To Waugh's jaundiced eye, a legion of Trimmers was on the move in postwar Britain. Anyone could become anything, and soon would. The practical effects of socialism, and the horrors thereof, were a favored middle-class topic of discussion in the late 1940s. I was growing up then, and as a child of the times, Iwondered why everyone behaved as though having to wash our own dishes were equivalent to a sentence of penal servitude. But Waugh's disgruntled perception of postwar Britain went beyond outrage at domestic inconvenience.
Aristocratic status is just a mouse click and a bank transfer away.
Waugh evoked that vanishing world and nailed its assumptions, its prejudices, its mysterious fault lines, with everything that his characters say and do. Taken together, the diaries and the novels demonstrate how a novelist tweaks and grooms reality into something more structured and coherent than life as it is lived. Waugh selected, distilled, and enriched his raw material, trawling his wide acquaintance to furnish the cast but then refining and polishing to create the heightened mood and action of fiction. They are not good or bad enough, or clever or stupid enough, or comic or pitiful enough. Waugh's tetchy and combative personality made him a difficult companion at arms.