He began drawing up plans to keep a pig, or preferably a sow, at his hermitage in the Hebrides. As he wrote to his sister, who was in charge of the place, “the only difficulty is about getting her to a hog once a year. I suppose one could buy a gravid sow in autumn, to litter about March, but one would have to make very sure that she really was in pig the first time.”
In his hospital room, at the time of his death, he kept in front of him, against the wall, a fine new fishing rod, a luxury in which he had indulged himself on receiving the first royalties from Nineteen Eighty-Four. He never had the chance to use it.
His first love — dating back to his adolescence and youth — who was now a middle-aged woman, wrote to him in hospital out of the blue, after an estrangement and silence of some twenty-seven years. He was surprised and overjoyed and resumed correspondence with her. In his last letter to her, he concluded that, though he could only entertain a vague belief in some sort of after-life, he had one certainty: “Nothing ever dies.”
*See my earlier essay “Orwell, or the Horror of Politics,” Quadrant, December 1983, reprinted in my collection of essays The Angel and the Octopus (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).
TERROR OF BABEL
There is but one sorrow, which is not to be a Saint.
Evelyn Waugh
ON READING Stephen Spender’s autobiography, Evelyn Waugh commented: “To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.” One would have to devise a statement to the exact opposite effect to describe accurately the delight which Waugh’s grace and dexterity with words never fails to arouse in his readers.
Waugh exemplifies the primordial importance of style. He infuriated a great many fools in his time, not only because he took a mischievous pleasure in taunting them (let us admit it, to irritate idiots actually is enjoyable), but, more essentially, because he stubbornly held onto a timeless (and therefore untimely) truth. The arbiters of public opinion do not forgive those who openly mock intellectual fashions or transgress political and aesthetic taboos. Social conformity has its dungeons where the irreverent are to be confined behind thick walls of silence until complete oblivion. With Waugh, however, the trouble was that, while alive, his flamboyant and formidable personality could not easily be ignored or dismissed. On his death, the intelligentsia at last breathed a sigh of relief, and, from the grudging homages that were paid to the deceased, one could see that the dour undertakers of the literary establishment had firmly set their minds on burying him for good. Actually, this task proved quite impracticable and Waugh’s wit continued to shine more brightly than ever, however much the stern guardians of political correctness would have wished to turn it off. The fact is, in order to get rid of Waugh, one would probably first have to get rid of the English language.
In his time, the splendour of his style as well as his hilarious inventions ensured that all his works remained in print. Twenty-five years later, a new generation of readers now discovers that Waugh is not merely fun, he is also wise — and his wisdom addresses our present anguish at a depth that none of his contemporaries seem to reach. Which of them indeed could promise us what he was already offering his readers nearly half a century ago—“A hope, not indeed that anything but disaster lies ahead, but that the human spirit, redeemed, can survive all disasters”?
Waugh dropped out of university without completing a degree. He never considered himself an “intellectual”—in fact he found this very notion utterly outlandish. At first he wanted to become a painter, and then thought of taking up carpentry or printing. When he finally came to literature he approached it like a craft, and retained this unconventional attitude all his life. Quite late in his career, to a literary journalist who had asked if his fiction was supposed to convey some “message,” he gave this characteristic answer: “No, I wish to make a pleasant object. I think any work of art is something exterior to oneself, it is the making of something, whether it’s a bed table or a book.”
Such a conception, which would naturally occur to a painter, sculptor, an engraver or a cabinet-maker, does not normally come to a writer, and we can perhaps find here a clue to the strikingly concrete quality of his writing. (It should be noted, by the way, that terms such as “abstract” and “abstraction” are used by him in an invariably pejorative sense.) Without a solid ground from which to rebound, imagination cannot soar; fantasy peters out in a vacuum; humour, waywardness, whimsicality quickly become tedious if developed in arbitrary isolation from the objective world. If Waugh’s invention is permanently throwing off sparks, it is because it always operates within the hard-edged frame of reality, and his wildest fantasies are always subjected to the discipline of a most rigorous structure. When A Handful of Dust was first published, old Belloc immediately detected this exceptional quality of craftsmanship. He wrote to Waugh: “I could not let it go… It is really a remarkable thing, and it owes this quality to construction, which today is in prose as rare as virtue. Every word is right and in its right place, so that the effect is a maximum for the material employed.”
Actually, the way in which Waugh manipulates language is akin to the poetic mode of literary creation: his is first of all an art of words. This is the reason why poetry, by its very nature, is essentially untranslatable — or to put it in a different form, any piece of literature is translatable only inasmuch as what it says can be dissociated from the way in which it is being said. In a poem, these two aspects are indivisible: if the poem is really good, displace one word and the entire piece collapses. A poem cannot exist outside the words in which it originally became incarnate, any more than a person could survive outside his own skin. In this respect, Waugh once made a very revealing criticism of Graham Greene’s use of language: “[Greene’s] is not a specifically literary style at all. The words are functional, devoid of sensuous attraction, of ancestry and of independent life. Literary stylists regard language as intrinsically precious, and its proper use as a worthy and pleasant task. A polyglot could read Mr. Greene, lay him aside, retain a sharp memory of all he said and yet, I think, entirely forget what tongue he was using. The words are simply mathematical signs for his thought.” Indeed, it would not be impossible to impart the gist of The Power and The Glory to someone who had not read the book, simply by re-telling it in other words, whereas it would be absurd and pointless to attempt the same exercise with Decline and Fall.
“The written word obsessed Waugh,” Martin Stannard notes in his biography, “and in this he lived entirely. Words on paper were to him almost tactile, malleable, subject to control. He thought in words, in perfect sentences.” A young American scholar who visited him in his country residence retained a vivid memory of an inscription which he found in the bathroom affixed upon the cistern of the toilet; handwritten and initialled E.W., the notice provided instructions on how to operate the toilet’s faulty flush: