Pivotal work …

… Evelyn Waugh: From Savage to Sober | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Put Out More Flags is one of Waugh’s most underrated novels. It is also a seminal work in the transformation of Waugh from the author of savage satires about the “Bright Young Things” of the late 1920s and early 30s like Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, and Scoop, to the more sober novelist of the postwar crisis of faith. It’s filled with the characters who once trotted mindlessly through those books, the “wealthy ill-mannered louts whose action left havoc in their wake,” men like Basil Seal, Peter Pastmaster, Alastair Digby Vane Trumpington, “Bright Young Things” all. It is also the novel that foreshadows the more serious postwar world of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited and Guy Crouchback in Sword of Honor. As such, Put Out More Flags is worth a second look.