When Evelyn Waugh interrupted the war
Farewell to an empty coffin: Evelyn Waugh 1943
Quelle: Getty Images
In January 1944, British officer Evelyn Waugh is granted leave. In no time at all he writes his novel Brideshead Revisited. It is much more difficult to send him the proofs afterwards. Because Waugh’s Dakota crashes over a Croatian cornfield.
Inspiration does not tolerate delay. “It is a peculiarity of the literary profession,” wrote the fearless Evelyn Waugh to his senior officer in January 1944, “that an idea, once formed in the mind of the author, perishes if left unused.” Indeed, if the book is not written now, it never will be written.”
An otherwise minor injury sustained by Waugh from a parachute jump did the rest: at the end of the month he turned up at the East Court Hotel in Chagford, firing at up to a thousand words an hour. Thus was born Brideshead Revisited, his famous “Song of the Empty Coffin” of old England.
On June 6th – at breakfast the waiter had greeted him with the news of D-Day – he wrote the last chapter in no time at all, on the 20th he mailed the manuscript and returned via Gibraltar, Algiers, Catania, Naples and Bari back to war: together with Randolph Churchill, son of the prime minister, Waugh was supposed to keep in touch with Tito’s partisans on the Croatian coast. How he should correct the upheaval of his novel behind enemy lines was therefore in the stars – especially since Evelyn Waugh also fell from the sky in the summer.
In the Prime Minister’s mailbag
The engine of the little Dakota, which was taking him and Churchill to Topusko, south of Zagreb at night, died at an altitude of 400 feet, and Waugh found himself in the light of its burning wreckage in a cornfield, his hands so badly burned that he couldn’t even could no longer hold a pen.
While they were recovering in Bari, Waugh and young Churchill preferred to yell at each other. Once they finally reached their quarters in Topusko, a small, isolated farm, they continued to torment each other, with Waugh having fun throwing on a conspicuous white coat whenever the German Luftwaffe appeared. He despised death even more than the “flabby bully” Randolph Churchill; other than death, he could use Randolph. Somehow the upheaval of Brideshead had to get to Topusko.
With some certainty no upheaval has embarked on a more adventurous journey than Waugh described years later. Brideshead was sent to Downing Street by the publishers in October 1944; “From there,” Waugh reported, “it traveled to Italy in the Prime Minister’s mailbag, was flown out from Brindisi, and parachuted into Gajana in Croatia, then an isolated region of resistance; it was corrected in Topusko and then taken to Split by jeep when the road was temporarily out of enemy hands; from there by ship to Italy and home, via Downing Street.”
Brideshead Reunion is Evelyn Waugh’s most famous book to date; when he wrote it while the war was on hiatus for him, he himself thought it his best. After that, however, he was as severe with him as he had been with Randolph Churchill, without whom it would not have appeared at the time.
“I wrote with a zeal that was completely foreign to me,” he recalled, “but also impatient to return to the war. It was a bleak time of real hardship before impending catastrophe – marked by soybeans and a limited vocabulary – and so the book is imbued with an immoderate lust for food and wine, for the splendor of the recent past, but also for rhetorical, ornamental language, which I find disgusting today on a full stomach.”
It is said that all writer’s life is paper. In this series, we present evidence to the contrary.
