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FIVE TIMES Evelyn
Waugh
Was Evelyn Waugh
a "snobbish misanthrope" ?
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In the
course of his lifetime, Waugh made enemies and offended many people; writer
James Lees-Milne said that Waugh "was the nastiest-tempered man in
England". Waugh's son, Auberon, said that the force of his father's
personality was such that, despite his lack of height, "generals and
chancellors of the exchequer, six-foot-six and exuding self-importance from
every pore, quail in front of him".
In the
biographic Mad World (2009), Paula Byrne said that the common view of Evelyn
Waugh as a "snobbish misanthrope" is a caricature; he asks: "Why
would a man, who was so unpleasant, be so beloved by such a wide circle of
friends?" His generosity to individual persons and causes, especially
Catholic causes, extended to small gestures; after his libel-court victory over
Nancy Spain, he sent her a bottle of champagne. Hastings said that Waugh's
outward personal belligerence to strangers was not entirely serious but an
attempt at "finding a sparring partner worthy of his own wit and
ingenuity". Besides mocking others, Waugh mocked himself—the elderly
buffer, "crusty colonel" image, which he presented in later life, was
a comic impersonation, and not his true self.
As an
instinctive conservative, Waugh believed that class divisions, with
inequalities of wealth and position, were natural and that "no form of
government [was] ordained by God as being better than any other". In the
post-war "Age of the Common Man", he attacked socialism (the
"Cripps–Attlee terror") and complained, after Churchill's election in
1951, that "the Conservative Party have never put the clock back a single
second". Waugh never voted in elections; in 1959, he expressed a hope that
the Conservatives would win the election, which they did, but would not vote
for them, saying "I should feel I was morally inculpated in their
follies" and added: "I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her
choice of servants".
Waugh's
Catholicism was fundamental: "The Church ... is the normal state of man
from which men have disastrously exiled themselves." He believed that the
Catholic Church was the last, great defence against the encroachment of the Dark
Age being ushered in by the welfare state and the spreading of working class
culture. Strictly observant, Waugh admitted to Diana Cooper that his most
difficult task was how to square the obligations of his faith with his
indifference to his fellow men. When Nancy Mitford asked him how he reconciled
his often objectionable conduct with being a Christian, Waugh replied that
"were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible".
Waugh's
conservatism was aesthetic as well as political and religious. Although he
praised younger writers, such as Angus Wilson, Muriel Spark and V.S. Naipaul,
he was scornful of the 1950s writers' group known as "The Movement".
He said that the literary world was "sinking into black disaster" and
that literature might die within thirty years. As a schoolboy, Waugh had
praised the art of Cubism but soon abandoned his interest in artistic
Modernism. In 1945, Waugh said that Pablo Picasso's artistic standing was the
result of a "mesmeric trick" and that his paintings "could not
be intelligently discussed in the terms used of the civilised masters". In
1953, in a radio interview, he named Augustus Egg (1816–1863) as a painter for
whom he had particular esteem.[n 7] Despite their political differences, Waugh
came to admire George Orwell, because of their shared patriotism and sense of
morality.
Throughout
his literary works, Evelyn Waugh freely expressed racial and anti-semitic
prejudices, especially in the books he wrote before the Second World War. The
writer V.S. Pritchett said that Waugh's anti-semitism, "like Mount
Everest, is there, nonviolent, but undeniable". Wykes said that
anti-semitism is Waugh's "most persistent nastiness", adding that
Waugh's racism was "an illogical extension of his views on the naturalness
and rightness of hierarchy as the [main] principle of social
organisation". As an admirer of Waugh's writing, Orwell said that Evelyn
Waugh was "almost as good a novelist as it is possible to be ... while
holding untenable opinions".
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(…) Evelyn
Arthur St. John Waugh was born in a suburb of London in 1903, the son of a busy
man-of-letters. Waugh's origins were gentlemanly but in no way aristocratic, a
point he seems to have been inordinately touchy about even as a boy. He was
sent to Lancing, one of England's less fashionable public schools; and from
there he won a scholarship to one of Oxford's decidedly less fashionable
colleges. At Oxford, however, his wit, good looks, and resolute preference for
the elite carried him into the company to which he aspired. There is a striking
portrait of him at this time in Harold Acton's Memoirs of an Aesthete: "I
still see him as a prancing faun, thinly disguised by conventional apparel. His
wide apart eyes, always ready to be startled under raised eyebrows, the curved
sensual lips, the hyacinthine locks of hair, I had seen in marble and bronze at
Naples ..." Other Oxford contemporaries have spoken of him in a harsher
vein: "A bitter little man" -- "A social climber."
After two
years, Waugh voluntarily left Oxford without a degree, and, like Paul
Pennyfeather of Decline and Fall, took a job in a school for backward boys.
Later, he worked for sixteen days on Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express. His
ambition was to be a painter, but a stint at art school left him dissatisfied
with his talent. At this time, he has said, he was a pagan and "wanted to
be a man of the world" -- a well-rounded English gentleman in the
eighteenth-century tradition. He joined in the whirl of Michael Arlen's
Mayfair. He "gadded among savages and people of fashion and politicians
and crazy generals ... because I enjoyed them." But he was a worldling who
could relish all this and still find it wanting. In 1930, after instruction
from the celebrated Father D'Arcy, Waugh entered the Catholic Church.
A few
months earlier, his marriage to the Honorable Evelyn Gardner had ended in
divorce. In 1937, he married again. His second wife was a Catholic: Laura,
daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel The Honorable Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux
Herbert, second son of the Earl of Carnarvon.
For nine
years, Waugh had traveled often and widely, by preference to wild places. The
best parts of the four travel books written during this period were later
reprinted in When the Going Was Good, and they are still lively reading. One is
periodically reminded, however, that Waugh's touch is surer and more sparkling
when he is using these same materials in his comic novels.
At the
outbreak of the war, Waugh joined the Royal Marines, and later, as a Commando,
took part in a succession of desperate actions in which he became famous for
his phenomenal courage. Years earlier, when Waugh had taken up foxhunting, his
recklessness had awed even veterans.
Waugh is
now settled at Piers Court in a secluded part of Gloucestershire, from which he
occasionally makes sorties to his London clubs. "I live in a shabby stone
house," he wrote in Life, "in which nothing is under a hundred years
old except the plumbing, and that does not work. I collect old books in an
inexpensive, desultory way. [His major avocation is the study of theology.] I
have a fast emptying cellar of wine and gardens fast reverting to jungle. I
have numerous children [three girls and two boys] whom I see once a day for
ten, I hope, awe-inspiring minutes."
A few years
back Randolph Churchill said of Waugh: "He grows more old-fashioned every
day. He seeks to live in an oasis." Waugh himself has affirmed with pride
that he is "two hundred years" behind the times, and that there is no
political party in existence which he finds sufficiently (in the strictly
literal sense of the word) reactionary. He has refused to learn to drive a car.
He writes with a pen which has to be continually dipped in the inkwell. And he
prefers to communicate even with his neighbors by written message rather than
resort to the telephone. A literary friend of Waugh's once delivered a
summation which neatly reflects the tenor of the anecdotes about him. As nearly
as I recall, it went: " Oh, I adore Evelyn. He's so frightfully witty and
so fearfully rude. Terribly conceited, of course -- and, poor sweet, rather
ridiculous. But such a good writer!"
COMPLETE
rejection of the modern world is the source from which springs the best and the
worst in Evelyn Waugh's writings. The artist who repudiates the realities of
his time must of necessity either work in the ironic key, as Waugh did in his
earlier novels which transmute repudiation into blandly destructive laughter;
or, if dissatisfied with a negative criticism, he must offer alternatives to
the status quo which can be taken seriously. But when Waugh abandons the
detached stance, when he seriously articulates his opinions and attitudes, the
results are often distressing, and sometimes disastrous.
His fierce
nostalgia for medievalism represents (as he himself recognizes) a yearning for
an irretrievably lost cause; and as social criticism, it is therefore merely
frivolous or petulant. Moreover in the Catholic content of his novels to date,
there has been little accent on religious experience such and a really shocking
absence of that human compassion which is so much a part of the Catholic
spirit. (What ounce of compassion Waugh can muster is reserved for the few who
meet with his approval.) In fact, the Catholicism of Waugh's fiction -- it is
not, of course, his faith which is under discussion, but his expression of it
-- is inextricably bound up with worship of the ancient. British nobility, so
laden with contempt for "lesser breeds without the law," that the Church
is made to appear a particularly exclusive club rather than a broad spiritual
force.
At his best
-- that is, when he remains detached -- Waugh is the finest comic artist to
emerge since the late 1920s. His style is swift, exact, almost unfailingly
felicitous. His inventions are entrancing; his timing inspired; his
matter-of-fact approach to the incongruous produces a perverse humor that is
immensely effective. Even that ancient comic device -- the use of suggestive
names -- is boldly put to work by Waugh with the happiest results. Mr. Outrage,
the leader of His Majesty's Opposition; Mrs. Melrose Ape, the phony evangelist;
Lord Copper, the press tycoon; Lady Circumference, Captain Grimes, Viola Chasm,
Ambrose Silk -- their names bespeak their nature.
Behind the
extravagant facade of Waugh's burlesques, manners and social types are observed
with a dazzling accuracy. The Bright Young People are illuminated with a glow
which spotlights the fantastic -- but they are profoundly "dans le
vrai." The Ministry of Information passages in Put Out More Flags are, of
course, a parody; but I can vouch from firsthand experience that the parody is
solidly founded in truth. In countless scenes throughout Waugh's farces, a
lapidary phrase or incident brings home with terrible directness the tragic
quality in the lives of his frivolous, gaily cockeyed, or unscrupulous
characters. Waugh's cosmos is, in the literal sense, funny as hell.
Like Eliot,
Waugh looked out on the world around him and saw it as a wasteland. His
temperament and special gifts led him to transfigure the wasteland into a
circus, within whose tent we are treated to a riotous harlequinade. But every
so often the flap of the tent is blown open; a vista of the wilderness
intrudes; and the antics of the clowns suddenly appear, as poor Agatha Runcible
would say, "too spirit-crushing."
This core
of tragic awareness gives to Waugh's comic vision the dimension of serious art.
The paradox, in fact, is that when Waugh is being comic, he makes luminous the
failures of his age, confronts us vividly with the desolating realities; and
when he is being serious, he is liable to become trashy. For without the
restraints of the ironic stance, his critical viewpoint reveals itself as
bigoted and rancorous; his snobbery emerges as obsessive and disgusting; and
his archaism involves him in all kinds of silliness.
WAUGH'S
first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), depicts a world in which villainy has the
innocence of man's primeval state before The Fall. The story opens on the night
of the annual orgy of Oxford's most aristocratic dining club: "A shriller
note could now be heard from Sir Alastair's rooms; any who have heard that
sound will shrink from the recollection of it; it is the sound of the English
country families baying for broken glass."
Paul
Pennyfeather, a colorless young man reading for Holy Orders, is debagged by the
rowdies and then expelled by the authorities for indecent exposure. Presently
he is taken up by an immensely wealth young widow, whose fortune comes from a
far-flung chain of bordellos; and when the police get on her track. Paul goes
to prison for white slavery, and the lady marries a Cabinet Minister. The fun
is incessant and the comic portraiture is pure delight, especially the hugely
disreputable schoolmaster, Captain Grimes, and the inventive butler-crook
Philbrick -- in his plushier moments Sir Solomon Philbrick, tycoon. Decline and
Fall is an unqualified success.
Vile Bodies
(1930) is almost as good. The combination of calamitous happenings and gay
insouciance is marvelously sustained as the story follows the Bright Young
People in their giddy dance through the condemned playground. But the farce,
now, has grimmer overtones; and the climax finds Adam on history's greatest
battlefield, clutching a bomb for the dissemination of leprosy.
Waugh's
next novel had its origin in the "crazy enchantment" of a visit to
Addis Ababa for the coronation of Haile Selassie. The Abyssinia of the early
thirties -- with its ancient Christianity and its enduring barbarism; its
strivings to be modern, frustrated by picturesque ignorance and limitless
inefficiency; its motley foreign colony, authentic savages, and wily promoters,
big and small -- provided Waugh with materials ideally suited to his talents,
and he worked them into what some critics consider the most amusing of his
novels, Black Mischief (1932).
A Handful
of Dust (1934), the most somber of the comic novels, is memorable for its
horrifying ending: the hero finds himself trapped in the recesses of the
Amazonian jungle, condemned to spend the rest of his life reading Dickens to a
cunning madman. In the next two books, Waugh's violent prejudices show their
hand. His biography of the Catholic martyr, Edmund Campion -- in many respects
a distinguished performance -- is marred by a partisanship which flagrantly
distorts Elizabethan history. Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) -- the product of an
assignment as a war correspondent -- is simply a piece of Fascist propaganda.
Strangely enough, the Ethiopian setting is again fictionally handled in Scoop
(1937) with the same detached zest as in Black Mischief. There is perhaps no
more uproarious burlesque of the workings of the press.
Put Out
More Flags (1942), a novel about phony war period, reintroduces Waugh's finest
pirate-hero, Basil Seal, more ingeniously iniquitous than ever. His use of
three loathsome evacuee children as a source of blackmail is just one of
several episodes in the book which are Waugh at his best. The story ends with
Basil's volunteering for the Commandos -- there was "a new spirit
abroad." The war apparently aroused in Waugh high hopes that victory would
open the way to return to Britain's former greatness. His deep and bitter
disillusionment at its actual outcome probably explains, at least in part, the
marked difference in temper between his pre-war and his post-war fiction.
Brideshead
Revisited (1945) is a romantic evocation of vanished splendors, which brings
into dismal relief the aridity of the present. In the first part, in which the
narrator reverts to his youth at Oxford, Waugh's artistic sense seldom falters.
Ryder's discovery of a magic world of freedom and intoxicating pleasures
through his friendship with Sebastian, the younger son of a noble and wealthy
Catholic family, and the accompanying contrast between the dryness of Ryder's
home life and the charm of the Marchmains -- these passages are among the most
memorable that Waugh has written. But, in the second part -- Ryder's unhappy
marriage and love affair with Sebastian's sister; Sebastian's descent into
alcoholism; Lord Marchmain's irregular and resplendent life in Venice, and his
death in his ancestral home -- those failings of Waugh's which were discussed
earlier run riot. And, as they take command, the characterization grows unreal,
the atmosphere becomes sententious, the style turns overripe.
Charles
Ryder is shaken out of his ill-mannered anti-Catholicism when the dying Lord
Marchmain, who has lived outside the Church, makes a sign indicating his
consent to receiving the final sacrament. But Ryder has been portrayed as so
insensitive to religion and so sensitive to the prestige of great families that
one is left, as Edmund Wilson has observed, with an uneasy feeling that it was
not "the sign" that made Ryder kneel beside the deathbed, but the
vision of this Catholic family's greatness conjured up in Lord Marchmain's
earlier monologue: "We were ... barons since Agincourt; the larger honors
came with the Georges ..." (and so on).
The Loved
One (1948) is one of Waugh's most savagely amusing books. As a lampoon on the
mortuary practices of Southern California, it is a coruscating tour de force.
When, however, the satire reaches out to other aspects of American folkways, it
is sometimes either hackneyed or crudely exaggerated. The trouble is that Waugh
can no longer maintain the same innocence of observation as in the pre-war
farces. The éclat of his performance in The Loved One is slightly marred by
traces of spite, and smudges of acid snob-distaste for all things American.
"There is no such thing as an American," he wrote in an explanatory
note about the book. "They are all exiles, uprooted, transplanted and
doomed to sterility."
Men at Arms
(1952), the first volume of an unfinished trilogy about military life during
World War II, describes Guy Crouchback's period of training for a commission in
the Halberdiers. Crouchback is a lonely, frustrated man, revolted by the modern
age, and the regiment -- with its proud traditions, its esprit de corps, its
rituals, its severe discipline and taxing duties -- restores to him a
vitalizing sense of dignity and purpose. The novel is written throughout in a
much lower key than Brideshead Revisited. Its major characterizations are
impressive; and though neither dramatic nor particularly moving, it is a very
polished and readable work. Its great weakness is that Waugh treats with
respectful admiration materials tinged with the ludicrous, which call for the
saving grace of irony.
Waugh's
latest book, Tactical Exercise (Little, Brown, $3.75), is a collection of short
fiction which more or less spans his writing career and is very varied in
range. It is probably better entertainment than any of the other books of its
kind that have just come off the presses; but there is not much in it that is
near to the top of Waugh's form.
One item is
unquestionably unique: an edifying melodrama, entitled "The Curse of the
Race Horse," which Waugh composed when he was seven; the spelling, which
foreshadows Waugh's genius for bold improvision, is utterly delectable.
"Excursion Into Reality" gives the movies the treatment Waugh gave
the press in Scoop. "'Love Among the Ruins" is Waugh's nightmarish
vision of the brave new world; but his total incompetence as a sociologist
makes this fantasy a nursery effort compared with those of Huxley and Orwell.
The most interesting item in this volume, "Work Suspended," consists
of the two chapters of a novel which Waugh abandoned in 1941, and which has
certain intriguing affinities with the book that took its place: Brideshead
Revisited.
Now
fifty-one, Evelyn Waugh has published twenty-two books. Considering the high
quality of his artistry, it is a remarkable output. He has himself defined,
with a characteristic touch of belligerence, the direction in which he plans to
move: "In my future books there will be two things to make them unpopular:
a preoccupation with style and the attempt to represent man more fully, which,
to me, means only one thing, man in his relation to God." It sounds as
though, from, now on, the "serious" side of Waugh will fully take
command.
However
laudable Waugh's objectives, I find it impossible to discount the evidence that
he has chosen a course which runs counter to his special gifts as an artist.
From the comic standpoint, Waugh's less amiable traits are actually an asset.
Arrogance, snobbery, and contentiousness -- when they work hand in hand with
irony -- are a corrosive solvent to satire. The religious writer requires at
least four qualities of which Waugh has so far displayed only one. Faith he
has; but little compassion and no humility -- and in his entire work there is
not a single truly convincing trace of love.
“Evelyn
Waugh: The Best and the Worst”
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