Waugh and Remembrance: A Multibiography : THE BRIDESHEAD GENERATION: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends <i> by Humphrey Carpenter (A Peter Davison Book/Houghton Mifflin: $27.95; 473 pp.; 0-395-44142-0) </i>

Humphrey Carpenter, a generous and forgiving biographer, has written a book about Evelyn Waugh and his friends. It is, thank goodness, a long book--473 pages of fascinating text, 30 pages of valuable appendixes and a thick, browsable index. After a bad beginning--four pages of pastiche--”The Brideshead Generation” becomes the sort of book one wants never to end.

It is a book with a theory--that Waugh and company shared “a hatred of the values of mid-twentieth-century bourgeois life”--a theory proved by an avalanche of evidence from their lives and their writings, and by Carpenter’s always intelligent, sometimes inspired interpretation.

The circle of friends--Harold Acton, Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, the pseudonymous “Henry Green” who was really Henry Yorke, Cyril Connolly and John Betjeman among them--had Oxford and Waugh in common. As corollary to their disdain for their own time and place, they were charmed by the aristocratic, the foreign and the past.

Betjeman, for one, “social-climbed with a will” at Oxford, often in the company of his teddy bear Archie, Archibald Ormsby-Gore, a character taken from life (as it were) and named Aloysius in Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.” In his long poem about Oxford life, “Summoned by Bells,” Betjeman confessed, “Week after sunny week/I climbed . . .”

Powell and Yorke, Betjeman and Waugh all married daughters of aristocrats. Laura, Waugh’s second wife, was the granddaughter of both a viscount and an earl.

Looking at prospective country houses (a country house being an entity quite distinct from a house in the country), Waugh wrote to his brother of his new interest in “the validity of our coat of arms & crest.”

Carpenter writes: “Waugh’s life from the beginning of his second marriage shows an almost anguished determination to identify with the landed aristocracy. In this, he was not alone among his generation.”

Cyril Connolly in “Enemies of Promise” asked the petulant question, “ ‘Why had not my father got a title? . . . Why be born, why live at all if I could not have one?’ ”

Why, indeed, be born into the 20th Century? Waugh, for one, liked to pretend he hadn’t been, and invented a modified version of the life of an 18th-Century squire, rusticating in the country.

Did he turn to Roman Catholicism from a similar attraction to antiquity, style and ceremony, to glamour and exclusivity? “England was Catholic for nine hundred years,” Waugh wrote, “. . . The Catholic structure still lies lightly buried beneath every phrase of English life; history, topography, law, archeology everywhere reveal Catholic origins. . . .”

If he thought to do the distinguished thing, Edith Sitwell must have hurt him when she remarked, “I can’t see any point in being a Catholic unless one belongs to an old Catholic family.” Dear Edith.

Perhaps Waugh sought a new beginning, a center of faith in a world of shifting values. As his disastrous first marriage ended, his literary success began. For the author of “Decline and Fall” and “Vile Bodies” (which chronicled the pointless lives of England’s Bright Young People), life was a seesaw. Waugh, said Graham Greene, “needed to cling to something solid and strong and unchanging.”

Perhaps Catholicism was another escape route from his old self. For Carpenter demonstrates brilliantly that Waugh created himself, as if he were a fiction of his own.

Waugh conformed himself to his vision and deliberately became the domineering, ill-tempered, eccentric, untouchable squire--the self he presented to friends and the public, and, alas, to his family. Carpenter makes a good case that the persona led to loneliness and isolation, premature aging and early death.

Neither Waugh nor Connolly ever quite grew up. Waugh, especially, was rude and misanthropic, throwing temper tantrums and making enemies until he died.

His relationships were blighted; he treated his family badly, and once suggested life in separate houses so that he could work apart from his children. “My children weary me,” he wrote in his diary, “I can only see them as defective adults.”

“Sweet whiskers,” Waugh addressed his long-suffering wife, Laura, “do try to write me better letters . . . I know you lead a dull life . . . though I believe you could make it more interesting if you had the will. But that is no reason to make your letters as dull as your life.”

Waugh preferred the letters of the dangerous Ann Fleming and of Nancy Mitford to his wife’s. But even Mitford, brilliantly talented and an altogether nicer, braver, cooler, cleverer and more gallant person than he, was not safe from his condescension. Waugh did not consider her his literary equal.

Tension and uncertainty mark the faces in a Waugh family photograph. Margaret alone turns to her father, and Margaret alone is smiling.

Carpenter tells of Waugh’s near-incestuous relationship with Margaret and of its transformation into fiction in the father-daughter combination in “The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.” It is a spell-binding narration.

The reading and writing of biography is the English virtue, an honorable way to investigate other people’s lives and fortunes, and, in autobiography, to explain one’s own. The investigation of lives past and present results in a sense of history, but also in a terrible self-consciousness. The English cherish their privacy and often have none.

When their careers began, the young, well-read, ambitious writer-subjects of “The Brideshead Generation” knew their predecessors; they knew their position and their possibilities. There were links to the Bloomsbury Group, but its older, established writers and painters were slightly scornful of the Waugh upstarts. Virginia Woolf called Cyril Connolly “Smartyboots.” (He was ever after called “Boots” by Waugh.)

The slightly younger Auden circle was, by contrast, left-wing, modernist and proletarian. Connolly called them “the pylon boys,” for their acceptance of life in the industrial age.

Each circle was aware of the others, and the members of each circle realized that one day they would themselves be written of.

To the writer’s risk of making a fool of oneself in public, add the risk of resounding literary failure: small sales, adverse critical notice or no notice at all, the squandering of talent--the failure to be told and retold in the memoirs of one’s friends and enemies.

Betjeman protected himself by writing in verse--to whom could he be compared? Waugh specialized in being outrageous and contemptuous of any criticism; Greene wrote about secret and exotic worlds known only to himself; Connolly’s defense was writing apologias and essays, editing what others wrote, and never writing the novel that was to be his masterpiece.

Should the life of the artist matter, or should the work be all? The question seems not to worry the English. Man, woman and text are all the same to them.

This grand multibiography makes the case for investigating the life. Carpenter simply and irrefutably illustrates that the people and relationships, issues and events of a writer’s life are the stuff of which fiction is made.