Why you should read Waugh

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, author of the immensely successful Brideshead Revisited, was the finest novelist of his generation. In this essay I will do three things. First, I will examine Evelyn Waugh's prose and highlight its outstanding qualities; then I will uncover the sociological criticism that lies beneath the surface of his work; and finally, coincident with the explanation of his criticism, I will make a study of Waugh the man.

His first novel was Decline and Fall. He wrote it in his early twenties after a stretch of teaching at an obscure school in northwest Wales, where he was so miserable that he contemplated drowning himself (he swam out to sea, leaving his clothes and a quote from Euripides on the beach, but returned after being stung by a jellyfish). It is blackly funny, and narrates the misadventures of an Oxford undergraduate sent down for indecent behaviour after being stripped of his trousers in the college quad by members of the 'Bollinger Club.'

It moves in rapid, picaresque fashion from the halls of Oxford to parties in Belgravia, from the pederastic monotony of boarding school to the chrome-plated luxury of a socialite's country home. The narrative is peppered with scarcely believable incidents and comic characters like the Lord Maltravers, the Minister of Transportation (get it?) In fact, in the hands of a lesser writer such material would be in danger of becoming gratuitous; it is Waugh's exhilarating prose that prevents this. The great critic Clive James once said of Waugh: 'Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English. Its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him.' This unaffected elegance gave him licence to paint with a freer brush than most and he took full advantage of the fact. Could anyone else have penned that famous passage in Decline and Fall, describing the appearance of the Welsh band?

"Ten men of revolting appearance were approaching from the drive. They were low of brow, crafty of eye and crooked of limb. They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over their receding chins, while each clutched under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape. On seeing the Doctor they halted and edged back, those behind squinting and moulting over their companions' shoulders.

'Crikey!' said Philbrick. 'Loonies! This is where I shoot.'

'I refuse to believe the evidence of my eyes,' said the Doctor. 'These creatures simply do not exist.'"

His immense facility (he wrote three thousand words a day in his younger years) allowed him to go in the other direction, penning passages that are lofty, sonorous, and unhesitatingly beautiful. For Waugh, who once described writing 'not as an investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language,' the goal was the creation of a beautiful object; style, to some extent, he saw as an end in itself. This luxuriance incurred the displeasure of Angry Young Men like Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, but to us, the children of the blankest, sparest, most utilitarian age, it comes as a breath of fresh spring air. The moving description of Charles Ryder's leaving Brideshead stands as a testament to Waugh's aesthetic.

"It was as I had often imagined being expelled from school. I almost expected to hear her say: "I have already written to inform your unhappy father." But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.

"I shall never go back," I said to myself.

A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden. I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed. I had left behind me--what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, "the Young Magician's Compendium," that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle."

Read that passage aloud. Note that he uses no contractions. Mark how effortlessly it flows, each sentence building on the one that came before. In the history of English writing it has rarely been equalled.

The second aspect of Waugh's style that demands our attention, is his extraordinary ability to write dialogue. He conceives each character so completely, and endows them with such individuality, that he often foregoes designations like 'John said' and 'She cried' altogether. Add to this his marvellous sense of timing, essential in a comic writer, and you get passages like this one, taken from Vile Bodies:

"Adam rang up Nina.

'Darling, I've been so happy about your telegram. Is it really true?'

'No, I'm afraid not.'

'The Major is bogus?'

'Yes.'

'You haven't got any money?'

'No.'

'We aren't going to be married to-day?'

'No.'

'I see.'

'Well?'

'I said, I see.'

'Is that all?'

'Yes, that's all, Adam.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I'm sorry, too. Good-bye.'

'Good-bye, Nina.'

Later Nina rang up Adam.

'Darling, is that you? I've got something rather awful to tell you.'

'Yes?'

'You'll be furious.'

'Well?'

'I'm engaged to be married.'

'Who to?'

'I hardly think I can tell you.'

'Who?'

'Adam, you won't be beastly about it, will you?'

'Who is it?'

'Ginger.'

'I don't believe it.'

'Well, I am. That's all there is to it.'

'You're going to marry Ginger?'

'Yes.'

'I see.'

'Well?'

'I said, I see.'

'Is that all?'

'Yes, that's all, Nina.'

'When shall I see you?'

'I don't want ever to see you again.'

'I see.'

'Well?'

'I said, I see.'

'Well, good-bye.'

'Good-bye.... I'm sorry, Adam.' "

If you think that is easy to do, I would encourage you to try it yourself. Now it is time to look at Waugh's powers of social and political observation, but before we do so we need to understand a little more about him.

Waugh was born into the middle class in the days when class meant something more than money in the bank. This fact, and Waugh's piercing appreciation of it, accounts for much of his literary energy; it distanced him from the society he frequented, and this distance allowed him to satirise it. He also knew, subconsciously or not, that art was the only way he could stake a permanent claim on that territory (artists have always been a curious exception to the British class system). This awareness gave birth to characters like Charles Ryder, the painter that comes within a hair's breadth of marrying into the aristocracy and inheriting Brideshead.

Marriage is by far the best way to tint your blood blue. Although we must make allowances for taste, and she was by all accounts a charming girl, it couldn't have been lost on Waugh that his first wife's father was the Baron Burghclere. His second wife was the granddaughter of the Earl of Carnarvon. Is it a coincidence, then, that in Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited men of the haute bourgeoisie are taken up by aristocratic lovers?

Without exaggeration, we can say that Waugh's relationship with the upper class, and the decline of that class (without which perhaps he could never have known it so well) was the very centre of his life and work. Whether he is writing seriously or satirically, Brideshead or Decline and Fall, he traces this falling apart. The results are diverse; in Brideshead we see the dissolution of a great country house and its melancholy transformation into barracks during World War Two; in Vile Bodies we get a Scottish laird turned gossip columnist who kills himself using a gas oven after he fails to receive an invitation to the most fashionable party of the season.

This aristocratic mindset was also, undoubtedly, the impetus for his fastidiously conservative lifestyle. Waugh was once asked about his political leanings: he replied that ‘I do not aspire to advise my Sovereign on her choice of servants.’ He lived in country houses like Piers Court and Combe Florey, took up fox hunting (and rode with astounding recklessness), collected paintings (preferably done before the Impressionists ruined everything) and lived to all outward appearances the life of a lettered country squire.

But Waugh had an adventurous side as well. After the success of his early novels he took up work as a foreign correspondent for the Times. He attended the coronation of Haile Selassie, enthusiastically followed the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and ventured in the jungles of South America. These exotic escapades came together in his third book, Black Mischief, a hilarious novel that describes the attempts of Seth, the emperor of a fictional island nation in northeast Africa, to modernise his benighted realm with the help of a graduate from Oxford University. But they were most elegantly employed in his bleakest work, A Handful of Dust, where they are combined with his aristocratic obsession.

The book takes its title from the famous lines of The Waste Land, and true to form it exhibits the fractured, barren decadence of interwar Britain. Affairs are coldly embarked upon, deaths are coldly remarked upon, money and sex and violence are the ultimate realities. The protagonist, Tony Last, is a Victorian leftover of Pre-Raphaelite taste, who flees his disintegrating marriage by embarking on an expedition to the Amazon. He comes down with a fever, grows steadily more delirious, and begins to hallucinate. Abruptly, in the same chapter, we are given vignettes of his wife Brenda's life in London with her young lover John Beaver; her looking for a job, and gossiping with her friends, and asking the lawyers for more money. She shows no sympathy or concern for Tony at all. This juxtaposition is Waugh's way of saying that British society in the 1930s was just as savage, and bizarre, and cruel, as the jungle with its natives and diseases. In both the city and the wilderness, Tony Last finds that he cannot understand the people and the goings on around him. Waugh confirmed this in an article written much later, where he said of the book:

"and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilized man's helpless plight among them."

Although Waugh did become a Catholic, and an ardently conservative one at that, the reader will find none of the stale paradox or self-assured laziness of Chesterbelloc in his works. In fact, his writing got him into trouble with the Church on more than one occasion, especially after his mockery of missionaries in Black Mischief. Although he wore tweed suits and abominated modernity, his writing is timeless and fresh and extremely entertaining, and he never thumps one over the head with his beliefs or subjects one to tiresome, clumsy Jeremiads; he is a remarkably subtle writer, despite the absurdity on the face of his stories, and he leaves the reader to work out the 'message' of his books on their own. The only proselytising in his works comes from reading them in succession, watching the agony, frivolity and cruelty of his younger years morph into despair in A Handful of Dust (which he wrote after divorcing his adulterous first wife), then give way to the calm and steady faith of his mature works (although the satire is as biting as ever).

I hope this essay convinces you to read him. If you do you shall discover pleasures that are impossible to find in contemporary literature. But I must warn you, that with a full appreciation of Waugh's mastery, is bound to come an increasing, despairing disgust at the state of British letters today. I have read near everything that the man ever put to paper, and there is not a novelist or a journalist alive that comes close to his learning. Next to Waugh, the snootiest of Telegraph columnists read like mewling children with crayons in hand.