Evelyn Waugh
English novelist (1903–1966), author of Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust, widely remembered as a snob and a misanthrope — a reputation the biographer Paula Byrne argues was substantially a performance.
In her biography Mad World, Byrne rejects the standard caricature of Waugh, arguing ‘everything was a joke’ and that he consciously played the part of the ‘grumpy colonel’ in public while remaining, on the testimony of those who knew him intimately — including his wartime bagman — deeply kind and loyal in private. Her one qualification: Waugh was an intellectual snob, with little patience for stupidity and a high regard for wit, but not a social one — he mocks the aristocracy even within Brideshead Revisited. Byrne connects Waugh’s performed misanthropy to a broader English habit of deriving social status from negative rather than positive opinion, tied to English reticence and ‘tall poppy syndrome’.
In the wiki
- Paula Byrne on Thomas Hardy’s Women, Jane Austen’s Humor, and Evelyn Waugh’s Warmth — Byrne discusses Waugh’s performed misanthropy and intellectual (not social) snobbery, and broadens into a reading of English fastidiousness and status-through-negative-opinion that she connects, from her separate career as a couples and family therapist, to the costs of a stiff-upper-lip culture that also suppresses family secrets.