But the humor was combined with a literary craftsmanship unsurpassed among his contemporaries (although Waugh himself would protest here in favor of Wodehouse). Who, or what, was Evelyn Waugh? He was, touching but the surface of the man and his art, a brilliant satirist-one of the funniest writers of the century. (The latter volume, which avoids the excessive Freudianism of the former, is in most respects the superior effort.) Still, and with far more acuity than was evident in Christopher Sykes’ earlier study, the multiple levels of Waugh’s persona are laid bare and, in some instances, gracefully, even insightfully, explored in Stannard’s recently completed two-volume biography. Martin Stannard, a lecturer in English at the University of Leicester, doesn’t quite fit that bill. But in Evelyn Waugh, nature and grace worked overtime to produce an extraordinary character, a full understanding of whose complexities would require the combined skills of an archaeologist, a psychiatrist, and a Jesuit confessor of the old school. Many great novelists have had intricate, even prickly, personalities.
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