Evelyn Waugh 1903–66
Evelyn Waugh's First Eight Books
Waugh's travel books are, as is to be anticipated, principally about Waugh. Their leitmotifs are boredom and discomfort. One is tempted to borrow a term from Sterne and call him a Splenetic Traveller, but this would not be quite accurate. In Waugh's case it is not the traveller's ruling sentiment that characterises the journey, but the unerring determination with which the sentiment is discovered in every situation. Waugh is a dogmatic traveller, and the dogma he carries with him is boredom, an attitude perfectly consistent with his comprehensively sceptical outlook as it developed during the late 1920s and early 30s. 'I am constitutionally a martyr to boredom,’ he declares in Remote People, the journey to Africa, organised as an account of two empires and three nightmares.
The London Magazine
December 2011 /January 2012
Waugh's first eight books are:
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1928)
Decline and Fall (1928)
Vile Bodies, 1930
Labels (1930)
Remote People (1931)
Black Mischief (1932)
A Handful of Dust (1934)
Ninety-Two Days (1934)
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