Arts: Postcards from the cutting edge of Waugh's wit Waugh's wit

Evelyn Waugh died 30 years ago, his name indissolubly linked with his poignant account of decadence and decay among the aristocracy - Brideshead Revisited. But a series of letters to be auctioned by Sotheby's offer an unexpected portrait of the author as a young man: short of cash, essaying his first marriage, and delighting in his particular brand of mordant wit.

Estimated to be worth pounds 3,500, the letters and cards were written to his first publisher, Thomas Balston, mostly between 1928 and 1931 when Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall, was hugely popular.

It was published in 1928, the year Waugh, aged 25, wed Evelyn Gardner. "We move into Canonbury Square, probably ... next week," an early postcard reads. "We have a bed, your sofa and a dining room table. I think that is enough to start with, don't you?" The next letter was written after Waugh had sat up with Evelyn all night. "She is laid up with a very nasty attack of flu ... I have really been most worried about her - temperature up to 104 yesterday and slightly delirious."

"Evelyn is recovering," a letter reports with relief two weeks later, "but she is in for a long convalescence. Today, she is sitting up in bed ... falling deeply in love with her doctor."

Waugh's writing career was flourishing, meanwhile. "Decline and Fall seems to be going well," a 1928 letter announces. "I am threatened with four libel actions and a horse whipping." Two years later, Waugh noted with amusement that Vile Bodies, his second novel, "is advertised in Calcutta as `Vile Bodices' ".

Waugh's world was shattered in 1929 when Evelyn left him for a mutual friend, John Heygate. A letter that year asks Balston to cancel his dedication of his biography of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti to her. "I wish I was handing Evelyn over to someone less radically contemptible, but clearly that is a matter in which I cannot exercise any choice ..."

Waugh married Laura Herbert - his first wife's cousin - seven years later. They had six children and Waugh lost none of his mischief, as a later letter reveals. "Many thanks for your congratulations after the birth of our daughter. I foresee that she will be a problem - too noisy for a man, too plain for a wife. Well, standards of beauty may change in the next 18 years."

The 19 letters will be sold on 28 June.