Waugh revisited Was he such a bad guy?
Davis, Robert Murray
Robert Murray Davis WAUGH REVISITED The author at 100 H. Auden maintained, in a phrase to chill the heart of any living writer, that on the death of William Butler Yeats, "he became his admirers."...
...For example, the Reverend Tendril's sermon in A Handful of Dust reads "the ravening tiger and the exotic camel, the furtive jackal and the ponderous elephant...
...Perhaps more significant is the number of times Waugh is quoted in the popular and upscale press, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century novelist, and not just by conservatives...
...So when you say Black you mean Red, and when you mean Red you say White, and when the party who call themselves Blacks say Traitors they mean what we call Blacks, but what we mean when we say Traitors I really couldn't tell you...
...And the Bolshevists want to be called Black because of their racial pride...
...The passages I have quoted, especially the cablese, have an uncanny resemblance to some of the language that came from government and media in the second Gulf War...
...None of this matters, since the instructions to the reporter are essentially "CONTINUE CABLING VICTORIES UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE...
...In this case, it is self-justifying political rhetoric and media venality...
...Despite the efforts of political opponents and gossips, three of his novels made the Modern Library editorial board's list of the hundred best novels in English since 1900: A Handful of Dust (34), Scoop (75), and Brideshead Revisited (80...
...On Easter Sunday, 1966, after he had heard Mass in Latin, his wish was granted...
...Hemingway said "it is a mistake to get to know an author," and Waugh explained why: "It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice all the odious qualities which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed...
...The initial manuscript reads "the tiger and the camel...
...And the Fascists won't be called Blacks because of their racial pride, so they are called Whites after the White Russians...
...He is read and quoted neither because nor in spite of his opinions but because of his conviction that, as he told Nancy Mitford, "all art is the art of pleasing...
...Lucid, elegant, and individual" this is Evelyn Waugh at his best, and the best epitaph...
...These qualities are allied to his acute sense of the absurd...
...And there are thousands of other instances in which Waugh's sense of rhythm, timing, and craftsmanship elevated a phrase, and a character, from the ridiculous to the fantastic...
...In his diary, he longed for death...
...he is prescient...
...One can and probably should quarrel with these polls...
...Some of his detractors may dislike him because they realize that he is judging them, their language, and the causes and issues they espouse...
...All of the novels except Helena, the short fiction, two of the biographies, and the travel books remain in print or will soon be again...
...In other words, beyond the monster was the man, not quite the same as the dipsomaniac persona displayed to hilarious effect in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold...
...As Waugh said, "Style is what makes a work memorable and unmistakable...
...Waugh was even more insecure and far more bedeviled than Pinfold by the drugs he took to alleviate insomnia, by the drink, which made his postwar visits to London a series of nightmares that he could not always remember, by manic-depressive-ness, by post-Vatican II changes in the liturgy he loved, by early and rapid physical decay, by fear of losing his ability to entertain either in society or in print...
...These critics include generations of reviewers in the New Statesman, postcolonial theorists, and most recently Christopher Hitchens, who concludes in his May 2003 article in the Atlantic Monthly that Waugh was good as a writer when he was good because he was so awful as a human being...
...What remains is the style...
...Robert Murray Davis is the author o/Evelyn Waugh, Writer, and Evelyn Waugh and the Forms of His Time, among other books.among other books...
...To enjoy Waugh, you cannot read him in search of an exemplary character or model of religious behavior...
...Succeeding generations of (at best) agnostic and left-leaning critics have seized on overt statements of conservative principles and upper-class solidarity, as well as the social texture of novels like Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honor, to condemn Waugh as a reactionary, even a fascist, whose opinions and by extension his work deserve the neglect that their continued attention refused to bestow...
...Rest in peace" seems not quite appropriate...
...As some of his best friends might testify, Waugh could be hectoring, dogmatic, and insensitive...
...The corollary, as he told Lady Diana Cooper, was that "spontaneity is the enemy of art...
...Despite these afflictions, he left more than a dozen novels, a thick volume of shorter fiction, three biographies, an autobiography, six travel books, and a large body of reviews and essays, collected and uncollected, letters, some of which are published in (so far) three different and sometimes overlapping volumes, and diaries that provide (along with very witty detraction, if not slander) a valuable social record of his time...
...Nor can one really appreciate Waugh if one reads him to find truth or falsity in his political and religious opinions...
...Consider the explanation of the political situation in Ish-maelia given by a newspaper editor in Scoop to point up the difference between the Red and Black parties: You see they are all Negroes...
...Adverse criticism of Waugh dates back to the mid-1940s, when Edmund Wilson and Conor Cruise O'Brien, writing as Donat O'Donnell, insisted that Waugh was a snob in love with the upper classes and the showier trappings of Roman Catholic ritual...
...Except for some academic theorists, no one cares that Pope and Swift were, perhaps rightly from our point of view, on the losing side politically and socially...
...We remember the false judgments of Voltaire and Gibbon and Lytton Strachey long after they have been corrected, because of their sharp, polished form and because of the sensual pleasure of dwelling on them...
...That is the paradox of artistic achievement...
...He could also be, as critics like Hitchens seem unable to comprehend, generous, contrite, helpful, and uncannily accurate in his judgments and his praise...
...Waugh is not just funny...
...In Black Mischief, Waugh questions both the ability of Africans to adopt European democratic institutions (a less limited view than it might once have seemed) and the superior wisdom of white imperialists...
...And in doing so he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though he may lose his own soul in the process...
...In the case of Evelyn Waugh, born a hundred years ago next month, that equation will not quite work, for he is defined not only by his admirers but by his detractors...
...Still, more serious damage to Waugh's literary reputation may come less from the critics than from tabloid-style celebration of him as another in the long line of English eccentrics, a rude and selfish monster whose antics both fascinate and appall...
...As Nancy Mitford said to Waugh, "If you say you think a thing is all right, one can believe you...
...These evaluations may have harmed Waugh's standing in the academy because political correctness and satire have never been comfortable partners...
...They come to one, not merely as printed words, but as a lively experience, with the full force of another human being personally encountered that is to say because they are lucid, elegant, and individual...
...Waugh pleased more often than not, and although his style looks easy and natural, it was due as much to discipline as to talent, for almost every memorable line in his novels is the result of a second or third rewrite...
Vol. 130 • September 2003 • No. 16
