Evelyn Waugh spent his Oxford years feuding, drinking and barely studying
Before Decline and Fall and Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh was an Oxford undergraduate who boasted he did no work, joined a hard-drinking avant-garde set and started a feud with his tutor so bitter that he spent years afterwards giving the man's name to absurd characters in his novels.
Born in Hampstead in October 1903, Waugh was the younger son of Arthur Waugh, managing director of Chapman and Hall, the firm that published Dickens. His mother taught him at home and they were close, while his father doted on his elder brother Alec. As a boy Evelyn wrote plays for the neighbourhood children, formed a mock army called the Pistol Troop, and ran errands at the War Office in 1914 hoping to glimpse Lord Kitchener.
He was meant to follow Alec to Sherborne, but Alec was asked to leave in 1915 and then published The Loom of Youth, a novel so plainly about the school that Evelyn could no longer go there. He went to Lancing instead, where he published his first article, an essay defending Cubism, founded the Corpse Club for boys who were bored stiff, and lost most of his religious faith. A history scholarship took him to Hertford College, Oxford, in January 1922.
Oxford changed him once Harold Acton and Brian Howard arrived that autumn. Waugh became secretary of their Hypocrites' Club, drank heavily and had several relationships with men, one perhaps inspiring Lord Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead. His study all but stopped. When his tutor C. R. M. F. Cruttwell told him to reform, he answered with what he later called fatuous haughtiness, and the two came to loathe each other. He scraped a third-class degree in 1924.
Recognition came later with satires such as A Handful of Dust and the war trilogy Sword of Honour, drawn partly from his service in the Royal Marines and Royal Horse Guards. He became a Catholic in 1930 after his first marriage collapsed, and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council deeply troubled him in his last years. He died in 1966, and the 1981 television serial of Brideshead won him a whole new readership.
Source: Evelyn Waugh
