Between the lines: Edmund White, the writer, on Evelyn Waugh

He was neither a scholar nor a regular soldier; the part for which he cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously, before his children at Lychpole and his cronies in London, until it came to dominate his whole outward personality. When he ceased to be alone, when he swung into his club or stumped up the nursery stairs, he left half of himself behind, and the other half swelled to fill its place. He offered the world a front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass.

(From Evelyn Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold)

I delight in the unsparing self-analysis that Waugh undertakes in this rigorous little novel about a middle-aged writer. In the past seven years, while writing the biography of Jean Genet, I never once permitted myself to pen that gratifying monosyllable 'I'. Now that I'm writing the last volume of the autobiographical trilogy that began with A Boy's Own Story, I must find once again the confidence, even arrogance, of the true egotist, the certainty that one's own experience is both interesting and emblematic.

Of course, as one grows older, one's experience becomes less sympathetic, less a pure bright anticipation standing on the threshold and more an old grouch grumbling over celluloid collar beside a lamp dripping with Victorian fringe.

At the same time one is wiser, if that means one can be ironic at one's own expense. Waugh is even willing to show himself as an old bastard - a breathtaking decision. This very qualified wisdom is something I'm aiming for, which I've sought to dramatise in my play Trios and which I admire in Waugh's intelligently grouchy and obsessed Gilbert Pinfold.

'Trios': Riverside Studios, W6 (081-748 3354) to 31 July

(Photograph omitted)