He drank a lot in college and afterward went to Wales to work as a schoolteacher. He didn't like it there, and later wrote: "The Welsh … are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing . . . sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver."
He was miserable and depressed and tried to commit suicide by walking out into the ocean, but along the way he was stung by jellyfish and turned back, abandoning his plans. He was fired from his teaching position for trying to seduce one of the head schoolmistresses.
In his 20s, he married a woman named Evelyn; the couple's friends called them "He-Evelyn" and "She-Evelyn." She came from an aristocratic family, and he was not a very nice person to her. They were unhappy together, and she left him for a BBC newsman a few years after they were married.
Around the same time, he converted to Catholicism, which fueled lots of gossip among his London peers and the press. He wrote an essay called "Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me," in which he said that it was about deciding "between Christianity or chaos." He wrote, "It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based."
He fell in love with a 19-year-old woman, Laura Herbert, the cousin of his previous wife. He wrote a bunch of letters trying to convince her to marry him — letters in which he said things like: "I can't advise you in my favour because I think it would be beastly for you, but think how nice it would be for me. I am restless & moody & misanthropic & lazy and have no money except what I earn and if I got ill you would starve. In fact it's a lousy proposition. On the other hand, I think I could do a Grant and reform & become quite strict about not getting drunk and I am pretty sure I should be faithful. Also there is always a fair chance that there will be another bigger economic crash in which case if you had married a nobleman with a great house you might find yourself starving, while I am very clever and could probably earn a living of some sort somewhere." He would tell her: "Above all things, darling, don't fret at all. But just turn the matter over in your dear head."
They wedded, had six kids, settled in Somerset, and stayed married for the rest of his life, a period during which he wore checkered tweed suits and used a big ear trumpet when he went hard of hearing. He died in his bathroom in 1966 from a heart attack; it was Easter Sunday, and he'd just come home from Latin Mass. His diaries were published in 1976, and an edition of his letters was published in 1980. There have been several biographies about Evelyn Waugh published recently, including Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2007), David Lebedoff's The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh (2008), and Paula Byrne's Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (2009).
In Brideshead Revisited,Waugh wrote: "I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendor, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest."
Posted over on Garrison's Keillor's the Writer's Almanac
Image borrowed from Yahoo.
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