Evelyn Waugh, fulsome in his tributes to Max Beerbohm and P.G Woodhouse, was rather niggardly in his praise for Saki even though he had relished his work as a boy. Perhaps, he felt Saki's diamantine compression dazzled, merely to baffle, the dull-witted repression of a censorious age. As with Disraeli's dandiacal wit, Saki's oeuvre was not Hellenic. It was not 'art for art's sake'. It served an alien end when it did not hanker for an impossible Orient or the savage freedoms of vast Scythian steppes.
I suppose, Waugh, being a University man, was more attracted to work encrusted with Latin & Greek erudition displaying the suave gentlemanly style of Plato's Socrates. Consider the following line I found in an essay by Max Beerbohm concerning a general whom Saki, in 'the Westminster Alice' had depicted as Humpty Dumpty- 'The late Sir Redvers Buller, tauredon hupoblepsas, was thought to be peculiarly well fitted with his name.' Beerbohm is kinder but more comprehensively deadly than Saki. The classical allusion is to Socrates facing the executioner 'like a bull' gazing up at the man from under his brows. It is particularly apt, because like Socrates, Buller had been made a scapegoat- he was blamed for the disastrous early course of the Boer War- but had accepted his fate with the dignity of a soldier and a patriot. But, readers of the Phaedo know, Plato's Socrates saw himself not as Theseus, but as the Minotaur, trapped in his own labyrinth. Of Buller's class it would be said they were sheep who led lions. Of Socrates, remembering Alcibiades, we reflect on the unwisdom of raising lion cubs within the City walls. In both cases there was a complacency regarding their own competence which was fatal to their cause. Elsewhere, in an essay on George IV, that great patron of dandies, Beerbohm warns the votaries of Classical Paideia against the political sociopathy of the barbatuli- the wealthy, ambitious, young men whom the Academy equips only with the ability to better conspire against the Polis. Critical Philosophy breeds Sociopathy in those it indoctrinates. Such, too, is the fate of the satirist. The greater the vogue he enjoys, the sooner his own moral Punctum Archimedis is dissolved by a rising tide of increasingly puerile bile. Only the cultivation of personal kindliness can make one's professional hemlock sweet and decorous.
V.S. Pritchett, speaking of the wits of the Edwardian era once observed that '“the cinema, if nothing else, has burned this educated shrubbery out of our comic prose.” I suppose dialogue did become crisper and the action unfolded faster but this would have happened in any case. The mass-market- represented by the paperback novel- was simply too lucrative to ignore. But what was lost was not mere shrubbery. It was the soul of the garden and the secret of the rose.
As a Tory and a patriot- Saki was 2 years older than Beerbohm but enlisted and was killed in the Great War- Waugh, at least by the time he came to write an introduction to a re-issue of Saki's 'Unbearable Bassington', must have felt greater sympathy for Saki than he chose to make known. I suppose it was the homoerotic element in Saki which Waugh wished to distance himself from.
Equally, it may be that, as a child, Evelyn had overheard some adverse comment on Saki in his father's house. The publishers of the period may have considered his oeuvre insubstantial or, more to the point, outré. The other problem was, he was a brainy fellow- he had learnt Russian and written a book on the history of that nation- and, what's worse, he was a Tory thinker at just around the time, Douglas Jerrold tells us, the upper class had decided that there should be no Tory ideology. The only way forward for the Party was to pretend it could manage things better without having any ideas of its own as to what should be done.
Waugh knew, and worshipped, Beerbohm as much for his Classicism as his social tact and great personal kindliness. I suppose Woodhouse & Saki- like Chesterton- went to schools presided over by great Classicists and thus had acquired a mastery over the syntax of the English language which those who did not spend their childhood writing or translating Greek and Latin verse seldom achieve. Except, of course, this bee in Waugh's bonnet has never inhabited English's honeycomb. Some wrote it well though they lacked even a smattering of Latin or Greek, while plenty of 'Varsity wits' wielded their pen not with the negligence of a nobleman, which would be forgivable, but the muddled pedantry of a provincial mystic.
Woodhouse loved and was influenced by Saki. His Psmith is witty in Saki's urbane manner but he is also a cricketer and a loyal friend. Woodhouse also wrote some 'Reggie Pepper' stories but his Reggie is the prototype of Bertie Wooster, not Saki's Reginald in Russia. Interestingly, the character was trans-Atlantic. In the American version of the story he is a New Yorker who inherited money from an Uncle in the safety razor business. He represents the 'idle rich' a theme which fascinated Americans at that time. In the British version, he is the heir of an uncle who owned a colliery. In other words, he was part of the 'smart set' but not the hereditary aristocracy. The latter were horsy, the former rushed around the place in sports-cars.
Both Reggie and Bertie talk in the breezy American manner. They may be 'College men', but you'd never guess it from their vocabulary. Waugh & Beerbohm, however, could not take a literary man seriously unless he was the sort who might drop the phrase 'tauredon hupoblepsas' in to a casual conversation. They harked back to the Oxford of the 1830s which had produced Statesmen who might turn aside from the great issues of the day to write a book on colour-perception in Ancient Greece. For Waugh & Beerbohm there is a collegial aspect to the Republic of Letters. A writer has a duty to other writers. He must read their work and, if at all possible, comment publicly upon it. Woodhouse, it appears, neglected this duty though he read Waugh and Orwell etc. Why, then, did Belloc and Waugh & T.H White rate him so highly? Waugh says it is because the world he creates is completely artificial. It lies beyond the reach of Time's wasting hand. It is Greek. It is Classical. It is a plenitude sufficient to itself.
I read somewhere that Orwell's essay defending PG Woodhouse (he had gotten into trouble for some broadcasts he made on German Radio during the war) came to the attention of Waugh and he visited his co-eval when he was on his death-bed. He felt Orwell was 'close to God'. Orwell, for his part, appreciated Waugh's style as well as his courage in standing up for his convictions. If, when the two were together, the third also present was Woodhouse, we begin to grasp that humour might itself be a theodicy those with different dogmas can nevertheless hold in common. Waugh who made his living from satire, needed a Saint drawn from his own profession. Orwell was on the side of the workers and Woodhouse was a tireless toiler in the vineyard who had arrived earlier and would stay later than Orwell was destined to do.
Is it wise to rank authors who have given you much pleasure? Perhaps, if you yourself have tried and failed to be a writer, it is salutary. Your preferences in the matter may also help you understand what held you back. I rank Waugh higher than Beerbohm (though I accept his novel and some of his stories are peerless) because I am an economist- i.e. bound to be dull if not dismal. Woodhouse I regard as the W.S Gilbert of a prosaic age. Yet, at his best, he produces his own music on some frequency only the soul is sensible of. Saki, I worship. Why? He most captures a particular mood- that of being certain one inhabits the wrong universe- which, in my clumsy pseudo-intellectual manner, I call 'ontological dysphoria'. Saki was lucky. His was a sweet and decorous death. Mine will be neither. What comforts me is that nothing I have written will live. God is Just. But He is also Merciful. I long for a personal oblivion like that which overtakes my books the moment they are published. This is funny precisely because I am too dull witted to understand I never really existed. The other side of the coin of ex nihilo nihil fit- nothing can come of nothing- is that I am nothing because I nowhere fit.
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