Friday 21st May, 2010
Evelyn Waugh and
the city of aquatint
W
ithin a couple of decades after the
Second World War ended, there was
hardly any celebration of novelists of
the inter-war period. As mentioned before, there
was a sense that D H Lawrence and James
Joyce had made seminal contributions, but otherwise those who had been widely read at the
time were treated largely as period pieces.
I should note that this applies only to British
fiction, because it was certainly felt that on the
continent several writers had transformed fiction
during those two decades. This applied most
obviously to Kafka, but also to less obviously
revolutionary figures such as Thomas Mann and
Marcel Proust. Unfortunately I cannot hope to
do justice to them in what must be a limited
series focusing on English Literature.
I will therefore, at the risk of seeming
parochial, devote a couple of columns to
English writers of that period. At the same time,
though the novelists I will talk about are not in
the league of the great
Europeans I have mentioned, I feel that they
are at least as interesting as Lawrence and
Joyce, perhaps even
more so.
My own favourite
amongst them is
Evelyn Waugh, who
was incidentally
brought vividly to life in
the collection of
Graham Greene’s letters which sparked off
this series of columns.
Waugh was also a
Catholic convert, and
aggressively traditional
about it, unlike his
more revolutionary
friend. But he was also
extremely funny, and
well aware of his own
foibles. In a sense then
he seems never to
have moved too far,
despite appearances to
the contrary, from the
Oxford undergraduate
who is perhaps the
most evocative celebrant of that city of
aquatint, as he
described Oxford as
once having been.
His best known
novel is ‘Brideshead
Revisited’, which was a
sensational television
series in the seventies,
and has recently been
filmed again, from a
different perspective
which helps to illuminate a complex study
of human relations.
Not surprisingly the
novel is best remembered for its account
of the relations
between the middle
class Charles Ryder
and
Sebastian Flyte,
the aristocrat he falls
in with, though in fact
the novel extends into
life after Oxford, and
Charles’s releations
with Sebastian’s sister
Julia. She marries a
ghastly man, based it
seems on the
Canadian newspaper
magnate Lord
Beaverbrook, who
played a powerful if
not entirely savoury
role in British politics
during and between
the two World Wars.
She and Charles have
an affair but, being a
Catholic brought back
to a sense of religious
obligation when her
disreputable father
comes back to the
Church just before he
dies, she decided not
to get a divorce.
Waugh’s capacity
to express the bleakness of life sometimes
seems to me without
parallel. After the
sheer joy of Oxford, a
joy in which shadows
are always gathering,
the depiction of how
life breaks up is unrelenting. The novel
ends with Charles going back to Brideshead,
the great house of the Flytes, a billet for soldiers during the war. The only sign of the world
of its previous inhabitants is Sebastian’s old
nanny, still there, almost forgotten, except by
the youngest Flyte, the nun-like Cordelia, and
through her by Julia.
Like Greene, Waugh’s range was extraordinary. He too travelled widely, and amongst his
funniest works is ‘Scoop’, about a journalist
sent to Africa at a time of turmoil. Unfortunately
the management got the wrong man, and sent
out the gardening correspondent, rather than a
similarly named international expert. In Waugh’s
world, which we realize bears a closer relationship to what really happens than the compartmentalized perceptions we privilege, the wrong
William Boot does better than the professional
might have done, both in finding out what is
happening and in understanding it.
Another of Waugh’s ventures into foreign territory has perhaps the most depressing, if chillingly funny, ending of anything I have read.
Written at the time Waugh’s own marriage broke
up, it is about how Tony Last lost his wife to an
obviously unworthy rival, and travelled abroad
to recover. He ended up lost in a remote settlement in South America, dominated by a British
expatriate who could not read, but loved
Dickens. He makes Last read to him, and conceals his presence from the team sent out to
find him. The novel is called ‘A Handful of Dust’,
and as we realize that Last is doomed to stay in
the Amazonian jungle for ever, reading Dickens
aloud, we realize what is meant by the Biblical
phrase about seeing despair in a handful of
dust.
Waugh’s range was remarkable, including
the late ‘Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold’, which is
about a middle aged man losing hold of reality,
as he realizes things can only get worse. Before
that was the War Trilogy, which caught brilliantly
the social changes that the Second World War
brought, with both nostalgia and contempt for
the ineffective social order that still held sway in
inappropriate places. ‘The Loved One’ deals
with funeral practices for pets, and incidentally
people, in Calfornia, while ‘Helena’ is an
account of the search for the true Cross of
Christ made by the mother of Constantine, the
first Roman Emperor to embrace Christianity.
With all this however, I still go back often to
Waugh’s first two novels. ‘Decline and Fall’ is
another odyssey of a comparatively poor young
man who goes up to Oxford, having taught in a
seedy prep school, a phenomenon that was
only just fading away by the time I went up to
University myself. Paul Pennyfeather gets
caught up in the social whirl of London, and is
about to marry the mother of one of his pupils,
when he is arrested on charges of white slavery
after he has run a small
errand for her– it turns
out that part of her fortune comes from the
procuring of prostitutes
for service abroad. The
juxtaposition of different
worlds, and the manner in
which some can whirl
through them whilst others cannot cope, is a feature that Waugh was to
expand on throughout his
career.
And then there was
‘Vile Bodies’, a personal
favourite, since we set up a dining society of
that name which swiftly became a cult, the photographs now being a sort of collector’s item in
the strange world of nostalgia that Oxford precipitates. We had distinguished members, a
head of the Australian Liberal Party, a
13
Conservative front bencher though sadly he has
not made the Cabinet. It was a world of Turkish
cigarettes and brown sherry, of Agatha Runcible
who got into a motor race by accident and went
round and round in circles, which would have
been funny except that she
was traumatized and lost her
mind. Something similar happened to our own Agatha
Runcible, which brought
home to me the sheer unpredictability of life.
There is a flavour to
Evelyn Waugh that is unique,
and still finds echoes even if
the life he described seems
so far away. I see him as a
master of space and time,
showing us how change is
relentless, how people see
everything around them
change, believing they are themselves constant,
even as they themselves alter as their own relationships shift. His capacity for nostalgia is
immense, so is his ability to show how useless
it all is; and then that that too matters little in
the immense scheme of things.