Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Michael Howard

Critical Essay by Michael Howard

Evelyn Waugh was forty-one when the war—his war—ended in 1945. It is an age when most successful professional men have achieved their first senior position and look forward to a further twenty five years of increasing power, responsibility, and probably happiness. Many if not most creative artists, having passed through initial stages of imitativeness and experiment, have found their distinctive style and go on productively enriching it until the end of their lives. Not so Evelyn Waugh. "My life ceased with the war", he wrote nine years later. Alas, it did not. He lived on for another twenty years to die at the comparatively early age of sixty-three: twenty years of accidie spent seeking relief from rural loneliness and boredom in drunkenness and worse boredom in London; toppling over occasionally into clinical insanity; dependent for his writing, on introspection and memory; rejecting the world as totally as if he had...
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