Mordant, mirthful, and unrelenting in their lampoon of aristocratic mischief, Evelyn Waugh's novels have earned him a permanent place in the literary pantheon. But this cantankerous master--the scion, by the way, of a decidedly middle-class family of publishers and writers--was no less adept when it came to the short form. Indeed, Waugh first broke into print in 1926 with "The Balance: A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High Necked Jumpers," an early story that suggests a modernized and misanthropic P.G. Wodehouse. And he continued to write short fiction throughout the rest of his career, all of which has now been collected in the delectable Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh.

The first few entries in the collection capture a kinder, gentler author, not yet red at the verbal tooth and claw. But by 1932, when he wrote "Love in the Slump," Waugh's eye for the black-comic detail was firmly in place: It rained heavily on the day of the wedding, and only the last-ditchers among the St. Margaret's crowd turned out to watch the melancholy succession of guests popping out of their dripping cars and plunging up the covered way into the church.... A doctor was summoned to attend the bridegroom's small nephew, who, after attracting considerable attention as a page at the ceremony by his outspoken comments, developed a high temperature and numerous disquieting symptoms of food poisoning. Waugh's wit only sharpened throughout the succeeding decades, and the very texture of his prose thickened (although it never took on much in the way of modernist adipose tissue). In "Compassion," a 1949 tale that belies the author's vaunted anti-Semitism, a mere glimpse of some Yugoslavian partisans leads to this superabundant sentence: "He passed ragged, swaggering partisans, all young, some scarcely more than children; girls in battle dress, bandaged, bemedalled, girdled with grenades, squat, chaste, cheerful, sexless, barely human, who had grown up in mountain bivouacs, singing patriotic songs, arm-in-arm along the pavements where a few years earlier rheumatics had crept with parasols and light, romantic novels." Nobody can accuse Waugh of squishy sentimentality--remember, romantic prose is strictly for convalescents. Still, The Complete Stories offers an accurate and stupendously entertaining vision of human folly, no less effective for being administered in smaller doses.


From Publishers Weekly
"It seems to me that Nature, like a lazy author, will round off abruptly into a short story what she obviously intended to be the opening of a novel," observes the Oxford-dropout narrator of "A House of Gentlefolk," and the same might be said of a handful of the 40-odd short pieces in this lavishly entertaining collection that resemble sketches and false starts toward longer works. Among them are two intriguing chapters of Work Suspended, a novel that Waugh abandoned in the mid-1940s, and his Oxford writings and juvenilia. But at his best, Waugh is a blazing practitioner of the short story, for it proves an ideal framework for a style that eschews the psychoanalytical investigations of modernist writers like Joyce or Woolf for taut social commentary, stylized characters and hilarious, dramatic conceits. Few aspects of life in England between the wars escape Waugh's blistering attention, be they the colonial blunderings of innocents abroad, the manners of genteel country families or the antics of his own peers, such as the supercilious Bright Young Thing in "Out of Depth" who antagonizes a magician he meets at a London dinner party and is transported to the 25th century. Waugh loves visiting cruelties upon his characters, like the cuckolded London dilettante in "The Man Who Liked Dickens" who funds an ill-fated expedition to the Amazon, is imprisoned by a Kurtz-like chief and forced to read Dickens to his captor. His misanthropy notwithstanding, Waugh is so adept at punchy openings, deadpan zingers and wickedly ironic situations, and so graceful is his use of language, that this volume should serve, at a time of renewed interest in the short story, as primer on the infinite possibilities of the form. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In his portrait of Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), Wykes (literature, Dartmouth Coll.) strikes a balance between chronicling his subject's life and examining his work. Wykes traces Waugh's emotional and creative life from birthAhe was the second son of well-known publisher and critic Arthur Waugh (a "literary businessman")Athrough adulthood. The elder Waugh made no secret of the fact that his firstborn son Alec (also a novelist) was his favorite. This early rejection, Wykes argues, helped cultivate the cynicism and dark humor that were so much a part of young Evelyn's Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934). Waugh attended Oxford, worked as a teacher and journalist, and married twice. In 1930, in perhaps the most pivotal move in his life, he converted to Roman Catholicism. This conversion, Waugh believed, helped impose an "eternal order" on the "frantic aimlessness" of his life and his workAespecially his "eschatological" masterpiece Brideshead Revisited (1945). A concise, readable piece of Waugh scholarship that deserves a place in all library collections; highly recommended. [The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh was published in September by Little, Brown, ISBN 0-316-92546-2, $24.95.AEd.]ADiane Gardner Premo, Rochester P.L., N.-ADiane Gardner Premo, Rochester P.L., NY Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Richard Eder
The Complete Stories, 39 of them, include a half dozen that are notable, if not up to the novels; and another eight or so that are interesting failures, or interesting because they so closely prefigure or replay the novels.


From Booklist
Waugh (1903^-66) was a prominent British satirist, author of such brilliant novels as Brideshead Revisited (1945) and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). Although not really known as a short-story writer, this first-time gathering of his work in that form is incontrovertible evidence of his short-story writing ability. These 39 stories span Waugh's writing career, and to a one they demonstrate his trademark wit and sophistication. "The Man Who Liked Dickens" is quintessential Waugh; even in a story set in the South American rain forest, his tone is of utmost urbanity! This delightful story features Mr. McMaster, who has lived by simple means on his homestead in uncharted Amazon territory for decades; and one day a lost and sick explorer stumbles onto the property. McMaster nurses him back to health, only to keep him captive so the "prisoner" can read McMaster daily doses of Charles Dickens. This is Waugh's dark comedy at its keenest; he will be enjoyed by those who like Ronald Firbank and Saki. Brad Hooper

FROM OUR EDITORS

Waugh Is Me

"I have been here before," claims Charles Ryder at the very outset of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh's most famous novel. Many readers of Waugh's novels (as well as fans of the PBS series adapted from it) may assert the same claim: I have been here before; I know what is here to be found. But these readers may yet be a bit surprised.

Now, for the first time, all this master satirist's short fiction of has been collected in The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh. These stories span the breadth of Waugh's career, both chronologically and stylistically, revealing a genius that runs much deeper than the often overwhelming sentimentality of Charles Ryder's reminiscences.

Waugh, born in England in 1903, was very much a man of the century, at once iconoclastic and curmudgeonly, casting a suspicious eye on the new while simultaneously lampooning everything in traditional British culture. This split in Waugh's writing—what might in fact be read as evenhandedness, a universal criticism—reveals itself throughout his career. Included in The Complete Stories are some of Waugh's earliest pieces of writing, the brief sketches that have survived from his childhood, misspellings and all. "The Curse of the Horse Race," for instance, a brief piece dating from Waugh's very early childhood, tells the story of how a lost bet leads to murder most foul, culminating in a moral befitting the later writer: "Then Tom drest himself then Tom took Rupert to the puliese cort Rupert was hung for killing the pulies man. I hope this story will be aleson to you never to bet."

The opposite end of Waugh's career is also represented, including "Basil Seal Rides Again, or The Rake's Regress," published three years before Waugh's death in 1966, in which the slightly deaf title character too loudly laments the rapid changes in a world of which he repeatedly, unknowingly, runs afoul. In between are more than three-dozen tales of scandal and sentiment, including many pointed satires of the lives of the upper classes.

Waugh's often apparent anger with the aristocracy, though seemingly at odds with his Christian undertone, was actually augmented by Christianity. Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930, an odd choice in an officially Protestant country, where Catholics were often routinely denied the privileges that the upper class ordinarily enjoyed. Perhaps because of his conversion, Waugh came to understand something of the principle of exclusion that underlies British culture. This is not to say, of course, that the attitudes Waugh reveals in his fiction are egalitarian; he is as guilty of snobbery as his characters, and his writing often betrays crushingly racist and sexist feelings. But Waugh's perspective from the margins of British society—in theory, one of the chosen; in practice, not—allows him an angle of satirical attack that few others have managed.

In "Love in the Slump," for instance, Waugh presents a honeymoon—following a marriage that was, we are told, "as unimportant an event as has occurred within living memory"—gone hilariously wrong, as duty at long last gives way to desire. In "Cruise," letters and postcards from a young woman on a sea vacation tell the story of the flightiness of the idle rich. And in "Bella Fleace Gave a Party," we see the disaster created by one old woman's doomed attempts to reenter the social swirl.

But even more, these stories give the reader an insight into the development of Waugh's longer work. We see, for instance, in the 1933 story "The Man Who Liked Dickens," the origins of Tony Last's fate in A Handful of Dust. Also included, "by special request," is an alternative ending written for that novel, in which the ill-fated marriage of Tony and Brenda takes a slightly altered, but perhaps not so different, turn. And in "Charles Ryder's Schooldays," a "missing chapter" from Brideshead Revisited, we get a peek into the youth of Waugh's sentimental hero.

To coincide with the publication of The Complete Stories, Back Bay Books has also re-released Waugh's most successful novels in new paperback editions, including his first novel, Decline and Fall, and his masterpiece, A Handful of Dust. Also re-released are Scoop, a burlesque of the sensationalism in modern newspaper reporting; Vile Bodies, a rather savage lampooning of the European social set between the wars; The Loved One, an exploration of the bizarreness of the American way of life and its obsession with death; and, of course, the ubiquitous Brideshead Revisited.

Although Waugh is undoubtedly and deservedly best known for his novels, his short fiction reveals a writer developing both his style and his subject matter, a writer whose concision and control often mask powerful emotion. These stories, while lending themselves to the reader's sense of having been there before—like that of Charles Ryder—nonetheless consistently surprise with their breadth, their imagination, and their insight.

—Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is assistant professor of English and Media Studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

For the first time, all of Evelyn Waugh's stories - thirty-nine marvelous works of short fiction spanning his entire career - are brought together in a single volume.. "The stories range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to one in which Waugh suggests an alternative ending to his novel A Handful of Dust; from a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to two long, linked stories, remnants of an abandoned novel that Waugh himself considered "my best writing"; from a plot-packed morality role that Waugh composed at a very tender age to an epistolary lark in the voice of "a young lady of leisure"; from a hilarious fantasy about newlyweds to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost.

SYNOPSIS

For the first time all of Evelyn Waugh's stories, thirty-nine marvelous works of short fiction spanning his entire career, are brought together in a single volume. The result is a book of brilliant entertainments.
The stories range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to one in which Waugh suggests an alternative ending to his novel A Handful of Dust; from a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to two long linked stories, remnants of an abandoned novel that Waugh himself considered "my best writing"; from a plot-packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age to an epistolary lark in the voice of "a young lady of leisure"; from a hilarious fantasy about newlyweds to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost.
The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh is a dazzling distillation of Waugh's genius;abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

"It seems to me that Nature, like a lazy author, will round off abruptly into a short story what she obviously intended to be the opening of a novel," observes the Oxford-dropout narrator of "A House of Gentlefolk," and the same might be said of a handful of the 40-odd short pieces in this lavishly entertaining collection that resemble sketches and false starts toward longer works. Among them are two intriguing chapters of Work Suspended, a novel that Waugh abandoned in the mid-1940s, and his Oxford writings and juvenilia. But at his best, Waugh is a blazing practitioner of the short story, for it proves an ideal framework for a style that eschews the psychoanalytical investigations of modernist writers like Joyce or Woolf for taut social commentary, stylized characters and hilarious, dramatic conceits. Few aspects of life in England between the wars escape Waugh's blistering attention, be they the colonial blunderings of innocents abroad, the manners of genteel country families or the antics of his own peers, such as the supercilious Bright Young Thing in "Out of Depth" who antagonizes a magician he meets at a London dinner party and is transported to the 25th century. Waugh loves visiting cruelties upon his characters, like the cuckolded London dilettante in "The Man Who Liked Dickens" who funds an ill-fated expedition to the Amazon, is imprisoned by a Kurtz-like chief and forced to read Dickens to his captor. His misanthropy notwithstanding, Waugh is so adept at punchy openings, deadpan zingers and wickedly ironic situations, and so graceful is his use of language, that this volume should serve, at a time of renewed interest in the short story, as primer on the infinite possibilities of the form. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Susan Minot