A Handful of Dust

Background

Evelyn Waugh (photographed by Carl Van Vechten, December 1940)

Evelyn Waugh, born in 1903, was the younger son of Arthur Waugh, a writer and literary figure who was the managing director of the London publishing firm of Chapman & Hall. After attending Lancing College and Hertford College, Oxford, Waugh taught for three years in a series of private preparatory schools before beginning his career as a writer.[1] His first commercially printed work was a short story, "The Balance", which Chapman and Hall included in a 1926 anthology.[2] He worked briefly as a Daily Express reporter,[3] and wrote a short biography of the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti before achieving success in 1928 with the publication of his comic novel, Decline and Fall. By the end of 1932 Waugh had written two further novels, Vile Bodies and Black Mischief, and two travel books. His professional successes coincided with private upheavals; in June 1928 he married Evelyn Gardner, but just over a year later the marriage ended when she declared her love for the couple's mutual friend John Heygate. Reconciliation proved impossible, and Waugh commenced divorce proceedings in September 1929.[1] At the same time, Waugh was undergoing instruction which led to his reception, in September 1930, into the Roman Catholic Church.[4]

Waugh's adherence to Catholic teaching on divorce caused him frustration while awaiting the possible annulment of his marriage.[5] He had fallen in love with Teresa Jungman, a lively socialite whose Catholicism precluded any intimacy in their relationship since in the eyes of the Church Waugh remained married.[5][6] Waugh's conversion did not greatly affect the acerbic and sharply satirical tone of his fiction—his principal characters were frequently amoral and their activities sometimes shocking. Waugh claimed "the right to write of man's depravity in such a fashion as to make it unattractive".[7] When Black Mischief was published in 1932, the editor of the Catholic journal The Tablet, Ernest Oldmeadow, launched a violent attack on the book and its author, stating that the novel was "a disgrace to anybody professing the Catholic name".[8] Waugh, wrote Oldmeadow, "was intent on elaborating a work outrageous not only to Catholic but to ordinary standards of modesty".[9] Waugh made no public rebuttal of these charges; an open letter to the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster was prepared, but on the advice of Waugh's friends was not sent.[10][11]


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