Charles Ryder's Schooldays and Other Stories
Waugh, Evelyn
CHARLES RYDER'S SCHOOLDAYS AND OTHER STORIES Evelyn Waugh / Little, Brown and Co. / $10.95 cloth; $5.95 paper George P. McCartney In his profile of his brother, Alec Waugh recalls that his mother...
...In Waugh's satiric vision the artifice of civilization clings to its precarious tenure as the chaos of barbarism awaits its opportunity to reassert its claim to precedence in human affairs...
...The elegant results of his labor are evident in all his work, including this collection which re-issues eleven stories together with the recently discovered unfinished manuscript entitled "Charles Ryder's Schooldays" that depicts a few days in the adolescence of the character who narrates Brideshead Revisited...
...It must be said at once that, with three exceptions, these pieces, especially the title selection, are rather slight...
...Out of Depth" creates a vision of London five hundred years into the future inhabited by Englishmen who have regressed to the primitive life of tribal hunters...
...His sentences are charged with an electric tension...
...Faced with this news, the British commanding officer is quick to respond: "It's one of the problems we shall have to tackle...
...W augh designed a style that still sets the standard for twentieth-century satire...
...Nothing more is reported of the unfortunate missionary until the story's close when we learn in an aside that his "now memberless trunk . . . has been found at the gates of the Baptist compound...
...Even in a trifle like "Period Piece," this technique makes something special of his portrait of an elderly widow trained to refinement but inclined to vulgarity...
...craftsmen do...
...It is essentially a matter of voice...
...Excursion in Reality," "Mr...
...Lady Amelia had been educated in the belief that it was the height of impropriety to read a novel in the morning...
...As her secretary reads to her in "delicately modulated tones enunciating page by page, in a scarcely comprehensible idiom, the narratives of rape and betrayal, Lady Amelia occasionally chuckle[s] a little over her woolwork...
...Their rudimentary social and economic organization is provided with whatever tenuous continuity it has by the armed benevolence of African imperialists...
...Troubled "by the caprice of the weather which, remaining clear and brilliant with promise until the arrival of the first guests, had suddenly blackened into a squall, it had been an abominable afternoon, culminating at about six o'clock in her father's attempted suicide...
...5.95 paper George P. McCartney In his profile of his brother, Alec Waugh recalls that his mother deeply regretted that her younger son, Evelyn, had not become a furniture designer as he had trained to do before he turned to writing...
...In "Mr...
...Waugh's point in these narratives has nothing to do with race or geography...
...In "Incident in Azania" the British colonists are compared with their native hosts and found to be just as tribal, just as vicious, and perhaps a good deal more fatuous...
...Some of them seem warm-up exercises preliminary to writing his novels that Waugh later decided to turn to account...
...In whatever skill he set himself to-calligraphy, drawing, carpentry, or writing-he became a deliberate craftsman taking special pride in the design of his work...
...I am going to make a report of the entire matter...
...Waugh brought to perfection the detached narrator capable of reporting every possible excess within the boundaries of flawlessly measured prose...
...Youkoumian, who produced an ear trumpet which he attempted to sell to the mission headquarters...
...Waugh understood her son's essential char-George P. McCartney teaches English at St...
...There the ambiguous confrontation between civilization and savagery provided him with "experiences vivid enough to demand translation into literary form...
...Loveday's Little Outing" a less pronounced but similarly absurd clash between etiquette and instinct characterizes the reminiscences of a young woman as she recalls the social embarrassment her mother had been made to suffer one summer afternoon ten years before...
...The three exceptions are another matter...
...This is why so many of his narratives are set in Africa and South America...
...In its unfinished state, "Charles Ryder's Schooldays" should not be considered an independent work at all, but rather a document valuable for what it reveals about Waugh's methods and intentions in Brideshead Revisited...
...Once luncheon is over, however, she feels at liberty to indulge her recently acquired passion for American authors "in the school of brutal realism and gross slang...
...Whether the setting is some uncharted outpost along the Amazon or the fashionable Mayfair district of London, his fiction always resides at the fragile partition that separates the civilized from the savage in all of us...
...After some initial concern, "the life of the town began to resume its normal aspect- administration, athletics, gossip...
...Love-day's Little Outing," and "Incident in Azania" stand on their own in no need of external support from the novels...
...But whether slight or substantial, all these pieces are graced by Waugh's style and this is reason enough to rejoice...
...The subplot of "Incident in Azania" concerns British colonists in Africa who never let emotion interfere with good form...
...Now, in the twilight of her days, when she had singularly little to occupy the two hours between her appearance downstairs at quarter past eleven, hatted and fragrant with lavender water, and the announcement of luncheon, she adhered rigidly to this principle...
...Waugh's style gains its effects by means of its subversive counterpoint...
...his narrative voice, unflappable...
...When natives bent on extortion kidnap a missionary and send his "right ear loosely done up in newspaper and string" to the consulate, the colonists exhibit admirable restraint...
...besides he would have been happier designing furniture...
...they crackle and flash where they have become frayed by the continual conflict between polite conduct and wayward impulse...
...the American missionary's second ear arrived and attracted little notice, except from Mr...
...His prose is supple, elegant...
...John's University...
...In his travel book, Ninety-two Days, he tells us that he is fascinated by "the borderlands of conflicting cultures...
...When Alec pointed out that he had been quite successful writing books, she replied, "I know, I know...
...But just beneath the surface lurks a riot of passionate excess, convulsive anger, and murderous rage...
...It seems Lady Moping's annual garden party had been a disaster...
...a case for action...
...but furniture is so useful...
...After describing the pains Waugh took over revision, his biographer, Christopher Sykes, records one of the few remarks he ever made about the shaping of his fiction, "I like tinkering...
...acter...
...While we may disagree whether any profession would have made the sardonic Evelyn Waugh "happier," there is no question that Mrs...
Vol. 16 • June 1983 • No. 6
