WAUGH, Evelyn.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Work Suspended. First edition, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "Frank from Evelyn, Christmas 1942", and housed in a fine onlaid folding box. The recipient was his friend Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford, an old associate from Oxford, the godfather of Waugh's son Auberon, and a companion with whom Waugh spent Christmas 1930 at Pakenham Hall in Westmeath, Ireland.During their university years, Pakenham (1905-2001) edited the Oxford Fortnightly Review, which announced that "Evelyn Waugh made a perilous but successful journey to Oxford the week before last on Queensbury, his new motor-bicycle, and a few were privileged to watch him, leather-coated and leather-helmeted, pushing it along the Corn in a gallant but blasphemous effort to shame [it] into some sort of activity" (cited in Stannard, p. 123). Waugh wrote to him about his place as a writer during wartime, stating that the conflict's "chief use would be to cure artists of the illusion that they were men of action", a lesson Waugh admits he learned slower than Pakenham (Carpenter, p. 351).Work Suspended was the title given to the fragments of a novel Waugh abandoned to take up active service, not published until his return. It is one of 500 copies printed.

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.