The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh

...10 East 53rd St New York, NY 10022 Catholic Brtdeshead Revisited, it rareown house and bathroom ly occurs to Waugh's characters to consider the "supernatural basis" of their lives The few who do are hindered by doubt or misled by zeal This is the story of Mr Prendergast, the agnostic parson, and his maniacal nemesis In Decline and Fall When Prendergast first appears he has already given up his ecclesiastical living and stooped to schoolmastering, a profession notoriously open to failures and rascals "I should be a rector with my only I had Doubts," he confides It isn't "the ordinary sort of doubt regarding Cain's wife or the Old Testament miracles" made the world at all 33 how fundamental that is Once granted the first step, I can see that everything else follows--Tower of Babel, Babylonian captivity, Incarnation, Church, Bishops, incense, everytinng--but what I couldn't see, and what I can't see now, IS, why did It all beglng" Prendergast raises the fundamental issue but hasn't the will to resolve It Instead, he foolishly jumps at the chance to return to the cloth as a prison chaplain when he discovers the post does not require him to subscnbe to any particular creed at all Of course, such agnostic felicity cannot last Among his caged flock there is a rehglous lunatic unhindered by any doubts at all whose beliefs are as unswerving as they are unexamined Convinced that the angel of the Lord has commissioned him to murder the faithless, this self-styled "hon of the Lord's elect" decides--with some cause--that Chaplain Prendergast IS not a Christian and so murders him by sawing his head from his body with tools conveniently provided him by the prison's enhghtened arts and crafts program which stresses the criminal's need for emotional release through artistic self-expression Prendergast's inability to sustain a coherent religious vision is one of the many Instances in which Waugh satirized the modern abdication of intellectual authority that calls forth the fanatic Whether rehglous or political, these zealots are led by the inner light of untutored emotion alone Surrounded by an ostensibly sane citizenry whose lives lack a rationally defined purpose, their peculiarly mindless dedication gives them a devastating strength Prendergast's grisly end provldes Waugh with one of his central metaphors twentieth century man decapitated, his intellect severed from his will When reason neglects its reign, impulse usurps its place with predictable results Reported casually, Prendergast's fate seems neither all that shocking nor partlcularly lamentable Instead, we are made to feel he got no more than he deserved He is one of Waugh's wellmeaning humanists, personally inoffensive but culturally lethal Without convictions o f any kind, these characters wander through the novels vaguely unnerved by the chaos that surrounds them Their failure to sustain the tradition of which they are the immediate beneficiaries has emptied their world of purpose and left those who are more willful and less scrupulous either to drift into aimless dissipation or to channel their otherwise undirected energy into one of the many perverse ideologies that plague the day This was Waugh's assessment of a culture that has lost confidence in itself and its ability to make sense of the world 34 clearly impossible in a world In which "vice no longer pays lip service to virtue...

...Then, continmng portentously, he Coast piece, "The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro," suggests that by now he may be having his passport stamped only in order to confirm unpleasant certmntles Books like The Return of The artist's only service to the dlsmtegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of h~s own 1 foresee m the dark age opemng that the scribes may play the part of the monks after the first barbarian victories They were not satirists From the perspective of 1984, who can doubt that this was just another of [] Waugh's outrageous ironies 9 At the tune of his conversion, Waugh objected to the type of modern sophisticated religion that hesitates to commit itself to any definite beliefs "If added its own mind is not made up," he reasoned, "It can hardly hope to withstand disorder from outside...

...REVIEWS THE ESSAYS, ARTICLES AND REVIEWS OF EVELYN WAUGH F_~hted by Donat Gallagher/LRtle, Brown/S40 00 A LITTLE LEARNING Evelyn Waugh/LRtle, Brown/S14 95 WHEN THE GOING WAS GOOD Evelyn Waugh/Lmle, Brown/S14.95 George McCartney So fictmn that remains sprlghther and m- demure and yet so wdd...

...BOOK Evelyn Waugh ~s everywhere these days A week doesn't go by w~thout a cnUc or journahst revoking h~s name m tribute or censure to the passing scene...

...THOMAS SOWELL, Hoover Institution $16 95 $22 50 Bustne~ Week In the Path of God Islam and Political Power DANIEL PIPES In recent years, Islam has again become a force to be reckoned with in world affairs What has caused this resurgence ~ And what are its likely consequences ~ In the first comprehensive study of Islam and its extraordinary role in world politics, Daniel Pipes probes the roots and likely results of today's Islamic revival Shattering misconceptions with a careful explanation of Islamic beliefs, tracing the troubled history of relations between the Islamic world and the West, he provides important insights Into a vital geopolitical Issue "Readable and comprehenswe Daniel Pipes has searched the depths of specmahst readmg on behalf of the general reader to produce a reliable grade for the perplexed "--MARTIN KRAMER, The Basic Books, Inc...

...hves without any deeply held convlcnever stand up to the c]vlhzed savagery of modern hfe At fifty-three he stdl recalled with some of the bmerness of early dtsdlusmnment the agnostic clergyman who taught him theology tor had commended hts student's puerde display of disbelief by wrmng the words, "No mean theologmn, Waugh came to be scandahzed by this ty seemed to conmve at ~ts own subversion How could those who were supposed to uphold tradmon and froth so easdy tolerate tbelr d~sparagement by the Ignorant and ~mp]ous~ Fourteen years later he denounced such softheaded tolerance as one of "The Seven Deadly Sins of Today" It is better to be narrow-minded than to have no nund, to hold hmlted and rigid pnnc~ples than to have none at all That ~s the danger which faces so many people t o d a y h t o have no considered opinions on any subject, to put up wRh what is wasteful and harmful vath the excuse that there is "good m everything'--which m most cases means an inability to distinguish between good and bad There are still things which are worth fighting against Decisiveness was essentml to Waugh, he could not hve w~thout it He was THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1985 convinced that it could only be achieved through the discipline exerted by fixed standards which for him meant the principles of the Roman Catholic Church and the classical tradition In Western philosophy This twin allegiance gave him the sense of purpose he needed to create the formldably poised, assured figure he presented to the world Today his type of self-assurance seems more than ever a dose of the right stuff for a generation wearied to exasperation by the inconclusive relativism that has been lnstitUtlonahzed In our educational system almost as if It were the only respectable intellectual position going There are signs everywhere that people have grown restive under what often seems an official policy of undiscriminating tolerance and mindless innovation In his latest book, TheArts abhorred plastics, Plcasso, sunbathing, Wtthout Mystery, for instance, Denis Donoghue argues that critical permissiveness can be hazardous to an artist's health and questions, among other things, the aesthetic claims of Mary Kelly whose framed displays of her son's soiled diapers recently edified the connoisseurs of the avant-garde at Yale's art museum In politics this year, Americans decided new ideas were not necessarily better ideas and voted down Gary Hart, the self-transforming candldate of ceaseless change I n this climate of open skepticism for the usual piety paid creativity and progress, it's not surprising that Waugh's talent for cold-eyed debunkmg should be gaining favor once more...

...H~s Gomg Was Good, to "go to the wild commentators keep trymg, but none lands where man had deserted his post seems qmte to touch the essenual and the jungle was creeping back to Rs Waugh In then" frustraUon, then" labels old strongholds "He believed that the anxtously prohferate dandy, cur- barbarism that so fascinated hun "was mudgeon, wit, morahst, conservaUve, a dodo to be stalked with pmch of anarchist, Tory satmst, Cathohc romancer, gentleman, snob, loyal friend, and, off the record, one mean son of a bRch Well, which ~s it 9 salt," and he wasn't going to rmss his chance As much as he admn.ed those who cultwated domestic seremty, he was often bored by home hfe...

...There can be little doubt that Waugh contrived his comical moral distraction in order to cover what, in all likelihood, was nothing more principled than a moment's petulance...

...a battle-zone of contendmg this superbly gifted entertmner was also forces He was by turns recluswe and one of our century's most ~mportant cosmopohtan, trachuonal and anarcluc, novehsts reflective and Impulsive He declared As would be expected, gwen th~s hnnself comrmtted to the "standards of revival of interest, the pundRs have c~vd~zauon," yet conducted h~s hfe turned out m force vying with one wRh legendary movflRy Though he another to tag Waugh with the label cherished European art and trachUon, that will fLX hun for the fihng drawer he elected, as he tells us m lus preface Then.s ~s not an enviable task Few to Ins collected travel wntmg, When the writers have been as fleet and agde...

...No one could do it better For proof, just look into Donat Gallagher's massive but, alas, not qmte complete collection of his journalism, The Essays, Articles and Rewews of Evelyn Waugh These pieces display Waugh's . refreshing decisiveness in action Here he is on modern criticism "It is a matter for thankfulness that the modern school of critics are unable or unwilling to compose a pleasurable sentence It greatly hmits the harm they d o " On writing for oneself "I have a deeprooted feeling that it is a mischievous and degrading habit to write anything which wall not bring in an Immediate pecuniary reward "On the persecution of Charhe Chaphn, a surprising defense "For many years [Chaplin] has been the victim of organized persecution [in Hollywood] A commumty whose morals are those of caged monkeys professes to be shocked by his domestic Irregularities He is accused, perhaps wath some jusUce, of socmllsm and pacifism [But] the simple truth is that he ]s hated because he ]s a great artist Talent is someUmes forgiven In Hollywood, genius never" On permisswe education might disapprove of architecture untempered by tradmon and good 31 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1985 taste, but his aesthetic instinct responded to Gaudes idiosyncratic energy Standards may have been neglected, but, intentionally or not, Gaudr amazing rule-breaking inventiveness did justice to a thoroughly Indecorous age Every effort was made to encourage the chddren at the public schools to "think for themselves " When they should have been wh]pped and taught Greek paradigms, they were set argmng about birth control and natlonallzauon Their crude little opimons were treated w]th respect Preachers m the school chapel week after week entrusted the future to their hands It is hardly surprlsnag that they were Bolshewk at 18 and bored at 20 )uch ambivalence seems to contradict Waugh's policy of decisiveness, That it has not been widely acclaimed as such can be easily explained Waugh vmlated one of the avant-garde's canons He was old-fashioned enough to insist upon entertaining his readers even as he stretched their imaginations Nevertheless, he firmly believed that "the artist, however aloof he holds himself, is always and especially the creature of the Zeitgeist, however formally antique his tastes, he is in sp~te Waugh always loved playing the surdly pretentious species ~ Waugh's genius was to be able to balance his enS I crusty traditionalist exposing the ab- but not really He was decisive, not of himself In the advanced guard " surdities of fashionable opinion, but he dogmatic...

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...she's married " I f this urbane effrontery was meant to disconcert his friend, It worked After admitting his puzzlement, Greene weighs Waugh's words in the moral scales of their shared religion "Fornication more serious than adultery~ It was not the orthodox Cathohc view I gave the problem up, and we were driven on in silence...

...Later, writing professionals Now, thanks to Acton adds that Waugh was also "a Little, Brown's reissuing of Waugh's pdlar of society, a pal of Randolph novels, travel writing, and, most recent- Churchdl, and an upholder of our ly, his journahsm together with the ap- glorious tradmons" wRh "a race taste pearance of his biography, d~ar~es, and m buttonholes " Acton's ~rony could letters over the past rune years, we have not be more apt Tlus was Waugh's perbeen discovering or rechscovermg that -sonalRy...

...It was his judgment on the Western world as well This IS why he disclaimed the title of satirist in 1946 arguing that satire is not possible in an unstable society that does not subscribe to "homogenous moral standards " The satirist "seeks to produce shame" and this he thought FINDING THE CENTER V S Naipaul/Alfred A Knopf/$13 95 Thomas Mallon Nmpaul wrote newspaper articles reveahng that natwe farmers of Hindu origin had defied government regulations for combating cattle diseases and had been subsUtutmg ancaent rites of the goddess Kah to drwe away the illness attacking their sacrlfiC~ Today he yielded to the entreaty of friends and relatwes and made the demanded sacnfic~ such, Fmdmg the Center attempts to places Naipaul in a BBC "freelances' room" three decades ago Having gone to Oxford on a Trinidad government scholarship, he is squeezing out a living with the Corporation's Caribbean Service and discovering (not so surprisIngly) that the colonial world he made strenuous efforts to leave is in fact his richest imaginative capital "To become a writer, that noble thing, I had thought it necessary to leave Actually to write, it was necessary to go back I t was the beginning o f selfknowledge " (One thing good writers should never write about is their own writing No subject leads them more inNot long after this, he suffered a breakdown and became a kind of wanderer No figure in life or books, from Mr Ramsay to Willy Loman, is more poignant than the ineffectual father, and here, surely, is one of the family wounds that has kept the younger Naipaurs bow trained on whatever mumbo jumbo he hears the Third World mouthing against the First The "subsidiary gift" he thanks his father for is a continuing "fear of Thomas Mallon teaches Enghsh at extinction " Vassar College His new book, A Book of One's Own People and Their Diaries, has just been pubhshed by Nalpaul says he travels "to discover other states of mind," but the Ivory Ttcknor & Fields Eva Perdn and Among the Behevers have earned him the title "the scourge of the Third World" (Newsweek, November 16, 1981), and in this one he does his self-conscious best to hve up to it He says he went to the Ivory Coast because it was supposed to be a political and economic exception to "the mess o f black Africa " But on the same page on which he makes this apparently sincere wish to be proved wrong, he sighs that the Frenchness he was hoping to see in the capital city of Abldjan was nowhere to be found "Instead of boulevards there was the African hubbub of 'popular' African areas " It is one thing, and a good one, to mock the spurious "Africantzatlon" of places like Mobutu's Congo, but Nalpaul has been doing it for so long now that he winds up, almost by reflex, whistling some fussy little anthems to colonialism He spends much of his stay in the V S Naipaurs eighteenth book joins evitably toward fatuity and obvious- grandiose Ivory Coast transformation fixated on the of president's his native ness "To write was to learn Beginning a slender piece of autobiography with village of Yamoussoukro, which ina book, I always felt I was in posses- a rather sketchy account of a visit the cludes the importation of man-eating sion of all the facts about myself, at the writer made to the Ivory Coast a cou- crocodiles which each afternoon are end I was always surprised ") ple of years ago Less a book than t~vo flung a hve chicken in front of observNew Yorker articles being marketed as Naipaul recounts the humiliation his ing tourists Nalpaul devotes a lot of father, himself an exile (an Indian in his tune to finding out what tins bizarre the Caribbean), suffered during his portray Naipaurs early efforts at arrangement designed by an apparently writing side by side with an example of career as a reporter for the 7~mtdad benign president--Houphouet-Boigny his mature subject matter and method Guardian As the New York HemM is no Mobutu--means "The symTribune reported on June 24, 1933, the But whatever string attaches one to the bohsm remained elusive, worrying " In elder other remains banally slack "However finding It all so sinister, so evocatfve of creatively one travels, however deep an the brutal and phony authenticity he experience in childhood or middle age, hoped to see the Ivory Coast avoiding, it takes thought (a sifting of impulses, Nmpaul shows himself too eager to ideas, and references that become more have his worst fears validated His conmultifarious as one grows older) to centratIon on the metaphorical understand what one has lived through crocodiles IS as deliberate as the placehvestock or where one has been " ment of the crocoddes themselves For The writer was told he would develop "Prologue to an Autobiography" a man who goes to discover an exceppolsomng tomorrow, die on Sunday, and be tion, he spends rather a lot of time beburied on Monday unless he offered a goat mg enthralled by the rule When he began to travel over twenty years ago, Nalpaul says, he had "no views or opinions, no system " But by now the "gambler's excitement" of his early journeying seems to have been lulled into Inattention by the song of his own grinding axes When a European he meets m Abldjan tells him that Africa is still really ruled by magic, and that all else depends on the Europeans, Nalpaul assures us that this man "was not concerned to score points off Afrlca"--a rather odd assurance to be caught making, one might say, perhaps the betrayal of Nalpaul's own desire to bring home bad news The reporting in this piece lacks diligence and surprise The native waiter trying to act French THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1985...

...Paul, on the other hand, lives his life as a divinity student with exemplary moderation (he smokes three ounces of tobacco a week and drinks a pint and a half of beer a day, "the half at luncheon, the pint at dinner"), keeps up with current affairs (he attends meetings at the League of Nation's Union on Polish plebiscites), and takes an interest in his nation's cultural past (he reads nightly installments of The Forsyte Saga) For his troubles he is sent down from Oxford, ~mprlsoned for crimes he didn't commit, and, finalTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1985 Ryder in Brtdeshead Revisited to arrive too late just as the ancestral home is about to be torn down In almost every novel you can hear the demolition ratthng along to make way for "something clean and square" which usually means a block of functional Bauhaus flats walled with chromium plating, dwelllngs shckly designed to accommodate ruthlessly streamlined urban lives divested of all purpose beyond selfadvancement and immediate gratification The resulting ethos is very much the one we see celebrated in today's popular magazines such as Playboy and Cosmopohtan, to name two of the more vulgar publications that set themselves up as mentors to the young and affluent, especially the affluent, who will buy the products they advertise as indispensable to success in the self-regarding arena of pure opportunism In 1930 Waugh was himself one of the Bright Young People, as he called the contemporary version of today's YuppIes He was fashionable, clever, ambitious, and successful He was also profoundly troubled As much as he enjoyed running with the smart set, he couldn't avoid the conclusion that their ly, deprived of his identity There is no justice in Waugh's world, no moral balance, and that's, of course, the point Unhke most satrrlsts, Waugh was not a moralist, at least not in any conventional sense of this term He did not write to correct behavior nor dlff he think the twentieth century had taken out a special patent on vice There was no point in reviling Grimes and the other amoral worldlings romping through his pages They were only symptoms of a general failure of conVlCtlOn Besides, they were a highly entertaining lot not least because Waugh had projected into them a good deal of his own mischievous self He reserved his satiric scorn for his decent, law-abiding bores, the characters who conduct themselves prudently accordIng to their inherited morahty but have lost touch with the prmclples upon which It was founded These figures are either doubtful or heedless of the metaphysics Waugh thought necessary to sustain civilization As such they are far more culpable than his scamps Like Paul Pennyfeather, they can be expected to acquit themselves "with decision and decorum in all the emergencies of Civlhzed life " Unfortunately, there's not much civilized life left Without spiritual resources beyond their pohte manners, they are no match for the moral carelessness and technocratic savagery they must face in Waugh's version of the modern world Because these supposedly Civlhzed individuals lack determinate values, they are fated like the younger Charles of Depth," his "shape in chaos " I n the novels up to the avowedly tion to Arlstotehan metaphysics as mediated through Thomas Aquinas intensely selfish lives were founded upon a generally unspoken despair He has one of his characters in Vile Bodies describe this condition as "an almost fatal hunger for permanence" not to be satisfied in a world grown skeptical not only of traditional values but also of the possibility of estabhshIng any permanent standards at all Waugh's bitterness at the break-up of his first marriage the year before certmnly hastened such misgivings about his social order, but there IS every reason to believe he would have reached the same conclusion eventually "It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of Clvihzation and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests " With these words he announced his conversion to Roman Cathohcism at age 27 This church and what was then its subscrip- that has unnerved him These he had been taught to explain away No, it is something "deeper than all that . . . . I would provide his stay against confu- couldn't understand why God had You can see sion or, as he put it in his story, "Out Disabling America The "Rights Industry" in Our Time RICHARD E. MORGAN It Is the challenging thesis of this controversial book that during the last two decades a "rights industry"--consisting of interest group advocates, activist lawyers, law professors, and publicists--has, in effect, become "unhinged " They had expanded, redefined, and mampulated the law of civil rights in order to create new rights against the claims of society, even when these ignored or distorted America's constitutional tradition As a result, malor American institutions, both governmental and private, have become seriously disabled "An original and provocative contribution This is a book that is likely to have an im pact that is wide and lasting Dzsabllng Amemca is a magnihcent indictment of one of the malor political problems of the 20th century--the rise of constitutionallsm bereft of the constitution " ---GARY L McDOWELL, Tulane University "A s c h o l a r l y , f a r - r a n g i n g , and t h o u g h t f u l b o o k . " --ERNEST GELLNER, The New Repubhc American Spectator religion plays in it "A scholarly attempt to explain what is gomg on in that httle-known, volatile and very important part of the world--and to define the role that well worth reading "--RONALD TAGGIASCO, "A much-needed examination of the dangers of the thoughtless proliferation of rights...

...Still, I like to think his rejoinder reveals something of his abiding attitude regarding hfe's little misadventures It was Waugh's easy acceptance of the distance between what people profess and what they do that has confused several of his commentators, especially in America where such a premium has been placed on sincerity that the civilizing arts of hypocrisy have fallen Into serious disrepute Some have complained that with the exception of his openly Catholic works, his fiction lacks moral purpose Others find it nihilistic, a condition to be blamed or praised according to taste There is no denying that many of his novels have a perverse way o f celebrating energetic immorahty at the expense of spiritless decency His rogues are attractively vital, his proper citizens exasperatingly anenuc...

...A faun halffimtely more entertmnmg than today's tamed by the M~ddle Ages, who would electromcally keyboarded fdm scripts bade lumself for months m some suburand best-sellers produced at exorbitant ban retreat, and then burst upon the expense by teams of techmcally skdled town with capricious capermgs...

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...This was especially true with Aesthetic theory aside, the type of was never merely the reactionary as regard to art Although he is popular- outlandish energy Waugh discovered In some have suggested In his avowedly ly known for his scathing dismissals of Gaudi spoke to him on a more imautobiographical novel, The Ordea[ of experimental art (Paul Klee, for one, mediate level Satirists have always Gdbert Pmfold, he makes it quite clear was derisively put down as the "acme fastened on the preposterous and that his Tory persona provided him of futility"), he frequently recognized grotesque with an enthusiasm no less with a useful mask Describing himself ItS power to reveal what he took to be intense for being expressed as outrage the essential failure of reason in con- in the third person, he tells us that "his After all, what could better serve to restrongest tastes were negative He mind men that they belong to an ab- temporary society, and he did not hesitate to appropriate its techniques, albeit in parodic form, when they suited his purposes Vde Bodies, for in- thusiasm and outrage side by side, neither one canceling the other Like other satirists, he delighted in the stance, is one of the truly successful hterary experiments of this century Pub...

...We are all potenUal recrmts for anarchy" He was convinced, as have been many others, that C~vll]zat]on m the twentieth century was lmperded by a dechne in respect for reason and a concormtant rise m mindless self-assert~on This is why he was so disturbed by decent, well-educated people who seemed perfectly comfortable to carry on then...

...Captmn Grimes and Paul Pennyfeather in Dechne and Fal~ for mstance, work and socialize together but seem to belong to mutually exclusive moral universes Grimes is the incorrigible rascal who flouts morals and manners so cheerfully that no one would ever want him brought to account He may be a bisexual bigamist who leaves schoolmasterlng In Wales for pimping in South America, but can these faults seriously be held agmnst a man who so genially admits, " I can stand most sorts of misfortune, old boy, but I can't stand repression'"~ Grimes goes his way "careless of consequence" slipping society's various restraimng nets with an ease as astonishing as it is comical He is an untameable hfe force, pure Dionysian energy, disruptive of good manners, certainly, but quite beyond moral censure...

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...Waugh rephed, "You have no Idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic" C l e a r l y Waugh did not beheve one's standards were discredited by one's behavior In fact, he seems to have been inclined to the view that It is precisely in the recognition of the inevitable discrepancy between ideals and behavior that one's moral awareness grows, however inconveniently This wholly orthodox if less than scrupulous position enabled him to make some rather surprising moral judgments, as Graham Greene discovered In Ways of Escape Greene recalls Waugh spoiling a dinner party at Carol Reed's by lnexphcably railing at one of the other guests, Alexander Korda, the Hungarian ~mlgr~ who had become one of Britain's leading film producers The "shocking intensity" of Waugh's verbal abuse finally succeeded in "killing the conversation" at the table The next day, as they shared a cab, Greene demanded an explanation Waugh justified himself by pointing out that Korda had committed an inexcusable offense by showing up with his young mistress Greene protested, "But I was there with my mistress " Undaunted, Waugh rephed, "That's quite different...

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...pacing than the latest thn.tymdhon dollar state-of-the-art smashh~t In th~s age of word-processed masterpieces, ~t's reassuring to know that a five-foot seven-mch Enghshman of Tory persuasmn who never learned how to use a typewriter and couldn't write a successful screenplay, created manner could not deceive me...

...g~ven propitious cn.cumstances, men and women who seem qmte orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity...

...His hterary sense came ahve m "chstant and barbarous places," especmlly at "the borderlands of confhctmg cultures and states of development, where ~deas, uprooted from then" tmchtlons, become oddly changed m transplantatmn " Th~s ~s not surprising The savagery and c~whzat~on he d~scovered thrwlng promiscuously together m Abyssmm, Kenya, and Brazd were sure to intrigue one so chwded between the appeals of uons He knew mere decency could order and anarchy w~thm himself No matter how stout and stuffy Ins outward appearance became m later hfe, Waugh never completely abandoned the wildness of his faun nature Yet, Waugh was not a hypocrite He thirty-eight years before This instrucnever attempted to d~sgmse e~ther h~s md~screuons or h~s mcons~stenc~es L~ke most of us, only more so, he was a person whose deeds chd not always Waugh," across one of his papers or even very frequently conform to h~s ideals At best, he managed a sort of and other occasmns m which authoriuneasy truce between Ins orthodox and I f you want the real goods, skip the latecomers and go to Harold Acton's 1948 Memotrs of an Aesthete where The gentleness of h~s you'll find an appraisal as charmmg as ~t ~s accurate Recalhng Waugh at Oxford, Acton describes h~m as a "prancing faun, thinly d~sgmsed by convenUonal apparel H~s wide-apart eyes, always ready to be startled under raised eyebrows George McCartney teaches Engltsh at St Vmcent's College of St John's Umverstty, and ts completing a book on Evelyn Waugh 30 wayward selves His reward disharmony may have caused turn cons]demble chstress but it had Rs compensations Most tmportantly, he was able to translate its tension into a hterary energy perfectly stated to satn.mng the Western world after the Great War, when it seemed itself to have become an unequal struggle between cwdlzmg reason and barbarous willfulness Waugh took ~t for granted that Ins contrad~cUons were not umque to tnmself and concluded that "the anarchic elements in society are so strong that it is a whole-tune task to keep the peace [for] barbarism is never finally defeated...

...State sale pnce of $995 (plus $1.25 postage and handhng) N Y and N J residents Please add sales tax ,,, Check One r7 Payrnent enclosed 51 prefer to charge this pumhase to Exp Account # and jazz--everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime Shocked by a bad bottle o f wane, an impertinent stranger, or a fault in syntax, his mind like a cinema camera trucked furiously forward to confront the offending object close-up with glaring lens, wath the eyes of a drill sergeant inspecting an awkward squad, bulging wath wrath that was half-facetious, and with half-simulated incredulity" Of course, this was all part of a role "for which he had cast himself a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel " I f Waugh enjoyed playing the curmudgeon bullying the wayward into line, he also relished the opportunities for doing so There is no doubt he was sensitive to the "offending object," but he seems to have been as much fascinated as provoked by it When Waugh's highly developed sense of architectural decorum was offended by Antonio Gaudl Cornet's free-form, poured-concrete structures in Barcelona, he did not turn away in disgust He rushed about to view as many as he could before leaving With unfeigned enthusiasm, he wrote of one building that its peacock-blue roof "built in undulations, like a rough sea petrified" with its "eaves overhung in irregular, amorphous waves" reminded him of a "clumsily iced cake" After seeing more of Gaudl's work, he concluded that it had broken "through all preconceived bounds of order and proprlety and coursed wantonly over the town, spattering its riches on all sides like mud" demonstrating what "artfor-art's-sake can become when it is wholly untempered by considerations of tradition or good taste Plcabia in Pans is another example, but I think it would be more exciting to collect GaudIs " Waugh's response to Gaudl is an Ironic amalgam of censure and delight His class]cally trained mind Signature I 9 BmrneQ & Noble Bookstoree, Inc Offer good only In the continental U S.A not ~mmedlately available, Waugh did although acquitted by three juries of not hesitate to provide his own His the crime imputed to him by rumour, or so earlier, of giving a rowdy party" biographer, Christopher Sykes, reports that he once commissioned a painting by Richard Eurich depicting the interior of the passenger cabin m a plane quicken the imagination of one for that was unmistakably about to crash whom outrage was a positive addiction unseemly, but, unlike many other burial to Fatty Arbuckle "because, mediums of the cankered muse, he knew it As Acton put it, he was "always ready to be startled " He only he had been found guilty, twenty years required the proper occasion This is why he found Hollywood's Forest Such a travesty could not fall to Lawn cemetery as irresistible in its own way as Gaudl's architecture It was, in his words, "a first-class anthropological The pay-off was his gloriously ghoulish puzzle of our own period," a cemetery novella, The Loved One that welcomed suicides but refused When the stimulus of outrage was contact Mr G Scot Hasted, Room D, HiIIsdale College, Hfllsdale, MI 49242 Serf City, Here We Come B efore the ideas of free trade and democracy became popular, most soctehes were based on feudaltsm Kings were all-powerful Under them were nobles, craftsmen and peasant farmers, known as serfs Serfs usually had no rtghts Whatever food they ate, clothes they wore and dwelhngs they hved in, they recetved from the [ generosity of ktngs and nobles Just as the upper class could grant these essenhals, they could also deny them or tax them away The hfe of a serf was hard, cheerless and quite often short Dunng the long march of hme, demock racy and free enterpnse broke down the old ~oclal orde~ hldlvlduui~ were recogntzed for thetr own worth and were free to enjoy the frufls of thetr labor and to determtne their own futures The serf class disappeared But as thts culture of free men and free markets grew into a soctety of unprecedented prosperfly and sacral mobflfly, a cunous thing happened--men and women began to entrust a growtng share of responslbthty over thetr hves to government Htllsdale Michigan For further ,nformatton regard,ng the avadab,hty of a full sertes of these short, reformative essays, 49242 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1985 A Hfllsdale College 32 Government has assumed many of the same trails of the old feudal order We find tax cuts described as "subsldtes," as if the earnings were not ourown, but a gift from The state We find regulatory bureaucracies extending their power to every aspect of society, telling people how they may or rn~Jy rloi uorldu~.l ihelr hve~ And we find government planners who believe the economy funchons best when hghtly controlled by the state Nobel prize-winning economtst F A Hayek described this reversal as "the road to serfdom "But you as a voter, a taxpayer, a parent and worker, are ~n the dnver's seat--you and millions hke you Which road shall we take--the road to a golden age of economtc and pohhcal freedom, or the road to serfdom') UIhmately, the decision is yours "Every possible detail contributing to horror and irony was Included at Evelyn's Insistence " When Sykes wondered if it would shock people, Waugh rephed, "I hope s o " Like many artists, Waugh thrived on contradiction Genuinely comrmtted to the discipline of civilization, he could never entirely resist the lure of anarchy, as frequent and glaring discrepancies between his moral ideals and social behavior Illustrate Sykes tells us that Waugh was so committed to the legalistic practices of the Catholic Church that he would carry scales with him when visiting friends to insure that his meal portions did not exceed the requirements of his Lenten fast Sykes goes on to remind us that such stickling was not unprecedented among Cathohcs before the Second Vancan Council But I wonder Waugh so enjoyed disconcerting friends and enemies alike that he could well have been capable of flaunting his pious discipline as much for the pleasure of shocking others as for the good of his soul Whatever his motives, his unembarrassed pubhc obedience to his faith d~d not prevent him from frequently ~gnormg its counsels regarding chanty He did httle to moderate his penchant for insult, a blood sport he clearly relished Annoyed by excessive prmse for Brtdeshead Revtslted, he put an abrupt end to one woman's fawmng "I thought it was good myself," he snapped, "but now that I know that a vulgar, common American woman like yourself admires ~t, I am not so sure" After reducing another admirer to tears, he was asked how he could behave so badly and profess to be a Catholic...

...Even the better sort of mowe revtewer wall occasmnally risk the d~spleasure of the stuchos by rermn&ng h~s readers of the writer whose early novels are more mvenuvely cmemauc m then...