1998
Evelyn Waugh (2)
In 1971 Cyril Connolly flew to the University of Austin, Texas, to view an exhibition of first editions of key twentieth-century works of literature inspired by his book The Modern Movement. Immodestly, Connolly had asked that one of his own books be included and suggested his “word-cycle” The Unquiet Grave, published in 1944. The university duly agreed and, having purchased Evelyn Waugh’s library on his death, decided to display Waugh’s own heavily annotated copy of The Unquiet Grave, sent to him on publication by Nancy Mitford. Connolly read the copious marginalia with horrid fascination: he was shocked and appalled at the cold dismissiveness and abuse they contained. Amongst the aspersions were “Irish corner boy,” “hack highbrow,” “drivelling woman novelist.” Writing about the experience later Connolly commented: “What I minded most was the contempt that emerged from a writer for whom for twenty years I had looked on as a friend.” He conjured up a demonic image of Waugh, contemplating the “bloated, puffed-up face of my old club-mate, the beady eyes red with wine and anger, the cigar jabbing as he went in for the attack.” Friends rallied, contrary and consoling alternative judgements were proffered. Waugh, it was generally agreed, was a venomous parvenu consumed by envy and snobbery.
I cite this anecdote because this portrait of Waugh still rings true, and it continues to represent for many the abiding image of the writer, born a hundred years ago on 28 October 1903. The fact that it does is in large part down to Waugh himself. The persona he created for himself in the later stages of his life was an elaborate construct — full of contradictions — but calculated to stir up derision, confusion and animosity amongst his perceived enemies. It was at times so close to the absurd, to the caricature (the bookie’s tweeds, the hearing trumpet, the brandished cigars) that its very artifice seemed to be designed to be exposed. Anthony Powell — who was always acutely perceptive about his peers — wrote about Connolly and Waugh, saying that both men were “mesmerised by beau monde mystique, both in their different ways fundamentally ill-at-ease there, unless in a position to perform his own individual act, put on a turn, in fact.”
“Putting on a turn” is what Evelyn Waugh did for most of his adult life and it had many manifestations: country squire, iconoclastic Tory, devout Catholic, fearless soldier, virulent anti-modernist, stern paterfamilias, rural anchorite, senile patrician and so on. Why he did this, and why he did it so assiduously, is a matter for endless debate (we all have our theories) but the consequences have not helped his posthumous reputation: the man, I feel, has in recent years shouldered the work aside — the life has become more compelling than the fiction.
The problem is that we know an enormous amount about Evelyn Waugh — we have the letters, the diaries, the collected journalism, five large biographies, let alone the memoirs of friends and neighbours — perhaps only Virginia Woolf of twentieth-century English writers has been more compendiously documented. This is a genuine shame because, however diverting the show might be, the spectacle of Evelyn Waugh guying or exploiting various forms of eccentric Englishness detracts serious attention from a fascinating and enduring body of work. Waugh’s debut was assured and precocious. His first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), published when the author was twenty-five years old set the style and the tone for the string of great comedies that followed: Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938). In between Black Mischief and Scoop, however, came A Handful of Dust (1934), considered by many to be Waugh’s “best” novel. I don’t agree: I see the novel as an uneven and semi-disguised act of revenge against Waugh’s first wife, whom he divorced after a year of marriage in 1928. Despite its modishly nihilistic superstructure (the title coming from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) it is essentially a society novel about an adulterous wife and the bleak consequences of that betrayal. It also heralded the concerns of his later work — a building religious dimension, a hatred of the new, a fawning admiration of the aristocratic past — that reached an early apotheosis in Brideshead Revisited (1945, considered by many to be his worst novel) and was continued and refined in the Sword of Honour trilogy. Scoop is, in my opinion, his real masterwork. It has a classical and deeply satisfying shapeliness but also contains sequences of hilarious comic writing unrivalled in English literature. As it turned out it was to be his final, sustained essay in the comic form. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) forms a strange coda to these four great comedies but is really too idiosyncratic to be truly cognate with them.
A hundred years on from Waugh’s birth and thirty-seven from his death it is perhaps timely to assess the measure of his achievement, to see how the work has survived. The “Brideshead myth” will, I suppose, always be the first aspect of Waugh’s output that seems the most visible if not the most significant. Yet a moment’s reflection — or a few pages of rereading — will expose the book as flawed and self-serving. It was conceived in wartime as an act of nostalgic recall, of rose-tinted reveries of a never-never-land Oxford (Waugh himself admitted as much). In a later edition he tried to curb the excesses and strip away as much as he could of what was lush and verbose but with little success. The subsequent television version in the 1980s only served to reinforce the sentimental romance. The book’s huge success was always rather embarrassing to Waugh: he was grateful for the revenue but vaguely ashamed of the way it was acquired. He never attempted such panting excesses again. Brideshead’s love affair with aristocratic virtues was dramatically honed down in the Sword of Honour trilogy. Claret, teddy bears and stately homes devolve into Mr Crouchback’s austere injunction “not to repine.” Lyrical upper-class hedonism gives way to an unbending and stoical faith in God’s edict and man’s duty to God on earth. To a non-believing or even agnostic reader the trilogy’s moral underpinnings appear close to mumbo-jumbo, but to anyone familiar with Waugh’s life they reflect his almost manic piety: he clung to his demanding faith with the tenacity of a drowning man to a piece of driftwood.
The contrast with the later novels and the early comedies is acute. What makes the four novels of 1928–38 so continuously readable is their tone of voice. Waugh sees the world as fundamentally absurd and indifferent to mankind’s fate. With this in mind the comedy is triumphantly dark and pitiless: the evil thrive, the innocent are punished. Happiness is transitory or delusional; hopes, dreams and ambitions are redundant in the face of an uncaring, cruel and arbitrary universe. Waugh didn’t invent this point of view: one could argue that it first received its full fictional expression in the mature short stories of Anton Chekhov. The great follower of Chekhov at the time Waugh was beginning his writing career was the now forgotten William Gerhardie. Later in life Waugh admitted his debt to Gerhardie’s early novels—Futility, The Polyglots, Jazz and Jasper (published to huge acclaim in the early twenties). It was not so much a question of borrowing (though a lot of Jazz and Jasper has slipped into Vile Bodies and Scoop) but of seizing on an authorial point of view that Waugh found entirely congenial. Gerhardie did not have Waugh’s talent as a writer but he saw the world in the same absurdist, amoral way and, like Chekhov, refused to pass judgement on his characters and their actions. For the young Evelyn Waugh it must have come both as a recognition and a revelation: the tone of voice in Decline and Fall is so assured because it had already been aired and developed by Gerhardie. Waugh applied it to his own fictional ends and hit the ground running.