Art is not fair. If they knew what his reputation was now that is the lesson Evelyn Waugh’s contemporaries would surely learn.
His literary generation was pacifistic, left-wing, irreligious, and righteously believed that justice existed to be rendered in this world, not the next. Hardly anyone reads Stephen Spender or Sylvia Townsend Warner any more. They wrote the right things; they believed the right things; they took up the earth’s wretched as their cause.
Evelyn Waugh never did. He did not hope to reform the species. Today his peers are not much more than inter-war curiosities. Read their poetry and prose, then feel the aeons open up between you and them. Waugh remains utterly modern. Such a state of affairs is a joke as icy as any found in his writing. Why the passing decades cannot diminish him ought to trouble our creaking, secular, liberal age.
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