed that: 

He [Waugh] possessed the comic intelligence that has 

persisted in the English novel, through Fielding and Jane 

Austen and Dickens, into the twentieth century and into the 

six comic novels that came before Brideshead Revisited in 

1945. Waugh's comic intelligence matches Jane Austen's 

and his exuberance in those six books is Dickensian. No 

account, biographical or otherwise, can explain how he 

came by this power… for it is the comedy of Waugh's 

earlier novels that supports the entirety of his reputation 

and gives him his permanent place in the history of the 

English novel. (Wykes,1999: 1) 

Through close focus on Waugh's late life one can find that 

Waugh lived with guilt and sadness, in spite of the happy life he tried 

to show and to amuse the people around him. It was resentment about 

the devaluation of modern life, the fading of serious and devoted faith, 

and the loss of the hierarchy and order which maintained civilization. 

In his second book, the later years of Waugh's life, Stannard noted 

that: 

Beneath all this, deeply buried, there lay that seed of guilt: 

guilt at his failure to do more in Yugoslavia; guilt at his 

lack of affection for his children; guilt at his instinctive 

cruelty; above all, guilt at not feeling guilty. There was a 

religious dryness in his soul which hurt him, a lack of 

contrition, and he found it difficult to pray. His faith 

remained one of intellectual conviction rather than of 

emotional release. (Stannard, 1994: 157) 



59 
 

Like most of the critics, Bradbury asserts that Waugh is "a 

totally modern novelist, offering his own values with assertive 

prejudice, but in a world where the really truthful statement is that of 

the flux and anarchy." (Carens, 1966: xvi). On this account, and as a 

result of the futile and absurd life of the period, after the Great War, 

the decline of moral values, the loss of faith and identity, the boredom 

of life, the sterility of the social relations and the disintegration of the 

English family, Waugh directs his sharp satire against these modern 

phenomena. "Modern times pressed hard on Waugh in his last 

decades. The decline of the aristocracy, the encroachment of American 

power, and, above all, the ascendance of the liberal movement in the 

Catholic Church appalled and depressed him." (Darman, 1978: 162-

67). In another article Bradbury adds that: 

Waugh is very much a novelist of the disillusioned 

Twenties, in that he shares the prevailing obsession of the 

decade with barbarism and vitalism as the alternative to 

rational civilization; it is an essential part of his comic 

thrust and subject-matter….Like other writers who began 

in the 1920s-Aldous Huxley and…Hemingway, Fitzgerald 

and Nathanael West – he is obsessed with the world of an 

irrevocable modernity, a world of psychological stress, 

dissolving relationships, new lifestyles, novel technologies 

and environments; his creative energy takes him readily 

into encounters with such people and milieux, with a 

curiosity divorced from moral judgment and fascinated by 

extravagant behavior. (Bradbury, 1973: 171-2) 

Waugh tried to convey a sense of modern disorder and explain its 

causes. He believed that modernity became the main danger to 

individuality which cannot be apart from the roots of traditional 



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morality and religious conventions. Without such roots, no real 

personality can flourish. Confirming these ideas, McCartney says that:  

In novel after novel, Waugh portrayed the consequences of 

jettisoning the traditions that had created the society and 

culture of Western Europe since the collapse of the Roman 

Empire...he was convinced the core of the older order's 

sensibility would be retained. He believed it would become 

the cornerstone for whatever new edifice was being built by 

an increasingly technological society. While he could never 

be fully in sympathy with such a world, as a matter of faith 

he concluded it would have to build on the Greek, Hebrew, 

and Christian past. (McCartney, 2004: x) 

As a result readers cannot feel sympathy with most of Waugh's 

characters; "Waugh, no less than Greene…he views his characters 

with the eye of the naturalist. They are animals, savage, unscrupulous, 

selfish… and weak. There are those who prey and those who are 

preyed upon. For both writers life is a jungle." (Boyle, 2011: 76). With 

the same notion, Davis argues that: 

One of the traits of Waugh's character obvious to him as 

well as to everyone who ever knew him or read his work 

was the inability to sympathize with or even to attempt to 

understand those who did not share his tastes…. Even 

when he liked people, he could keep them at the point of 

his barbed style and regard them as specimen. (Davis, 

1989: 53) 

With this sense Wykes debates that "The human behaviour that 

Waugh depicted in his books is that of exiles, outcasts, people with no 

valid landmarks or guideposts." (Wykes, 1999: 2). Because of that, 

one may notice that, in most of his fictions, Waugh showed how he 

hates and fears the Age of the Common Man, the lower– middle– class 



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man, who is the inheritor of the future. Such philosophy concurred 

with the American Vice–president's declaration about the Age of the 

Common Man, not long before Evelyn began to write the novel 

Brideshead Revisited in February 1944 the Vice-president of the 

United States, Henry Wallace, had declared that "the century on which 

we are entering…can and must be the century of the common man." 

(Patey, 1998: 205). But the fact is that Waugh continued insisting that 

"The Common Man does not exist. He is an abstraction invented by 

bores for bores." (Gallagher,1984: 302). Waugh has also confirmed his 

opinion with the interviewers of a programme called ‘Frankly 

Speaking’ in the BBC in 1953, who were gravely horned; when they 

asked Evelyn Waugh: 

‘You have not much sympathy with the man in the street, 

have you, Mr Waugh?’ [Waugh answered that]… ‘you 

must understand’… ‘that the man in the street does not 

exist. He is a modern myth. There are individual men and 

women, each one of whom has an individual and immortal 

soul, and such beings need to sue streets time to time.’ 

(Sykes, 1985: 477) 

 

2.2 The Theoretical Study 

Waugh performs comparable anti-humanist criticism of secular 

societies in his novels. Furthermore, it can be suggested that Waugh's 

respective examination of modern society, both in England and 

abroad, is informed by his Catholic belief. Humanism was problematic 

for Waugh because he did not agree that fallible man – morally weak 

and liable to sin – should be placed as the highest being in the 

universe; nor did he accept that society would progress increasingly 

over time, as he argued that boundaries and structure were needed in 



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order to limit man's inherent failings. Waugh proposed that men and 

society in general should live in relation to God's laws. In his fictions 

of the early to mid-thirties, he can be viewed as disapproving of 

humanist system o