Snooty Scribe
EMMET, KATHLEEN
Snooty Scribe_ Evelyn Waugh: A Little Order Edited by Donat Gallagher Little, Brown. 192 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Kathleen Emmet Contributor, "Wilson Quarterly," "New Boston Review" Evelyn...
...These pieces have always been available for anyone willing to endure long library waits, or tussles with microfiche and tattered back numbers, but now Donat Gallagher has reprieved us from that tedium...
...There is as much to be learned from these essays about his views and character as from the diaries and letters...
...A Little Order permits us to trace Waugh's development from a new perspective, to directly consider the shifts in attitude and opinion we can glean from the novels and diaries only obliquely...
...Especially interesting is the schism between Waugh's modernism and his traditionalism...
...Like his postwar satires, these later pieces seem thin and bitter by comparison with the early work...
...we expect as much from writers...
...Reviewed by Kathleen Emmet Contributor, "Wilson Quarterly," "New Boston Review" Evelyn Waugh clearly was a comic genius, yet he affronted our most treasured ideas about literary greatness...
...The problem is that in his case, drink and difficulty went hand in hand with the most reactionary values...
...The tensions that gave strength to his fiction took their toll on him, and eventually on his art as well...
...And yet such was the national hardiness of body and conscience that our grandparents went to no extremes in search of physical ease...
...if use is made of nearly all the pegs it offers, it tends to fall forward on the observer...
...Even his ardent admirers feel a certain uneasiness about his place among the more conventionally great...
...Waugh was unsure of the worth of his satirical achievements...
...It is not that he drank and was difficult...
...When he renounces his talent for stylish invective, or when his gifts were inadequate to his purpose, he could become strident, bitter, even nearly dull...
...Nowadays we have to be coaxed into repose with every ingenuity of spring and padding...
...and from Wilde...
...In Defense of Cubism" presentsaspiriteddefenseof modern art and anticipates the anti-realistic esthetic Waugh would practice in his novels and preach intermittently throughout his life...
...For all hisgreat powers of observation and explanation, he was an intuitive rather than a dialectical thinker...
...A divided man, Waugh was passionately anarchic and defiant, in love with excess, yet also reflective and religious, strongly attached to order and rectitude...
...his virtuosity shows off best in dramatic set-pieces or in extended images that elude analysis and compel applause...
...Almost every article in A Little Order has at least one moment of self-indulgence, one wonderful conceit: "The mid-Victorian home was a place of rest and retirement indissolubly associated with Sunday afternoon, to be enjoyed to its full in the coma that comes from heavy eating...
...From the start of his career Waugh vainly tried to distinguish between the freedom he allowed himself in his novels and the seemliness he sought in his nonfiction...
...But this is Waugh being serious...
...Hiscomic works brought his antinomian sentiments into play, while in his biographies and travel books he felt an obligation to not veer from the facts...
...With his essay on "Urbane Enjoyment Personified: Sir Osbert Sitwell" ??Waugh gives a wonderful summary of the aristocratic high-life that marked the '20s, of the flamboyant publicity-seeking in militant defiance of the bourgeoisie that so influenced his own imaginative development...
...In "The Philistine Age of British Decoration," a loving essay about Victorian lifeand furniture, Waugh's lifelong fascination with Victoriana feeds his sense of humor...
...The notorious curmudgeon of legend holds forth in the essays of the '50s and '60s against Americans, Communists, Socialists, reform in the church, visitors on business, etc...
...Of course traditionalism won...
...for the purest Waugh one must go to the pie-Brideshead Revisited novels, in all their dangers and delights...
...Modernism may have satisfied his rebelliousness, but too much clean-lined efficiency bored him...
...A favorite item is the mid-Victorian hat and umbrella stand, "an unusual combination of weight and instability...
...Gallagher covers the important strains in Waugh's public career and does a particularly good job in representing all the contradictions of the '20s, the crucial period in Waugh's maturing as a writer...
...His '20s advocacy of traditional, masculine Englishry, a clue to Waugh's interest in adventure, backs right up against the modernism he inherited from theSitwells...
...The esthete yearning for action, the modernist admirer of Ruskin, the bullying snob, the man with a terrible tongue who was also a devout Catholic??all are present in this new book of essays...
...I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants...
...Gallagher notes in his introduction that, except for a brief period after the War, when the profits from Brideshead Revisted left him free to choose only the assignments he enjoyed, Waugh wrote journalism chiefly for money...
...As we learn here in "Fan-fare," after Brides-head Revisited he renounced comic fantasy and pledged his energies to religious fiction...
...Readers should not come to Waugh by wayof/1 LittleOrder, but for Waugh addicts and scholars it will be fascinating reading...
...Nevertheless, the sensibility that galvanized the novels remained evident...
...he alludes to the Great War with bitterness as late as 1947 ("Introduction to The Unbearable Bassington"), but in 1924 had spoken with nostalgia of its intensity and its camaraderie ("Oxford and the Next War...
...His soldierly, uncompromising quality shows with particular force in his dismissal of Tito ("Our Guest of Dishonour") and in his zestful insistence on stark poinls of Catholic dogma (" Felix Culpa,"" Half in Love with Easeful Death...
...Consequently, the Wavian essay is usually a hybrid: a patina of fiction, an outrageous gimmick to make it sell, coupled with enough "seriousness" to satisfy his own standards...
...In "Let Us Return to the '90s," by contrast, he urges a return not to the '90s of the "great booby" Oscar Wilde and his fraudulent, theatrical estheticism, but to the '90s of Kitchener, Kipling and Edison, the makers and doers, the men of empire and adventure...
...The "truth" was his norm, although he might embroider an anecdote or exult in some fantastic episode...
...There is the generation issue and the Youth Movement that Waugh rang so many changes on??proud defense, concerned irritation, mockery, and finally ("Why Glorify Youth") dismissal...
...Like Dickens, Waugh was a theatrical writer...
...His excellent selection gives sequence and coherence to Waugh's journalism...
...indeed, there were signs of artistic self-doubt throughout his life...
...Waugh was too skeptical by temperament, though, too much a child of the '20s ever to take public affairs quite seriously, as he demonstrates in his famous "Aspiration of a Mugwump": " I have never voted in a parliamentary election...
...With the '30s, his divorce and his conversion to Catholicism, Waugh turned away from cosmopolitan dandyism...
...our grandparents lay stupefied on the most uncompromising horsehair and on structures which outraged every principle of human anatomy...
...Elaborate and impractical Victorian decoration was more his taste, inspiring him to crazy specifics, verbal precisions and solemn detachment about absurdities...
...Yet right beside Cubism Gallagher puts "Preface to the Designs of Francis Crease" where Waugh praises his old drawing master in Ruskinian terms for "sensitivity to natural beauty" and the moral meanings of nature...
...Waugh is least effective when he eschews extravagance for argument, most notably in his later essays on religious matters...
Vol. 64 • February 1981 • No. 4
