The Mask Made the Man

By Paul Gray

THE ESSAYS, ARTICLES AND REVIEWS OF EVELYN WAUGH Edited by Donat Gallagher; Little, Brown; 662 pages; $40

Posthumous disclosures about Evelyn Waugh (1903-66) have proceeded like a striptease in reverse. First came the Diaries (published in the U.S. in 1976), a revealing look at Waugh's private, sometimes drunken and usually unflattering thoughts about his contemporaries. Next arrived the Letters (1980), in which the writer appeared in the less scathing demeanor he put on for his correspondents. Now this massive selection of Waugh's journalism displays him fully dressed for his reading public. There are thus no naked surprises in this volume, but it is fascinating all the same: a chronicle both of tumultuous decades and of Waugh's refusal to adapt his clothes to changing tastes.

A common misconception about Waugh holds that he was a liberal young man who turned into a middle-aged fogy. He was, given the temper of his times, a reactionary all along. The faintly scandalous success of the comic novels Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930) made their author the most prominent spokesman for the Bright Young People of his generation. London newspapers offered fees for his thoughts on youth. He did not give them exactly what they expected. "I admire almost anything about old people," he wrote in 1930. Waugh, as it turned out, was not kidding about his reverence for maturity and tradition. Several months later he converted to Roman Catholicism.

As a Catholic and a conservative, Waugh occupied an underpopulated area in the spectrum of British public opinion. He filled it vigorously, both because he needed the extra money that papers and magazines provided to supplement his earnings from fiction and because he wanted to whip his countrymen into shape. During the 1930s he watched "the pitiable stampede of the 'LeftWing Intellectuals' in our own country" and tried to head it off through ridicule. He mocked the socialist sympathies expressed in Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly: "He seems to have two peevish spirits whispering into either ear: one complaining that the bedroom in which he awakes is an ugly contrast to the splendid dining-room where he was entertained the previous evening; the other saying that the names have been made up for the firing squads; he must shoot first if he does not want to be shot." Reviewing the work of a Marxist critic, Waugh pounced with feigned humility: "His thesis, if I do not misunderstand him, is that the class struggle is the only topic worth a writer's attention; his difficulty that this means relegating to insignificance almost the whole of the world's literature."

Unfortunately, Waugh's argument against rating books according to their ideology fell on deaf ears, including his own. He praised J.F. Powers' Prince of Darkness in parochial terms: "The book is Catholic. Mr. Powers has a full philosophy with which to oppose the follies of his age and nation." A novel by Antonia White spurred him to greater extravagance: ";She knows that man is in the world for quite another purpose than teaching Greek or winning the war or marrying well or even writing admirable novels. He is here to love and serve God, and any portrayal of him which neglects this primary function must be superficial."

Waugh was certainly capable of measured or dispassionate judgments. He wrote of George Orwell, an avowed socialist, with respect:

"He has an unusually high moral sense and respect for justice and truth." After certain church and Italian officials had criticized Federico Fellini's film La Dolce Vita, Waugh noted, "I can only say that as a conventional Catholic I saw nothing objectionable." He grew most belligerent when he felt most defensive, and his era offered him plenty of opportunities to do so.

"He had seen the course of history deflected from the direction of all his early aspirations," Waugh wrote of Kipling in 1964, a statement that also described its author.

From Waugh's viewpoint, nearly every public event during his adult life was a catastrophe. Liberalism became dogma. After World War II, large Catholic populations in Eastern Europe were bartered away to Soviet control, and the welfare state began dismantling the English class system. The number of colonial outposts that had "enjoyed British rule" dwindled. In his final years, he watched aghast as the Second Vatican Council instituted changes in Catholic liturgy (";the Mass I have grown to know and love").

Waugh's view of the world let him down badly, but his craft sustained him in splendid form. That is why this book, which should be unremittingly bitter, is both gallant and funny. Waugh could not write a dull sentence, no matter what his fee, nor could he suppress an anarchic sense of humor. He idealized the vanishing English aristocracy, but also undermined himself when describing the once standard duties of an Anglican vicar: "It was he who burrowed in the Roman encampments and wrote monographs, full of daring attributions, on the condition of his parish before the Norman conquest. It was he who explained the newspaper to the squire." That throwaway line is the essence of Waugh. "The mask," he insisted, "the style, is the man." If so, here in gracious plenty is the person he made of himself.

Excerpt Apropos of the telephone, it should be noted that the caller is in the position of the suppliant. He cannot expect to burst in unannounced whenever it suits his convenience. He must expect to be kept waiting. In the days when I myself had a telephone I found that certain bumptious businessmen had the habit of employing secretaries to make their calls for them. I would be led to the pantry, where the instrument was housed, to hear: 'Mr. Waugh? Just a moment, please. Mr. Brute wants you and he is speaking on the other line.' The only reply to such treatment is to ring off immediately.

--By Paul Gray