The year 1973 saw a big serialisation of the private diaries of Evelyn Waugh in the Observer Magazine, edited by Michael Davie. The edition of 1 April covered the period between ‘coming down from Oxford and getting secretly engaged in the winter of 1927’, which was ‘probably the unhappiest stretch of his life’ (‘Waugh on the bright young people’).
‘Oxford had introduced him to a new world of smart and clever people, but it was borne in on him, after he came down, that he was not really part of that world,’ wrote Davie. Furthermore, Waugh himself never really liked parties, which was rather the whole point of the Bright Young People.
‘Waugh’s diary entries for these years show a keen interest in the sexual activities and perversions of others, and a trace of puritanism. He showed flickerings of homosexual interest after he fell in love with Olivia… he visited a male brothel in Paris, but lost patience and went to bed in chastity,’ he wrote.
When the teacher Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall left his clothes on the beach and a note in a faked suicide bid, it had echoes of Waugh. After running out of money and losing a job, Waugh had gone ‘down to the sea, left his clothes and a valedictory quotation from Euripedes on the beach, and swum towards the horizon. He was stung by a jellyfish, however, and turned back.’ And so A Handful of Dust was nearly a handful of dust.
He was sacked from one teaching job after he ‘had attempted to assault the matron in French’ (though he was never quite sure what he’d done) and, therefore, he wrote: ‘It seems to me the time has arrived to set about being a man of letters.’
Waugh was also sacked after just three months as a reporter on the Daily Express. On the upside, all this material fed into Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and, of course, Scoop . Much to thank the jellyfish for.
