by David Lodge
So what sort of books are these novels, and what is the secret of their enduring and catholic (with a small “c”) appeal? The first thing to be said about them is that they are funny. Very funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. Laughter, as we know (intuitively, and lately from medical science), is highly therapeutic; and the ability to provoke it, in generation after generation of readers, is a rare gift, always cherished. But to call these books “comic novels” might suggest that they belong to a sub-genre of light fiction designed merely to divert and amuse. Waugh’s early novels certainly do that—but they do much more. They disturb and challenge as well as entertain the reader. P. G. Wodehouse wrote “comic novels”—with great skill and verve, which Waugh greatly admired. But they are essentially escapist and formulaic; they do not grapple with the dark side of human nature. As Waugh himself eloquently observed, late in life, “For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no Fall of Man . . . the gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled.”1 The world of Waugh’s fiction, in contrast, is definitely a fallen one, in which people act with appalling disregard for fidelity, honesty, and all the other virtues. The fact that this behaviour is often very amusing does not make it any less shocking.
For this reason these books are sometimes described as satires. Waugh himself disclaimed this description, asserting that satire “flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards.”2 In fact it is doubtful whether there ever was such an era—it is a historical construction or a nostalgic myth. But the idea was of the utmost importance to Waugh’s imagination. His work is saturated in the idea of decline—that civilization is in a state of terminal decay. The title of his first novel, Decline and Fall, could stand as the title of almost all of them, and the hymn sung by Uncle Theodore in Scoop, “Change and decay in all around I see,” could be their signature tune. Satire in any era is a kind of writing that draws its energy and fuels its imagination from an essentially critical and subversive view of the world, seizing with delight on absurdities, anomalies, and contradictions in human conduct. It is not the disposable wrapping around a set of positive moral precepts. Evelyn Waugh’s early novels therefore have an essentially satirical motivation. They turn an impartial and comprehensive ironic vision upon the pretensions and follies of every class, profession, race, and even religion. They gave offence to some readers in their own day, and undoubtedly they still do in the era of Political Correctness. We all have a desire or need to protect some things from irreverent scrutiny. But in these novels nothing is immune.
In combining elements of comedy, often of a robustly farcical kind, with satirical wit and caricature, in order to explore social reality with an underlying seriousness of purpose, Evelyn Waugh belonged to a venerable and peculiarly English literary tradition which one can trace back through Dickens and Thackeray, Smollett, Sterne, and Henry Fielding. Lewis Carroll was also a perpetual source of inspiration. But Waugh’s early novels were distinctively modern—indeed, they were significantly innovative in form; though it was some time before this was fully perceived or appreciated. Could novels so effortless to read, so funny and so accessible, really belong to the history of modern literature? The academic critics of the time certainly didn’t think so. Reviews apart, there was virtually no serious criticism written about Evelyn Waugh until after World War II (and then, ironically, the usual complaint was that he was not as good as he had been before the War).
One reason for this neglect was that in the perspective of the dominant critical orthodoxy, that of the New Criticism, modern fiction was identified with modernist fiction, that is to say the symbolist novel of subjective consciousness as represented variously by the work of Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. Modernist fiction was difficult, obscure, experimental. It sacrificed story to the representation of subjective experience. It heightened and distorted language to imitate the workings of the consciousness and the unconscious. The generation of writers to which Waugh belonged (it includes Christopher Isherwood, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Anthony Powell) were of course well aware of this body of work, and of its poetic equivalents (Waugh’s familiarity with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is particularly obvious). In many ways they shared the assumptions on which it was based—that modern life was peculiarly chaotic, disorderly, and unstable, and that the conventions of the Victorian or Edwardian realistic novel were inadequate to represent it truthfully. But like every new generation of writers, they had to free themselves from “the anxiety of influence” by their literary father-figures; they had to find a new way to “make it new” They developed a fictional technique that was antithetical to that of modernist fiction, without being a mere reversion to Victorian or Edwardian models. Instead of the over-plotted, over-moralized traditional novel, and instead of the almost plotless stream-of-consciousness novel, they wrote novels which declined either to comment or to introspect, which told interesting but often unsettling stories mainly through dialogue and objective description of external behaviour.
Of course nothing is ever entirely new in the development of literary form. There is always a precursor, a source of inspiration, for every innovation. In Waugh’s case it was Ronald Firbank, that late-flowering bloom of the Decadence. Waugh’s description of Firbank’s eccentric but original fiction, in an essay published in 1929, is worth quoting at length:
[Firbank’s] later novels are almost wholly devoid of any attribution of cause to effect; there is the barest minimum of direct description; his compositions are built up, intricately and with a balanced alternation of the wildest extravagance and the most austere economy, with conversational nuances . . . His art is purely selective. From the fashionable chatter of his period, vapid and interminable, he has plucked, like tiny brilliant feathers from the breast of a bird, the particles of his design . . . The talk goes on, delicate, chic, exquisitely humorous, and seemingly without point or plan. Then, quite gradually, the reader is aware that a casual reference on one page links up with some particular inflexion of phrase on another until there emerges a plot; usually a plot so outrageous that he distrusts his own inferences.3
This, written by Evelyn Waugh between his first and second novels, would do very well as a characterization of his own technique. But great writers do not merely copy other writers; they borrow and transform the tricks they admire. Firbank’s novels, amusing in short, infrequent samplings, are fatally limited by the author’s narrow interests and camp sensibility. Waugh applied Firbank’s techniques to a broader and more recognizable social world and combined them with other methods of fictional representation. From Firbank he derived the technique of evoking a scene and implying a plot through a mosaic of fragmentary, often unattributed, direct speech, but he does not entirely eschew “direct description.” Indeed, passages of carefully wrought descriptive prose are often the source of his most effective comedy—as in, for example, the arrival of the Welsh Silver Band at the school sports in Decline and Fall:
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 clasped under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape.
Unfair to Welsh rustics? Of course—but the description of the upper-class members of the Bollinger Club mustering for their Oxford reunion on the first page of the novel is scarcely more flattering:
. . . epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands; ambitious young barristers and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes . . .
The comic surprise of that last
phrase, attributing indelicacy to the putative virgins rather than their suitors, is very typical of Waugh’s style, depending as it does on both the artful positioning of the words and the inversion of a presumed natural order.
Who was the young man who composed this droll, poised, irresistibly readable prose? Born in London in 1903, he belonged to a very literary family. His father, Arthur Waugh, was a publisher and man of letters; his elder brother, Alec, wrote a novel, The Loom of Youth, when he was only seventeen, and went on to become a professional writer and popular novelist. Alec had left his (and his father’s) public school, Sherborne, under something of a cloud—the source material for The Loom of Youth—and in consequence Evelyn was sent to Lancing College, an establishment which prided itself on its atmosphere of Anglican piety By the time Evelyn went up to Oxford, in 1922, however, he had become an agnostic.
Evelyn Waugh’s adolescence was inevitably overshadowed by the Great War and the patriotic emotions it aroused, heightened by the fact that Alec was fighting in the trenches of Flanders. Evelyn’s generation, the young men who had been just too young to fight in the War themselves, felt an irrational guilt about this, and a certain resentment at having been denied the opportunity to prove themselves in action. But in retrospect the War itself seemed more and more to have been a catastrophic folly, which completely discredited the older generation who had presided over it, and the values and assumptions to which they clung. In due course many of the younger generation, including Evelyn Waugh, would find ways of testing themselves by adventurous foreign travel, and would seek an alternative system of values in Communism or Catholicism. But in early youth they asserted themselves by the reckless and anarchic pursuit of pleasure. By the time Waugh went up to Oxford, the sobering presence of Great War veterans in the student body had almost disappeared, and undergraduate life was, for many at least, a continuous party. Waugh certainly did little academic work. He mixed with a fast, smart set, lived above his income, got frequently drunk, and amused himself with student journalism. He was, in his own words, “idle, dissolute and extravagant.” He left Oxford with a third-class degree in History and scant prospects of employment that would enable him to keep up with his fashionable friends. He enrolled for a while in an art course (he was a skillful draughtsman, as his illustrations to his own early novels attest), taught in two private schools of the kind classified by the teaching agency in Decline and Fall as “School” (as distinct from Leading School, First-Rate School, and Good School), was briefly a probationary reporter on the Daily Express, and even contemplated an apprenticeship as a carpenter. This was a period of great frustration and depression for Waugh, and according to his volume of autobiography, A Little Learning, he actually tried to drown himself off a Welsh beach in 1925, but was driven back to shore, and the will to live, by the stings of jellyfish. This story, at once shocking and amusing, reminds us how much angst and despair lie under the urbane comic surface of his early novels.
In 1927 he obtained a commission to write a book about Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and became engaged to Evelyn Gardner, daughter of Lord Burghclere. In 1928 they married, and at first fortune seemed to smile on the union of “He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn” (as they were known to their friends). Decline and Fall was published shortly afterwards to enthusiastic reviews, and they had a belated honeymoon on a Mediterranean cruise which He-Evelyn was offered free, as part of a travel-book deal (Labels, 1930). Rather ominously, he took Spengler’s The Decline of the West with him to read on this trip. On their return to England in the spring of 1929, the novelist retired to the country to write Vile Bodies, leaving his wife in London. A few months later she informed him that she was in love with another man; the couple separated; and civil divorce proceedings began.
This, needless to say, was a heavy blow to Waugh, a private agony and a public humiliation. It seems that he had no inkling that anything was amiss with his marriage, and the suddenness and completeness of his wife’s infidelity, so early in their life together, left a permanent scar on his psyche. It also left its trace in his fiction, most powerfully in A Handful of Dust, where the heartless sexual betrayal of a man by a woman epitomises the general collapse of values and morals in modern society. Shortly after this experience Waugh began taking instructions from a Jesuit priest and was received into the Church in 1930, the year when Vile Bodies was published. The character of Father Rothschild, S.J., who pops up here and there in that novel, often in the most exalted political circles, with a false beard and heavily annotated atlas in his suitcase, parodies the Protestant stereotype of the Jesuit as devious conspirator. But he makes a serious comment on the decadence of the Young Generation which seems to reflect Waugh’s own views: “Don’t you think,” said Father Rothschild gently, “that perhaps it is all in some way historical? I don’t think people ever want to lose their faith in religion or anything else. I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence. I think all these divorces show that.”
Although Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies are obviously the work of the same writer, there are interesting differences, both formal and thematic, between them. Paul Pennyfeather, the hero of the earlier book, is, as has often been observed, a kind of latter-day Candide, an innocent naïf, who is both victim and observer of the folly, villainy, and corruption of modern society Expelled, with monstrous injustice, from Oxford, he is condemned to work as the lowest form of pedagogic life, an unqualified schoolmaster at a bad private school. From this fate he is rescued by the whim of Margot Beste-Chetwynde and suddenly installed at the glittering apex of high society. But the financial basis of this luxurious life-style is a prostitution racket for which Paul chivalrously takes the rap, and he is sent to prison. He is not altogether unhappy there: “anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.” The absence of any pity for the hero’s plight is entirely typical of these novels: it is left to the reader to supply the moral outrage which events invite. But he is rescued once again by his rich friends, and given a new identity, under which he returns to Oxford to study theology. Paul thus ends up where he began—but not quite the same person. He has had enough of liberty and licence. We leave him studying early Christian heresies in a spirit of intolerant orthodoxy—perhaps a premonition of the author’s later conversion to Roman Catholicism.
Adam Fenwick-Symes, the hero of Vile Bodies, is also the victim of duplicity and betrayal, but he is less innocent and more knowing than Paul Pennyfeather; and by the end of the story he has become a deceiver himself. The plot, such as it is, charts his constantly frustrated attempts to raise enough money to marry Nina. Promises of riches are constantly being pressed upon him—by the drunk Major, by Nina’s father, by Fleet Street—only to be snatched away again, or prove worthless. Eventually Nina callously jilts Adam to marry his friend Ginger, but soon regrets her decision. While Ginger is fighting in the war which has just broken out in Europe, Adam impersonates him at the Christmas festivities in Nina’s family home. This adulterous episode, framed by all the domestic sentiment that belongs to a traditional English Christmas, is richly ironic—funny, shocking, and oddly poignant, all at once.
Vile Bodies is my personal favourite among these novels, for its daring mixture of the comic and the serious, and for the brilliance of its technique. There are unforgettable comic set-pieces, like Agatha Runcible’s appearance at breakfast at Number 10 Downing Street in her Hottentot fancy dress costume, or Colonel Blount’s absent-minded reception of Adam at Doubting Hall. But there is also a seemingly effortless evocation and deployment of a large cast of characters on a broad social stage. The novel might be described as a kind of comic prose equivalent to The Waste Land. Like Eliot’s poem, it had painful personal sources (Adam’s relationship with Nina obviously derives in part from Waugh’s courtship and the breakup of his marriage), but, like Eliot, Waugh managed to objectify this material and embed it in a panoramic picture of the decadence
and confusion of English society in the aftermath of the Great War, which seems to be spinning faster and faster out of control, like Agatha Runcible in her racing car. The narrative shifts rapidly from social group to social group; Cockney accents contrast with patrician voices, the jargon of motor racing mechanics with the in-group slang of the Bright Young Things—so bogus, so sick-making, don’t you thinks? Or don’t you?
The technique owes a lot to cinema, in its fluid cutting from scene to scene, and in making the reader infer meaning from brief, telling images and fragments of conversation. Waugh belonged to the first generation of writers to grow up with the medium, and he remained a regular cinema-goer throughout his life. His early fiction does by choice what film is bound by its nature to do—it stays on the surface of things. Perhaps this explains why these novels have proved difficult to adapt successfully as films: what seems experimental on the page seems routine on the screen, and the tension between the two media is somehow lost.
