BOOKS
297
A MAN FOR NO SEASONS
THE LETTERS OF EVELYN WAUGH. Edited by Mark Amory.
Ticknor
&
Fields. $25.00.
The criteria for culling this volume of 840 letters out of the
approximately 4,500 Waugh wrote are plainly stated in the preface:
the editor chose only those he found "interesting or funny." Fair
enough. Letters, I suppose, should be at least those two things, par–
ticularly if one is going to publish a book of them. And lest I be
accused of not being willing to pay the price of admission, let me
state from the outset that the letters, not surprisingly, are indeed
funny. An unfunny Waugh would be rather a grim spectacle-as the
ponderous
Brideshead Revisited,
for example, painfully reveals-and
the master is in splendid shape here, dispatching, dismissing, and
devastating the plenitude of human imperfection he inevitably finds
encroaching upon him. Waugh flails with a sharply honed razor,
shedding the blood of the pompous and absurd wherever he finds
them.
Their "interest," however, is another, considerably more com–
plicated matter. Most letters are not written for posterity's approba–
tion, or for anyone except the person who opens the envelope. They
are by nature transient, at times hastily conceived kinds of commu–
nication-Waugh instructs his wife, Laura, to think of them as "a
form of conversation" -that convey information and feelings now
generally transmitted over the telephone. In what sense are these
things reviewable? And what special qualities do they possess to sug–
gest that, instead of residing in carefully catalogued isolation in
some giant silo at an affluent Texas university, available to the scru–
tiny of scholar or zealot, they should be placed before the public in a
smartly bound volume? Put another way, why publish letters and
what are we supposed to make of them?
It
is true, of course, that we are curious about our artists and
tend to preserve their droppings and ephemera in the hope of find–
ing some odd illuminating nugget that will make their work more
accessible or more resonant for us. And certainly writers like Joyce,
Woolf, Yeats, and Lawrence, to name some, have left behind them a
correspondence that is critical to our appreciation of their achieve–
ments. Exploring esthetic theories, detailing the agonies of creation,
