The Complete Short Stories and Selected Drawings [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION At the age of seven, Waugh began his diary: 'My History. My name is Evelyn Waugh I go to Heath Mount school ' A year later he tried again, with more panache: My HISTORY BY E. WAUGH AT SCHOOL HOME ILASTRATED BY THE AUTHER WRITEN AT THE AGE OF EIGHT Throughout his life, Waugh turned his own experiences into fiction; throughout much of his life, too, he was preoccupied with the graphic arts. Until well after he left Oxford his ambitions were to be an artist rather than a writer. Among his Juvenilia are two short stories composed entirely of succinctly titled pictures (see p. 524). At Lancing School he earned a guinea a time designing book jackets for his father's firm. Chapman and Hall; these supplemented the normal one pound a term the boys could expect to spend on tuck. At Oxford Waugh was, on his own admission, pre-eminent not as a writer but as a provider of decorative drawings for undergraduate magazines. When he began, reluctantly, to write, his first novels were published with his own illustrations — six and a title page for Decline and Fall, An Illustrated Novelette, another nine for Black Mischief, a cover and frontispiece for Vile Bodies. This collection of short stories is interspersed with hitherto unreproduced drawings from Waugh's undergraduate years, whose originals are now exceedingly rare, difficult to locate and vulnerable to loss. One of the many ways in which this volume comes full circle is that its penultimate story, 'Love Among the Ruins', is also ilastrated by the auther - or, in his later, more elegantly ironic mode, supplied 'with decorations by various eminent hands including the author's'. Waugh's fine economy of line is hardly changed from his undergraduate chef d'oeuvre, 'The Tragical Death of Mr. Will. Huskisson', to this late story's pastiche Canovas with their tongue-in-cheek inscriptions, 'Canova fee. Moses delin. Waugh perfec.' (Canova made it; Moses drew it; Waugh completed it).