I didn't read any of Evelyn Waugh till I was about 19 and had completed a degree in Mathematical Economics. In consequence, I read a completely different author, treating of completely different subjects, than did people like Seamus Perry, who is four years younger than me, and is a Professor of English Literature. He writes in the LRB-
'The novelist is condemned to produce a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery,’ reflects the beleaguered hero of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh’s portrait of the artist as a middle-aged car crash.
This is the beleaguered observation of a Professor obliged to pretend that novels are important. For an economist, what Waugh was saying was, the scope of the novel had greatly declined since a highwater mark in the Victorian era. Seventy years previously, even a relatively second rate scribbler, like George Moore, could turn from the travails of a kitchen maid, to those of a carpenter's son in Galilee, while taking an active role in the politics of his country. Now, even the undoubtedly talented Priestley could not raise Sociological observation to the level of literature.
Thus, the interwar generation was incessantly reminded, there had been an age, not too distant, when novelists were assumed to have titanic strength. They were constantly flexing their muscles to lift up the world or to toss it this way or that. But Samuel Butler, slaying the Victorian Patriarch, had, in the same manner that Darwinism had undone or reversed its own Enlightenment Teleology, also killed off any type of Uranian begetting- save as farce.
For Waugh, a contemporary of Joan Robinson, but one whose Dad was in the Book Trade, it was obvious that the 'barrier to entry' for being a novelist had been greatly lowered and, anyway, most of your income would derive from little articles for evanescent magazines funded by some magnate or political pressure group. But low barriers to entry militates for 'monopolistic competition' whereby 'product differentiation' is a narcissism of small differences involving an endless ringing of changes upon the same dreary formula, or gossamer wisp of novelty.
Waugh's genius- more even than Balzac- was to apprehend at a glance, minute changes in the economic 'substructure' which underlay the chrematistics of a febrile Socio-economic order.
I should explain that, by chance, one of Waugh's first pieces I gluttonously imbibed was 'Work Suspended'- that too in a Soviet anthology!
Previously, as a dimwitted Iyer doomed to the 'Arts' stream in Delhi's St. Columba's school, I'd read Priestley and Greene's 'It's a battlefield' and 'England made me' and reams of Shaw and Wells but, at the age of 19, in Moscow ,and with an LSE degree under my belt, it seemed to me, Waugh alone actually exhibited Marxian Capital's dynamics albeit from the point of view of a Schumpeter.
But really, as Pinfold goes on to say, ‘most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters – Dickens and Balzac even – were flagrantly guilty.’
Dickens and Balzac are the two contemporary writers Marx most references. What had changed was that not having a daemon, as Kipling or Hardy did, was no longer a 'barrier to entry'. It was enough to have a point of view or, more modestly, merely a formula of some anodyne type. No doubt, the publishing industry could accommodate the daemonic Robert Graves, provided the fellow appeared to be subbing for the Classics master, but the the terrible entrenchments of the Great War separated him from Waugh's generation, which, however, had actually, if somewhat timidly or with fake bravado, inhabited the long or lost weekend of the inter-war period.
Pinfold is by admission a self-portrait, so Waugh must have expected readers to speculate on how this observation applied to his own career, and whether he was a one or a two-book man himself.
The English Catholics, as idealised by Waugh are not bookish or, indeed, a People of the Book. Confession may be a sacrament. Scribbling isn't.
In 1958, a Cambridge don called Frederick J. Stopp produced a study of Waugh – uniquely, Waugh himself gave ‘generous assistance’ – which warmly endorsed the idea that he had basically ‘two books in his armoury’, the first featuring the ‘contrast between sanity and insanity’ and the second ‘sanity venturing out into the surrounding sphere of insanity, and defeating it at its own game’.
This is a description of Chesterton's oeuvre, but Chesterton, after getting drawn into the Marconi affair, had gone quietly and completely mad without anybody really noticing. Waugh, for sound financial reasons, was taking an interest in the American Catholic market- which, to be frank, was intellectually superior to anything Europe had to offer as has by now become obvious. But, even forty years ago, people would have thought Unitarian 'Boston Brahmins', not Catholics, would be the brains directing the revolt of the 'Silent Majority'.
Whether this particular dualism had Waugh’s approval is unclear, but either way it doesn’t seem entirely satisfactory since the two alternatives look like variants of the same thing. Less well-disposed readers have thought that Waugh’s books divided on much more rudimentary lines: the good ones, which are funny, and the bad ones, which are pious.
But the funny ones are only funny because irony is a theodicy. In any case, Waugh, as a Catholic convert, felt he needed to show a type of 'Party discipline' by producing tedious propagandistic tomes from time to time. But they fell flat from the Press. We still recall Greene's sojourn in Mexico. Waugh's left no impression. His was an ideological age whose polemicists were incapable of understanding any ideas whatsoever. Waugh was not so fortunately constituted. Still, with Public School spirit, Waugh backed to the hilt a side which, even at the time of his death, when the tide had begun to turn, appeared to be the one side everybody could be sure was doomed, if not already decomposing.
There is the string of brilliant, brittle social comedies in the 1930s, and then there is whatever started happening with the publication in 1945 of Brideshead Revisited.
Brideshead isn't that different from 'Handful of Dust'. The other point is that no serious author who served in the War could be expected to wholly revert to the same themes. Waugh wasn't PG Woodhouse whose great regret was that he had not served, as his elder brother did, King and Country.
Stopp reported, presumably with his master’s sanction, that ‘Mr Waugh’s reputation among the critics has hardly yet recovered from the blow.’ Brigid Brophy had the best joke: ‘In literary calendars, 1945 is marked as the year Waugh ended.’
Then the Americans discovered that half the British Diplomatic Corps was in the pay of the Kremlin. The Sword of Honour trilogy was bang on the money. Still, Waugh didn't blow the whistle on Communist penetration of Churchill's war machine till the damage had been done. After all, he was a patriot.
But maybe Dr Stopp was on to something when he implied that the two Waughs are really dual aspects of a single cast of mind.
This was because Waugh only had one brain. Dr. Stopp was clearly a genius- in so far as Professors of English literature can be any such thing.
No doubt one side of his writerly nature, the devout and romantic, exerted itself more completely as he aged – so that what Brophy took to be the authentic Waugh, the brilliantly sardonic farceur, was ‘conclusively eaten by his successor, Mr Evelyn Waugh, English novelist, officer (ret.) and gentleman’. But the co-existence of startlingly different elements was there from the off. His first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), established at once the distinctive atmosphere of Waugh’s 1930s books: ‘the world’, as Malcolm Bradbury summarised it, ‘of comic absurdity and anarchy, in all its animalism and madness’.
But Anglo-Catholicism is a safe refuge. The protagonist grows a moustache, studies medieval Scholastics rather than modish Socialists, and, no doubt, will become a popular cricket-playing Rector or increasingly beloved Headmaster of a minor Public School.
But only shortly before the novel appeared Waugh had published a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti that inhabited a different world altogether. The book conveys the deep romanticism of Rossetti’s best paintings with quite unfeigned reverence: Beata Beatrix, a rapt portrait of Elizabeth Siddall, is acclaimed as ‘the most purely spiritual and devotional work of European art since the fall of the Byzantine Empire’.
But Veronica Veronese is dismissed. There is a consistency here which, however, isn't very interesting. Still, it may be, the young Waugh had a notion of setting up as an expert on that period. After all, a day may come when a hereditary man of letters is grateful to earn a couple of guineas turning out fustian for little magazines or auction house catalogues.
More remarkable still, Waugh found in Rossetti a dark predicament which sounded rather close to home: ‘the baffled and very tragic figure of an artist born into an age devoid of artistic standards’.
A point of view they themselves very vociferously made. A later generation preferred their painters to be silent or confined to a padded cell. What works even better is if they are safely dead.
Given that ‘very tragic’ plight, it may not be surprising that Waugh began his study with the observation that ‘there is singularly little fun to be got out of Rossetti.’ But Decline and Fall manages to get a great deal of fun out of much the same baffled predicament of an age without standards.
It has too many. What is lacking is any incentive to harmonise them. But then Beerbohm's Oxford had been infected by a mimetic madness, rushing off to be slaughtered in the trenches for, not Zuleikha Dobson, but an old bitch gone in the teeth.
‘IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY,’ Waugh helpfully explained in a preface, as though conscious that the raw material of the book could just as well have formed the basis of a very different sort of work. John Betjeman picked up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’
Betjeman, it appears, was a polite young man. It is important to point out to students of Literature at Oxford that the conventional way to register appreciation of an author's new work is to tell him it was enjoyable to read. Taking a dump on the dude's doorstep may, it is true, convey more delicate shades of approbation, but much depends on what you dined upon the night before.
Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s books to have been reissued recently by Penguin, in hardback and with new introductions. It follows the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, who, expelled from Oxford for a misdemeanour he did not commit,
he was debagged. The fellow should have beaten the shit out of his assailants or else kept out of their way. This, was 'salutary' or 'medicinal' punishment aimed at suppressing the threat to order posed by young men wandering around naked from the waist down. The analogy here is not with the illegitimate child of a violent rape who must nonetheless be stigmatized but rather with any type of collective responsibility of a collegiate type. Waugh, in this respect is, merely sane and 'Public School' rather than De Maistrean. This is what appeals to his working class readers- perhaps more particularly those of dusky hue.
wanders through an unsuccessful career as a schoolmaster before becoming engaged to the grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from the white slave trade, in which Pennyfeather becomes unwittingly implicated, and for which he uncomplainingly takes the rap. After some strings are pulled, however, he is released from prison and goes back to Oxford to pursue his theology degree. So anonymous a character is he that merely growing a moustache is enough to ensure that no one recognises him, and he happily resumes his study of long-forgotten Christian heresies. ‘Paul Pennyfeather would never have made a hero,’ Waugh says in his best deadpan, and indeed he is barely present in his own novel. He remains entirely unfazed by extreme vicissitude and undismayed by the moral imbeciles he encounters, not through anything admirable in his character but thanks to a sort of blithe existential indifference.
Paul starts off as a bit of a prig- the sort of chap who might go to work for the League of Nations. He ends it as a Christian and a gentleman. The purpose of paideia has been served. But the same thing could be said of Clement Atlee, fresh out of Haileybury, facing the horrors of the East End.
If there is a hero in Decline and Fall he comes in the unlikely form of Captain Grimes,
Not unlikely at all. The man was an Old Harrovian. Etonians are expected to end up in the lunatic asylum. Harrovians end up in jail. Graham Greene too has a wrong 'un who sports a Harrow tie. The genuine Harrovian in the novel is Catholic and thus in a worse prison- albeit a purely mental one.
whom Paul first encounters during his spell as a schoolmaster. Grimes is a habitual drunk and general cad who is always ‘in the soup’, repeatedly sacked from teaching posts for crimes that dare not speak their name, yet nevertheless able to move from job to job thanks to the support network naturally available to ‘a public school man’. It would be an obtuse reading to see in this some sort of criticism on Waugh’s part of a corrupt social order:
Baldwin would boast that his one achievement as P.M was to reverse the proportion of Etonians to Harrovians in the Cabinet.
the precondition of the comedy is an ostentatious refusal to engage in such humdrum ethical judgment.
No. The comedy arises from the contextual futility of those judgments. If anyone should have blown their brains out during the Great War it wasn't Grimes but General Townshend, who abandoned his men to incessant buggery at the hands of the Turks while sailing away up the Euphrates on a barge worthy of Cleopatra.
Grimes is scandalous but he has an indefatigableness which, in the absence of any other value, wins Waugh’s heart.
A Theologian may speak of 'conatus'. An economist, of 'memoryless' or 'hysteresis free' ergodicity. What is mathematically intractable is the mysterious economy of the Katechon.
Our final glimpse of Grimes is his forsaken hat, floating on a treacherous bog in which everyone presumes he has drowned;
not if they read novels.
but Paul, who has not learned very much, has acquired enough wisdom to know that this cannot be. ‘Grimes, Paul at last realised, was of the immortals,’ a thought which inspires a paragraph of Paterite rapture: ‘Surely he had followed in the Bacchic train of distant Arcady, and played on the reeds of myth by forgotten streams ... Had he not moved unseen when darkness covered the waters?’ The passage is wonderfully facetious, but at the same time it manages momentarily to smuggle into this remorseless world, by the duplicity of a joke, just the sort of transcendent feelings evoked by Rossetti’s pictures.
There was quite a complicated Homosexual Theosophy by then. Grimes is an avatar of Tiamat who is identified with that Python slain by Apollo which, by Socratic 'palinode' reappears in Plato. Yet, as the Great War showed, Chaos must triumph ere the Eschaton.
Reviewers were not slow to allocate Waugh’s novels a place within what his friend Rebecca West called ‘the contemporary literature of disillusion’,
what great illusions did Edwardian fiction display?
a modern tradition supposedly inaugurated by The Waste Land – the poem from which Waugh took the title of one of his best novels, A Handful of Dust (1934).
Eliot, like most sensible people, rated Kipling's 'Recessional'. He described himself as 'a Royalist', an 'Anglo-Catholic' and a 'Classicist'. Michael Polanyi, the Chemist and Economist and elder brother of the cretin Karl, was one of his crew. It really would not be difficult to give Waugh's political psilosophy the full 'history of concepts' or Begriffsgeschichte treatment. Indeed, the thing might be wildly funny- which is why I, having been born in Germany and thus having gained a purely German sense of humour- i.e. none at all- must abstain from sketching the thing out.
Returning to Perry's elegant, wholly un-Babu, prose, we find this hilarious non-sequitur
Waugh certainly shared with Eliot
Oikeiosis, as appropriation, is the reverse of sharing. Shapley values have changed. As Aumann points out, the thing is in the Talmud. As for Methexis- no Scripture does not show it is denied those, albeit merely meretriciously, supplanted.
a sense of ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history’,
In 1921, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff warned that the Army did not have enough soldiers to suppress a Bolshevik uprising in England itself. Then some Irishman killed the fucker thus precipitating a horrible Civil War. Thankfully, the British General Strike was a tame affair though some crazy Lesbian Fascists did run amok.
and he was ready to produce semi-serious ‘think’ pieces that identified the malaise as a contemporary phenomenon. The lingering effects of the First World War had worked to undermine ‘the standards of civilisation’ and ‘the restraint of a traditional culture’, he told the readers of the Spectator in 1929, and the present ‘crazy and sterile generation’ was the result.
The Jazz Age was ending. Wall Street would crash. Where the brilliant Bolsheviks had failed, a bilious Bourse would succeed. All order, all hierarchy, save of a spiritual kind, seemed doomed. But, in Russia, in Mexico, in Spain, the Church itself might be exterminated.
His anatomy of that generation, Vile Bodies (1930), is populated by a cast who, like Pennyfeather, possess only the most approximate acquaintance with their own existences:
No. It is the fact that those whom they interact with are interchangeable which poses the problem. This is a 'memoryless' ergodic equilibrium in which there are only vile bodies, no salvable souls.
‘It was about now that Adam remembered that he was engaged to be married’ is a representative gag.
That isn't a gag. Men who are engaged to be married, indeed, men who are married, frequently need some sharp reminder of that fact.
Waugh described the book as ‘rather like P.G. Wodehouse’,
a bleaker Saki perhaps. I suppose Waugh recoiled from Saki precisely because his own oeuvre could always be condensed and then re-condensed if only he could be sure there was anything there in the first place.
but the running joke is much more scarifying than that, involving the real possibility of harm and what should properly be hair-raising emotional carelessness: ‘Anyway, we aren’t engaged any more, are we – or are we?’; ‘I’ve known her all my life. As a matter of fact, she’s my mother.’
which is the sort of thing Comus Bassington might have found himself having to say though, truth be told, the chap might not have known his Mum for much of his childhood because she was away in India or Canada or whichever benighted Colony her husband chanced to govern.
BTW, Churchill's Mum married a chap only 16 days older than himself.
None of Waugh’s characters
those too well bred to 'talk shop'
seems to have any interests – not literature or art or politics or themselves.
girls are seeking to pair off in marriage and boys aren't immune to their charms.
They are, as Rose Macaulay astutely noted, ‘amiable nitwits’,
No. Basil Seal has a high IQ but of the sort that bluffs its way to a First and then finds it has only succeeded in rendering its possessor a crashing bore.
and some of them aren’t that amiable. You can see the force in Bradbury’s remark that Waugh’s novels of this period are in a way ‘anti-novels’, their mode defined by a deliberate refusal to undertake scrupulous psychological and ethical deliberation.
This is nonsense. John Last is a moralist for the same reason he isn't really a man who can husband anything. His factor and his broker and his solicitor manage things for him. There is a brief moment when he can rise above Prep School morality. But, the man is a worm and, merely as a worm, turns when required to sacrifice his ancestral seat to buy his wife a boyfriend. It is a pre-pubescent sense of morality- when one's own younger sister may tower over you- but, in fairness to Waugh, it is scrupulously psychological and does involve ethical deliberation (i.e. adolescent cant) .
Like Crouchback, Last's ancestral heritage is providentially preserved precisely because both dimwits did, if not the right thing, then what was 'congruous' in the Catholic sense of the term.
The closest the nitwits come to moral response is finding something ‘a bore’ or ‘amusing’ or ‘bogus’. The exception to the misrule in Vile Bodies is Father Rothschild: he is what Decline and Fall conspicuously lacks, a commentator on the novel in which he appears, and although one character dismisses him as ‘that charlatan of a Jesuit’, Waugh’s own attitude seems a good deal more respectful. At any rate, Rothschild is permitted to offer assessments of the zeitgeist such as ‘there is a radical instability in our whole world-order,’ and to speak with foresight of ‘this war that’s coming’.
If so, his own machinations contribute to it. But the Katechon must yield to the Eschaton.
Waugh shared with his modernist coevals a fascination with the atavistic savagery which they saw lying beneath the pseudo-civilisation of modern times, and there is a good deal of violence and misery in the 1930s novels.
Agatha Christie was worse.
Paul’s harmless friend Mr Prendergast gets his head sawn off by a prisoner
this is clearly theological. Prendy was a clergyman who had 'doubts' and thought this required him to quit a comfortable living. Then he discovered he could keep his 'doubts' while being a modern clergyman and so he became a chaplain in a prison which, one must say, is a step up from a Public School. Then, a religious maniac chops his head off.
who has successfully resisted his institution’s enlightened regime;
it is foolish. The Director is a Sociologist.
the ditzy party girl Agatha in Vile Bodies descends into mania thanks to her traumatic experience racing fast cars, and lies dying unnoticed while her chums drink cocktails;
which is exactly the sort of thing which does happen amongst the fast set- or so us proles fondly believe.
and in Black Mischief Basil Seal unwittingly eats his fiancée, Prudence, who has been cooked up into a stew.
This is tragic for Seal because it is the sort of grand guignol touch which prevents the thing from serving as the sort of wry anecdote one could dine out on for years. The truth is Basil is a bit of a bore- a second W.S Blunt. That's what comes of having a brain. Sad.
That last novel bears its modernist credentials most clearly: it is a rewriting of Heart of Darkness, done the second time as farce.
No it isn't. It is crude pro-Mussolini Catholic propaganda on the one hand (which is why Scoop is a better book) but also a shrewd enough picture of East African racial politics. The trajectory of the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution appears inevitable in its light. My memory is that Douglas Haig wrote a novel on that theme back in the late Sixties. As Bill Deedes observed, Waugh was a very clever man and had a nose for the scoop. I suppose it was his literary style which counted against him in that increasingly remunerative racket.
Basil is Waugh’s version of Marlow,
Nonsense! Basil is the sort of brainy chap who, if the times weren't out of joint, would have gone into the Consular Service and pacified the Trucial States or gotten the Japanese out of the Cannibal Isles or something of that sort. On the other hand, he'd have been wasted at the F.O or on the backbenches.
Also, Basil would have taken great pleasure in disillusioning Kurtz's fiancee back home as to the size and girth of the African dicks which had pleasured her beloved.
a man possessed of the indomitable urge to survive – Edmund Wilson called it ‘perverse, unregenerate self-will’ – that characterises his greatest shits. A cadge and a waster who has grown bored of his desultory life in London (‘Isn’t London hell?’), Basil travels to the remote land of Azania.
Sadly, Basil is not motivated by money because stealing from Mummy better serves his ends. Had she been poorer, he'd have made good.
There he establishes himself in the good books of Seth, the emperor, as innocent a figure as Pennyfeather but filled with a vague reforming zeal, having returned from a miseducation at Oxford bearing enlightenment. (‘I have seen the great tattoo of Aldershot, the Paris Exhibition, the Oxford Union,’ he explains.)
Seth is downright stupid. Pennyfeather was merely unfortunate except he wasn't really. He got to shake off Potts.
While Seth indulges himself with utopian fantasies of a new capital – the plans for which include renaming the site of the Anglican cathedral as ‘Place Marie Stopes’ – Basil insinuates himself as high commissioner in charge of the Ministry of Modernisation. It is a portfolio that he pursues with brazen cynicism, for, of course, he believes in the value of the ‘modern’ no more than Waugh does. The progressive language of improvement is deployed with the driest irony, just as in Conrad.
Conrad was a naval man, not Rider fucking Haggard. The problem with the Congo was that, unlike Azania (Ethiopia crossed with Zanzibar) it hadn't retained its independence. King Leopold's merry crew weren't doing 'development' or promoting 'progress' in the Free State.
‘Reluctantly, step by step, barbarism retreated,’ Waugh comments in the brief history of Azania with which the book begins: ‘The seeds of progress took root and, after years of slow growth, burst finally into flower in the single, narrow-gauge track of the Grand Chemin de Fer Impérial d’Azanie.’ And there are passages of spoof jungle-Conrad no less funny: ‘Beyond the hills on the low Wanda coast where no liners called and the jungle stretched unbroken to the sea ... the drums of the Wanda throbbing in sunless, forbidden places.’ Meanwhile, with the atavistic drums continuing in the background, ‘Seth in his Citroën drove to lay the foundation stone of the Imperial Institutes of Hygiene.’
Seth had made the mistake of alienating both the Church and the Aristocracy. He was doing exactly the opposite of what a British Resident would have done. His policies are a caricature of French laicite which, people like Waugh thought, was the dogma which had made that country so unstable and unreliable.
Waugh never used bathos
unless that is what Brideshead is.
to better effect than in Black Mischief,
there is no bathos there. Indeed, there is nothing. This is propaganda. Any remaining independent parts of Africa must come under European rule- preferably that of Mussolini now he has a Concordat. Also, he is killing a lot of Muslims in North Africa. That's what Crusaders do- right?
which turns on a recurrent anticlimax: where you expect to find a clash of cultures you find
a clash of cultures. The British Legation is completely different from the French Legation. The British envoy has forgotten his French and retreated to infantile imbecility. The French Minister is a Free Mason and believes his English counterpart is spinning a web of intrigue.
moral equivalence,
all are equally useless
a point which Waugh makes in all sorts of deft and self-ironising ways.
Self-ironising? No. We may say that Waugh is exploiting, for a propagandistic purpose, a vein of comedy he had previously tapped dry. Africa must be ruled the way the Punjab was ruled in the Nineteenth Century. But Britain, where a cad like Seal might easily become a member of a Coalition Cabinet, no longer produces the sort of pro-consuls who might see to the sewers and enforce a quarantine. Nor does France. Mussolini is the man for the job.
Oddly, the Somalis agreed. They rebuffed Ernie Bevin, who offered them a greater Somalia, and chose to take the Italians back as the mandatory power.
The savage practice of cannibalism, say, is just the sort of thing the primitives do over there; but, as Brophy cannily recognised, auto-anthropophagy
which means eating parts of one's own body. I'm not aware that any characters in Black Mischief showed any propensity to bite off their own feet.
had a special place in his own heart. Certainly, eating people is wrong, as Flanders and Swann pointed out; but several pages before consuming his fiancée, Basil has already given away his deep cannibalistic instincts: ‘You’re a grand girl, Prudence, and I’d like to eat you.’ She seems pretty keen on the idea.
In such matters it is more prudent to stick with the eucharist.
I omit what Perry has to say on Waugh's travel writing because, unlike Greene, Waugh sometimes let slip interesting economic information. His own comment on this period of his life is given in Brideshead when Ryder admits his paintings made in remote tropical lands were just 'English charm, playing tigers' though, to be frank, dyspepsia, not charm was Waugh's forte.
‘Horror starts, like charity, at home,’ as Donald Davie put it,
Charity should begin at home. Horror, not so much.
and the phrase could stand as epigraph to much of Waugh, especially his masterpiece of tangled modernism and barbarity, A Handful of Dust (1934). This time the protagonist is Basil’s anti-type, someone who is doomed from the start: Tony Last’s surname tells you he is destined to be the end of his line.
He isn't. His cousins take over the ancestral pile and see to its upkeep.
His rude exposure to the underlying brutality of things comes in the shape of his wife, Brenda, of whom he is very fond in a habitual sort of way. In her frivolity and complete lack of moral self-acquaintance she resembles the ninnies of the earlier novels,
She is an intelligent woman. It is credible that she is doing a course on Monetary Policy at the LSE.
but the mood has grown nastier. Brenda hooks up with Beaver, an indifferent and snobbish young man who is universally deplored and whom even Brenda recognises as second-rate, and demands a divorce.
Tony Last should have been more socially active. He may have had enough money but the economy is subject to exogenous shocks. His wife had social graces. She had a sort of 'funktionzlust'- a need to do the thing she was bred for- which her husband should have ensured served his own financial interests. But Tony was lazy and complacent. He had an heir. He should have provided himself with a spare before leaving it to other men to plough his wife.
The beau monde is charmed by so fantastic a romance, and a broken Tony seeks to be obliging; but after various humiliations he puts his foot down and refuses all her demands. Never one to resist convention, Tony then goes on an expedition, ‘going away because it seemed to be the conduct expected of a husband in his circumstance’. He falls in with a dotty explorer who is intent on finding a lost city in the Amazonian jungle, but the expedition quickly proves catastrophic; and, after various mishaps, Tony ends the novel in the impenetrable heart of the rainforest, where he has been imprisoned by a sinister character called Mr Todd, to whom he is condemned to read aloud the works of Dickens in perpetuity.
Todd supplies Last with an excellent soporific of a sort which Pinfold would have profited by. The food is wholesome, there are comely enough women and reading Dickens aloud is a Swendenborgian Paradise. The alternative was to return to London and get cirrhosis and end up marrying Princess Jenny Abdul fucking Akbar.
Waugh told Henry Green that the novel was about ‘a Gothic man in the hands of savages’ –
the Goths were pretty savage
savages both at home and abroad – ‘and the civilised man’s helpless plight among them’. It is the Black Mischief parallel effect again: the latter pages of the novel switch to and fro, like cuts in a movie, between Tony’s delirious ruin in the jungle and Brenda’s differently disastrous life in London,
not so disastrous. She marries a rising young MP. Well, when I say rising, I mean, the fellow is of Scottish ancestry. Bound to do well for himself, I mean to say.
as though to insinuate that they are in some way correspondent.
Tony wasn't a particularly hospitable or clubbable fellow. Brenda was sociable. It would have struck a false note to consign her to the fate of a Anna Karenina. She'd make an excellent wife for an MP from a rural constituency and if the husband of some chum of hers becomes Prime Minister, her husband might be made Chancellor.
Unlike in Black Mischief, though, there is something that you might risk calling a moral positive in the novel
Black Mischief does have a 'moral positive'- it is the boring side of Colonialism as represented by the Public Works Department.
and it comes in the unexpected form of a house.
Why unexpected? It is part of filial piety to seek to preserve the ancestral manse be it ne'er so grand.
What makes Tony the Gothic man finally snap is not the realisation that Brenda is awful,
she simply isn't. Tony's husbandry was defective.
but that the settlement she demands might involve giving up the ugly Victorian pile in the country to which he is truly devoted: one of the first things we learn about him is that ‘there was not a glazed brick or encaustic tile that was not dear to Tony’s heart.’ (Brenda loathes it, of course, and can’t wait to escape to her London flat.) Waugh refers to this aspect of the story as ‘English Gothic’. There is much fun to be had from a house with rooms named after Arthurian characters (‘The ceiling of Morgan le Fay was not in perfect repair’); but there is genuine reverence here, too, as ‘Gothic’ comes to stand, as it did for Ruskin, for everything that gets destroyed by modernity.
But Last's house is Victorian, pseudo-Gothic. One might as well speak of the Albert Memorial as a standing reproof to the vainglory of the Elizabethans.
Tony likes attending church on Sunday
the Vicar reads out his old sermons which were composed under tropical skies. Waugh was very good on the fractal frauds involved in the expat re-colonization of Olde England. But Hardy and Chesterton had got there first.
and chatting in a paternalistic way with the villagers, for which Brenda teases him:
Brenda's ancestors actually had feudal retainers who had turned into tenants many centuries ago. The Lasts probably started off as 'villieins'. Brenda, as a widow, can re-marry as a Catholic- if that is what she wants to be.
‘Tony saw the joke, but this did not at all diminish the pleasure he derived from his weekly routine.’ When the collapse of their marriage threatens the persistence of this corner of England, it is as much the end of an era as it was for Burke when Marie Antoinette was seized by the sans-culottes: ‘A whole Gothic world had come to grief
pseudo-Gothic
... there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet in the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled.’ Of course the dappled unicorns are ironic;
Are they though? There is a ready market for such things- as a Google Search swiftly determines.
but then, as William Empson observed, irony only has a point if it is true in some degree in both the senses on offer: here, poor old Tony’s Gothic world is both an object of disenchanted modern mockery and at the same time a system of defunct values that is regarded most tenderly.
Tony's cousins will look after the house properly. The point about faux Gothic architecture and Tennyson's fatuous Arthur is that the middling sort lap the thing up.
In one of his travel books, Waugh remarks in passing, as he gazes at Venice, ‘that unlike most men of letters, Ruskin would have led a much more valuable life if he had been a Roman Catholic.’
But, had he converted, he'd have been bitterly attacked in the Press. The cause of Workers' Education would have suffered. Also, actual Venetians- albeit now settled in Alexandria or Alexandra Park- would have had a field day taking his trousers down. The fact is, there's a good reason the Etonian pronunciation of Latin changed at that time. Britain had fallen behind in Philology and Mathematics and its figurative arts and Music remained confined to its own shores.
It is a puzzling thing to say but I suppose the point is that Ruskin could have made a much better fist of explaining the Gothic in The Stones of Venice if his religion had been properly in tune with the subject:
I don't understand this. Perhaps, Prof. Perry is of Irish Catholic heritage. There might be a great deal to be said on the question. To be frank, my own interest in Ruskin lapsed when I discovered his book wasn't actually titled 'Stoned in Venice'. Also Macaulay didn't write 'Great Lays of Ancient Rome'.
like Waugh’s Rossetti, he was ‘a Catholic without the discipline or consolation of the Church’. By the time of A Handful of Dust, Waugh himself had been a Roman Catholic for four years, and he regarded his reception into the Church as the most important event of his life. His conversion was apparently not a matter of high spiritual drama: his instructor, the celebrity Jesuit Martin D’Arcy,
better it had been a witty, but kind, Irishman like Fr. John O'Connor- the inspiration of Chesterton's Father Brown. I suppose, the ending of Brideshead is a condign tribute to Irish priests humbler yet. But, you find the same thing in Kipling. My generation, which in adolescence saw the last flicker of bigotry against the Irish, are, of course, now habituated to a reflex of resentment against the superior products of that more successful Knowledge Economy.
Still, we take grim pleasure in the fact that it is only the fucking Ascendancy Proddy, or half Maratha, bastids wot actually speak Gaelic.
was struck by how very ‘matter of fact’ Waugh’s approach was. For someone who missed ‘the restraint of a traditional culture’, the unmitigated authority of the universal Church naturally had a salutary appeal. Part of Waugh’s religion came from a sense of desperation: it was, he wrote in the Daily Express on the occasion of his conversion, only Christianity that could resist the ‘materialistic, mechanised state’ that was spreading across Europe from Russia. The world faced a stark choice between ‘Christianity and Chaos’; but to say so is really to express a distaste for Chaos rather than make a case for the truth of Christianity.
Nothing wrong with the Tiamat, that is Chaos, though nothing is.
Leviathan is a theodicy and part of the Divine Plan. Still, a good craftsman may wish to avoid 'drinking wine with the Dragon in Summer'. Even Waugh could not have doubted his own consummate skill. But that was all it was- skill.
Waugh could indeed make religion sound comically ‘matter of fact’ – as his favourite theologian, Ronald Knox, did when he described the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima as ‘not cricket’. In Helena, Waugh’s mildly bizarre historical novel published in 1950,
it would have been bizarre only if Waugh had not been an Englishman of a certain class.
he cheerfully adopted the medieval fabrication that the saint, almost certainly Greek, was actually the daughter of the British king Coel. The book features the sort of young woman you might find in Angela Brazil, given to saying such things as ‘What a lark! What a sell!’ Converted as an old lady to the new religion, she conceives the duty of her piety to be the discovery and excavation of the True Cross. She is impatient with the theologians who are meanwhile busy inventing Christian metaphysics: ‘There’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against.’ And, once discovered, the mere existence of the crucifix in all its solidity somehow comes to be an adequate proof for the whole Christian system. ‘It states a fact,’ Waugh says on the last page, manifesting the same no-nonsense spirit that has animated Helena throughout: ‘Only a Briton could have solved the problem as Helena did.’ He is probably right there.
Again, being a Curry & Chips Cockney, there may be some theological subtleties to what Prof. Perry is saying which I don't grasp. Perhaps the reference is to the dream of the Rood, tuirgen, and the notion that Joseph of Arimathea brought the child Jesus to Britain where the trees refused to let the Druids sacrifice him to them. Still, in mathematical logic, we might say the wood is a 'witness'. Univalent foundations are therefore possible and thus, for the moment, metaphysical strife can be set at rest.
But while offering a compelling structure of dogma which, if properly attended to, would sort out the mayhem, Wavian Catholicism also provided something almost entirely opposite: an account, no less compelling, of ubiquitous human discontent and depravity. ‘I believe that man is, by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth,’ Waugh announced, ‘that his chances of happiness and virtue, here, remain more or less constant through the centuries and, generally speaking, are not much affected by the political and economic conditions in which he lives’ – not an uncontentious proposition in 1939, you might think. Summarising Waugh’s worldview after conversion, his biographer Martin Stannard says: ‘Life on earth could now quite happily be reviewed as an empty charade.’ Stannard knows more about Waugh than anyone and what he says rings true, though it doesn’t sound very much like the things Christians usually say about life on earth: it certainly seems a bit short on the Pauline virtue of hope, say.
I don't get this. Surely Christians affirm God's gracious and wholly gratuitous bounty of an eternal reward- at least, for those of the Faith?
From the economist's point of view, Knightian Uncertainty means that it is rational to have 'discoordination' games and 'ontologically dysphoric' hedges. Moreover, without them- unless they are replaced by 'animal spirits'- there will be too little volatility to drive the system. God's 'mysterious economy' or the market's 'invisible hand' must include non-deterministic verification or witnesses.
Nancy Mitford remembered reproaching Waugh for behaving with quite unprompted unkindness to a young admirer at dinner: ‘You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic,’ he replied. ‘Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.’ It is an odd kind of defence to invoke your innate awfulness as a mitigating factor, but it is one which, according to Christopher Sykes, Waugh’s friends would often hear.
Surely, it is the only defence against the charge of hypocrisy? One might say Waugh had a bad 'conatus' or an inherent vice of mean-spiritedness and that though 'synderesis' led him to the Church, its sacred medicine could but be palliative.
Perhaps the most chilling story, because its cruelty is so frivolous, is one told by his son Auberon. After long war years of rationing and scarcity, three bananas arrived at the Waugh household: they were taken to the dinner table, where his young children sat incredulously watching Waugh consume them, one after another, topped with cream and sugar. ‘From that moment,’ Auberon Waugh recalled, ‘I never treated anything he had to say on faith or morals very seriously.’
What's unfair is none of his kids or grandkids took to drugs or crazy cults or turned into serial killers.
The combination of heartless mirth
is reminiscent of Saki
and deep sentimentality
where?
that features in Waugh’s early novels persisted in the religious vision that came increasingly to dominate his work.
I suppose one might mention Maurice Baring, a forgotten figure now, but quite important in Waugh's time. In the 'lonely lady of Dulwich' which came out in the early Thirties, Baring depicts a Catholic woman who, unfulfilled in her marriage, is contemplating adultery. This leads to her husband discarding her and her lingering and lonely death in a suburban villa. Waugh clearly came from a very different generation. It was impossible to be too sentimental about the fate of women whom one would continue to encounter in Pont Street when the dim bint really ought to have been languishing somewhere far south of the River.
The moral absurdity that had always drawn him to write now acquired some theological heft, while the flourishes of sentimentality took shape as a misty-eyed pastoral myth of Catholic England. The young Waugh had speculated about the impact of the First World War on the national character, but it turns out that such a historical perspective was far too confined: the real disaster occurred long before, under the Tudors,
thanks to Cardinal Wolsey
as he explained in his biography of Edmund Campion. The ‘freebooters’ who flourished under Edward VI were destined in time to become ‘the conspirators of 1688’, and then morphed into ‘the sceptical cultured oligarchs of the 18th century’ – and from that point the future was all too predictable: ‘competitive nationalism, competitive industrialism, competitive imperialism, the looms and coal mines and counting houses, the joint-stock companies’.
Catholic France, of course, had no such things.
These are the familiar bugbears of the Victorian moralists, but now involved in a melancholy tale of Catholic dispossession. Waugh’s imagination was always stirred by the thought of things going wrong and getting worse; the idea of a lost Catholic England gave him that on the scale of historical myth. As Conor Cruise O’Brien argued in a fine essay, Waugh was made for Jacobitism: the rightful king had always already taken to the hills.
Excessive drinking makes for paranoia. Look at Chesterton!
Yet if Protestantism was disastrous it was also oddly superficial since, as Waugh thought, ‘the Catholic structure still lies lightly buried beneath every phase of English life, ’ a proximity which only added to the poignancy of the occasional glimpses still to be had: ‘Everything one most loves in one’s own country seems only to be the survival of an age one has not oneself seen.’ These glimpses, as many commentators pointed out at the time, seemed to be located disproportionately among grand recusant families and big houses: Frank Kermode observed that ‘the operation of divine grace seems to be confined to those who say “chimney-piece”.’ Waugh wasn’t troubled by accusations of snobbery, claiming the right ‘to deal with the kind of people I know best’, but that doesn’t quite address the point – especially since, as Stannard points out, none of the aristocrats whom Waugh actually knew came very close to the ideal he nurtured in his fiction.
A good thing, libel laws being what they are.
The plot of A Handful of Dust turns out to be, like those of Mansfield Park and Howards End, a version of that quintessentially aristocrat plot: the question of inheritance. Who is going to get the house? Which is a way of asking: who shall inherit England? With Tony lost in the jungle, his home goes to some cousins who, oblivious to the Gothic values, run wire fences across the cherished sward and set up a silver-fox farm.
What's wrong with that? The thing will fail soon enough and they will turn to rabbits or turkeys. What is important is that, living outdoor lives, they wouldn't complain too much about the plumbing or the heating of the old pile. The Goths, after all, were a hardy race.
The novel doesn’t quite say so, but Tony’s failure is really a function of his Anglicanism, which Waugh thought an enfeebling disposition to believe nothing very much. ‘Do you believe in God?’ Mr Todd asks Tony, to which he flimsily replies: ‘I suppose so.’ (In her study on Waugh, Ann Pasternak Slater reports that the manuscript actually read, ‘I suppose no,’ which conveys an even more spineless sort of agnosticism.)
Belief is a separate matter from Faith. There is such a thing as a dark night of the soul though it may be caused by some well-meaning Episcopalian tampering with the fuse-box.
The inheritance plot is to be found as well in Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy, the major works of Waugh’s later period (Penguin has reissued the trilogy as one volume). The logic of these novels, however, is quite different: they are both, in one way or another, providential, with everything, as Julia Flyte says in Brideshead, ‘part of a plan’. Waugh saw Brideshead as a great advance on A Handful of Dust, ‘vastly more ambitious’: it was, he said, about ‘the operation of divine grace’, which makes it sound in the Paradise Lost class; but at first sight it seems to end in quite as pessimistic a spirit as its precursor.
Julia escapes marriage to a crushing snob. Catholicism has its uses.
Brideshead Castle has been taken over by the British army and requisitioned for the duration, and the army is no more worthy of the great house than the silver-fox farmers are of theirs:
It is natural for former residents of a beautiful building to resent their successors. But Castles of any antiquity will have had, at some time or another, military occupants while the mansions of the noveau riche will in time come to be inhabited by their more impoverished descendants. In the one case, we may deplore a country's diplomatic or defence policy. In the other, we must reflect that wealth breeds hubris of an aesthetic sort. To signal taste is to invite the nemesis of an empty larder.
the soldiers gaze cluelessly at its loveliness, clumsily smash fireplaces and throw fag-ends in the fountains. Everything about these interlopers that Waugh most despises is encapsulated in the figure of Hooper, Ryder’s junior officer, a young man about whom almost the first thing we are told is that he ‘was no romantic’.
He was no gentleman. He had not attended a Public School. The full quotation is-
Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert's horse
Rupert, a staunch Calvinist, was disliked by Catholics. Apparently, though he had long hair, he wasn't actually a poofter. Still, he was a Hun of some sort.
or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side;
the Iliad does not recommend itself to young boys. Homer's heroes come across as sissies.
at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry – that stoic, red-skin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man
Charles was a sissy before he became a bore and a prig. Fast flowing tears indeed!
– Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry's speech on St Crispin's day,
who the fuck weeps at it? The thing is quite stirring and, anyway, you get to wave your arm around brandishing an invisible sword.
nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae.
To a boy, Simonides' line suggests resurrection for a finer, if, sadly, final, battle. After all, that's how the mock-battles of childhood end. Charles, prig that he is, has got it into his head that pathos, rather than the reverse of his own prolixity, was Simonides' chief strength.
The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change.
That was the History Ryder was foolish enough to study at Collidge. Hooper wouldn't have touched the thing with a bargepole.
Gallipoli, Balaclava,
why not Kut el Amara?
Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon –
but not Trafalgar or Waterloo- how fucking precious is this Ryder cunt?
these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.”
Because Hooper, whatever his other faults, wasn't a vain, pretentious, little shit. Also, he was actually closer in age to actual boyhood- one not marred by a pederastic type of paideia.
The same could not be said for Ryder, who is just as romantic as Tony Last.
Last isn't a prig or a poseur. Ryder is a fucking artist.
He is initially quite like Tony in his spiritual desuetude,
Tony was idle but happy. Then his son died and his wife left him. Sad. What would have saved him was having a hobby. He should have bred pigs.
too, but he is clearly far better equipped to receive the enchantments of the aristocratic Catholicism practised by the Flyte family,
Waugh gives us no glimpse of any such enchantments. Bridey isn't exactly an advertisement for Stonyhurst. Lady Marchmain lacks a suave Jesuit for a chaplain, though, no doubt, a Douai trained Benedictine would have been more serviceable.
Why? The Benedictines, being an older order, better understood that heteronomous claims are, essentially, heterogeneous. Commensurability could only arise by reason of utilitarian, instrumental, reason. Waugh's 'Father Rothschild' could only be a Jesuit. But Britain is solidly Benedictine.
The fact is, Lady Marchmain is neither of the bon ton or the beau monde. This charming enough matron is too modestly endowed with savoir faire to see through Mr. Samgrass and thus get value for money from him. At the very least, had she any feline, or feral, instincts at all, she'd have found some suitably attractive boy of her own Faith for her son to befriend rather than seek to work upon the conscience of a mere simulacrum of a human being- viz. a Soulless Protestant- that too from North London.
and his susceptibility is in good part due to his even greater fondness for English Gothic.
Baroque- surely?
As he wanders around Brideshead Castle he feels ‘a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring’.
This is the sound Victorian engineering of Nesfield. Perhaps, Perry is having a little fun with his readers here.
A reader coming across such a sentence in 1945 might have been forgiven for not identifying its author as Evelyn Waugh.
Waugh's forte was Victorian pastiche. The false notes in the above suggest that Ryder's aesthetic engagements are superficial and facile. On the other hand, there may be money in the thing. If exiguous enough, an essentially meretricious talent can look like class.
The same is true of many passages in Brideshead: the debutante Julia, for instance, is said to bring to those she meets ‘a moment of joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the river’s bank when the kingfisher suddenly flames across dappled water’. Waugh toned down such purple patches in subsequent editions, but your main reaction is still: oh puh-lease.
It might equally be that this pinchbeck metal was meant to ring hollow. Still, we understand she was a looker. Thankfully, she escaped Charles.
And especially since, as Rose Macaulay pointed out, this is just the kind of romanticism that the younger Waugh ‘pilloried in bland ridicule’: in Scoop, especially, which has much fun at the expense of William Boot’s fine writing in his ‘Lush Places’ column (‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole’).
But Boot's sister understood that only ageing Cockney clerks read 'Lush Places'. Purple prose of this sort offered a more orient horizon of escape than the yellow journalism of the News Columns.
Still, once you’re attuned, you discover such lush passages elsewhere: ‘those wistful, half-romantic, half-aesthetic, peculiarly British longings which, in the past, used to find expression in so many slim lambskin volumes’.
Those peculiarly British longings caused British people to be a little particular on the point of having British babies.
Take Tony’s unicorns, for example, or the ‘soft English weather’ of his estate, ‘mist in the hollows and pale sunshine on the hills’.
Or take the husband of Basil Seal's mistress. He is an aesthete and a capable enough fellow. I suppose he could always go to America and create landscaped gardens for American plutocrats.
The apogee of this Wavian pastoral comes in the dying speech of Lord Marchmain
who had lived in Italy for decades. It is not intrinsically improbable that, during his terrible years in the trenches, some such florid formulation came into his head (he was already well over the age for active military service) and that, in Venice- the discarded Mistress of a Sea the British still ruled- it either refined itself or became fat and florid.
in Brideshead: he approaches his maker with thoughts of the chapel, ‘the tombs, cross-legged knight and doubleted earl’, and of the good old days, ‘the days of wool shearing and the wide corn lands, the days of growth and building, when the marshes were drained and the waste land brought under the plough’. This is splendid schmaltz, like the Albert Memorial or The Dream of Gerontius: you can see why a puzzled Edmund Wilson thought the passage ‘an absurdity which would be worthy of Waugh at his best if it were not – painful to say – meant quite seriously’.
But the best comic would have himself become so comic a creation as to be unconscious of the hilarity he occasions.
None of that would mean anything to unromantic Hooper, who nevertheless seems all set to inherit the earth; but then on the last page Charles thinks of the light burning in the sanctuary of Brideshead chapel, ‘the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs’ and which remains ‘burning anew among the old stones’.
What long dead soldiers see only those who have actually been to war can tell.
So the closing note is hopeful if unaccompanied.
Or else it reassures us that Julia- who, after all, was not utterly charmless- had a lucky escape. Charles was a bore and a prig and his thoughts were cliches.
The Sword of Honour trilogy tries to make a grand orchestration out of it.
It is a valuable addition to our knowledge of some of the less important theatres of the period. The Yugoslav stuff seemed prescient not that long ago. People of my generation had thought Tito had successfully soldered together that nation.
This time, finally, our protagonist is what we have long wanted, a proper Catholic squire:
an improper one might have been more interesting. What is the point of being a Catholic if you have nothing steamy to confess?
Guy Crouchback, resident in Italy
so a loafer, not a squire at all
when the war breaks out, enlists in the army to defeat what he identifies as ‘the Modern Age in arms’.
why did he not fight for Franco who appointed the Virgin Mary the Captain General of his Army?
He is another betrayed romantic,
his wife left him. Boo hoo.
a frustrated crusader, hankering for the spiritual certitudes
like what? Hitler wasn't actually a teddy bear?
which he associates with the local tomb of one Sir Roger of Waybroke, an English knight who set out to liberate Jerusalem but never made it beyond Genoa. The book traces Guy’s own thwarted crusade as he grows increasingly disillusioned with the randomness and shambles of army life;
the fellow was too old. We sympathize.
but the important background idea is that such a life is just a concentrated version of life in general. ‘Army life, with its humour, surprises and loyalties,’ Waugh said elsewhere, ‘comprises the very essence of human intercourse.’
Churchill made sure the Second War wasn't too horrible for men of his own class. His daughter-in-law's war work, on the other hand, set her up as one of the last grand horizantales of the long eighteenth century. She converted to Catholicism and died as the American Ambassador to France.
That essence is as bleak as ever: Guy experiences ‘the war of attrition which raged ceaselessly against the human spirit’. He views his career as a crusader with increasing jaundice,
the thing is a joke
and loses it altogether as soon as Soviet Russia, for Waugh the embodiment of modernity, belatedly enters the war.
Hitler declared war on Russia and America. They did not enter it of their own accord.
Guy finds himself abruptly thrown back into ‘the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour’.
Coz 'Peace with Honour' was a real thing- right?
The book has many brightly drawn recurrent characters full of the remorseless self-perpetuation that we have met before; the satirical account of the London wartime literary scene is very funny;
it was funnier in 'Put out more Flags'. But, by then, this was well trodden ground. Who could match Orwell who turned Senate House into the Ministry of Truth?
and the errancies of military life are well depicted, interspersed with some vivid set pieces such as the chaotic evacuation from Crete and the experience of displaced Jews in Yugoslavia. But Guy, who had ‘dedicated himself on the sword of Roger of Waybroke’, has a mostly disappointing war
he did well enough given his age and rather modest attainments
and is himself rather disappointing company, an incomplete personality, a version of Pennyfeather though in a new, more sombre mode. Pennyfeather was born to drift,
Nope. Pennyfeather will be a clergyman of a sensible sort.
and Guy entertains heroic spiritual ambitions but ends up drifting all the same.
He too does okay. Nobody expected him to rise rapidly through the ranks and end up a Field Marshall.
A rightful inheritance is accomplished, but only in a way: Guy’s son is set to inherit the grand house in England, with the twist that the boy’s biological father is actually a loathsome chancer called Trimmer.
So what? Trimmer was a hair-dresser which is just as good as the sort of footman who obliged their masters by siring an heir for them back in the eighteenth century.
The wisdom of Providence is not enacted flamboyantly, as with Lord Marchmain crossing himself on his death bed,
an atavistic and superstitious gesture. Perhaps it has 'congruous' merit. Perhaps not. What is providential is Julia escaping the priggish Charles.
but it hangs around in the periphery of the novel, principally represented by the inner calm of Guy’s saintly father.
But it is Apthorpe, slain by Guy's gift of a bottle of whiskey, who is the pharmakos, the sacrifice, by which the divine economy is restored. Uncle Peregrine does what Guy's father could not with propriety do- viz. accord the mother of what will be the heir to the house the emotional equivalent of a manger. Still, the fact is, both the Crusader's sword, and 'the sword of honour' gifted to Stalin, were fatal to Eastern Europe. There is a pattern to things which economists call ergodic and ecclesiastics more humbly term a mystery.
Waugh told Stopp
one might tell a man with such a name, such a profession, anything at all save the truth
that Crouchback Senior functioned as ‘a steady undertone of the decencies and true purpose of life behind the chaos of events and fantastic characters’. God’s purpose also makes an appearance, secondarily, in the shape of Mr Goodall, the appropriately named genealogist of the Crouchbacks, who claims to spot the workings of Providence in the family tree. Guy asks him the million-dollar question: ‘Do you seriously believe that God’s Providence concerns itself with the perpetuation of the English Catholic aristocracy?’ ‘But of course,’ Mr Goodall replies. It is both a joke and somehow a truth.
No. It is a joke. But irony is theodicy. Like every other type of genealogy, those of the Aristocracy are either chess-pieces moved by an invisible hand, or else they must moulder in a box having been swept off the board.
All the anarchy and absurdity in which Waugh found his truest inspiration becomes inexplicably folded into an encompassing scheme of God’s design: it is the very odd form of pessimism that Baudelaire once articulated as ‘all is for the best in the worst of all possible worlds,’ which is probably nonsense.
Ad astra per aspera isn't particularly pessimistic. We are expelled from Eden into, it turns out, Plato's mathematical world. But mathematics is hard work and like Waugh we may prefer to peck at the sunny side of the peach.
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