Evelyn Waugh was born in November, 1903, and as his centenary approaches, the mighty grinding of wheels and axes can be heard across the English-speaking world. Waugh’s conservative, not to say crusty, outlook counts very little with the British left. After all, the celebrated author in question cannot raise his voice in protest. Why not enlist him in the anti-American cause?

     Here, for example, is Geoffrey Wheatcroft “appreciating” Waugh in the Guardian: “His analysis of the Suez adventure in 1956 reads with painful relevance after the Iraq adventure of 2003: ‘It cannot be justified on moral or legal grounds’ (but then ‘practically no recent action of any British government can be justified morally’). “

     Waugh might very well have deplored the Blair–Bush nexus in Iraq, but Wheatcroft cannot know that. But he needs troops to back his argument, and if he runs out of live draftees, why, a dead one will do just as well. This is just the sort of thing so loudly deplored when George Orwell was co-opted by the right, but never mind. For the fact is that Waugh cannot be conscripted for any side. He was a rare, lone, comic artist, sui generis, well beyond categories.

      Evelyn Waugh rose to prominence as a farceur of the first order, laying waste the smart set of London between the Wars. His first novel, Decline and Fall, published in 1928, set the tone for all that was to follow: a drunken revel is under way at a particularly snobbish Oxford dining club: “A shriller note could be heard from Sir Alastair’s rooms; any who have heard that sound will shrink from the recollection of it; it is the sound of the English country families baying for broken glass.” (Readers of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities will recognize the homage, up to and including the use of the word ‘baying.’)

       Waugh’s attack did not let up. Vile Bodies brilliantly anatomized the Mayfair Set of bright young wastrels; and when he tired of local targets he traveled to Africa. There Waugh wrote what would one day be looked upon as racist amusements, among them Black Mischief and Scoop. If the PC police have their way, both books will soon go missing from libraries. A pity; the latter novel takes place in an unnamed country that is manifestly Abyssinia during the days of Haile Selassie, and should be required reading for anyone contemplating a career in journalism. Scoop’s exposure of venal, petty and self-serving foreign correspondents has never lost its pertinence, nor has its portraits of courtier journalists who are still as ubiquitous as their expense accounts. Waugh is particularly withering in a scene with the pompous fool Lord Copper, to whom no employee ever says no. If he is to be contradicted, it is with the words, “Up to a point.”  Sample dialogue: CEO: “Is Yokahama the capitol of Japan?” Toady: “Up to a point, Lord Copper.”

       Much as been made of the autobiographical aspect of Waugh’s best book, Handful of Dust, a reflection of the bitterness he felt upon learning of his first wife’s infidelity. The wife in the novel takes a lover with the same name as her son; when the son is killed in an equestrian accident, she hears that something terrible has happened to “John.” When she learns that it is not the man, she breathes a sigh of relief in one of the most savage passages in the Waugh canon. The final scene, in which her husband, Tony, is taken capture in the jungle, and forced to read Dickens every night to a crazy old man makes Stephen King’s horror writings seem sophomoric indeed.

     Those who like brisk, cinematic writing combined with farcically revealing names— Lady Metroland; Basil Seal; Mrs. Melrose Ape; Ambrose Silk; Mrs. Stitch; Lady Circumference—will prefer the brisk, cinematic books characteristic of the early Waugh. Those who prefer their novels in more conventional form should seek out the Sword of Honor trilogy, Waugh’s autobiographical novels of World War II in Europe. No better works were produced in the postwar period. There is something on the shelf for everyone.

    This is not to say that the man, or the writer, was without flaws. Personally, Waugh was marred by snobbery, a characteristic that showed in his later work; Brideshead Revisited, for example, is clotted with a hushed worship of Britain’s oldest families. And, hilarious as it is, The Loved One, a lampoon of Southern California’s transplanted Brits in the movie colony, and of the vulgarity of Forest Lawn Cemetery, wavers badly when it tries to send up the American scene, about which Waugh knew very little.

    And yet he was not a hater of the U.S. A Catholic convert, Waugh deplored what he saw happening in Western Europe, with its relentless secularization and creeping collectivism. He thought he saw in the New World a chance for his Church: “There is a purely American ‘way of life’ dreaded in Europe and Asia. And that, by the grace of God, is the ‘way of life’ that will prevail.”

      By all accounts, Waugh was not a pleasant man to know, crusty, intemperate, filled with loathing for modernity of every sort. He is one with T.S. Eliot, who viewed the world as a Wasteland. But unlike the poet, the novelist never lost his sense of the antic and absurd. He was many things—a family man, an entertainer, a social critic, an amateur theologian, a writer of biographies and reminiscences, a crank, an eccentric, a malcontent. What he was not was a political football to be kicked about by the kind of journalists and hustlers who supplied him (and then us) with so much derisive amusement.