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Title: Evelyn Waugh
Author: Macaulay, Rose [Emilie Rose] (1881-1958)
Date of first publication: December 1946
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Horizon, December 1946
   [Vol. XIV, No. 84]
Date first posted: 4 August 2014
Date last updated: 4 August 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1193

This ebook was produced by Al Haines






_ROSE MACAULAY_

EVELYN WAUGH




Most novelists set themselves to explore the world, or some corner of
the world, in which they believe themselves to live; they weave their
dreams, imaginations and tales within their apprehensions of the life
they perceive about them, composing variations on the theme.  Other
writers step aside, turn an oblique glance on the world they know,
reject it, and, half deliberate, half instinctive, compose one of their
own making, a world within a world, in which they can move and invent
with greater felicity, sureness and ease.  Among the world-creators of
our time Evelyn Waugh is the most entertaining, and perhaps the most
gifted.  The world he invented and decorated with extravagant _jeux
d'esprit_ is a comic world.  In it he moves with the blandest security
and ease; from within its circumference he can utter any commentary on
life, create and manipulate any beings who inhabit there.  Brilliantly
equipped to direct the radiant and fantastic circus he has called into
being, he can stand within it cracking his whip while his creatures
leap through his paper hoops with the most engaging levity, the gravest
fantastic capers.  His command of verbal style is adept and skilled,
his characters admirably irresponsible, his wit unfailing.  Like
Anthony Blanche in _Brideshead Revisited_, he does more than entertain,
'transfiguring the party, shedding a vivid, false light of eccentricity
upon everyone', so that prosaic people seem to become creatures of his
fantasy.

What would occur should he step out of his delightful baroque circus
tent into a solid actual world (if indeed any world is this) was not a
question which used to trouble the reader, who accepted his unique
contribution as a priceless gift.  It would seem that he has now
stepped out of it; and the airs beyond the ropes breathe on us with
something less of rarity, with a lusher, less sharp and exhilarating
taste.  It must be the desire of his most ardent devotees that he
should speedily retrace his steps.

He did not begin with the circus.  His first published works were a
brief and competent essay on the Pre-Raphaelites (at the age of
twenty-three) and (at twenty-five) a life of Rossetti, an able,
scholarly and entertaining study, which, if it reveals nothing new
about its fascinating, over-written hero or his friends, gives on them
an intelligent and sympathetic slant.  A serious work of interpretation
and history, it did nothing to prepare the way for _Decline and Fall_,
which broke on the English literary scene the following year.
Sub-titled 'an illustrated novelette', it was, the author explained in
a note, not meant to be shocking but funny.  A redundant note: _Decline
and Fall_ is funny from first to last.  Its bland, destructive
brilliance lights up a world of comic happenings through which people
move with the lunatic logic and inconsequence imparted to them by their
creator's ironic vision of mankind.  Though it was apparent that a
bright particular star has risen in the fictional firmament, that
firmament was not empty of stars that twinkled a little similarly, with
something of the same bland and gay insouciance.  But _Decline and
Fall_ carried the subversive approach further, enlarging the bounds of
erratic nonsense.  It opens at Oxford, with a riotous meeting of the
Bollinger Club.  'A shriller note could now be heard rising from Sir
Alastair's rooms; any who have heard that sound will shrink at the
recollection of it; it is the sound of the English county families
baying for broken glass....'

The detachment is complete.  (The scene may profitably be compared with
the Oxford scenes, more nostalgically and naturalistically handled, in
_Brideshead Revisited_.)  In the ensuing romp, the Bellinger bloods
break up pianos, smash china, throw pictures into water-jugs, tear up
sheets and destroy manuscripts, and debag Paul Pennyfeather, the
innocuous and luckless hero of this tale, a quiet young man from
Lancing who is reading for holy orders; he is sent down for running
trouserless across the quad.  'I expect you'll be becoming a
schoolmaster, sir,' the college porter says to him.  'That's what most
of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.'

That is, in fact, what Paul does; he gets a post in a private school,
perhaps the only attractive private school in modern fiction, and
continues his innocent and disastrous downward career.  The school
staff, and in particular the headmaster and his assistant Captain
Grimes, are superb figures of comedy; the climate is that of an
inspired lunatic asylum, the conversations extremely and ceaselessly
funny.  The story is gaily, grimly and totally amoral; its vicissitudes
catastrophically logical; its ingenuous hero the victim of the most
shocking turpitudes and betrayals.  He is landed in prison, helped out
of it by intriguing friends, and ends officially dead and resuming life
in disguise, a quiet Oxford ordinand once more.  The book is, apart
from the sparkle of its wit and its baroque detail, an excellent and
coherent story.  It moves from start to finish with experienced ease.
It has, I believe, been found vulgar by some critics: but it moves in a
sphere where vulgarity, refinement and morality do not apply, the
sphere of irreverent and essentially anarchic fantasy.  The world, one
might say, of Ronald Firbank, of Norman Douglas, perhaps of the
brothers Marx.  But it reflected none of these; it was a genuinely
original comic work.

It was followed next year by _Vile Bodies_, a novel more crowded, less
classic and clear-cut in plot, more dispersed in interest, more of a
revue show.  Disappointing at first reading to some who had looked for
another _Decline and Fall_, it proved a dazzling kaleidoscope of
brightest Mayfair, brilliantly fantasticated.  'The action of the
book', says the Author's Note, 'is laid in the near future, when
existing social tendencies have become more marked....  I have assumed
a certain speeding up of legal procedure and daily journalism.'  Social
life, too, is sped up; the parties, the racket, the vices, the chatter,
the jokes.  Here and there Firbank takes a hand; as in the dialogue
between the two old _mondaines_ on the channel crossing.  But Mr. Waugh
has not Firbank's butterfly irresponsibility; he is never silly; he
knows what he is about; his imagination is at once more constructive
and destructive.  The giddy whirl of _Vile Bodies_ snatches up in its
dance at least a dozen separate groups of people, each with their own
story, as in a ballet where groups perform in different corners of the
stage, sometimes crossing one another's orbits, entangling one
another's courses, flung together and lurching apart like heavenly
bodies on the run.  The mass effect of unsteady, extravagant fantasy
and sick and squalid reaction is breath-taking.  The moralist has
looked in; the smell of dust and ashes hangs on the circus air; irony
has become less bland, the death's head grins among the roses.  Every
now and then Mr. Waugh extricates himself from his tale and becomes a
commentator, pointing a social moral, with 'Oh, bright young people',
or 'You see, that was the kind of party Archie Schwert's party was'.
When _Vile Bodies_ was dramatized, a chorus of draped figures came on
between acts and made lament.  This damaged the play.  But the comments
in the book, though out of keeping, are too infrequent to damage it; it
pursues its course, kaleidoscopic, various, irresistibly funny.  Its
wit seldom flags; situations and persons are flung on the scene with
lavish extravagance; a more parsimonious or cautious novelist might
have reflected that he was using up in this one book material for a
dozen.  As before, he has for _jeune premier_ and fortune's football an
ingenuous and luckless youth, see-sawed up and down by fate, roguery,
and his own folly.  He saunters tranquilly among sudden fortunes and
catastrophes, love, loss, customs officers, dud cheques, drunken majors
who welsh, young women as debonair and luckless as himself.  He has no
more moral sense than anyone else in the book, but a rather appealing
innocence.  We leave him on the battlefield, grasping in his pocket a
Huxdane-Halley bomb for the dissemination of leprosy germs among the
foe.

Moral scruples nowhere intrude in _Vile Bodies_.  That is, no one has
them except the author himself, who shows occasional signs; we discern
them, apart from explicit comment, in the book's structure.  Agatha
Runcible, whirling to her fatal crash in a fantastic motor race, then
dying among cocktails and chattering friends, and finally buried with
only one of her gay companions at the funeral (the others did not
bother to go, or were too uneasily alarmed at such a grim intruder on
their revels as death), is a figure perhaps more menacing and exemplary
than the Bright Young Person she seems; Mr. Waugh might, with a little
less of artistic control, have emphasized this aspect of her, given her
in her last moments a spiritual malaise more explicit and profound than
her delirium of racing cars.  She dies in a nightmare of skidding
wheels and crazy speed, crying '_Faster, Faster_'.  Symbolic, but
admirable in its reticent realism.  Would the later Waugh, the Waugh of
_Brideshead_, have been equal to this, or would he have floundered the
girl into remorse, bewildered terror of death, change of heart, perhaps
introducing Father Rothschild, the priest, into her last hour?  There
is no such concession here: Agatha dies as she has lived, in a hectic
spin.

It is noticeable that none of these people, young or older, has any
interest in art, literature, drama, music, or world affairs.  They are
amiable nit-wits.  True, one of them has apparently had abroad with him
some books on architecture, economics and history, and the
_Purgatorio_', but really only to give the Dover customs officer
opportunity for cracks.  'French, eh?' he says of Dante.  'I guessed as
much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder.'  And, 'Particularly
against books the Home Secretary is.  If we can't stamp out literature
in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
That's what he said the other day in Parliament, and I says Hear
hear....'

A pretty scene; but one cannot believe that the traveller had ever read
the books.  None of the vile bodies reads anything, except the gossip
columns in the papers, for which they also write.  A critic has said
lately in these pages that genuine tragedy at a low level of mentality
is a contradiction in terms, and attempts to create it produce an
impression of impertinence and moral chaos.  I do not myself find this
altogether true; one can think of tragedies that befell low
mentalities, in Dickens, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, and elsewhere.
But if it were true, there could be no tragedy in _Decline and Fall_ or
in _Vile Bodies_, where the intellectual sensibility of the characters
is as low as their moral and spiritual apprehension.  Indeed, it is
lower.  It is not out of the question that the young (and old)
barbarians should 'get religion'; there is a moment at a party when,
under the hypnotic influence of a troupe of evangelists, Lady
Metroland's worldly guests quiver on the verge of self-abandonment to
religious hysteria.

'But suddenly on the silence vibrant with self-accusation broke the
organ voice of England, the hunting-cry of the _ancien rgime_.  Lady
Circumference gave a resounding snort of disapproval.  "What a damned
impudent woman," she said.  Adam and Nina began to giggle....'

It had been, perhaps, a close thing.  The catching of the Bright Young
People by any exciting religious movement, whether Aime Macpherson's
Angels, or Mr. Buchman's life-changers, or a branch of an historic
church, is always a possibility round the corner.  What is not round
any corner for them is their conversion to intellectuality, culture,
artistic or literary sensibility.  Sublimely uneducated, gaily
philistine, blandly barbarian, agreeably funny, they reel through the
book with the maximum of wit on the part of their creator, the minimum
of intelligence on their own.  Not for a moment does the brilliance
falter or the pace slacken.  More truly comic situations, the
extravagance of their conception balancing the unemotional economy of
their setting forth, are to be found in few novels.  As a whole, _Vile
Bodies_ cannot compete with the more close-knit _Decline and Fall_, but
the bits and pieces are as funny, the general effect as glittering.
_Decline and Fall_ approaches more nearly to the bland shimmer of
_South Wind_, that great amoral novel whose ripe intellectual humour
none of its contemporaries or successors can emulate.  In _South Wind_
is true ironic detachment; its author surveys the world with the amused
derision of a learned elderly satyr looking on at humanity's capers
from his private brake, mocking, philosophic and undisturbed.  Norman
Douglas deals with all ranks and kinds of person, from peasant to
prince; Evelyn Waugh in _Vile Bodies_ (more than in _Decline and Fall_,
which includes a fantastic scholastic world) concerns himself almost
entirely with the rich of Mayfair.  Though some of them think
themselves poor, they always have money for parties of pleasure.  The
professional middle classes, who live by their wits, not on inherited
capital, and therefore with enforced economy, do not really engage his
attention.  He is amused and a little beglamoured by the gay and idle
rich: too much so, for his wit can play with peculiar excellence on
such small beer as seedy journalists, dingy schoolmasters, and shady
adventurers.

Between this and his next (and possibly his best) novel, _Black
Mischief_, Mr. Waugh produced two travel books, _Labels_ and _Remote
People_.  _Labels_ is an account of a cruise, slight, bright and
amusing; witty bookmaking, but Mr. Waugh's is too acute an intelligence
for this kind of travelogue.  _Remote People_ is, on the other hand,
entirely up his street; it deals with an actual country which he might
have invented for his comic world.  Abyssinia was a gift to him.  The
book's first and better half is a quite brilliant description of the
coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie, which he went out to report
for a newspaper.  The eccentricities of Abyssinia's ancient and
remarkable Christian uncivilization were near kin to his own creations;
no wonder that they captured his humour and imagination, and that he
made out of them three delightful books: _Remote People_, _Black
Mischief_, and _Scoop_.  The fantastic contradictions, myths and
absurdities of the strange barbarian land, the imposing lavishness of
the coronation, made of the expedition a stagey comic opera, a happy
blend of the pompous, the romantic, the barbarous, the picturesque, the
absurd.  It was a theme nicely suited to this sardonic and relishing
mind.  Abyssinia is savoured with a sensibility no less keen because
sharply satiric, an intelligence no less efficient because also
romantic.

'It is to _Alice in Wonderland_ that my thoughts reach in seeking some
historical parallel for life in Addis Ababa ... it is in Alice only
that one finds the peculiar flavour of galvanized and translated
reality....  How to recapture, how retail, the crazy enchantment of
those Ethiopian days?'

However engaged his imagination was by the enchantment, his
appreciation of the Abyssinian scene has sobriety and grasp.
Picturesque colour and detail, extravagantly funny incidents, abound;
so also does information on geography, ethnography, personalities and
politics.  The book is as amusing and lively an extravaganza as a Waugh
novel.  That is to say, the Abyssinian half of it is.  The second half,
which relates travel in East Africa, is less amusing, less fresh in
subject, and has its sententious moments.  The writer has stepped
outside the circus for an excursion into actual worlds.  There are a
few good scenes, encounters and fiascos, but too few.  The lights are
down; there is an effect of writing undertaken without much zest.

The zest is all back again in _Black Mischief_, a gay tapestry woven
out of the Abyssinian material; with it we are once more inside the
ropes.  It is an admirably funny fantasia; several of its characters
are really good creations (one uses the word to include the element
drawn, in all Mr. Waugh's novels, from life, but fantasticated and
dressed up in his own manner)--the ingenuous and aspiring black
emperor, the helpful Armenian rascal, the enterprising English cad, the
British and French envoys.  There are a few London scenes of rather
dreary revelry and social life, faintly and less gaily recalling _Vile
Bodies_, and dealing with many of the same people; but the bulk of the
story occurs in Azania, and is in the best vein of fantastic farce.
All the author's gifts are in evidence: unceasing wit, precise economy
of phrase, quick-fire dialogue, a background of exquisite absurdity.
Basil Seal, the hero-cad, a recurrent figure in the later novels, who
here makes his dbut, is (within the convention of the circus, and
conforming to its terms) a masterly study; a bore to his friends, a
cadger, a drunkard, a liar and a thief, he lacks the engaging
cheerfulness of Captain Grimes, but has a quality of remorseless and
resourceful vice that would fit him for the hero of a gangster novel.
_Black Mischief_, whether or not it is Mr. Waugh's best book, is on the
whole the most attractive to read.

After it, _A Handful of Dust_, two years later, seems up to a point
more ordinary, for it deals with real life: it is a social novel about
adultery, treachery, betrayal, tragic and sordid desolation.  The
gaiety has gone, and much of the wit.  The characters seem to lack
motive and awareness.  The theme is the destruction of a simple, dull
and honest bore by his wife, a cad without heart or affections; the
social scene is one of dreary squalor and unkindness.  Gone is the
sparkle of _Vile Bodies_; it is replaced by a neat, crisp, jabbing
bitterness and the tragedy of meaningless, silly lusts.  Grim events
succeed each other; wit is not lacking in their narration, but it has
become angry and adult.  The last section of the book, however, gives
the tragedy a new and wholly original baroque twist; the dull and
ill-used hero, born to be betrayed, is left the victim of a fate
contrived with devilish ingenuity, and will pass the rest of his life a
slave, reading Dickens aloud to his master in an Amazonian jungle; a
brilliant and terrifying _tour de force_.  Later, the author wrote an
alternative ending, of a more ordinary, cynical type; more probable,
less remarkable, it has a closer coherence with the rest of the book.
_A Handful of Dust_ seems to reach the climax of Mr. Waugh's view of
life as the meaningless jigging of barbarous nit-wits.  Pleasure,
sympathetic or ironic, in their absurdities has vanished: disgust has
set in.

What has also gone from his view is detachment.  In his next book he is
no longer objective: he has come down on a side.  In art so naturally
ironic and detached as his, this is a serious loss; it undermines his
best gifts.  And it was unlucky that the first of his partisan,
side-taking books should have been a work of history, where
objectiveness and truth to fact should be a _sine qua non_.  In _Edmund
Campion_ there is too little of both, though there is interest,
brilliance, imagination, and sympathetic interpretation.  But it is
like a barrister's brief, omitting all that does not support his case.
It would seem scarcely credible, for instance, that any one should
undertake a serious life of Campion without familiarity with the State
Papers of the time, the letters that passed between Madrid, the
Vatican, the Spanish ambassador in London, Cardinal Allen of Douai,
Father Parsons, Dr. Nicholas Sanders, and the others of the 'Spanish
party' among the English Catholics (which included nearly all the
prominent Jesuits abroad).  Yet Mr. Waugh shows no signs throughout his
book (or in his lists of references) of having read these, or of
familiarity with the unceasing plots, intrigues and correspondence that
went on about 'the enterprise of England', the plots to invade Britain,
murder or depose Elizabeth, and set Philip of Spain on the English
throne.  The Spanish ambassador wrote continually of his hope to see
his Majesty in speedy possession of his realm, that heresy might be
extirpated and the Faith restored.  English Catholics were absolved
from their allegiance, and those who obeyed the Queen's laws put under
sentence of anathema by a Bull whose provocative folly caused even
Philip and Alva to protest; for, said Philip, 'it will drive the queen
and her friends to oppress and persecute the few good Catholics who
remain in England'.  The English exiles were in perpetual
intrigue--'traitors who gape daily for the death of the queen', as an
agent wrote home.  Madrid and Rome financed and equipped one fruitless
invasion expedition after another.  Yet Mr. Waugh can write almost as
if Catholic plots were an invention of Cecil's.  Campion was, indeed,
an innocent non-political missionary; but Parsons, his chief colleague
in the mission, was steeped, like Dr. Allen, in conspiracy.  As an
earlier biographer of Campion observes, though Campion himself
disapproved of the papal policy, and laboured merely to make every
Englishman a Catholic, his friends wished to make every Catholic a
conspirator.  Allen wrote to the Pope that English Catholics were
already conspirators, and would welcome Catholic invaders of any
nation, since they detested their own government more than any foreign
prince, and would all join the Pope's army if it landed, and help to
depose 'this Jezebel'.  Such views were an exile's pipe-dream, of a
kind familiar in history: their answer was the English Catholic
resistance to the Armada, when nearly all Allen's fifth column let him
down.  But even the innocent Campion's mission was not, as has been
pointed out by historians, purely spiritual; indeed, how could it be,
since Catholics were contending for more than their lives?

There are other indications of bias (that natural but deadly poison to
historians) than the glossing over of the political side of these
heroic expeditions.  That fanatical religious idealist, Pope Pius V,
with his notorious record as Grand Inquisitor, his incitement to murder
and war, his rejoicing over the massacre of the Huguenots, is described
as a saint; this is surely to debase the currency of words.  Then Mr.
Waugh's excessive hostility to the Anglican Church leads him too often
into inaccuracies, as when he calls it 'the crazy, fashionable
Calvinism' (ignoring the incessant war waged against it after the
Elizabethan settlement by Calvinists and other Puritans) and repeats
several times that it had no sacraments.  What he of course means is
that, in the eyes of his Church, Anglican sacraments were not valid;
but, from the way he puts it, one might not gather that the deluded
Anglicans believed that they were, or that they were taught that they
'verily and indeed received the body and blood of Christ' in communion.
After all, the Prayer Book was mainly translated (as Milton was to
complain bitterly) from Catholic missals, though mutilated; it earned
the undying hatred of the Puritan party, who were persecuted under
Elizabeth with cruel severity.  But Mr. Waugh dislikes this wary _via
media_ so much that he relegates it to the outer darkness of the
Protestant left wing.  To dislike the deplorable outrages of the
Reformation, and many aspects of the whole business, is natural enough;
indeed, it is rather hard not to; but to take ecclesiastical sides is,
to a style such as Mr. Waugh's, part of whose charm is in ironic
objectivity and detachment, fatal.  Partisanship should be left to
thunderers; one cannot have it both ways, and something must be
sacrificed to individual style.

Though _Campion_ is a very readable and often moving book, and its
brave and touching story beautifully told, greater accuracy and balance
would have given it a finer urbane polish; as it is, it remains a
little one-sided and shrill, and strengthens one's view that its author
betrays his gifts when he deserts his own idiom and convention.

_Campion_ is, however, mellowness itself compared with _Waugh in
Abyssinia_ (1936), a blast of triumph over the Italian conquest of that
land.  Mr. Waugh went to Abyssinia to write of its subjugation for 'the
only London paper that seemed to be taking a realistic view of the
situation', and to blow a scornful trumpet against the 'whinney of the
nonconformist conscience' which had protested against the assault--the
same whinney from the same conscience that protested against the Nazis,
and is protesting now, though more faintly, against the enslavement of
eastern Europe.  Mr. Waugh disagreed with this whinney.  He found that
the Italians had spread order, decency and civilization, that yperite
was pretty harmless, though the Abyssinians were 'bored and exasperated
with a weapon to which they could make no effective return', that
Graziani was a most agreeable man, that along the new Italian roads
'will pass the eagles of ancient Rome, as they came to our savage
ancestors in France and Britain and Germany', and that 'the new rgime
is going to succeed'.  He completely failed to grasp the idea behind
the League sanctions applied to Italy for its aggression against
another League State, and calls the British protests 'peevish and
impolitic remonstrance'.

An odd and rather unchivalrous book.  What is its motive?  Preference
for Italians over Abyssinians?  That we most of us share; it should
not, but perhaps does, affect the issue.  Dislike of black populations?
He shows no such dislike in _Remote People_, _Black Mischief_, or
_Scoop_.  Support of a policy endorsed by the Italian clergy?  Very
probably.  Dislike of the League of Nations!  Again, likely enough.  Or
merely sympathy with the big battalions?  If it were that, Mr. Waugh
should now be crying up the Russian domination, and he is not.  This
book must be pronounced a Fascist tract.  Sadly we hasten away from it,
to the pleasures of _Scoop_.  This gay fantasy (published two years
later, and also about Abyssinia) is extremely funny, entirely
good-tempered, and of considerable brilliance.  If any one in it is a
Roman Catholic or a Protestant, Mr. Waugh does not mention it; religion
does not throw its fatal apple of discord among the _dramatis person_;
every one gets fair treatment, every one is ridiculous, and the whole
scene of delicious absurdity.  With it Mr. Waugh re-entered his
peculiar world; it was a relief to those of us who had begun to fear
that we were losing him, that the wit was being slain by the
propagandist and the partisan.  _Scoop_ carries an ingenious plot, and
a crackling of jokes only a little less good than those of _Decline and
Fall_; it is a completely light-hearted _jeu d'esprit_, in which the
journalistic and tourist experience gained in Abyssinia is again
brilliantly used.  It is Mr. Waugh's last novel for four years.

Written in the summer of 1941, _Put Out More Flags_ is a war novel.
The rejection of temptations, such as patriotism and public spirit, is
creditable, and almost, but not quite, complete.  The central
character, the iniquitous Basil Seal, is more ingeniously corrupt than
ever, making his fortune out of blackmail and evacuees, and alighting
for a time in the Ministry of Information, that quarry for wits, where
he ruins a friend and appropriates his possessions.  The whole
composition is gay, heartless, neat and amusing.  It stands on the
border between fantasy and actuality.

After it (published the same year, with a preliminary note that it
dealt with a world now dead and would never be finished) came a
perfectly serious fragment of a novel called _Work Suspended_.  Mr.
Waugh said that it was his best writing up till then.  He is right that
it is well written: he always (or nearly always) writes well.  It is
carefully composed; it lacks the earlier sparkle; it has a seriousness
of tone that might or might not have been folly justified by its theme
as it developed: it did not develop, so we cannot know.  In spite of a
fine and delicate vein of comedy (the hero's artist father and the
commercial traveller who ran him down and killed him, are both charming
figures of fun), there is a sobriety, almost a solemnity, of mood that
foreshadows that of _Brideshead_.  Lucy, the grave young heroine, is
presented with restraint, and with a new subtlety of emotion, composed
and near-profound, at times a little Jamesian in slant.  The style is
quiet and full.  That it was not finished one feels a loss.  It was an
experiment, a study, abandoned, in a new genre; it seems, fragment
though it is, to have balance and perspective; and the key is low; if
ecstasy should develop, one does not feel that it would necessarily be
flamboyant.  It might (or possibly not) have justified its author as a
straight novelist.  But it shows the warning red--or perhaps only
amber--lights.

Between suspending this work and writing _Brideshead Revisited_ (in
1944), Mr. Waugh underwent development.  The baroque became flamboyant;
the style curved and flowered; sentimentality at times cushioned it; a
grave lushness bloomed.  Not continuously, but at intervals,
emotionalism, over-brimming the theme, swamped it.  The era of
brilliant farce was over; the circus was deserted.  Irony and humour
still remained; there are in _Brideshead_ wit of character and some
sharply drawn comic scenes; there is also much subtly precise and
intelligent writing; but it flowers too often into an orchidaceous
luxury of bloom that, in a hitherto ironic wit, startles and
disconcerts.  Love, the English aristocracy, and the Roman Catholic
Church, combine to liquefy a style that should be dry.  Like _Work
Suspended_, the story is told in the first person; a mode that affords
opportunities too tempting for romantic soliloquy.  The Oxford section
is good, its characters excellently suggested (rather than drawn), its
atmosphere authentic, its period the lavish 'twenties.  To each
character a real-life model or two is (probably wrongly) attributed by
sapient readers, always more anxious than authors for the _roman 
clef_.  Sebastian Flyte, mentally below normal, drunk, silly, of
touching beauty, potentially a saint, has an odd, improbable existence
of his own; his equally beautiful, less saintly sister Julia, on the
other hand, belongs to the realms of fantasy, one might almost say of
the novelette; Lady Marchmain is better, because less romanticized;
Lord Marchmain will pass for a rakish eloped father and husband, until
his deplorable deathbed; their elder son is a cleverly imagined puritan
fantastic.  None of them has the sharp actuality of some of the minor
and more plebeian figures--stray undergraduates (in particular the
sophisticated homosexual), the common Lieutenant Hooper, who excites
the acid snob-distaste of the narrator and of Mr. Waugh, Mr. Samgrass
the don, a portrait etched with dislike and wit, the narrator's
scoffing father, the amiable Glasgow-Irish priest with his cheerful
pertinacity, the more elaborate portraits of the Canadian millionaire
and the arty, gushing wife.  About the Flytes there remains to the end
something phoney: they belong to a day-dream, to a grandiose world of
elegance and Palladian grace, a more than mortal ecstasy.  Their
conversation is at times incredible; Julia's monologue about her 'sin'
on pages 251-3; Lord Marchmain's about his ancestors on his deathbed;
some other passages, which flower up from naturalism like exotic purple
plants in a hot-house.  Some of these purple passages concern love,
some a romantic memory, some sin, some religion, some food and drink
(which are treated with intense and almost mystical earnestness; a good
meal in a restaurant becomes a sacred rite).  Mr. Waugh has been
charged with snobbishness.  I would rather call it self-indulgence in
the pleasures of adolescent surrender to glamour, whether to the
glamour of beauty, food, rank, love, church, society, or fine writings.
For example, love:

'So at sunset I took formal possession of her as her lover.  It was no
time for the sweets of luxury; they would come, in their season, with
the swallow and the lime flowers.  Now, on the rough water, as I was
made free of her narrow loins and, it seemed now, in assuaging that
fierce appetite, cast a burden which I had borne all my life, toiled
under, not knowing its nature--now, while the waves still broke and
thundered on the prow, the act of possession was a symbol, a rite of
ancient origin and solemn meaning.'

And dinner:

'I remember the dinner well--soup of _oseille_, a sole quite simply
cooked in a white wine sauce, a _caneton  la presse_, a lemon
_souffl_.  At the last minute, fearing that the whole thing was too
simple for Rex, I added _caviar aux blinis_.  And for wine I let him
give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with the
duck, a Clos de Bre of 1904....  The cream and hot butter mingled and
overflowed separating each glaucose bead of caviar from its fellows,
capping it in white and gold....  The soup was delicious after the rich
blinis--hot, thin, bitter, frothy.....  The sole was so simple and
unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it.  We ate to the music of the
press--the crunch of the bones, the drip of blood and marrow, the tap
of the spoon basting the thin slices of breast....  I rejoiced in the
Burgundy.  How can I describe it? ... This Burgundy seemed to me, then,
serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and
better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had
learned a better wisdom than his.  By chance I met this wine again,
lunching with my wine merchant in St. James's Street, in the first
autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years,
but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime and ...
whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of
hope.'

And the season:

'Some said it was the most brilliant season since the war, that things
were getting into their stride again.  Julia, by right, was at the
centre of it....  Foreigners returning on post from their own waste
lands wrote home that here they seemed to catch a glimpse of the world
they had believed lost for ever among the mud and wire, and through
those halcyon weeks Julia darted and shone, part of the sunshine
between the trees, part of the candle-light in the mirror's spectrum,
so that elderly men and women, sitting aside with their memories, saw
her as herself the blue-bird.

'"'Bridey' Marchmain's eldest girl," they said.  "Pity he can't see her
tonight."

'That night and the night after and the night after, wherever she went,
always in her own little circle of intimates, she brought to all whose
eyes were open to it a moment of joy, such as strikes deep to the heart
on the river's bank when the kingfisher suddenly flames across dappled
water.

'This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through
the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the
power of her own beauty, hesitating on the steps of life; one who had
suddenly found herself armed unawares; the heroine of a fairy story
turning over in her hands the magic rings; she had only to stroke it
with her finger-tips and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to
open at her feet and belch forth her titanic servant, the fawning
monster who would bring her whatever she asked, but bring it, perhaps,
in unwelcome shape.'

And the ramblings of the dying marquis:

'They dug to the foundations to carry the stone for the new house; the
house that was a century old when Aunt Julia was born.  Those were our
roots in the waste hollows of Castle Hill, in the brier and nettle;
among the tombs in the old church and the chantrey where no clerk sings.

'Aunt Julia knew the tombs, cross-legged knight and doubleted earl,
marquis like a Roman senator, limestone, alabaster and Italian marble;
tapped the escutcheons with her ebony cane, made the casque ring over
old Sir Roger.  We were knights then, baronets since Agincourt, the
larger honours came with the Georges.  They came the last and they'll
go the first; the barony descends in the female line....'

All these passages, and others, might have been pilloried in bland
ridicule in the earlier novels--in Lord Copper's newspapers, for
instance, along with the finny creatures plashing their lush way
through the reeds.

It is part of the adolescent approach, too, to mistake a part for the
whole; this, I think, Mr. Waugh does in _Brideshead_, and it gives just
the effect of triviality which should have been avoided in a book
alleged to be 'an attempt to trace the workings of the divine purpose
in a pagan world'.  No purpose can well have greater importance; no
faith can be more worth asserting than that 'the human spirit,
redeemed, can survive all disasters'.  But Mr. Waugh seems to equate
the divine purpose, the tremendous fact of God at work in the universe,
with obedient membership of a church; the human spirit, if redeemed,
must loyally conform to this church and its rules.  It is perhaps an
inevitable view for a sincere Roman Catholic, and it is not for those
outside this communion to criticize it; but no less inevitably, it
seems to them to reduce the formidable problems of the universe and the
human spirit to a level almost parochial.  Divine purpose, human
redemption, must flow through channels larger than those of any church;
the impression is rather of an attempt to pour the ocean into a stoup.
The interest in moral issues which, as has been lately said by a
critic, must in the end impose itself again on novelists, transcends
(even if it often includes) loyalty to a church: in Mr. Waugh's novel,
it is subordinate to and conditioned by this.  (Here he differs from
that equally convinced Catholic but greater and more sin-haunted
moralist, Graham Greene.)

Not only does this concentration on a church narrow the moral issues,
but it seems to add a flavour of acrimony, a kind of partisan contempt
for other churches, about whose members acid and uncivil remarks are
made by persons in the book, voicing, one would say, their author.  It
is the same belligerent attitude as was shown in _Campion_, but with
less excuse, since Protestants and Catholics were in Campion's time at
war, and enmity may be part of the period approach.  They are now at
peace; and great civility and respect are shown, at least in this
country, towards Catholics by Protestants.  Mr. Waugh's answer would
perhaps be that other churches, being in schism, are unworthy of
civility in return.  This rather truculent and acid attitude seems to
have developed some years back, showing itself partly in intemperate
assaults on the writings of those from whose views he dissented, those
who inclined to agnosticism in religion or to the Left in politics.
Strangely fierce intolerances and phobias emerged; one gathered that he
despised and hated, rather than tolerated, religious and political
dissidents from his own views.  Gone is the detachment, and with it the
bland, amused, tolerance, of the early novels.  Belief meant for him
hatred of misbelievers; no sympathetic effort to understand their
standpoint has been evident, still less the urbane culture which
recognizes human error to be distributed among all sections of opinion,
including that to which oneself belongs.  This is the spirit that shows
itself intermittently, and to its detriment, through _Brideshead
Revisited_.

Nevertheless, _Brideshead_ has remarkable qualities.  When not
over-written and lush, and too consciously, opulently graceful, its
style is admirable; the construction (the story of the past inserted
like a long reverie between the present-day beginning and end)
effective; there is humour, though it dissolves helplessly before love,
the church, or a delicious meal; there are some well-drawn human beings
and some good talk.  If Mr. Waugh would sternly root out the
sentimentalities and adolescent values which have, so deplorably as it
seems to many of us, coiled themselves about the enchanting comic
spirit which is his supreme asset as a writer, and return to being the
drily ironic narrator of the humours of his world and of his lavish
inventive fancy, he would thereby increase his stature, he would be not
a less but a more serious and considerable figure in contemporary and
future letters.  His genius and his reputation seem to stand at the
crossroads; his admirers can only hope that he will take the right
turning.  It is possible that he may.  The sentimentality that largely
vitiates _Brideshead_ is a common, perhaps in some degree or another a
universal, weakness.  There is in nearly every writer, perhaps in
nearly every human being, a soft-headed romantic, who will, if allowed,
get out of hand.  The creature may expend himself while young in
writing sentimental verse or sentimental prose; he may thus write
himself out.  Or he may throughout his master's life lurk, sly and only
partly suppressed, in a corner of his soul, giving the pen now and then
a quirk, inserting here a lush phrase, there a row of dots, spying pink
roses round the porch and blue-birds on the wing, patting life and
death into romantic fancy shapes.  He may be thrown out early, leaving
only a manageable phantom behind; he may remain, a permanent partner,
either growing or dwindling in stature.  In Mr. Waugh's case, this
romantic being, kept well under in earlier life, would seem to have
temporarily seized the pen.  An unhappy and quite unsuitable
partnership, overdue for dissolution.






[End of Evelyn Waugh, by Rose Macaulay]
