Ralph McInerny
University of Notre Dame
This paper on the life and work of Evelyn Waugh was given on October 12, 2004, as part of the Center's 2004 Catholic Culture Series.
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) once began a book review thus: “There are three kinds of writer: those who know how to write and have nothing to say, those who have something to say but don't know how to write, and the rest are at meetings speaking of the agony of creation.” Waugh himself knew how to write, had something to say, and seems never to have indulged in the usual self-pity of the creative writer.
Before he found his way as a writer, he dabbled in the graphic arts — the illustrations in Black Mischief are by the author — and cabinet making. His first novel, Decline and Fall, appeared in 1928 and already displayed a mastery of his craft that is unusual at the outset of a literary career. From that point on, with few exceptions, his novels are models of the art that conceals itself, like well-made cabinets. A careful study of them could save the aspiring writer a good deal of the agony of creation. But the initial reaction to most of his novels is laughter. They are funny. Hilariously funny. Humor, one sometimes thinks, is the best medium for seriousness. From the very first novel, the reader finds, as the laughter dies, a residue of usually unstated or understated gravitas.
For all that, readers of Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies (1930), those who ran as they read, could have been forgiven if they thought of him as merely a comic writer. P.G. Wodehouse, whose writing Waugh, like Hilaire Belloc, held in high esteem, was the object of close study. Jeeves and Psmith, the golf stories the Mulliner stories, the whole Wodehouse canon, provides hours of shrieking pleasure for the reader. Now, it is a truism that the explained joke is never a joke. There is a vast and humorless library on the nature of humor. To Wodehouse can easily be applied Oscar Wilde's dictum that we laugh and we are not wounded. We find in his journalism and reviews Waugh's appreciation of Wodehouse.
The world of Wodehouse seems self-contained—the Drones Club is unlike any real club, Wodehouse's limp young men do not find their counterparts among the living, the stories turn on issues of consummate triviality, the pursuit of a young woman is on a par with the pursuit of a lost golf ball, but no Wodehouse golfer would be permitted on any respectable course. Waugh's 1939 essay on the work of Wodehouse is called “An Angelic Doctor.” It is clear that Waugh was a close student of this comic master and what he has to say of him casts indirect light on himself.
Wodehouse's characters, Waugh asserts, are “purely and essentially literary characters.”
We do not concern ourselves with the economic implications of their position; we are a bit skeptical about their quite astonishing celibacy. We do not expect them to grow any older, like the Three Musketeers or the Forsytes. We are not interested in how they would ‘react to changing social conditions' as publishers' blurbs invite us to be interested in other sagas. They are untroubled by wars…(p. 255)
But literary or not, the world of Wodehouse is entered from this one and it is to this one we return. Even to say that it is essentially literary suggests a contrast. Of course, there is contrast within the stories, as well, particularly those introduced by the Oldest Member or Mr. Mulliner, making them stories within stories. The comic requires a contrast, if only with the prosaic; and the literary, in Waugh's sense, implies the literal. For all that, we emerge from the world of Wodehouse with little sense that we are meant to see this one differently.
Another author whom Waugh obviously studied closely was the elusive and epicene Ronald Firbank, a fin-de-siecle fop and Catholic convert who was a minimalist in fiction before the term. The characters are fantastic, the plots improbable. There are pages of nothing but dialogue, as we often find in Waugh. Moreover, in Firbank, allusiveness is all. In writing of him, Waugh notes the way apparent asides scattered through a story connect and tell a story of their own, one only the careful reader will find. This was a lesson Waugh learned well. For example, in Decline and Fall, the starting gun, fired at the ground as a safety precaution, knicks the foot of one of the boys about to race. His condition is casually alluded to later until finally we learn offhandedly that his foot has been amputated. Another example: in Vile Bodies, Adam places a thousand pound bet on Indian Runner, a long shot, with a scarcely know colonel. Later we learn the horse has won and from time to time the colonel appears and fails to recognize Adam but when he does promises him his winnings. This weaves through the novel until when the money is paid it is worthless. Another example: the way Basil Seal becomes Minister of Modernization of Azania in Black Mischief. These are marvels of oblique narrative.
If Wodehouse and Firbank are enormously important influences on Waugh, two others are Belloc and Hemingway, both of them for their masterly use of language. Of course it was Wodehouse's pellucid prose that Belloc praised. When Waugh wrote of Across the River and Into the Tree, he reviewed the book's reviewers, asserting that however inferior Hemingway, the book was infinitely better than those such reviewers praised. It is perhaps an exaggeration, but I don't think there is a single lazy or uninteresting sentence in the whole of Waugh. He is an artist whose medium is the English language. But the language is the medium, not the message. It is impossible to admire Waugh's style, early and late, but this is always step two, reflective, not the first reaction of the reader. On a first reading, the prose is transparent.
A superficial reading of Waugh would see him beginning as a frothy Wodehousian and then metamorphosing into the elegiac Brideshead Revisited, ending with the underestimated—sometimes even by himself—war trilogy, published over a decade, from 1952 to 1961, and brought together as Sword of Honour. In a preface to the first gathering of these three novels, a preface missing from the recent Modern Library edition, marred by the windy introduction of Frank Kermode, Waugh has this to say:
On reading the book I realized I had done something quite outside my original intention. I had written an obituary of the Roman Catholic Church in England as it had existed for many centuries. All the rites and most of the opinions here described are already obsolete. When I wrote Brideshead Revisited, I was consciously writing an obituary of the doomed English upper class. It never occurred to me, writing Sword of Honour, that the Church was susceptible to change. I was wrong and I have seen a superficial revolution in what then seemed permanent. Despite the faith of many of the characters, Sword of Honour was not specifically a religious book. Recent developments have made it, in fact, a document of Catholic usage of my youth.
Was there an evolution in Waugh the writer from one of the Bright Young People to Grumpy Old Man? His mordant comments on modernity and on the ravages that Socialism wrought on his country have provided texts for writer after writer who would dismiss him as one who dearly loved a lord, a would-be aristocrat, a man who never voted because, in his words, he did not presume to instruct his sovereign in her choice of ministers. Not for the first time, in Scott-King's Modern Europe, which concludes with the hero's judgment that it would be immoral to prepare a boy to live in the modern world, Waugh's distaste for post-war Britain is palpable. He once said that the only way he could remain in England was to think of himself as a tourist there. The contempt and hatred in which he is held by many leftist critics and journalists will one day be studied as the phenomenon it is. The present antidote to it is to go back to the early novels. The judgment that came as an odious surprise to many as the aging Waugh took on the persona of a curmudgeon is there from the beginning, and its vehicle is humor.
Paul Pennyfeather, the protagonist of Decline and Fall, is a remarkably passive character. Unjustly expelled from his college for indecent behavior when a mob of drunken students strip him to his shorts and run him through the quad, Paul almost without demur leaves and takes a position at a parody of a public school in Wales, where once again he is buffeted by people and events, emerging as the wooer of the mother of one of his students. She has inherited from a previous husband a brothel business and when, on the eve of their wedding, Paul goes to Marseilles all unwittingly to see off a new supply of girls for the Latin American trade, he is arrested, sent back to England , tried and convicted and sent to prison. At the end of the novel, he is back at Oxford , reading theology.
As naïve Candide, Paul's vicissitudes are told with a lightness seldom darkened by any adverse comments of his own. He is surrounded by frauds, con men, heedless hedonists, amoral if not immoral colleagues and aristocrats, and is victimized by them all. He endures all this with stoic equanimity. The reader laughs his way through the pages and when the laughter dies becomes aware that with authorial aloofness Waugh has provided a foil against which to assess the events of the story. We could not laugh if we did not form judgments of others that Paul himself eschews. When we leave him, preparing for the ministry, we realize what that foil is.
Between his first and second novels, Waugh entered the Catholic Church. Who reading Vile Bodies would guess that the author had undergone a religious conversion? Of course there is Father Rothschild, but the dramatis personae is made up largely of the Bright Young People, and characters are introduced who will have a long career in subsequent novels. We are in a post-World War I milieu, but the Bright Young People are too young to be veterans of that war. Their lives are made up of parties, drinking binges, affairs; aristocrats are either bumbling fools or mindless hedonists. But it is the all but submerged point of view that gives meaning to these antics. It would be excessive to compare Waugh to Dante, but there seems little doubt that we are in hell. It is the world in which Waugh's first marriage—to the other Evelyn—took place. His wife's infidelity scarred Waugh indelibly and versions of what happened show up in other novels, not least Handful of Dust (1934) whose very title provides the viewpoint of the novel. These lines from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland are quoted on the title page:
…I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Eliot shared Waugh's estimate of the modern world and like him would seek refuge from it in Christian faith.
The way in which his faith influences the Catholic writer is a subject of great complexity. Perhaps Catholic fiction could be compared with the analogous phenomenon of Christian Philosophy. For some Catholic writers, religious dogma becomes thematic in the story, sometimes quite overtly, as in Graham Greene's Catholic novels, sometimes obliquely via clerical characters, as in J.F. Powers, but sometimes only as the ambience providing the author's point of view, as in Flannery O'Connor. Waugh's early work shares the subtlety of the presence of faith that we find in Walker Percy's Thanatos Syndrome. The presumably secularized reader has his own outlook accepted as good money and is led to see the bankruptcy to which it leads. The believer is portrayed as a madman, as indeed he is in contrast with modernity, a scandal and a folly.
Handful of Dust may be Waugh's darkest novel, proceeding inexorably toward disaster and the finale in which Tony Last, the prisoner of Mr. Todd in a Latin American jungle is condemned to read the works of Dickens over and over to his illiterate captor. (Waugh disliked Dickens, as the reader of Donat Gallagher's Penguin collection of Waugh's essays, articles and reviews will know.) Brenda, Tony's wife, bored with their life in a crumbling house, Hetton Abbey, meets the vacuous Beaver, takes an apartment in town, and then drifts without difficulty into adultery. In one of the most horrible scenes in Waugh, when Brenda learns that her son John has been killed, she thinks at first John Beaver is meant. Learning the truth, she expresses relief. Tony is devastated by what has happened to his marriage and, in a familiar move in Waugh's fiction, heads for foreign lands where worse disasters await him.
The story is told with no overt moralizing, either by the author or characters; the banality of evil is allowed to display itself without comment. Bright chatter, wit, people who lack all seriousness, dominate the scene and are put before us with marvelous pith and accuracy. It is as if Waugh expects to find his reader to supply the criteria of judgment on the antics of the novel.
It is in Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938) that the present-day reader may find his politically correct assumptions most assaulted. Of course, already in the first novel, as in the hilarious description of the arrival of town musicians, the Llanabba Silver Band, for the school game day, Waugh's English condescension is on display.
Ten men of revolting appearance were approaching from the drive. They were low of brow, crafty of eye, and crooked of limb. 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 the receding chins, while each clutched under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape. On seeing the Doctor they halted and edged back, those behind squinting and moulting over the companions' shoulders.
No wonder the Welsh want their independence. In Black Mischief, Seth, the emperor of Azania, is an absurd figure and doubtless throughout the novel there is condescension toward natives, black, Indians, mixed as well as the non-English, but the emperor's absurdity stems from his efforts to bring progress and the New Age to his realm with the help of the redoubtable Basil Seal. The target of the satire is not the little empire but the European ways Seth seeks to impose upon his people. The Birth Control Pageant is one of the great set pieces of the novel, rivaled only by Dame Mildred Porch and her companion Miss Sarah Tin who have been drawn to the empire out of compassion for animals and find themselves lauded for their refined cruelty. The British embassy is not spared; Sir Samson Courtenay is a diplomat who does not let business interfere with his knitting and begrudges hospitality to his visiting countrymen. His promiscuous daughter Prudence is writing Panorama of Life, has an affair with Basil and, when revolution breaks out and she is flown away, her plane makes a forced landing. Some time later, Basil, replete from feasting with a backwoods tribe, learns that Prudence has been the meal. Writing of the novel in 1962, Waugh admits that a reader might mistake Azania for Abyssnia, but denies any similarity between Seth and Haile Selassie.
In Scoop, Waugh combines his contempt for journalism and Africa , but this is a light novel, beginning with a comic cliché, mistaken identity, and unraveling the delightful consequences. John Boot is no Basil Seal and his adventures are less laden with implicit critiques of the colonizing countries.
Perhaps his last truly comic novel, recalling his earliest manner, is Put Out More Flags, which appeared in 1942 and is set in the year of the Phoney War, after war had been declared and before Hitler swept west to the far shore of the Channel, only 25 miles away from England . Basil Seal, Lady Metroland, Ambrose Silk, Peter Pastmaster and other characters from earlier novels romp through the story. The novel is a hilarious send-up of the preparations for combat, men jockeying for position, Basil says that he wants to be one of those hard-nosed men who made a good thing out of the war. It is as if Waugh is bidding adieu to them all, allowing them a final fling before the real awfulness begins. But one finds too adumbrations of both Brideshead and the war trilogy, trying out in a comic key themes which will later become elegiac.
With this notable exception, it could be said that Waugh's moral center of gravity, what makes his humor more than funny in a Wodehousian way, is less and less implicit in later novels. The prologue and epilogue of Brideshead Revisited present Ryder in the army, his unit billeted on the massive estate of the Marchmains. The contrast with the events of the novel and this frame provides a lens through which we see the remembered events of Ryder's association with the Marchmains. A golden world, suffused with nostalgia, stands in bleak contrast to a present in which the age of the gentleman is fading away, the world of Hooper. There is snobbery here, no doubt of it, but if that were all the novel could not continue to command the readers it does. Doubtless many saw the television series based on the novel before they read it, if they ever did, and that is not all bad. Waugh has been well served when novels of his have been turned into films. The adaptation of Handful of Dust relentlessly conveys the dark viewpoint of the novel. Scoop was an easier matter, and the results are on the same level of comedy as the novel.
The Loved One appeared in 1948, a slight and delightful novel, that has great fun with Hollywood and Forest Lawn Cemetery . The preparation of the corpse for viewing, the trivialization of death by baroque obsequies, the smoke lifting from the crematorium — these make for easy comedy, and Waugh, at the height of his narrative powers, immortalizes them in a sense that even Mr. Joyboy might have understood.
After the war, Waugh became a character, a kind of Colonel Blimp who provided endless copy for journalists, goading them into excess and then successfully suing them. His manner of life enraged the leveling outlook, a country house, aloofness alleviated by infrequent television appearance in which he fulfilled all the horrified expectations of his interviewers. But he did not wholly enjoy his alienation. There was a kind of nervous breakdown on which he based The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957). The outlook of the protagonist is captured neatly. “There was a phrase in the thirties: ‘It is later than you think,' which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought.” This most autobiographical of his novels invites identification of author and protagonist. Pinfold is a writer. “He regarded his books as objects which he had made, things quite external to himself to be used and judged by others. He thought them well made, better than many reputed works of genius, but he was not vain of his accomplishment, still less of his reputation.” It is a novel one reads differently than any other by Waugh. The author himself has become the target of his comic genius. It interrupted the production of Waugh's masterpiece, but one comes to think that Pinfold was worth the delay.
Great things take time, Newman said. The three novels that make up The Sword of Honour appeared over almost a decade, separated by great intervals. Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time comprises twelve novels and covers a far greater period of time, so comparison of the two achievements must inevitably seem strained. Powell's vast cast of characters meet and meet again, usually in the most adventitious way, and the narrative advances sinuously. Like Waugh, Powell has been the object of ridicule by some leftist critics, usually for all the wrong reasons. Waugh reviewed Casanova's Chinese Restaurant. It may seem surprising to find Waugh chiding his friend on the way his characters view marriage, but this turns out to be an internal, not external, criticism.
[Mr. Powell's characters] are married and fretting under the restraints and disillusions of their state. What one is not told, and needs to know in order to understand them, is what they mean by marriage. None of them avows any religious belief or traditional, ethical code; they have no dynastic ambitions of family alliances or heritable properties; no expectation of life-long companionship. All believe that marriage is terminable at will; most of them marry more than once. How do they distinguish this relationship from other forms of concubinage? That they do make a distinction is apparent from the gravity with which they discuss it, but Mr. Powell gives no hint of its origin and character.
Powell's novel is set in 1936, not long after the time when Waugh was writing his earlier novels. It occurs to the reader that no such mystery attends Waugh's treatment of similar behavior. Nor is there any ambiguity as to how the reader is to understand the broken marriage of Guy Crouchback, the hero of Sword of Honour.
The trilogy is a wartime book and draws on Waugh's own military experiences. Its theme is clear and we are given Waugh's views of the modern world, in the round. There are of course characters and scenes of masterful comedy. Apthorpe and his chemical toilet, Ritchie-Hook the mad commando leader, Jumbo the benign professional military man having a good war, the ineffable Trimmer, hairdresser become a war hero, thanks to bogus publicity, the sinister Ludovic and his pensees. Guy's broken marriage enables Waugh to return one more time to the personal wound that never healed. His former wife is promiscuous, and Guy himself makes a rendezvous with her, on the sound theological basis that they are still really married, but she is offended by this, evidently preferring the illicit. One could go on, but these are merely elements and leitmotifs in a work that explains more than any Waugh's post-war gloom.
Like Waugh himself, Guy Crouchback enters the army in middle age, his soul stirred by the thought that he is engaged on a noble task as was an ancestor who went off on a Crusade. The conflict seems clearly one between good and evil, the Allies against Fascists and Communists. It is the defense of Christendom. The military plot, the main one, traces Guy's slow disillusionment as this initial interpretation of the meaning of World War II erodes. When Stalin and the USSR become allies of Britain and America , the war is seen as a struggle between two indistinguishable gangs of louts. As Waugh himself had, Guy ends in Yugoslavia where the betrayal of the country to Tito proves the last straw. The sword of the title is one “made at the King's command as a gift to ‘the steel hearted people of Stalingrad.'” It is put on display in London before being sent and cast crowds gather to make obeisance. The final chapter is called “Unconditional Surrender.”
Waugh's diaries have been published, as well as a huge number of letters, and there is as well the Gallagher collection mentioned earlier. Despite all this material, he remains an elusive and enigmatic figure. His remarks about the post-conciliar Church cited above are but the tip of an iceberg of disillusioned reaction, especially to the liturgical depredations that made worship penitential. Gallagher reprints some of this, but it would be nice if all his articles on the subject were brought out in a single volume, minus the all-too-frequent condescension toward such allegedly mugwump views that the otherwise conscientious Gallagher feels constrained to exhibit. There seems little doubt that comedy moved from a central place in the early novels to a more and more auxiliary role at the end. When Adlai Stevenson lost a second time to Dwight Eisenhower he said that it hurt too much to laugh and he was too old to cry. Waugh never cried, at least in public, but it seems inescapable that as he grew older in a world of leveling and illiteracy and liturgical razzmatazz it increasingly hurt too much for him to laugh and to make us laugh. He does however have the last laugh on his leftists enemies. Countercultural as he was, Waugh seems to be the most read novelist of his generation, his popularity surviving into these godless post-Christian times. But after all, he died on Easter Sunday.
