One can’t help but think that the universe is underwhelmed by us, by our individual lives, our passions and problems; there is a dispensation of providence that murders our best effects, so that our moments of personal grandeur, of triumph and despair, are undercut by some ludicrous incident. As a young schoolmaster, drunken and depressed, in debt and unpublished, Evelyn Waugh decided to end his life by swimming out to sea, having left, with his abandoned clothes, an apt tag from Euripides. He had not gone very far when he was stung by a jellyfish. The sea was full of them. He decided to return to shore. And, of course, he had not brought a towel.

This is the incident that ends Evelyn Waugh’s autobiography, A Little Learning. Was it true? It hardly matters; if not true, it was telling. Waugh’s sense of the absurd seems to have governed his life, relationships and opinions; it was stronger than his perception of the heroic. Death by jellyfish is a fate that he might have dealt out to one of his characters. He was ruthless with them, and ruthless with himself in the cause of his art.

Selina Hastings’ accomplished and highly readable biography has to deal with both the real Waugh and the part-comic, part-tragic persona he created for himself. She guides us smoothly through a suburban childhood, and traces the early development of a sensibility that made its possessor tramp to Hampstead (for the postmark) rather than send a letter from Golders Green. His father was a publisher and old-fashioned man of letters, a volatile self-inventor who, as he aged, seemed to speak almost entirely in quotations; at the sight of himself in a mirror, he would leap back with a cry of ‘O horrible! Most horrible!’ Evelyn was unhappy at Lancing, and was very conscious that his father preferred his athletic and less anguished brother, Alec, to whom success seemed to come easily. Alec was five years his senior, and was establishing himself as a writer while Evelyn was still bemired in the torpor, gloom and self-doubt of late adolescence. At Oxford he took a third-class degree, but he never underestimated himself: ‘It’s rotten when you think you’ve got a touch of genius and you don’t know how things are going to turn out.’

Becoming a prep-school master for want of anything better, he seized on whatever was most grotesque in the various establishments he passed through, and stored it up; already misanthropic but intensely curious about people, he stored up characters too. Decline and Fall was an instant success. It astonished the critics, and was a best seller.

In dealing with the novels and with her subject’s other writings, Hastings is never heavy-handed, never reductive, always acute. She suggests how experience fed into art, how particular books were put together; she is interesting, for example, on A Handful of Dust, showing how it grew from a short story, how its American ending came to be different from its English one. Unlike some literary biographers, she enhances our pleasure in her subject’s work and does not belittle genius by finding mundane explanations for what is so marvellous on the page. Later, as she takes us through Evelyn’s unhappy first marriage, through his long fight for an annulment, through his romance and disillusionment with a soldier’s life, she is working on an increasingly crowded canvas; she never confuses the reader, and the pace does not flag. Where Hastings digresses, she does so entertainingly.

The vital and complex matter of Evelyn Waugh’s religious beliefs is handled in a manner that is informed and full of insight. He did not become a Roman Catholic for aesthetic or social reasons, he insisted, though it gave him great satisfaction that he made a second marriage into the Catholic aristocracy. The tenets of the Church seemed self-evident to him, truths which any reasonable, thinking person should accept. Still, the workings of the convert’s conscience are often Byzantine, its scruples minute and impenetrable. Between marriages, Evelyn indulged in affairs, choosing those who were ‘morally unencumbered and sexually experienced and eschewing those who seemed to have a soul to lose. His faith defined his own role in life:

‘Evelyn’s vocation was to write; and just as chaos was seen as the Devil’s domain, so was the imposition of order by the artist part of the divinely imposed task?’

There was no escaping the Almighty; there was no point trying to escape. Expounding to Evelyn his plans for The Quiet American, Graham Greene said: ‘It will be a relief not to write about God for a change!’

‘Oh?’ Evelyn replied. I wouldn’t drop God if I were you. It would be like P G Wodehouse dropping Jeeves…’

His beliefs did not make him a softer character; he could be ‘the funniest man alive’, Hastings says, but from day to day, charity and tolerance were in short supply. Nancy Mitford asked him how he reconciled being so horrible with being a Christian. He replied rather sadly that were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible…’

In later years Evelyn Waugh was assiduous in the cultivation of his own myth; an element of it involved the creation of a florid, blimpish reactionary, bluff and unthinking. Yet his politics were, as Hastings shows, born of a lifelong delight in mischief combined with a growing melancholy and pessimism. At Oxford, he defined himself as a Conservative because the general drift was leftish. He liked unpopular, failing causes; if they became popular, or successful, he withdrew in fastidious disgust. His beliefs were often romantic ones, and it seems clear that conviction and temperament cannot be separated; there is a conjunction between his view of the world and his inner reality. When he wrote that ‘The anarchic elements in society are so strong that it is a whole-time task to keep the peace’, he might well have been writing about the populous state inside himself.

For he did not have much peace. He craved the security of a country house, a large family, the status of a gentle-man, and his second marriage endowed him with all the external attributes of a happy man. But dissatisfaction gnawed at him. At Lancing he had founded the Corpse Club, ‘for people who are bored stiff, and later this boredom became an active and malign force in his life. The exact craftsmanship of the novels, the precise and controlled imagination they display, the brilliant dialogue and exquisite timing: these gave more satisfaction to others than to himself. He was angry if anyone paid him compliments about his work, as if to mention it was in bad taste.

The war produced the masterly Sword of Honour trilogy, but also a bleakness and a fear of the future which was in no way assumed for effect, or to make a point, but seems to have been genuine and pitiable:

‘…there is nothing left – not a bottle of wine nor a gallant death, not anything well made that is a pleasure to handle – and never will be again. The English are a very base people. I did not know this, living as I did. Now I know them through and through, and they disgust me.’

Old age overtook him prematurely, as it had done his father. Ann Fleming wrote that ‘he has developed a personality that he hates but cannot escape from’ and Nancy Mitford spoke of the ‘iron mask’ that he wore to protect himself from the world. To have seen behind this iron mask is Selina Hastings greatest achievement. In her memoir of Evelyn Waugh, written soon after his death, Frances Donaldson was exercised about how his singular qualities would ever be conveyed on the page. His wit in conversation was as great as it was in writing, and he was content to have casual untruths about himself given currency; he did not care what people believed about him. She concluded that:

‘No one but a Boswell who had sat beside him over the years with pen and paper could bring Evelyn to life again.’

One can easily understand her misgivings; yet this painstaking, perceptive and distinguished book is very near to a resurrection.