When the going got tough

The acute emotional pain caused by his first wife’s infidelity was of priceless service to Evelyn Waugh as a novelist, says Paul Johnson

Evelyn Waugh died, aged 62, in 1966, and his reputation has risen steadily ever since. His status as the finest English prose-writer of the 20th century is now being marked by an annotated complete edition of his works, sumptuously published by the Oxford University Press. As a prolegomenon, Penguin is issuing another complete edition in hardback, the first eight volumes of which are now available, priced £20 each. They include his life of Rossetti, three travel books, Labels, Remote People and Ninety-two Days, and his first four novels, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust. These books, published between 1928 and 1934, cover his emergence as a major novelist.

Waugh’s gifts as a storyteller are now so obvious to us, and fit so well into his overwhelming personality, that it is impossible to think of him as anything else.