SOURCE: “Decline and Fall: ‘Grimes, You Wretch!’” in From Grimes to Brideshead: The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh, Bucknell University Press, 1990, pp. 37–57.

In the following excerpt, Garrett explores the nature of the humor in Decline and Fall, praising Waugh's use of language and narrative structure.

In September 1927, staying with his parents at Underhill and still working on Rossetti, Waugh observed in his diary: “How I detest this house and how ill I feel in it. The whole place volleys and thunders with traffic. I can't sleep or work. I … have begun on a comic novel.”¹ Sometime later he read the first ten thousand words to Anthony Powell, and at some point he read the early chapters to Dudley Carew as well:

What he read to me that night, sitting in the chair where Arthur was wont to proclaim that beautiful Evelyn Hope was dead, were the first fifty...