Waugh's wit only sharpened throughout the succeeding decades, and the very texture of his prose thickened (although it never took on much in the way of modernist adipose tissue). A doctor was summoned to attend the bridegroom's small nephew, who, after attracting considerable attention as a page at the ceremony by his outspoken comments, developed a high temperature and numerous disquieting symptoms of food poisoning. Margaret's crowd turned out to watch the melancholy succession of guests popping out of their dripping cars and plunging up the covered way into the church. But by 1932, when he wrote "Love in the Slump," Waugh's eye for the black-comic detail was firmly in place: It rained heavily on the day of the wedding, and only the last-ditchers among the St. The first few entries in the collection capture a kinder, gentler author, not yet red at the verbal tooth and claw. And he continued to write short fiction throughout the rest of his career, all of which has now been collected in the delectable Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh.
Indeed, Waugh first broke into print in 1926 with "The Balance: A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High Necked Jumpers," an early story that suggests a modernized and misanthropic P.G. But this cantankerous master-the scion, by the way, of a decidedly middle-class family of publishers and writers-was no less adept when it came to the short form. This edition contains the original illustrations to "Love Among the Ruins," as well as more than thirty graphics produced by the author as an Oxford undergraduate in the 1920s.Mordant, mirthful, and unrelenting in their lampoon of aristocratic mischief, Evelyn Waugh's novels have earned him a permanent place in the literary pantheon. Loveday's Little Outing" and "Scott-King's Modern Europe" an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the hero of Brideshead Revisited and two linked stories, remnants of an abandoned novel that Waugh considered his best writing.
The thirty-nine stories collected here include such small masterpieces as "Mr. We find in them Waugh's almost superhuman technical skill as a writer and his quicksilver attentiveness to the minutiae of human absurdity, as well as his worldly knowledge, his tenderness, his perceptive compassion, and his sophisticated, disabused, but nevertheless forceful idealism. Evelyn Waugh's short stories are the marvelous, concentrated riffs of his comic genius, revealing in miniaturized perfection all the elements that made him the greatest comic writer of our century.
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