I recently read ‘The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh‘ as edited by Michael Davie. What is shared below is a small selection of entries, often partial, which do not present the whole. I am interested in Evelyn Waugh for his writing [his art] and have read much of his work.
As a retired doctor I find that I also have some interest in the life he led which, it is fair to say, was anything but healthy: his excessive drinking and the powerful drugs prescribed for him cannot be ignored. I have no wish to focus on this, particularly as my view is that the discipline of ‘pathography‘ has inherent difficulties. Most important of these difficulties are that the subject is dead and the world that they lived in has passed.
Whilst it is tempting to ‘diagnose’ in retrospect, such a ‘pathological lens’ fails to see a much wider bigger, necessary, picture that it is impossible to capture.
