Fifty Years of Total Waugh

By R.Z. Sheppard

The greatest comic genius since Shaw is still in style

Evelyn Waugh fortified himself against his times with a moat of disdain, crenelated views and a castle keep of private devotions. He was raised in the middle-class London suburb of Golders Green, son of a modest publisher. At Oxford in the '20s he associated with the aesthetes, young men he later termed "mad, bad and dangerous to know." He graduated far from the top of his class, then taught school. Evelyn's experiences left him well stocked for his first novel, Decline and Fall (1928): "I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour." A young critic named Cyril Connolly spoke of Waugh's "delicious cynicism." Years later it was apparent that the vivacious style had been based on profound disgust.

As he acquired recognition, Waugh adopted the ways and means of a country gentleman. In a big house he lived surrounded by six children, his second wife Laura, servants, heavy furniture, mullioned windows and good bindings. He was never chatty about his work. On those few occasions when he lowered the drawbridge to journalists, Waugh remained grandly indifferent to explanations of his comic genius. He insisted, "I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language."

He was even more emphatic about his intentions: "An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along." As a conservative convert to Roman Catholicism, Waugh decried the aims of Vatican II, the un-Latinizing of the Mass and papal excursions too far from Rome.

His own wanderings produced the raw material for most of his fiction. There are striking similarities between the African backgrounds in Black Mischief and Scoop and descriptions in his travel books. Military service in Britain, Crete and Yugoslavia during World War II supplied incidents for Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and The End of the Battle. In 1965, the year before he died, Waugh published an edited version of the trilogy under the single title Sword of Honour. It is a masterpiece in which the author fully joined the two sides of his nature: the detached satirist and the chivalrous, disillusioned romantic.

Little, Brown's republication of Waugh's dozen best novels provides a fresh opportunity to appreciate how skillfully he balanced between satire and romance. Most important, these handsome new editions reconfirm Edmund Wilson's 1944 judgment that Waugh "is likely to figure as the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw." Characters like Lady Margot Metroland, Mayfair hostess and procuress of Decline and Fall, Mrs. Melrose Ape of Vile Bodies, the American evangelist modeled on Aimee Semple McPherson, Basil Seal, highborn wastrel of Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags, and Lord Copper, publisher of the Beast in Scoop, still delight because there are always new grotesques to fill the shoes of Waugh's caricatures. And his work has more serious undertones: extrapolations of what Waugh called "existing social tendencies" led him to premonitory visions of war during the '20s; his Africa of chaos and farce foreshadowed many follies of today's emerging nations.

Waugh's first wife ran off with a future baronet, and betrayal by women is recurrent in much of his fiction. The ladies are usually charming and never malicious but they are prime examples in Waugh' natural history of thoughtlessness. Thei egoism, stupidity, conceit and self-regard become the causes for both cruelty and comedy. In A Handful of Dust, for ex ample, Brenda Last cheats on her hus band Tony. He journeys to South Amer ica and ends as the prisoner of an illiterate jungle madman who makes Tony read Dickens aloud to him for the rest of his life. Waugh's most savage literary revenge for past hurts occurs in Black Mischief when Basil Seal unwittingly dines on his girlfriend during a cannibal feast.

The essential Waugh hero is a British Don Quixote dejectedly tilting at the 20th century. His troubles begin with a code of honor that is ill suited for campaigns in society or on the battlefield. Humor is shaped by innumerable collisions with bad manners, bad writing, bad architecture and bad service.

Sea voyages abound in Waugh; indeed, he has launched more ships of fools than any other modern writer. There is also much seasickness that often resem bles a queasiness with the world itself. In the Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) a middle-aged writer suffers paranoid hallucinations while cruising to Ceylon. Voices of passengers plotting murder and humiliation filter into his ears from parts of the ship. The author acknowledged that he too suffered hallucinatory episodes, and Pinfold's curmudgeonly character and opinions are essentially his own.

"His strongest tastes were negative," writes Waugh of Pinfold. "He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz--everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the thirties: It is later than you think,' which was designed to cause un easiness. It was never later than Mr. Pin fold thought."

It is also never too late to read or reread Waugh. His vitality, matchless craftsmanship, audacious imagination and stinging perceptions ("She wore the livery of the highest fashion, but as one who dressed to inform rather than to attract") have not dated. Like Charles Ryder, the painter hero of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh focused "the frankly traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of barbarism."

No wrenching political or social change in this century would indicate that his novels are in danger of going out of style.

Excerpt

"Mr. Salter's side of the conversation was limited to expressions of assent. When Lord Copper was right he said, 'Definitely, Lord Copper'; when he was wrong, 'Up to a point'

'Let me see, what's the name of the place I mean? Capital of Japan? Yokohama, isn't it?'

'Up to a point, Lord Copper.'

'And Hong Kong belongs to us, doesn't it?'

'Definitely, Lord Copper.'

After a time: 'Then there's this civil war in Ishmaelia. I propose to feature it. Who did you think of sending?'

'Well, Lord Copper, the choice seems between sending a staff reporter ... whose name the public doesn't know, or to get someone from outside with a name as a military expert. You see since we lost Hitchcock.,.'

'Yes, yes. He was our only man with a European reputation. I know. Zinc will be sending him. I know. But he was wrong about the Battle of Hastings. It was 1066. I looked it up...'

'We might share one of the Americans?'

'No, I tell you who I want; Boot ... Do you read him?'

'Up to a point, Lord Copper.' [Scoop, 1938]"

--R.Z.Sheppard

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