Back in 1999, David Lodge- a very good novelist despite being a Professor of Literature- wrote an article on Evelyn Waugh for the New York Review titled 'Waugh's comic Wasteland'.
TS Eliot had become an Anglo-Catholic. Waugh went the whole hog and embraced Rome. The first marriage of both men failed- in Eliot's case for a quite tragic medical reason.
Lodge posits an equivalence between Eliot's 'Wasteland' & Waugh's 'Vile Bodies' & 'Handful of Dust'.
Waugh yielded the palm to PG Woodhouse. He himself was a College man, with valuable connections to Fleet Street, who appealed to a narrower social class- one which might well believe that Oxford had, most lamentably, lost its intellectual preeminence in England at the time of the Reformation and only regained it three centuries later with the Oxford Movement which, plausibly, might be linked to the Pre-Raphaelites & the Pateresque Art for Art's sake Decadents.
Lodge was very bright. Thankfully, he didn't go to Oxbridge and thus didn't turn into a snobbish piece of shit.
Waugh's world was involuted. Jazz & Swing wasn't that 'door in the wall' which might open on to Eden, it was as a window barred against such escape as it providentially provided the kike, the nigger & the prole.
everyone was on short rations while Lodge was growing up. Oddly, the kids were all the better for it.
Rationing only ended when Lodge was about 19. He himself had to do National Service after University.
By the time Lodge wrote this, the British Prime Minister was sending his son to a state-aided Catholic school in Fulham. Many families in my neighborhood started going to Church so as to be able to get their kids into 'selective' Catholic school. Lodge & Anthony Burgess were Catholic by birth and were candid about the educational head-start they received thereby.
It must be said, the quality of teaching in State schools rose steeply between 1950 & 1970.
populated by young people who, after the age of 5, had never got to kiss their Mummy or hug their Daddy. James Hilton's last book, which came out in 1953 just before his death, paints a poignant picture of such a scion of the upper class who is desperately afraid that he will never be able to connect emotionally to his own adolescent son.
no alma mater can compensate for a Mummy to whom you can boast of your academic achievements- I got a CSE in Woodwork- while she cooks your tea.
unless, like the 13th Earl of Home, they were running the country. Oh. How stupid of me! Lodge was bang on the money.
Roman Catholicism is a rational, knowledge-based, religion with strong family values? As the last line of the Old Testament says- the hearts of the sons must be turned towards their fathers and vice versa.
It was an upwardly mobile subculture- not aggressively so, yet, being knowledge based, all the more secure for being slow and steady.
In Decline & Fall, Waugh pictures Life as ' like the big wheel at Luna Park. You pay five francs and go into a room with tiers of seats all around, and in the centre the floor is made of a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly.' The Vita Activa, if pursued ambitiously enough, gets you to the still center but so does the Vita Contemplativa which involves never getting on the wheel at all.
Catholicism is the notion that at the still center of things there is 'perichoresis'- the perpetual dance of the Trinity proposed by Gregory of Nazianus, so as to redeem, I like to think, his master, Himerius, who felt himself wronged by Rhetoric, in that it was only his own words he could make dance for the Muses, whereas, I believe, for the Catholic man of letters, the Word is its its own Kallinitikos- the dance of the three friends of the bride- at the marriage at Canae where Christ turned water into wine.
My point is, Waugh could never have brought himself to write a Babu line like the above but Babus like me- wot went to St. Columba's in Delhi- are welcome to read such shite into his texts so as to render them yet more richly stupid and spiritually sterile.
I suppose I found these books fascinating precisely because they opened my eyes to the existence of a milieu wholly different from my own
every novel of the period did so. I wasn't actually a RAF fighter pilot like Biggles. Indeed, it has even been suggested that I never had a liscence to kill. On the other hand, I was definitely married to Mary Poppins.
—adult, glamorous, hedonistic, and quintessentially “pre-war.”
Apparently Auberon Waugh, at Oxford, had a pal who would tell Grammar School oiks that their fathers would be turned out of their tenancies by the fathers of the boys in his own set. On the other hand, sodomy had declined because of the increasing assertiveness of female undergraduates.
By Christmas 1950, when I was a month short of sixteen, I was sufficiently hooked to request as a present from my mother copies of Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, and Scoop in the Chapman and Hall Uniform Edition—books which I still possess and frequently reread with undiminished pleasure.
Lodge actually liked English literature. Back then, some such people became Professors of it.
So what sort of books are these novels,
Situation comedies of a brisk but brilliantly lapidary sort.
and what is the secret of their enduring and catholic (with a small “c”) appeal?
They are short. Everything is exquisitely story-boarded and soldered together. Thankfully, there are no epigrammatic dandies or purple passages which run on too long.
A little after ITV's excellent version of Brideshead was broadcast, Channel 4 did a series on E.F Benson's Mapp & Lucia. Apparently, Benson's books had gone out of print after his death but regained popularity in the Seventies. It has been conjectured, Waugh was influenced by Benson's brother- who converted to Catholicism.
The first thing to be said about them is that they are funny, very funny, laugh-out-loud funny.
I love the passage where Lord Marchmain farts in the face of dowager Duchess.
Laughter, as we know (intuitively, and lately from medical science), is highly therapeutic;
so if farting- more particularly in the face of Duchesses
and the ability to provoke it, in generation after generation of readers, is a rare gift, always cherished.
Fashions in comedy change. What Waugh had was literary talent of a narrow, but rare, type. But, it must be said, everybody back then seems to have been churning out books. But it was journalism that paid the bills.
“Comedy” is a generic term more often applied to drama than to fiction, but to call these books “comic novels” might suggest that they belong to a subgenre of light fiction designed merely to divert and amuse.
Waugh was one of the Bright Young Things- descendants of Benson's 'Dodo'- who had achieved notoriety at that time. 'Vile Bodies'- which made him financially independent- is a satire on the gossip columnists who were themselves the subject of which they wrote. But Waugh knew his set was of no importance in itself. A press Lord- like Beaverbrook- might turn against them, in which case they would be merely dipsomaniacs of a shabby genteel sort.
Waugh’s early novels certainly do that—but they do much more. They disturb and challenge as well as entertain the reader.
They really don't. But, there can be no doubt, that (apart from Vile Bodies, which cashed in on a bogus trend) they are works of art.
P.G. Wodehouse wrote “comic novels”—with skill and verve,
Wodehouse was a genial fellow. His works are sunny, because he had a sunny outlook though his life had had its disappointments.
Beerbohm & Benson too were kindly people. Waugh's streak of cruelty is like that of Belloc & Saki.
which Waugh greatly admired. But they are essentially escapist and formulaic;
i.e. readable.
they do not grapple with the dark side of human nature.
Literature doesn't grapple with shit. The police and the penal system do so.
As Waugh himself eloquently observed, late in life, “For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no Fall of Man….
Man really hasn't fallen. He climbed down from the trees without doing himself an injury.
The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled.”
Day trippers visit them for a modest fee.
The world of Waugh’s fiction, in contrast, is definitely a fallen one,
Indeed. Mad Max is based on the exploits of Miles Malpractice amongst the ruins of Mayfair. The description of his death-match with Lady Pamela Popham, head of the Lesbian cannibal collective, is particularly harrowing.
in which people act with appalling disregard for fidelity, honesty, and all the other virtues.
Nothing in Literature is appalling. Pretending otherwise, because you teach that shite, is a horrible fate.
The fact that this behavior is often very amusing does not make it any less shocking.
Lodge was deeply shocked by reading the Beano. Gnasher's behavior appalled him. He became so disturbed that he decided to study worthless shite at Uni.
For this reason these books are sometimes described as satires.
Catholicism endorses satire as a means to 'scourge persistent follies' but warns against holding up any person or group to hatred, ridicule and contempt. I suppose, Waugh is a satirist because he scourges his own failings. 'The ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold' is extraordinarily frank.
Waugh himself disclaimed this description, asserting that satire “flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards.”
Put another way, it flourishes in a censorious society composed entirely of whited sepulchres.
The 'satire boom' of the early Sixties had a lot to do with chaps from minor Public Schools expressing contempt for Old Etonian Aristocrats.
In fact it is doubtful whether there ever was such an era—it is a historical construction or a nostalgic myth. But the idea was of the utmost importance to Waugh’s imagination.
No. It was because it didn't matter at all that he would bang on about it when he had nothing better to do.
His work is saturated in the idea of decline
Britain, and Europe, had indeed declined thanks to a pointless war between Imperial cousins. Wodehouse's America rose and rose. It could afford to look with a kindly eye upon the 'old country' and its charming eccentricities.
—that civilization is in a state of terminal decay.
The decline of a particular rentier class is not the decline of a civilization.
The title of his first novel, Decline and Fall,
chimed with what Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had said a year before he was assassinated. Britain did not have the troops to retain Ireland or Egypt or India. Indeed, it would be hard put to put down a Bolshevik revolution.
could stand as the title of almost all of them, and the hymn sung by Uncle Theodore in Scoop, “Change and decay in all around I see,” could be their signature tune.
The decline dates back to the 1880s when agricultural rents began to fall. The Distressed Gentlefolk's Aid Association was set up in 1897. Between 1911 and 1941, the proportion of GNP contributed by capital ('unearned') income declined considerably. The Financial Crisis of 1914- triggered by Britain & France's need to liquidate foreign investments to finance the coming War- marked the displacement of the City of London by American Capital markets.
After the War, 'Geddes axe' (cuts to Army & Navy budgets) struck at the very foundations of the British upper class. Once it became apparent that the Dominions would go their own way in economic matters, the British Empire was merely a catchphrase for politicians, like Churchill, who had been cast out into the wilderness.
Satire in any era is a kind of writing that draws its energy from
envy and powerlessness?
an essentially critical and subversive view of the world,
Thersites may have been critical. He didn't subvert shit.
seizing with delight on absurdities, anomalies, and contradictions in human conduct.
That can be done well enough by comedy of a kindly sort.
It is not the disposable wrapping around a set of positive moral precepts.
Why not? The satire in 'Decline & Fall'- e.g. the virginal Potts seeking to save 'fallen women' from 'White Slavery' but only succeeding in ruining his old pal- is disposable. What isn't is Grimes- the sex extinct incarnate- who prevails in resurrectio ex profundis.
Evelyn Waugh’s early novels therefore have an essentially satirical motivation.
The motivation is artistic and vocational- Waugh wished to earn a living by his pen- and the comedy is sophisticated and well observed.
They turn an impartial and comprehensive ironic vision upon the pretensions and follies of every class, profession, race, and even religion.
Lodge's class was rising. Whatever 'pretensions and follies' it might have had were endearing not self-enfeebling.
They gave offense to some readers in their own day, and undoubtedly they still do in the era of “political correctness.”
Thankfully, Trump had made the world safe for elderly racists like myself.
We all have a desire or need to protect some things from irreverent scrutiny. But in these novels nothing is immune.
One could equally say, everything which really mattered was immune. The point about the Bright Young Things is that they weren't bright. They were infantile. The presumption was that older, not necessarily wiser, heads would protect Empire & the ancestral rent-roll
In combining elements of comedy, often of a robustly farcical kind, with satirical wit and caricature, in order to explore social reality with an underlying seriousness of purpose, Evelyn Waugh belonged to a venerable and peculiarly English literary tradition
This could be said of any English comic writer. Studying or teaching Eng Lit destroys your brain.
which one can trace back through Dickens and Thackeray, Smollett, Sterne, and Henry Fielding.
Not to mention Chaucer and, before him, my old pal, Alfred King's Cura Pastoralis whose sarcasm was perhaps overdone- e.g. Ure ieldran, ða ðe ðas stowa ær hioldon, hie lufodon wisdom & ðurh ðone hie begeaton welan & us læfdon.
Lewis Carroll was also a perpetual source of inspiration.
There is a theory that Charles Ryder's 'low door in the wall' is a reference to Alice in Wonderland. It isn't. There is a very small door at the end of a magical hall through which Alice ventures. But Ryder is speaking of H.G Wells's door in a wall that moves around the neighborhood of the Chelsea Arts Club. Oxford, with its medieval courtyards and parterres is an even better location for this portal though all it might lead to would be pedantry.
But Waugh’s early novels were distinctively modern,
As were all novels written by post-War Co graduates at the time. But it was the pre-War generation which continued to dominate the market.
indeed they were significantly innovative in form, though it was some time before this was fully perceived or appreciated.
Sadly, to be innovative is to be imitable. What is sui generis is a cul de sac. One may say this of Waugh as we say it of Wilde or Beerbohm or Saki.
Could novels so effortless to read, so funny, and so accessible really belong to the history of modern literature?
No. Like Modern Art, Modern Literature is shite stupid peeps can get PhDs for pretending otherwise.
The academic critics of the time certainly didn’t think so. Reviews apart, there was virtually no serious criticism written about Evelyn Waugh until after World War II (and then, ironically, the usual complaint was that he was not as good as he had been before the war).
Nothing was quite as good.
One reason for this neglect was that in the perspective of the dominant critical orthodoxy, that of the New Criticism, modern fiction was identified with modernist fiction, that is to say the symbolist novel of subjective consciousness
À rebours? Axël? English novels tend to have at least some informational content.
as represented variously by the work of Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence.
not to mention W.S Gilbert & the Fabian Society.
Modernist fiction was difficult, obscure, experimental. It sacrificed story to the representation of subjective experience.
It is an objective truth that experience is subjective. Psychology was turning into a scientific discipline around this time.
It heightened and distorted language
the way we all do- more particularly when we stub our toe
to imitate the workings of consciousness and the unconscious. The generation of writers to which Waugh belonged (it included Christopher Isherwood, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Anthony Powell) were of course well aware of this body of work, and of its poetic equivalents (Waugh’s familiarity with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is particularly obvious).
But this was also true of Lodge's generation & my generation but not, strange to say, Chaucer's generation.
In many ways they shared the assumptions on which it was based—that modern life was peculiarly chaotic, disorderly, and unstable,
Not in England.
and that the conventions of the Victorian or Edwardian realistic novel were inadequate to represent it truthfully.
They were more than adequate. A.J Cronin was minting money.
But like every new generation of writers, they had to free themselves from “the anxiety of influence” by their literary father figures;
Fuck off! Eliot's cohort was anxious to be considered as carrying on some boring tradition or the other.
they had to find a new way to “make it new.”
No. They needed to write just entertainingly enough to avoid a career in Merchant Banking or Chartered Accountancy.
They developed a fictional technique that was antithetical to that of modernist fiction, without being a mere reversion to Victorian or Edwardian models.
Nothing wrong with WS Gilbert, Stevenson's 'wrong box', Chester-Belloc, Beerbohm, Saki etc.
Instead of the overplotted, overmoralized traditional novel, and instead of the almost plotless stream-of-consciousness novel, they wrote novels which declined either to comment or to introspect, which told a clear but often unsettling story mainly through dialogue and objective description of external behavior.
The same could be said of Agatha Christie.
Of course nothing is ever entirely new in the development of literary form.
Nor in development of any sort.
There is always a precursor, a source of inspiration, for every innovation. In Waugh’s case it was Ronald Firbank, that late-flowering bloom of the Decadence.
He had a private income. Waugh needed to earn money.
His description of Firbank’s eccentric but original fiction, in an essay published in 1929, is worth quoting at length:
[Firbank’s] later novels are almost wholly devoid of any attribution of cause to effect; there is the barest minimum of direct description; his compositions are built up, intricately and with a balanced alternation of the wildest extravagance and the most austere economy, with conversational nuances….
Firbank is pre-War. Waugh is Jazz Age.
His art is purely selective. From the fashionable chatter of his period, vapid and interminable, he has plucked, like tiny brilliant feathers from the breast of a bird, the particles of his design…. The talk goes on, delicate, chic, exquisitely humorous, and seemingly without point or plan.
Or wit. Firbank was stupid. Nobody can say that about Oscar Wilde.
Then, quite gradually, the reader is aware that a casual reference on page one links up with some particular inflexion of phrase on another until there emerges a plot; usually a plot so outrageous that he distrusts his own inferences.
Nonsense! We suspect that the author was high as a kite and gayer than Piers Gaveston's gyrfalcon. It would be tedious to establish that such, in fact, is the case.
This, written by Evelyn Waugh between his first and second novels, would do very well as a characterization of his own technique.
No. Waugh's plots are as good as Wodehouse's- or, indeed, Christie's- but the characters are less scenes a faire. There is an element of Sociological verisimilitude and an appreciation of the working of abstract Economic forces which caused the Soviets to publish a version of his work for the use of their diplomats and secret agents. 'Work suspended', in particular, attracted their attention.
But great writers do not copy other writers; they borrow and transform the tricks they admire.
Shitty writers do the same thing.
Firbank’s novels, amusing in short, infrequent samplings, are fatally limited by the author’s narrow interests and camp sensibility.
They are shit. Still, so long as sodomy was against the law, there would have afforded certain readers a frisson lacking in even the most reverential contemplation of Stanley Baldwin's backside.
Waugh applied Firbank’s techniques to
The habitues of Pont Street as opposed to the patrons of 19 Cleveland Street?
a broader and more recognizable social world and combined them with other methods of fictional representation.
of reality. He didn't want to be sued for libel or banned for obscenity.
From Firbank he derived the technique of evoking a scene and implying a plot through a mosaic of fragmentary, often unattributed, direct speech,
The difference is that there really is a plot. A young man is debagged. He loses his scholarship and his chance to rise in life. He is condemned to become a school-master.
The fact that he takes it on the chin suggests that he unconsciously longs to escape a suffocating existence. True the same purpose would have been served by a drunken trip to a brothel but Paul is destined for the Church.
but he does not entirely eschew “direct description.” Indeed, passages of carefully wrought descriptive prose are often the source of his most effective comedy—as in, for example, the arrival of the Welsh Silver Band at the school sports day in Decline and Fall:
this isn't carefully wrought at all. At the time it was fashionable to evince great hatred for the Welsh because Lloyd fucking George had fucked up the Aristocracy.
Ten men of revolting appearance were approaching from the drive.
The Welsh are a handsome race.
They were low of brow, crafty of eye and crooked of limb.
A book on English hisytory, written for the use of Indian students, compared the Welsh to the Tamils.
They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over their receding chins, while each clasped under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape.
It took the genius of TH White to turn the Scots into like figures of sub-humanity.
Unfair to Welsh rustics? Of course—but the description of the upper-class members of the Bollinger Club mustering for their Oxford reunion on the first page of the novel is scarcely more flattering:
…epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands; ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes…
this has informational content. The description of the Welsh villagers has none.
The comic surprise of that last phrase, attributing indelicacy to the putative virgins rather than their suitors, is very typical of
sodomites?
Waugh’s style, depending as it does on both the artful positioning of the words and the inversion of a presumed natural order.
That's how comedy works.
Skipping over biographical material which Lodge supplies, we come to Waugh's conversion to Catholicism after his divorce.
The following is from 'Vile Bodies'.
“Don’t you think,” said Father Rothschild gently, “that perhaps it is all in some way historical? I don’t think people ever want to lose their faith either in religion or anything else. I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.
even the young don't want to die.
I think all these divorces show that…”
No. Putting cyanide in hubby's soup evinces a hunger for permanence. The problem with Divorce is that it doesn't always take.
Although Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies are obviously the work of the same writer, there are interesting differences, both formal and thematic, between them.
There are differences between every book by every author.
Paul Pennyfeather, the hero of the earlier book, is, as has often been observed, a kind of latter-day Candide,
No. He belongs to the age of Freud, not Leibniz. He is studying worthless shite & might end up working for the League of Nations or some other such swindle. He unconsciously wishes to be 'debagged' if not buggered. However, to shake off Potts, one has to die and be reborn washed in the blood of some Welsh lambs or whatever.
an innocent naif who is both victim and observer of the folly, villainy, and corruption of modern society.
Actually, he is shrewd enough.
Expelled, with monstrous injustice,
Fuck off! He should have contacted the Headmaster of his School (a sound enough Anglican establishment), marshalled support amongst people of his own class & launched an appeal with the Visitor. But why bother?
from Oxford, he is condemned to work as the lowest form of pedagogic life, an unqualified schoolmaster at a bad private school.
Like Waugh- who had a degree- or his pal Plunket Greene.
From this fate he is rescued by the whim of Margot Beste-Chetwynde and suddenly installed at the glittering apex of high society. But the financial basis of this luxurious life style is a prostitution racket for which Paul chivalrously takes the rap, and he is sent to prison. He is not altogether unhappy there: “Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.” The absence of any pity for the hero’s plight is entirely typical of these novels: it is left to the reader to supply the moral outrage which events invite.
They really don't. Prison saves Paul from alcoholism & drug abuse- perhaps also syphilis.
But he is rescued once again by his rich friends,
Margot needs to marry Lord Metroland to reestablish her position in society. Metroland is happy enough to spring Paul because there is little point becoming Home Secretary if you can't make a mockery of the law.
and given a new identity, under which he returns to Oxford to study theology. Paul thus ends up where he began—but not quite the same person. He has had enough of liberty and license. We leave him studying early Christian heresies in a spirit of intolerant orthodoxy—perhaps a premonition of the author’s later conversion to Roman Catholicism.
Alec Waugh says that his little brother was very devout as a child.
Adam Fenwick-Symes, the hero of Vile Bodies, is also the victim of duplicity and betrayal,
No. There is great financial volatility before the outbreak of an all annihilating war.
but less innocent and more knowing than Paul Pennyfeather; and by the end of the story he has become a deceiver himself. The plot, such as it is, charts his constantly frustrated attempts to raise enough money to marry Nina.
Not that it matters. Marriage, like everything else, has ceased to mean shit.
Promises of riches are constantly being pressed upon him—by the drunk Major,
who does actually have his money
by Nina’s father,
No. The old boy thinks he is humouring a lunatic.
by Fleet Street—only to be snatched away again, or prove worthless. Eventually Nina callously jilts Adam to marry his friend Ginger, but soon regrets her decision. While Ginger is fighting in the war which has just broken out in Europe, Adam impersonates him at the Christmas festivities in Nina’s family home. This adulterous episode, framed by all the domestic sentiment that belongs to a traditional English Christmas, is richly ironic—funny, shocking, and oddly poignant, all at once.
The division of labour triumphs when Marriage is divorced from the Honeymoon.
Vile Bodies is my personal favorite among these novels,
It had good bits but was deeply silly. The Prime Minister wasn't worried about the jejune antics of prematurely debauched debutantes or petulantly parasitic younger sons.
for its daring mixture of the comic and the serious, and for the brilliance of its technique. There are unforgettable comic set-pieces, like Agatha Runcible’s appearance at breakfast at 10 Downing Street in her Hawaiian fancy dress costume, or Colonel Blount’s absent-minded reception of Adam at Doubting Hall.
He is too like Lottie Crump- 'the Queen of Cooks'- who ran the Cavendish hotel.
But there is also a seemingly effortless evocation and deployment of a large cast of characters on a broad social stage. The novel might be described as a kind of comic prose equivalent to The Waste Land.
Where is the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad and where the Maharajah of Pukkapore? The truth is Nina is a nice girl & Adam is a lucky devil. Hopefully, his Nanny will tell him about cunnilingus.
Like Eliot’s poem, it had painful personal sources (Adam’s relationship with Nina obviously derives in part from that between He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn),
Eliot's wife had a painful medical condition. Bertrand Russell fucked her & she went mad. By contrast, Evelyn suffered little. She-Evelyn divorced her next husband quickly enough.
but, like Eliot, Waugh managed to objectify this material and embed it in a panoramic overview of the decadence and confusion of English society in the aftermath of the Great War, spinning faster and faster out of control, like Agatha Runcible in her racing car.
The great mass of English people of all classes are not depicted as 'decadent' They may be a little bewildered or bemused by the antics of the smart set or the gyrations of financial markets or the sudden earthquakes of geopolitics.
This is how Waugh describes the rank and file of the upper middle class visiting one of the great Mayfair mansions
a great concourse of pious and honourable people (many of whom made the Anchorage House reception the one outing of the year), their women-folk well gowned in rich and durable stuffs, their men-folk ablaze with orders; people who had represented their country in foreign places and sent their sons to die for her in battle, people of decent and temperate life, uncultured, unaffected, unembarrassed, unassuming, unambitious people, of independent judgment and marked eccentricities, kind people who cared for animals and the deserving poor, brave and rather unreasonable people, that fine phalanx of the passing order, approaching as one day at the Last Trump they hoped to meet their Maker, with decorous and frank cordiality to shake Lady Anchorage by the hand at the top of her staircase
The narrative shifts rapidly from social group to social group; Cockney accents contrast with patrician voices,
the toffs sometimes put on Cockney accents. No doubt, the opposite happened as well. But, by the end of the Great War, there was a Field Marshal who dropped his aitches and who had worked his up through every rank in the British Army. Still, accent snobbery died hard. Harold MacMillan complained of Norman Tebbit's accent
the jargon of motor-racing mechanics with the in-group slang of the Bright Young Things—“So bogus, so sick-making, don’t you think? Or don’t you?”
The conceit here is that the daughters of Earls & Dukes are more illiterate and have a sparser vocabulary than Board School educated chambermaids.
The technique owes a lot to cinema,
No. The first talkies- e.g. Hitchcock's Blackmail- didn't have 'snappy' dialogue. But Ben Hechte's 'The front page' was first filmed in 1931.
PG Woodhouse wrote the dialogue for 'three French girls' in that year. It isn't very good.
in its fluid cutting from scene to scene, and in making the reader infer meaning from brief, telling images and fragments of conversation. Waugh
trusted to the intelligence and savoir faire of his readers. Hanging out with illiterate debutantes has its advantages.
belonged to the first generation of writers to grow up with the medium,
he grew up with the silent movies and seems to have had a good knowledge of Expressionist Cinema. But his dialogue is sui generis. Take Philbrick the butler. The yarn he spins Paul owes something to Thomas Burke, a self-professed expert on the East End, whose 'Chink & the Child' was turned into a movie by W.G Griffiths. To my mind, Waugh improves on Burke's Limehouse.
This is Philbrick describing his father, a prize fighter- a good-hearted sort of fellow but rough, as I was telling you; he used to knock my poor mother about something awful. Got jugged for it twice, but my! he took it out of her when he got out. There aren’t many left like him nowadays, what with education and whisky the price it is.
I should explain, in 'the Chink & the Child', a drunken boxer beats his daughter to death. Philbrick mourns the passing of that battling breed & with admirable justice, divides the blame between the Board School & the tax on spirits- both of which, it must be said, were a product of a wholly misguided fiscal policy.
and he was fascinated by it. He was involved in the making of a silent film himself on coming down from Oxford (an experience turned to good effect in Vile Bodies in Colonel Blount’s hilarious venture into the movie business) and remained a regular cinema-goer throughout his life. Waugh’s early fiction does by choice what film is bound by its nature to do—it stays on the surface of things.
But there are deeper currents and, perhaps, tears at the heart of things.
Perhaps this explains why these early novels have proved difficult to adapt successfully as films:
but they make good TV serials of a sumptuous sort
what seems experimental on the page seems routine on the screen, and the tension between the two media is somehow lost.
Waugh's Vile Bodies did well financially. There was a ready market for this short fiction some of which, in time, became the the seed of something more substantial. I think the somewhat infantile idiolect he endows his young flappers with is original and endearing.
Another development in technology which left its mark on Waugh’s fiction was the telephone. He was perhaps the first literary novelist to exploit this instrument on a significant scale to dramatize failures of communication, either deliberate or involuntary, between characters.
James Hilton describes a Music Hall Act where a Society Lady is on the phone displaying herself as all sunshine & sweetness to the person at the other end of the phone. Her maidservant, however, is hissed and growled at.
I don't know if such 'turns' were common at that time. To be fair, Waugh's girls aren't particularly two-faced.
Much of the courtship between Adam and Nina is conducted by phone,
Communication. Not courtship.
and one short chapter (eleven) consists entirely of two such conversations. Behind the clipped, banal phrases—“We aren’t going to be married today?” “No.” “I see.” “Well?” “I said, I see.” “Is that all?” “Yes, that’s all, Adam.” “I’m sorry.” “I’m sorry too. Good-bye.” “Good-bye, Nina”—there are depths of unspoken pain and betrayal.
Adam will sell his 'share' in Nina to Ginger for a little less than a hundred pounds.
The phrases “Well” and “I see,” which have a merely phatic function in the conversation, acquire an ironic and poignant resonance, for nothing is well and these interlocutors cannot see each other.
Well? doesn't mean 'may all be well'. It means 'What's your next move?' Nina says that she sees Adam is hopeless. She had thrown him a pity fuck and may well be preggers. She needs to make other arrangements.
In the 1930s, Waugh’s professional life fell into a certain pattern: he would go abroad, write a travel book about his experiences, and then rework the material in a novel. In 1930 he was sent to Abyssinia by a newspaper to report on the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie I. His nonfiction account of this trip was Remote People (1931), and its fictional fruit was Black Mischief (1932).
The comedy is over-broad. Africans are cannibals. Ooga Booga!
Abyssinia is transformed into Azania, an island state off the coast of East Africa, whose young monarch, the Emperor Seth, is
stupid.
infatuated with Western ideas of Progress
Which, at that time, had to do with Fascism not Family Planning.
and strives vainly to impose them on his still-primitive subjects. He orders his commander-in-chief, General Connolly, to issue the army with boots and equip it with a tank. The tank cannot operate in jungle terrain and is useful only as a punishment cell; the soldiers assume the boots are extra rations and eat them.
Africans will eat anything- but prefer White Missionaries.
Seth’s campaign to introduce contraception misfires when the people misinterpret his posters, with their before-and-after illustrations of the advantages of using condoms.
Africans are like the Pope. Did you know that Catholics consume the blood and flesh of Christ?
See: on right hand: there is rich man: smoke pipe like big chief: but his wife she no good; sit eating meat; and rich man no good: he only one son.
Proddy bastid! He will burn in Hell! Alternatively, he might be a Jew. Christ-Killer!
See: on left hand: poor man: not much to eat: but his wife she very good, work hard in field: man he good too: eleven children; one very mad, very holy. And in the middle: Emperor’s juju. Make you like that good man with eleven children.
This was the stereotype of the Irish or Italian Catholic incessantly making babies at the Pope's command.
It is easy to mistake this comedy for a display of racial prejudice.
It is easier to say that Waugh knew his market.
There is no doubt that Evelyn Waugh, like most Englishmen of his class and time, harbored a measure of such prejudice.
They were the axioms of a vast Imperial project.
But his imagination was more even-handed. It was the clash of different cultures in colonial and postcolonial Africa, all seeking to exploit each other, that fascinated Waugh,
Nonsense! He was in a hurry to get home. There might be one or two people in the Kenya Colony whom one wouldn't lose caste by consorting with but, otherwise, there was no real Society anywhere between Cape Town & Cairo.
because it generated so many delicious incongruities, absurdities, and contradictions in human behavior.
That sort of stuff had been done to death. What redeems 'Black Mischief' is Basil Seal. Had he been born twenty years earlier, he might have been a great Pro-Consul, like Cromer, or else a W.S Blunt. As things were, he was merely an agent of anarchy speeding the end of the island's independence & its being turned into a boring-as-fuck League of Nations Mandate.
In Africa, he found, the comedy of manners bordered on the surreal.
There were no manners and thus no comedy was possible- save of the broadest sort. Still, the contrast between the prematurely senile British Envoy & his paranoid French counterpart is part and parcel of the British mythology of having acquired an Empire in a fit of absent-mindedness.
Only in Alice in Wonderland, Waugh wrote in Remote People, could he find a “parallel for life in Addis Ababa…the peculiar flavour of galvanised and translated reality.”
Waugh had loved Saki who had turned the great politicians of the day into characters in Alice. The pity of it was that Wonderland endures. Not so the Europe of Edward the Peacemaker.
The obvious comparator for Addis Ababa was Gilbert & Sullivan's 'Mikado'. But Japan rose every quickly. Indeed, England ended its splendid isolation by allying with that country at the beginning of the Century.
Seth defines his struggle as “a war of Progress against Barbarism.”
No politician of the period said he was against progress.
Waugh shows that progress is usually only another form of barbarism.
No. He shows Africans- including Christian Africans- as Cannibals. That wasn't progress at all.
Certainly its representatives in Azania are hardly to its credit: the sublimely lazy and inefficient British legation,
the Oriental Secretary is competent enough. The others don't matter because Azania doesn't matter.
the self-important, self-deceiving French legation, or the Englishman who becomes Seth’s right-hand man, Basil Seal. As a novel, Black Mischief suffers perhaps from not having a really sympathetic character, unless it is the down-to-earth General Connolly.
The question it poses is- can one of the idle 'bright young things' make good if sent off to darkest Africa. The answer is- no. Don't be silly.
Instead of a reactive, victimized hero, we have in this book a totally amoral antihero, a “corker” but a cad, to whom deception and the double cross are second nature.
He has no impulse control. As later books featuring him make clear, he only betrays people for some temporary advantage- or the fun of the thing. He isn't actuated by malice.
Basil Seal’s romance with Prudence,
She is bored. He finds her boring.
the British ambassador’s daughter, lacks the underlying poignancy of the relationship between Adam and Nina in Vile Bodies, but this absence licenses one of the blackest reversals in the history of comedy.
Basil, in the jungle, is displaying a mastery of the local languages and traditions in the best 'Pukka Sahib' or 'Bwana' tradition. Having him dine on Prudence deflates him appropriately.
What actually happened, as I still recall, was that Prudence married Tarzan the Ape-Man and led a team of gorrilas to rescue Basil's expedition.
In the winter of 1932-1933, Waugh made a trip to British Guiana and Brazil to gather material for a travel book (92 Days).
He paid for it himself. The book fell flat- like Champagne not chargable to expenses.
In the course of an otherwise uneventful trek through the jungle, he encountered a lonely settler whose eccentric and slightly sinister demeanor gave him the idea for a short story about an explorer who is held captive by such a man and made to read the entire works of Dickens aloud at gunpoint.
His father's firm published Dickens. Otherwise, one cold imagine worse fates.
The idea continued to fascinate him, and in due course he wrote a novel, in his own words, “to discover how the prisoner got there, and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilized man’s helpless plight among them.”
There are no civilized men in Waugh. They display various degrees of infantilization or senility.
The novel was A Handful of Dust (1934), and the “civilized man” is Tony Last, proud owner of Hetton Abbey, a hideously ugly Victorian fake Gothic country house, happily married (or so he thinks) to Brenda.
He is lazy. He should first have become an MP and then sought to rise through the ranks of Colonial Governors and thus simultaneously repairing his finances and gaining promotion in the peerage. Lady Brenda's social skills and aristocratic connections would ensure that the couple could rise and rise. True, their social round would have been dull, but there would be some point to it.
In fact Brenda, a kind of aristocratic latter-day Emma Bovary,
She is smart and of superior social class. I suppose her mother steered her into a marriage with a boring Country Squire to whom she herself could be condescending.
is bored and restless, unable to share Tony’s enthusiasm for Hetton
he ought to be 'monetizing' it- if the thing could be monetized
and the archaic lord-of-the-manor
Country Squire, Tony isn't exercising droit de seigneur- more's the pity.
life style that he tries to keep up on an insufficient income.
This is the crux of the matter. Tony has assets- including his beautiful wife- but isn't getting the best return on them. Take Hetton. Tony should be inviting journalists and pulp novelists for weekends and helping them get publicity for the place. At the very least, the Society of Psychical Research should be holding seances there.
She starts an affair with the unremarkable and effete John Beaver
poor. Not effete. She throws him a pity fuck but then, because she bores him and he doesn't care if she knows it, she gets trapped.
because he offers her some escape from the crippling ennui of her domestic life, and reentry into the shallow, sophisticated pleasures of London high society.
Nonsense! She can visit her sisters or other relatives in London as much as she likes. She only needs to get a bed-sit of her own so as to fuck Beaver whose interest in an older woman was bound to wane.
Tony is easily deceived because he
is stupid
“had got into a habit of loving and trusting Brenda,”
the lazy habit of a stupid man
but a tragic accident to their son, John, precipitates an open breach.
Brenda knows that the Beaver will leave her. She simply hasn't enough money to keep him. Unconsicously, she hopes he will just drop dead. That's why she jumps to the conclusion that it is Beaver who died. She then says 'thank God' when she realizes this is not the case. Why? It isn't nice to think you wished somebody to death. Hilariously, it turns out that she is saying 'thank God' in response to her own son's death! But the guy she says this to doesn't hold it against her. They later get married.
Of all Waugh’s novels, A Handful of Dust draws most deeply on the traumatic breakdown of his own first marriage,
his wife fucked off with a bloke who worked for the BBC. He had to resign in consequence. But she divorced him within a few years.
which makes the poise of the book—its subtle balancing and tight control of the tragic and the comic, the emotional and the satirical—all the more remarkable.
Waugh was an artist. What he himself didn't realize was that Irony is Theodicy.
Waugh’s technique of staying on the surface, giving the minimum of information about the characters’ thoughts and feelings, making the reader draw the appropriate conclusions from what they say and do, prevents the novel from becoming excessively emotional or moralistic.
Yet Lodge has chastised Brenda in hysterical and moralistic terms. The truth is she committed no great crime.
We never, for instance, get direct access to Brenda’s mind or heart. The first indication that she is attracted to Beaver comes from a conversation with her sister Marjorie in which she first denies and then half-admits that she “fancies” him; and when she fails to mention on returning home to Tony that she met Beaver in London we realize that she has embarked on a course of deception.
Nina gave Adam a pity fuck. Why should Brenda not do the same? The problem with pity is that its object may come to look down on us.
Marjorie irresponsibly encourages the affair, then tries to effect a reconciliation—too late and for the wrong reasons. “Of course Brenda doesn’t love Beaver. How could she?” Marjorie says to Tony. “And if she thinks she does at the moment, it’s your duty to prevent her making a fool of herself. You must refuse to be divorced—anyway, until she has found someone more reasonable.” The callousness, snobbishness, and arrogance of that afterthought make it a devastating indictment of Marjorie and her set.
It really doesn't. Divorce had ceased to be a big deal. True, the King Emperor had to abdicate but that's because his wife was believed to have been a hooker in Shanghai.
Our sympathies are naturally drawn to the innocent party in the triangle, Tony Last, and it is hard to suppress a cheer when, by a brilliant narrative reversal, he turns the tables on Brenda’s selfish and grasping family and friends.
Even if adultery was proved against him, it would not have helped Brenda because of her own guilt. She'd have got no money and no divorce. A.P Herbert's 'Holy Deadlock', published in 1934, laid bare the absurdities of the law of the period.
But it is important to recognize that he is portrayed as a weak and limited man in many respects, and that his cult of Hetton is exposed as a self-indulgent illusion.
Hetton was realenough. The cousins who inherit it, like it and will do what they can to preserve it.
“A whole Gothic world had come to grief”
an Arthurian world came to grief with the infidelity of Guinevere
in the collapse of his marriage, for which he must bear some of the blame. That is why, in the novel’s design, he is punished by the grotesque fate that awaits him in the depths of the South American jungle.
The alternative was to marry Princess Abdul Akbar and die of cirrhosis.
Both Tony and Brenda are shown to be fundamentally immature, reverting to nursery rituals in times of stress,
Nothing wrong in that. It beats soiling yourself and screaming hysterically.
and both are shown weeping with self-pity, like children, when their fortunes reach their lowest ebb. Waugh later said of A Handful of Dust that “it was humanist and contained all I had to say about humanism.”
The word 'humanist' comes from 'Literae humaniores'. Waugh's own school had a magnificent Gothic Revival style Chapel. Why does he find nothing to like or no literary associations to rake up in connection with Hetton? Perhaps he thought Newman & Manning had rejected Puginsm in favour of something more Byzantine for some profound theological reason.
What he implied was that, without a transcendental religious faith, humanism was helpless in the face of human weakness, evil, and death.
As is religious faith. My pussycat died even though I trusted God to keep him alive.
His title was taken from The Waste Land, the work of another literary convert to Christian orthodoxy: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
You can go to jail for showing a handful of your dick.
A Handful of Dust is considered by most critics to be one of Waugh’s finest achievements, possibly the finest. It is certainly the most serious and complex of the early novels.
Brenda marries an MP. She will get him into the Cabinet. Last is good at reading out Dickens. An invisible hand- not that of the market- has guided to them to their best employment.
With Scoop (1938) Waugh returned to a more purely comic mode. “It is light and excellent,” he commented in his diary early in its composition, and he was right.
Vile Bodies satirized the Gossip Columnist. Scoop's target was the Foreign Correspondent- more particular the ones who specialized in War.
Waugh, as a Catholic, felt obliged to support Mussolini & Franco but, in Scoop, but Ishmaelia remains independent.
For this novel he drew on the experience of two more visits which he made to Abyssinia in the 1930s, as a correspondent reporting the Italian invasion and occupation of that country for The Daily Mail. This campaign was, like the Spanish Civil War, part of the political run-up to World War II, and in Scoop there is a good deal of topical satire at the expense of both Fascist and Communist ideologies.
There couldn't be because Africans were involved. All they can do is eat people.
Essentially however, it is, as its subtitle declares, “a novel about journalists,” and has achieved immortality as such. Many journalists consider it the best novel ever written about their profession.
More have never heard of it.
The engine of the plot—a case of mistaken identity, which sends the retiring nature columnist of the Daily Beast, William Boot, to the war-threatened African state of Ishmaelia instead of the fashionable novelist John Boot—is one of the oldest in comic literature, and is, in the cold light of reason, highly implausible.
Not really. Ishmaelia didn't matter in the slightest.
So are many other events in the story. That doesn’t matter in the least. As the very name of the fictitious newspaper implies, the novel is not meant to be soberly realistic. Waugh’s comic genius allowed him to invent fantastic incidents which seem only slightly exaggerated in the reading, because they have a representative truthfulness.
No. He can do so because he is writing of a far off place of no interest whatsoever to us.
One might cite as an example the embedded anecdote of the legendary ace reporter Wenlock Jakes, who started a revolution by accidentally filing a story from the wrong country.
Places of zero interest to us are welcome to have revolutions every other day.
The basic message of the book is that newspapers construct the reality they claim to report; not (as modern media studies would argue) for sinister ideological reasons, but because they are so obsessed with the mystique of their trade—the need to entertain their readers, to scoop their competitors, etc.—that they make gross errors of fact and interpretation all the time.
Only about stuff that doesn't matter. Get the football scores wrong and you are toast. Football matters. Distant wars don't.
It is precisely because he is not a professional journalist that William stumbles on the truth about Ishmaelian politics; but at one exquisitely ironic point in the narrative he is unable to publish a true story about a Russian agent operating in the capital because a false story to the same effect has already been circulated and then denied.
But Russian agents didn't matter. The place did have some strategic mineral or other but it was more profitable for all concerned that it remain under the ground.
The whole novel is a tissue of mistakes, misrepresentations, lies, and evasions. The foreign editor Mr. Salter’s formula for dealing with his employer’s gross misconceptions, “Up to a point, Lord Copper,” has deservedly become proverbial.
Salter has integrity. He'd make an excellent editor for a hobbyist magazine.
Put Out More Flags (1942) is a kind of epilogue or envoi to the sequence of novels that began with Decline and Fall.
No. It is Basil Seal's second outing. Our boy didn't do well in darkest Africa. Will he prove himself of the bulldog breed now the Nation was at War?
Fuck off! People of his class were a waste of space.
In it, Waugh revived several characters from the previous books, like Basil Seal, Peter Pastmaster, Alastair and Sonia Trumpington, invented a lot of new ones (notably the homosexual aesthete Ambrose Silk),
whom Seal bundles off to Ireland where he stops writing. He is being publicly honoured for his two decade long silence in Seal's final romp
and exhibited this large cast reacting in various ways to the outbreak of World War II. Most of them are ill-prepared for the crisis—including the soldiers:
Especially the soldiers.
Freddy was in uniform, acutely uncomfortable in ten-year-old trousers. He had been to report at the yeomanry headquarters the day before, and was home for two nights collecting his kit, which, in the two years since he was last at camp, had been misused in charades and picnics and dispersed about the house in a dozen improbable places. His pistol, in particular, had been a trouble. He had had the whole household hunting it, saying fretfully, “It’s all very well but I can get court-martialled for this,” until, at length, the nursery-maid found it at the back of the toy cupboard.
Why is Freddy more successful in dominating his wife than Tony? He is a richer man and his ancestral pile combines beauty with comfort. Also, his wife isn't in the direct line of any of the grand Ducal families.
The novel is diffuse and episodic in structure,
It is about the 'phony war'.
and somewhat uneven in tone, combining ruthless comic satire in Waugh’s old manner with a more affectionate, even at times sentimental attitude toward his characters. One might cite, as examples of the latter, Alastair’s altruistic enlistment in the ranks,
he'd have been a shit officer
or Peter Pastmaster’s decision to marry and beget an heir before risking his life in the armed struggle.
That's not sentimental at all. Incidentally, if you died in combat, your Estate escaped Death Duty.
It should be remembered, though, that Waugh himself volunteered for active service with similar idealism, and that his subsequent disillusionment with the political and military conduct of the war had not yet hardened into firm conviction when, in 1941, he wrote Put Out More Flags to divert himself on a long and tedious voyage by troopship.
It wasn't obvious in 1940, that Britain would be unable to prevail (save against Italians) on any front without American help.
And, in spite of its flaws, this novel has many pleasures to offer. The subplot of Basil Seal’s commercial exploitation of the awful evacuees, for example,
Waugh has the 'big fish'- i.e. the aristocrats in big houses- exploit the 'little fish'- i.e. upper middle class retirees who own modest villas in the manner of the unscrupulous Cockney solicitor of folklore.
the narrative thread of the lunatic bomber
a lunatic- yes- but a patriot. He thinks the War office might be interested in his 'invention'.
at large in the Ministry of Information,
He was sent there by the Admiralty
and the unerringly wrong prophecies of Sir Joseph Mainwaring are handled with characteristic skill. The fact is that Evelyn Waugh was incapable of writing badly, and often in this novel he writes as brilliantly as ever. But his great work of fiction about the Second World War, the Sword of Honour trilogy, was still to come.
'Put out more flags' was written purely for pleasure and is read in the same way. The title is taken from Lin Yutang's 'Importance of Living'.
Ambrose, the aesthete, takes up the theme while lunching with his publisher-
To the Chinese scholar the military hero was the lowest of human types, the subject for ribaldry. We must return to Chinese scholarship.’
‘It’s a terribly difficult language, I believe,’ said Mr Bentley.
‘I knew a Chink in Valparaiso . . .’ began Basil; but Ambrose was now in full gallop.
‘European scholarship has never lost its monastic character,’ he said. ‘Chinese scholarship deals with taste and wisdom, not with the memorizing of facts. In China the man whom we make a don sat for the Imperial examinations and became a bureaucrat. Their scholars were lonely men of few books and fewer pupils, content with a single concubine, a pine tree and the prospect of a stream. European culture has become conventual; we must make it hermetic.’
‘I knew a hermit in the Ogaden desert once . . .’
‘Invasions swept over China; the Empire split up into warring kingdoms. The scholars lived their frugal and idyllic lives undisturbed, occasionally making exquisite private jokes which they wrote on leaves and floated down-stream.’
‘I read a lot of Chinese poetry once,’ said Mr Bentley, ‘in the translation, of course. I became fascinated by it. I would read of a sage who, as you say, lived frugally and idyllically. He had a cottage and a garden and a view. Each flower had its proper mood and phase of the climate; he would smell the jasmine after recovering from the toothache and the lotus when drinking tea with a monk. There was a little clearing where the full moon cast no shadow, where his concubine would sit and sing to him when he got drunk. Every aspect of this little garden corresponded to some personal mood of the most tender and refined sort. It was quite intoxicating to read.’
‘It is.’
‘This sage had no tame dog, but he had a cat and a mother. Every morning he greeted his mother on his knees and every evening, in winter, he put charcoal under her mattress and himself drew the bed-curtains. It sounded the most exquisite existence.’
‘It was.’
‘And then,’ said Mr Bentley, ‘I found a copy of the Daily Mirror in a railway carriage and I read an article there by Godfrey Winn about his cottage and his flowers and his moods, and for the life of me, Ambrose, I couldn’t see the difference between that young gentleman and Yuan Ts’etsung.’
I may add that Godfrey Wiinn played the Archbishop of All England in 'Up the Chastity Belt'. Waugh read history at Oxford. Omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti. Connect the fucking dots.
