My Brother Evelyn and Other Profiles

"In a way I feel sorry for Alec Waugh. In his lifetime he always felt that he was the brother who succeeded. During the twenties and thirties, Alec was far better known than Evelyn. He wrote a book a year, and was very pleased with himself, adored by his parents. His three passions in life were cricket, wine and women. He was very orderly, very neat, and without a glimmer of Evelyn’s genius, but his portrait of Evelyn is very touching. He sees him as the annoying little brother, to be dismissed. In a Penguin history of literature published in the 1950s, it said: “Of the novelists writing today, the two we can be sure will be forgotten very quickly are Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.” Disastrously. She was a female version of the Dandies. She was pretty, silly, well-born – which Evelyn liked, because he was always a bit of a snob – and he rather fell for her. They had a short, fun time together, but She-Evelyn was only really interested in parties and having fun, and didn’t understand her husband at all. When He-Evelyn went away for weeks at a time, to work on Vile Bodies , she started an affair with another man. He was mortified and miserable, but it was more that his amour propre was wounded. I think he would have grown out of her quickly in any case. I think it was the worst thing that happened to him. And underneath his bullying, he was lacking in confidence, particularly sexual confidence with women. He was constantly falling hopelessly in love with women who wouldn’t give him the time of day. He was also prone to depression, and the ending of Vile Bodies reflects that very clearly. He saw himself as them, dancing into chaos. He was terrified of chaos. And that’s when he was saved by the Catholic church. One of the draws for him was the church’s inflexible rules. He knew exactly where he stood every minute of the day, and that became terribly important to him. He was always a hardline Catholic, and tried to convert John Betjeman."