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Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love By Duncan McLaren Harbour, £15
Evelyn! romps through Waugh land, from his London childhood to school and Oxford, to teaching, to writing, to getting in with the aristos, to his short first marriage, and on through his prodigious literary output – Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Brideshead Revisited – and sensational success. It is mainly delightful, and is also insightful in showing how Waugh's childhood, "lacking in love", and his public cuckolding were bitter wounds that Waugh alchemised into art. He drank ferociously, and was a snob and bully, but I wonder about McLaren's conclusion that his real love was the first Mrs W, his happiest times in the Barley Mow, in Dorset, with her in 1929, writing Decline and Fall. A 29-year second marriage and seven children with (the beautiful) Laura Herbert written off just like that? Maybe he plans a second volume.
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