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 entered a monastery, but without finding any alternative discipline and peace.
This melancholy picture of Evelyn Waugh is perhaps overdrawn in the collection [The Letters of Evelyn Waugh], for out of 600 pages two thirds are taken up by his easily recoverable correspondence of the post-war years…. This was the period in his life when Waugh, cut off for long periods from his scattered friends and at his wits' end to know how to pass his time, found most relief in letter-writing. Nor should one set too much store by letters written in hours of loneliness and despair…. Uprooted from the metropolitan culture that he despised but on which he remained so dependent, he found no alternative pleasures in the country…. He hated what he could see of the world and he hated himself. And though he was a totally committed Roman Catholic, he found no consolation in his religion. It simply presented him with a set of bleak, incontrovertible facts from which no personal comfort whatever could be drawn.
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