At the very core of the English national character, the secret worm of despair gnaws constantly. This heartsickness may be disguised by rosy cheeks and well-cut tweeds, by displays of joviality and truculent common sense, but it will not be gainsaid. Some of the best of England’s writers have chosen, with much profit, to explore this anguish at the center: Blake, and Keats and Hardy, and in our time Philip Larkin and Graham Greene. Yet it is perhaps the so-called comic writers who best capture the anomie that haunts the English soul: Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Chesterbelloc, John Betjeman and, especially, Evelyn Waugh.

Here is Waugh’s portrait of himself shortly before he died:

My life is roughly speaking over. I sleep badly except occasionally in the morning. I get up late. I try to read my letters. I try to read the paper. I have some gin. I try to read the paper again. I have some more gin. I try to think about my autobiography. Then I have some more gin and it’s lunch time. That’s my life. It’s ghastly.

The falling off was not sudden. From childhood on, Waugh’s days had been spent in constant, terrified and vain flight from boredom. He was a lonely child (“Ascension Day never passes,” he wrote in 1947, “without my thinking of the day now thirty years ago at Lancing [his public school] which was the most miserable of my life”) and a troubled adolescent. After a few brief years of bliss as a student at Oxford he married young and disastrously, a mistake that left his soul permanently scarred and that may, indeed, have unhinged his mind. There was a mad tinge to Waugh’s anger and grief at this time, a hint of the serious bout of delusional paranoia he would suffer in middle age, which is chronicled in the surprisingly autobiographical novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. When he was in his 30s he married again, successfully, this time, and for a period in his middle years he was almost happy; and then his creativity deserted him.

The loss of his ability as an artist was fatal. Henry James wrote in his notebooks, “In literature we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which everything is saved by it.” Waugh would have adapted the maxim by substituting the word “life” for “literature” and “curst” for “blest.” He put his faith, and even his Faith, in the generative and redemptive power of words, and when words went dead on him, in his 60s, he ceased to be, in Oscar Wilde’s grand formulation, a “lord of language.” The world turned gray and he found himself, as Selina Hastings puts it, “drowning in melancholy, ill, aimless and miserable. He did no work, spending the day, he said, breathing on the library window, playing noughts and crosses and drinking gin.”

How to explain the continuing fascination that Waugh holds for us, as a man and a writer? Martin Stannard’s recent two-volume biography, a superb work written in a clean, vigorous style befitting its subject, seemed the last word, but now here is Selina Hastings’s hefty Life. Has she unearthed new material on Waugh, or found new things to say about him and his world? The answer is: not really. All the same her book is a valuable and fascinating biography, not displacing Stannard’s but complementing it. Hastings has drawn a remarkable portrait of a remarkable figure.