Waugh Revisited

...Still, one has no cause to make overmuch of whatever uneasinesses and disappointments the later books afford It is sometimes instructive for the reader to be of two minds, unsure of just how to respond to particular situations, how much to judge the passage, or the work, a "success" or something less Waugh's biographer, Christopher Sykes, tells of visiting him in the hospital where he was recovering from an operation for hemorrhoids ("The Piles,' as Waugh liked to think of this condition) The operation and its consequent treatment had been extremely painful, and he points out to Sykes that in fact it was not strictly necessary "Then why did you have it done'" asked Sykes "Perfectionism,' Waugh replied The magnificent comic response shows how intensely this writer's limitations, in literature and in Life, are bound up with his striking virtues, even occasional perfectionisms, as an artist We should not want him to have been otherwise...

...Is it possible to satirize a character yet simultaneously be sympathetic to him...

...It is all done better in Waugh's diary "Home for a cold New Year's Day My children weary me I can only see them as defective adults, feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humourless " But in the novel Guy Crouch-back has to remember from time to time that he is a Catholic Christian, and in a style soberly appropriate to such an activity It is the hangover in novelese after the raucously satiric night out, it feels more like conventional fiction, and less like art Whatever one thinks of Waugh's earlier novels, they were resolutely art...

...This may be considered in the light of an entry in Waugh's diary, written four years previous "After a quiet day in cinemas, I had a dinner party of Claud, Emley, Terence, Roger Hollis and a poor drunk named Macgregor I arrived quite blind after a great number of cocktails at the George with Claud Eventually the dinner broke up and Claud, Roger Hollis and I went off for a pub-crawl which after sundry indecorous adventures ended up at the Hypocrites where another blind was going on Poor Mr Macgregor turned up after having lain with a woman but almost immediately fell backwards downstairs I think he was killed ". The next day a drunken Waugh is expelled from the New Reform Club by "a preposterous person called Cotts", "Alfred and I then drank double brandies until I could not walk He carried me to Worcester where I fell out of a window and then relapsed into unconsciousness punctuated with severe but well-directed vomitings I dined four times at various places and went to a drunk party at Worcester in someone's rooms I did not know' Compared to these antics the Bollinger Club's stoning to death of a fox seems downright decorous, champagne bottles or no Note, moreover, that awful as Waugh's drunken vomitings may have been, their description in the diary-severe but well-directed"-possesses all the crispness and authority of well-turned sentences...

...Waugh tried in A Handful of Dust, but there is some doubt about just how deeply we can feel for its hero, Tony Last For the first time Waugh turns on a plangent note in attempting to express a character's un-happiness "His mind had suddenly become clearer on many points that had puzzled him A whole Gothic world had come to grief there was now no armour, glittering in the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the greensward, the cream and dappled unicorns had fled " The ellipses are Waugh's, and they invite us to feel for Tony Yet Orwell's famous response to A E Housman's Shropshire Lad -Hard cheese, old chap"-is a possibility Waugh seems not quite to recognize Tony Last is a bit of a bore, a bit of a child, so out of touch with the modern world that his author loves him And implicit in Tony are the later Waugh heroes-Charles Ryder and Guy Crouchback, with their put-upon air, their devotion to lost causes and forsaken beliefs (see Matthew Arnold on Oxford), and most importantly their unwise passiveness before the experiences that befall them...

...Except for the more tremulous moments in Sword of Honour, notably Guy Crouch-back's determination to carry on the knightly-saintly tradition of Sir Roger Waybroke's Catholic sword-cuckold and old fogey though Guy be-Waugh achieves a relatively sober, even deadpan style of presentation Yet despite the periodic antics of an Apthorpe, a Ben Ritchie-Hook, or the comic doings of the Laird of the Isle of Mugg, the deadness is also a problematic and finally unsatisfactory case of the diffident hero's spiritlessness falling like blight on whatever it touches...

...William H Pritchard is a professor of English at Amherst College...

...Nonetheless, certainly in Waugh's later novels-Brideshead, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), and the war trilogy, Sword of Honour (1952-61), all recently reissued by Little Brown-neither his prose nor his wit are up to the high standard set by the earlier books In this, his career bears a superficial resemblance to that of another modern English satirist, Aldous Huxley The splendid entertainer of Crome Yellow and Those Barren Leaves eventually capitulates to "seriousness" and novelese in Point Counter Point, Eyeless in Gaza and the subsequent, mostly unread, novels...

...Culture Watching WAUGH REVISITED BY WILLIAM H PRITCHARD THE 0NLY first-rate comic I genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw," said Edmund Wilson of Evelyn Waugh Wilson was speaking about the early Waugh, author of the brilliant series of six novels beginning with Decline and Fall (1928) and culminating in Put Out More Flags (1942) When Brideshead Revisited was published in 1944, the critic deplored it, objecting to Waugh's increasing conservatism, snobbery and religiosity Asked about the criticism, Waugh noted that Wilson was an American and remarked, "I don't think what they have to say is of much interest, do you...

...Near the end of the trilogy, Guy receives word that his wife Virginia (whom he has remarried and who has just borne a child, not Guy's) and his eccentric uncle Peregrine have been instantly killed by one of "the new doodle bombs " We are told that "The news did not affect Guy greatly, less, indeed, than the arrival of Frank de Souza and the jeep and the 'Praesidium '" The reader shakes his head once more in disbelief at Guy's lack of responsiveness, is bored with his boredom, depressed by what seems to be his creator's depression...

...Tony Last's vision of the lost "cream and dappled unicorns" is of course a romance vision Waugh indulged his own propensities for this kind of unworldliness, at the same time joining n to satiric attitudes Indeed, one is sometimes hard put to know how seriously or how humorously to weigh a particular passage Shaw in Pygmalion exhibits a similar blend of satire and romance, but carries it off through the snap and crackle of dramatic dialogue Waugh's more leisurely-paced narratives-particularly the later ones-make that sort of thing impossible and show by contrast the seams of their construction...

...Waugh's behavior and delinquent attitudes toward other people ("Everyone in Wales has black spittle and whenever he meets you he says 'borrada' and spits I was frightened at first ") served him immensely well in Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, in the climax of Black Mischief with its spot of cannibalism, in parts of Scoop, and in the Basil Seal sections from Put Out More Flags-particularly the magnificent episode where the displaced Connolly children appear "The Connollies were found at last and assembled Dons had been in Barbara's bedroom trying out her make-up, Micky in the library tearing up a folio, Marlene grovelling under the pantry sink eating the remains of the dogs' dinners When they were together again, in the lobby, Basil inspected them Their appearance exceeded anything he had been led to expect " It turns out that Marlene is, as the phrase goes, mentally retarded, but sympathy for this condition gets shoved out of the way so that we can delightedly observe her grovellings under the pantry sink Of such are the best moments in the early novels composed...

...Unlike Anthony Powell or Kingsley Amis, too, Waugh puts his heart on his hero's sleeve, he speaks to the reader through unironic and unhumorous utterances like the following, from Brideshead "My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of wartime...

...What we have in Waugh, I think, is a writer who performed so memorably and irresponsibly in his early work that later attempts to write books which were "adult" and "mature" (terms he would have loathed, especially used by an American) were doomed to look a bit lame by comparison Let us remind ourselves of the formidable style and the outrageous attitudes that made Waugh such a comic genius Here is the second paragraph of Decline and Fall, describing the festivities of the Bollinger Club of Oxford "It is not accurate to call this an annual event, because quite often the Club is suspended for some years after each meeting There is tradition behind the Bollinger, it numbers reigning kings among its past members At the last dinner, three years ago, a fox had been brought in in a cage and stoned to death with champagne bottles' What an evening that had been...

...These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history " So it goes for stretches of Charles Ryder's impassioned account of how much his experience with the Marchmain family has meant to him Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the book's attempt to present "the fierce little human tragedy in which I played" can be taken at face value The vitality of its comic sections ill suits the human spirit's afflatus that breathes heavily in the solemn parts...