They were an accurate echo of Waugh's popular reputation, still unchanged today. In his madness, Pinfold is persecuted by hallucinatory voices accusing him of snobbery, greed, irascibility, homophobia, homosexuality, anti-semitism, bigotry and bad manners. Waugh was well aware how badly he appeared to others. He acted the role strenuously till it dominated his whole personality and he could not shake it off. "It was his modesty which needed protection, and for this purpose, but without design, he gradually assumed this character of burlesque." The role he cast himself in, Waugh confesses, was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel, a paradoxical "front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass". It was, he tells us in the manifestly autobiographical Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), a self-defensive imaginative construct. He was quite frank about its fictional nature. It is ironic that Waugh's rebarbative, bi-polar social persona should dominate his literary reputation. But his real transcendence of death comes in his fiction. His complex personality, reduced to a comic grotesque clutching an ear trumpet, struts and fulminates in countless anecdotes. Evelyn Waugh was born 100 years ago, on October 28, 1903.
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