ABSTRACT
Waugh (1903–66) won high praise as a novelist, biographer, and autobiographer, and posthumously as a diarist and letter-writer. His novels include ‘Decline and Fall’ (1928) and ‘Brideshead Revisited’ (1945). Waugh’s depreciation of Auden lasted for many years: during the electioneering skirmishes for the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, which Auden won in 1956, he recorded:
There is keen excitement about the election of the Professor of Poetry – Auden and Nicolson, both homosexual socialists, and an unknown scholar named Knight. I wish I had taken my degree so that I might vote for Knight. John Sparrow and Maurice Bowra have put up Nicolson, Enid Starkie and David Cecil, Auden. (20 January 1956, ’The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh’, ed. Michael Davie, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979, p. 753)
