The choice, nevertheless, is instructive. The hushed grays of the English edition, published by Everyman, would stand you in better stead. might frown at the luridly whimsical dust jacket offered by Little, Brown. The new batch of short fiction is a necessary purchase, and you should be able to claim it against tax as an aid to professional sanity, but the I.R.S. The craving for Waugh can come upon one without warning, especially when the tide of public folly or private slush rises to flood level, but I resent having to slake my need with an emergency Penguin. He himself was a chronic bibliophile and a connoisseur of typography, who was admired in his youth for his capacity to illustrate rather than compose a text, and his fussing is contagious as a rule, I am quite happy to read any cruddy old softback with splinters of wood pulp poking out of the pages, yet I treat my early edition of “Vile Bodies,” with its vibrantly woodblocked title page, like a frail and endangered pet. The unfinished yet gracefully rounded tale “Work Suspended,” for instance, which consumes eighty-four pages of the present book, feels almost a match for “The Loved One,” “Helena,” and “The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold”-the brisk, peppery, death-haunted trio of novellas that Waugh produced in his riper years, and which are available only in individual volumes. The title is clear, although in the Waugh canon a short story is not easily defined. Best of all, we have a fresh gathering of primary material: “The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh” (Little, Brown 29.95). We have had biographies in two volumes from Martin Stannard and in one volume from Selina Hastings more recent, and more slender still, is David Wykes’s “Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life,” which bravely introduces us to the new adjective “Wavian”-helpful to scholars, perhaps, but unlikely to gain a wider currency. The years since Waugh’s death, in 1966-and, in particular, the past decade-have been marked by studious attempts to savor his achievements. The hint is clear enough: Waugh, and Waugh alone, was of vintage stuff. Now, thirty years later, he would sit in solitude, grasping his glass, bullishly proud that there was nobody present who deserved to share a drop.

At Oxford in the nineteen-twenties, Waugh had chosen his friends on the basis of their ability to handle, or entertainingly mishandle, the effects of alcohol “an excess of wine nauseated him and this made an insurmountable barrier between us,” he wrote of one college acquaintance.

In anticipation of the event, he wrote to a friend, Brian Franks, with a description of the menu, closing with the words “Non Vintage champagne for all but me.” Rarely has an edict been issued with such a firm smack of the lips, yet nothing could be sadder. In July, 1956, Evelyn Waugh gave a dinner party for his daughter Teresa.

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