Fool’s Gold

A writer who abhorred modern image-making is now defined by an image, a late image: Standing between two stone sphinxes in the garden of his country home and looking a little like their surprised father, Evelyn Waugh performs his country squire act. He is dressed somewhat vulgarly, like Toad of Toad Hall, in a check three-piece tweed suit that looks like bespoke graph paper; a watch chain crosses his plump belly like an alderman’s sash. Mark Gerson’s famous photograph is an exercise in rationed revelation: A trilby hides Waugh’s eyes with its shade, so that we see only his rather unkind mouth and several terraced chins. This is late Waugh, the bucolic bigot, the lion of prejudice who, in “Brideshead Revisited,” had defined the enemy of civilization as the age of “the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures,” or as “the age of Hooper,” Hooper being the platoon commander who vulgarly asks of Brideshead Castle: “one family in a place this size. What’s the use of it?”

Just as a generation of Austrian novelists felt that their lives ended when the Hapsburg Empire began to collapse in Sarajevo in 1914, so Waugh, and others like him, felt that their age ended in 1939. Waugh after 1945, after “Brideshead,” is very different from the Waugh of the 1920s and ‘30s. Yet it is the later Waugh who is most familiar. Our sense of him has been so darkened by the fiery charade of his postwar life that, to compensate, his admirers tend to make him sound as if he were a great moralist, the Swift of SW1; or the greatest comic stylist of the century (but read a page of Joyce or Beckett or Nabokov, and how thin Waugh seems!); or a covert modernist who turned the speech of the upper classes into neurotic fragments as Eliot did with London voices in “The Waste Land”; or, most absurd, as a humanist in disguise. “The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh” demonstrates, however, cruelly enough, that though perhaps never simply the misanthrope of popular image, Waugh was a more limited writer than modern over-compensation will allow: He was a brilliant, polished, somewhat depthless entertainer, at his best when writing a kind of novelized version of West End drawing-room theater and at his worst when crooning on behalf of the causes he believed in (the Catholic church, the endurance of the English aristocracy, old architecture).

Waugh’s early comic brilliance, like so much comic writing, has to do with the conversion of speech, and speech patterns, into discursive prose. Speech runs on, observes few boundaries and is full of non sequiturs and strange juxtapositions. Speech, because it is unguarded, is not always rational and is therefore often comic. Waugh, of course, had an exceptionally hospitable ear, and he listened to the breaking glass of brittle upper-class English speech and imagined it into being in the early novels: “Decline and Fall,” “Vile Bodies,” “A Handful of Dust,” “Scoop.” One of the stories reproduced in this book, “Charles Ryder’s Schooldays,” fills in for us the pre-Oxford life of the narrator of “Brideshead Revisited.” The story is quite without the self-indulgence of that novel and clicks along at a satirical pace. It is an insular, rather trivial, almost pointless fragment--yet another evocation of English boarding school life--but it demonstrates Waugh’s perfect pitch for speech.

The boys are discussing the elevation of O’Malley, who is hated, to the position of prefect (called the Settle): “Graves had him in at the end of last term and said he was making him head of the dormitory. The head of Upper Dormitory never has been on the Settle before last term when they moved Easton up from Lower Anteroom after we ragged Fletcher. O’Malley told Graves he couldn’t take it unless he had an official position.”

The boys’ names, combined with the strange proper terms, clog the sentence into code--a madman’s code. Waugh reveals ordinary speech to be a kind of lunacy. This is what Waugh was best at, and at such moments he does indeed reveal a modernist side (which, like Eliot’s voices, was borrowed from Dickens). It recalls a passage of very similar Joycean speech from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” in which “a fat young man” announces the civil service exam results: “Griffin was plucked. Halpin and O’Flynn are through the home civil. Moonan got fifth place in the Indian. O’Shaughnessy got fourteenth. The Irish fellows in Clarke’s gave them a feed last night. They all ate curry.”

But more than the reproduction of his characters’ speech, Waugh converted speech into his own narrative style; he transferred the mad logic of speech and made it a principle of his comic universe. The typical Waugh sentence runs on in the way speech does, into borderless fields of irrationality: “At dinner Margot talked about matters of daily interest, about some jewels she was having reset, and how they had come back all wrong, and how all the wiring of her London house was being overhauled because of the fear of fire; and how the man she had left in charge of her villa at Cannes had made a fortune at the Casino and given her notice . . . and how the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings was demanding a guarantee that she would not demolish her castle in Ireland; and how her cook seemed to be going off his head that night, the dinner was so dull; and how Bobby Pastmaster was trying to borrow money from her again. . . .”

The comedy arises from the clipped specificity. In reality, our speech is generally vague and filmy, often maddeningly undetailed. Waugh retains only the movement, the speed of speech; for the purposes of comedy, he makes his details abruptly local. This is comic because his sentences then have the form of vagueness (they speed onward borderlessly) but the content of extreme precision. It allows Waugh to slip past us the most outrageous exaggerations, since the propulsion of the sentences is such that the exaggerations are treated as if they were ordinary details. The effect is to make exaggeration seem true, since they must be true if the novelist is making such little fuss about them. This, of course, by understating the comedy, ultimately intensifies it.

Waugh perfected this technique in the early novels and in his letters, where the most bizarre details and connections are offered as if they were mere banalities, hardly worth mentioning: “Miss Jungman has another baby. She has become very proletarian.” Or: “B. Bennett has had all his teeth knocked out by his daughter Vivian.” Or: “I have taken up with a highbrow gentleman who has rubber soles on his boots.” (It is this calm understatement that makes so funny Waugh’s celebrated description of Norman Mailer as “an American pornographer,” as if it were simple fact.)

The “Letters” is probably Waugh’s funniest and most cunning--most literary--book. It is there that his paradoxical comic art of what might be called airy precision finds its most strategic form. His short stories, or most of them, are bald by comparison. Too many of them seem like vacations from the true business of literary composition. Several are feeble, feeble because they so willingly collude in their own limitations. “An Englishman’s Home,” for instance, tells the tale of a stranger who arrives in a typical English village, buys a vacant field and announces that he is planning to build a scientific laboratory on it. The appalled villagers, roused to action, buy the field back from the stranger, who makes a profit and moves on to the next village. The story’s close reveals that the stranger is not, of course, a scientist or a builder, but an ordinary crook, a sort of Chichikov of the shires. Waugh colors in the stripes of the local types--Mr. Metcalfe, Lady Peabury, Colonel Hodge--as expertly as one would expect. But this little chip off Gogol’s block only reveals, by comparison, how weak Waugh’s tale is. It barely rises above the kind of serviceable, middlebrow entertainment of which a hundred English writers would have been capable.

*

Waugh’s severest limitation is that he trades in typologies, not individuals, and one soon wearies of types. At the heart of Waugh is a strange lack of curiosity. He is content merely to click the hard wooden draughts of his types across his metropolitan boards; it is a game. This is surely why one generally begins Waugh’s comic novels with relish and ends them in boredom. The novels somehow run out of irrigation and substitute crisply farcical proceedings for a current of human stories. One of the tales in this book, “Love in the Slump,” shows Waugh at his most typologizing. The story narrates a comic incident in the honeymoon of two dull, perfectly ordinary upper-class people. Here is how Waugh introduces the woman, Angela Trench-Troubridge:

“Angela was twenty-five, pretty, good-natured, lively, intelligent and popular--just the sort of girl, in fact, who, for some mysterious cause deep-rooted in Anglo-Saxon psychology, finds it most difficult to get satisfactorily married. During the last seven years she had done everything which it is customary for girls of her sort to do. In London she had danced on an average four evenings a week, for the first three years at private houses, for the last four at restaurants and night clubs; in the country she had been slightly patronizing to the neighbours . . . . [S]he had worked in a slum and a hat shop, had published a novel, been bridesmaid eleven times and godmother once; been in love, unsuitably, twice; had sold her photograph for fifty guineas to the advertising department of a firm of beauty specialists; had got into trouble when her name was mentioned in gossip columns; had acted in five or six charity matinees and two pageants, had canvassed for the Conservative candidates at two General Elections, and, like every girl in the British Isles, was unhappy at home.”

Of course, the writing is briskly exaggerated, and Waugh is knowing about this portrait of exaggerated normality. But it is not very hard to write like this. Isn’t there a path from this kind of writing to Tom Wolfe’s tumuli of typology, his bulging caricatures? It is hard to be very interested in such a paragon of conformity, unless the writer proceeds to show us that something a little wayward, a little individual, stirs under her society armor. That is precisely what the great, delicate English novelist Henry Green, a friend of Waugh’s, would do in this circumstance, and Angela Trench-Troubridge, in Green’s hands, would live. But this is not Waugh’s way. He simply stretches the essence he has already established and offers a farcical episode in the life of a society type. (The farce is that Angela’s husband gets off the train on the first day of their honeymoon, meets an old school friend on the platform and disappears for a drink, only appearing a week later at the end of the honeymoon. It is a smirking and negligible tale.)

Reading Waugh too often puts one in mind of Virginia Woolf’s remark that “Middlemarch” is one of the few English novels worthy of an adult’s attention. Waugh always glitters, but he is not quite worthy of adult attention. Like so many 20th century British novelists--Angus Wilson, Muriel Spark, Martin Amis, even Salman Rushdie--he took from Dickens certain elements: a brilliance at caricature and vibrating grotesques, an attention to speech, a penchant for outlandish names. But he lacked Dickens’ transfiguring power, which is the power of metaphor. And he lacked Dickens’ humane reach.

Nevertheless, there is one strange story in this book which does not resemble anything else in it. The story is called “Compassion,” and it concerns a Scottish soldier, Major Gordon, who finds himself in Croatia at the end of World War II. His job is to help the anti-fascist partisans, and that job, as he sees it, is only complicated by the presence of 108 needy Jews. The Jews come to Major Gordon and implore him to arrange their escape to Italy. He seems at first unmoved, but his conscience is gradually goaded: “[H]e had seen something entirely new, which needed new eyes to see clearly: humanity in the depths, misery of quite another order from anything he had guessed before.” Major Gordon eventually arranges the safe passage, against great odds, of all but two of the Jews.

The story is too didactic and reveals that sermonizing rostrum which Waugh mounted whenever he was trying to be “affirmative”: “By such strange entrances does compassion sometimes slip, disguised, into the human heart.” (A sentence vulgar enough to have been written by Evelyn’s middlebrow popular novelist brother, Alec Waugh). It is not really inquiring enough to be a great story; it is a brisk parable. But it is firm, unsentimental and absolutely adult, and a brisk parable is probably better than a brisk farce.