The Sword of Honour Trilogy: Men At Arms; Officers and Gentlemen; Unconditional Surrender.

WAUGH, Evelyn.

$15,000.00

Item Number: 146212

London: Chapman and Hall, 1951-1961..

First editions of each volume in the author’s acclaimed Sword of Honour Trilogy. Octavo, 3 volumes, original cloth. Men At Arms is an association copy, lengthily inscribed by the author to Patrick Balfour on the front free endpaper, “For Patrick with love from Evelyn Sept 6th 1952 I say why not read the copy you bought to a friend in the forces instead of exchanging it. There are too many homes which still lack one E Sept 16th.” Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) and Patrick Balfour (1904-1976) first met at Oxford in the early 1920s, and later in that decade were members of the social set known as The Bright Young Things, satirized in Waugh’s 1930 novel Vile Bodies. In the book, Balfour serves as a model for Lord Balcairn – the gossip columnist on the fictitious Daily Excess, whose column, written under the name Mr Chatterbox, is taken over by the central character, Adam Fenwick-Symes. In real life, Balfour – who was heir to the Barony of Kinross – wrote a gossip column for the Evening Standard, and was one of a number of aristocratic young men employed by mass circulation newspapers to recount the exploits of their friends and relations. Waugh often teasingly referred to Balfour as ‘Mr Gossip’. The two men got to know each other well as war correspondents in Abyssinia (part of present day Ethiopia) during the Second Italian-Abyssinian war of 1935-36. The war provided much of the material for Scoop, Waugh’s satire of the newspaper industry, published in 1938. Waugh also drew on aspects of Balfour’s life for the character of Lord Kilbannock in the Sword of Honour Trilogy set over the course of the Second World War. In the novels, Ian Kilbannock is a former journalist, working for the military as a press liaison officer. He plays a recurring, and increasingly significant role, in the development of the plot. Balfour himself, who became Lord Kinross on the death of his father in 1939, worked as Director of the Publicity Department in the British Embassy in Cairo in the latter stages of the war, having previously served in naval intelligence. A witty inscription, perhaps reflecting Waugh’s concerns about a book which when published “had what is called a ‘mixed reception'” (Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh, 1975), and which he advised Nancy Mitford to “leave.. until you have read the whole of the national library. I sent it [to her] with full preliminary warnings.” From the library of Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross. Each are near fine to fine in near fine dust jackets. An exceptional association.

The Sword of Honour trilogy of novels about World War II, is largely based on the author's own experiences as an army officer and some critics ague the crowning achievement Waugh's career. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war too much for him. "Sword of Honour was the climax of [Waugh’s] career as a novelist . . . Here in his final work there run together the two styles, of mischief and gravity, that can be noted in his writing from the beginning . . . He may justifiably have thought of it as crowning his work" (Frank Kermode). Waugh received the 1952 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Men at Arms. The trilogy is considered by many critics to be the finest novel series of the Second World War.