Waugh in Pieces

In July, 1956, Evelyn Waugh gave a dinner party for his daughter Teresa. In anticipation of the event, he wrote to a friend, Brian Franks, with a description of the menu, closing with the words “Non Vintage champagne for all but me.” Rarely has an edict been issued with such a firm smack of the lips, yet nothing could be sadder. At Oxford in the nineteen-twenties, Waugh had chosen his friends on the basis of their ability to handle, or entertainingly mishandle, the effects of alcohol; “an excess of wine nauseated him and this made an insurmountable barrier between us,” he wrote of one college acquaintance. Now, thirty years later, he would sit in solitude, grasping his glass, bullishly proud that there was nobody present who deserved to share a drop. The hint is clear enough: Waugh, and Waugh alone, was of vintage stuff.

The years since Waugh’s death, in 1966—and, in particular, the past decade—have been marked by studious attempts to savor his achievements. We have had biographies in two volumes from Martin Stannard and in one volume from Selina Hastings; more recent, and more slender still, is David Wykes’s “Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life,” which bravely introduces us to the new adjective “Wavian”—helpful to scholars, perhaps, but unlikely to gain a wider currency. Best of all, we have a fresh gathering of primary material: “The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh” (Little, Brown; 29.95). The title is clear, although in the Waugh canon a short story is not easily defined. The unfinished yet gracefully rounded tale “Work Suspended,” for instance, which consumes eighty-four pages of the present book, feels almost a match for “The Loved One,” “Helena,” and “The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold”—the brisk, peppery, death-haunted trio of novellas that Waugh produced in his riper years, and which are available only in individual volumes. He himself was a chronic bibliophile and a connoisseur of typography, who was admired in his youth for his capacity to illustrate rather than compose a text, and his fussing is contagious; as a rule, I am quite happy to read any cruddy old softback with splinters of wood pulp poking out of the pages, yet I treat my early edition of “Vile Bodies,” with its vibrantly woodblocked title page, like a frail and endangered pet. The craving for Waugh can come upon one without warning, especially when the tide of public folly or private slush rises to flood level, but I resent having to slake my need with an emergency Penguin. The new batch of short fiction is a necessary purchase, and you should be able to claim it against tax as an aid to professional sanity, but the I.R.S. might frown at the luridly whimsical dust jacket offered by Little, Brown. The hushed grays of the English edition, published by Everyman, would stand you in better stead.

The choice, nevertheless, is instructive. Is Waugh in hock to the riots that he records, or does he purvey a more Apollonian calm? Is “Vile Bodies,” his Anglo-Saxon chronicle of the nineteen-twenties, the last word in madcap, or does it represent the lethally coherent findings of an onlooker? Max Beerbohm once labelled himself a “Tory Anarchist,” and the tag hangs well on Waugh, too; his nostalgia for abandoned glories (largely of his own devising) was matched only by his relish for current catastrophe. It is never enough, whatever the temptation, to mock the age in which you live; the mockery must continue to peal, like an echoing bell, long after the objects of your scorn have been decently laid to rest. Take the cruise liner; now little more than a floating mall for the retired and the tan-crazy, it was once a decorous addition to the Grand Tour, tricked out with just enough raffishness and cultural ambition to lure the satirically minded. Waugh got a whole book, “Labels,” out of a Mediterranean cruise that he took in 1929, and, four years on, he distilled the swaying, semi-nauseated atmosphere of those days into six pages:

so we had champagne for dinner and were jolly and they threw paper streamers and I threw mine before it was unrolled and hit Miss P. on the nose. Ha ha. So feeling matey I said to the steward isnt this fun and he said yes for them who hasnt got to clear it up goodness how Sad. If you had to pick a single Waugh word—the syllable that registers his demeanor as reliably as the “Sir” of Dr. Johnson—it would be “so.” Designed to establish a causal connection, it may equally gesture toward a run of events so fluid that cause and effect can be found giggling under the table. The hurler of paper streamers is a case in point; beneath the chirpiness, her emotional logic is on its last legs. The passage comes from “Cruise: Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure,” and it skewers a small world as cleanly as anything in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”; you could argue that comic ventriloquists such as Waugh and Anita Loos are among the most zestful descendants of Joyce—at least, of the Joyce who spoke in the tongue of Molly Bloom. Waugh detested “Ulysses”; I once heard him, during a television interview, decry it as “gibberish” with a hard “g”; but, as many of the stories make clear, the caddish young novelist was not averse to pilfering any modernist techniques that could be of service. The cinematic clamor of competing voices in “Vile Bodies” bears traces of the pub talk in “The Waste Land”; you can still hear it in “Excursion in Reality,” written in 1932, with its clicking exchange of dry-hearted lovers:

‘I say, was I beastly tonight?”

“Lousy.”

“Well, I thought you were lousy, too.”

“Never mind. See you sometime.”

“Aren’t you afraid to go on talking?”

“Can’t, I’m afraid. I’ve got to do some work.”

“Simon, what can you mean?”

Note the absence of guidelines: no “he said,” or “she replied.” Note, moreover, how little you need them; never in a Waugh conversation do you have to backtrack and work out who is speaking. (Try this some day in the privacy of your own writing, and see how hard it is.) The tones are tethered tightly to character, yet at the same time they seem to float upward like a plainsong of fatigue.

The miracle of Evelyn Waugh is that withering cannot age him. The “Complete Stories” comprises nearly six hundred pages of weariness, withdrawal, disappointment, tweediness, harrumphing snobbery, and flashes of red-faced rage; by rights, the book should grind you down in gloom, instead of which you emerge braced and bolstered, as if by a cold shower and a cocktail. There are thirty-eight tales in all, composed over fifty-two years. Some will be familiar, having been corralled in “Work Suspended and Other Stories”; others, including a trove of juvenilia, were never easy to unearth, and it is gratifying to find them so readily to hand. The earliest effort, written in 1910 and new to me, is “The Curse of the Horse Race.” It is thrilling stuff:

On they went aintil they were face to face with each other. the peliesman lept from his horse only to be stabed to the hart by Rupert then Tom jumped down and got Rupert a smart blow on the cheak.

Not bad for a seven-year-old. Such boyish taste for Victorian melodrama was hardly uncommon; one surprising revelation of “The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh” is that the adult storyteller never shook it out of his system. We are so accustomed to the legend of Waugh the patient craftsman—or, less happily, to the honeyed ruminations in which “Brideshead Revisited” gets stuck—that we tend to neglect his talent for whipping a tale along. There may be no unsung masterpieces in this latest volume, but nor is there the slightest temptation to skip, and some of Waugh’s openings leave you ravenous for further particulars: “The marriage of Tom Watch and Angela Trench-Troubridge was, perhaps, as unimportant an event as has occurred within living memory.” Or, “John Verney married Elizabeth in 1938, but it was not until the winter of 1945 that he came to hate her steadily and fiercely.”

Marital friction, or the farce of wedded lethargy, was one of Waugh’s enduring obsessions; he himself married a woman named Evelyn Gardner in 1928. They were known as He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn: the perfect couple, at least until the following year, when she fell in love with another man. Waugh filed a petition for divorce in September, 1929, and it is a commonplace of Waugh criticism to point out that his fiction was henceforth stained by the rich mortification of the cuckold. Tom Watch and Angela Trench-Troubridge can’t even make it through their honeymoon without adultery rearing its tousled head. Tom alights from their train ride to the country, gets left behind, meets an old school friend whose name he can’t remember, drinks, hunts, and gets lost; Angela arrives too late to find him there, but thrives anyway. (“Quite all right,” she cables. “Your friend divine. Why not join us here.”) Nothing is stated, but we learn in passing that the young bride is thinking of taking a cottage out of town.

This sly history of betrayal, “Love in the Slump,” was created in 1932, three years after Waugh’s own downfall. The whole thing clips along with the curtness of a telegram; under the pressure of his own fury, the young writer had discovered a species of suffering that he could be funny about. Turn to the back of the book, however, and the chronology of humiliation hits a bump. There you will find a ragbag of fiction from Waugh’s time at Oxford, including a cod-historical romance called “Antony, Who Sought Things That Were Lost.” I naturally warmed to the title, but the story doesn’t really come alive until the death rattle of the last page. Count Antony is imprisoned with his betrothed, the Lady Elizabeth: “And they made a bed of straw on the step and thus among the foul and creeping things was their marriage made.” The Lady soon tires of her paramour and looks for a replacement. The only candidate is the pockmarked jailer; she makes love to him in full view of the agued Antony, who then rises up in silence and throttles her. Five years after the creation of this cheerful scene, Waugh entered the holy estate of matrimony.

One should not read too much into the excesses of youth; it does seem, though, that Waugh the undergraduate was preparing himself, consciously or otherwise, for a lifelong scrutiny of bad faith. The whole point of excess was that it should be reported; if you indulged in it personally, good for you, but your pleasure still awaited the cool stroke of a pen and the careful coloring of exaggeration. The joys of “Decline and Fall,” as of the early stories and the barbarous deadpan of the letters, are those of drunkenness recollected in sobriety, even the perpetration of serious crimes seems to be leavened, if not pardoned, by the punctiliousness of the prose. In the 1923 story “Edward of Unique Achievement,” an undergraduate murders his tutor for no better reason than that he dislikes him. The slaughter is blamed on a fellow-student, Lord Poxe, who is censured by the Warden with the words “It was a foolish act, Lord Poxe, an act of wanton foolishness, but I do not wish to be hard on you . . . . Lady Emily Crane, your great aunt, you will remember, married a Mr Arthur Thorn, my grandfather. I feel that the College owes it to your position to treat this matter as discreetly as possible.” Poxe is fined thirteen shillings.

All of Waugh is there in bud: the rude names, the wrongful accusation, the clashing rocks of good behavior and evil deeds, and the lunatic conviction that human worth can be measured by genealogy. (There are moments in “Brideshead” when Waugh, devoutly in love with the fine old Catholic name of Marchmain, veers ominously close to the Warden.) Like Lord Poxe, the author himself never killed anyone, although he once made a hapless attempt on his own life, swimming out to sea from the Welsh coast; as he recalls in his autobiography, he met a shoal of jellyfish and turned back. (It’s a fine joke against himself; only the thoroughly spineless would be deterred by invertebrates.) “All fates are ‘worse than death,’ ” he noted in his diary in 1963, and he delighted in submitting his characters to unlikely varieties of doom and dénouement. “The Balance” (1926) imagines its hero downing a blue bottle of poison; the aging Irish hostess of “Bela Fleace Gave a Party” (1932) expires a day after her extravagant but unattended ball, the invitations to which she forgot to put in the mail; the heroine of “On Guard” (1934) is guaranteed a dismal spinsterhood when her jealous poodle, Hector, in a bid to repel all suitors, bites off her ravishing nose.

Then there is McMaster, otherwise known as “The Man Who Liked Dickens.” The story was written in 1933, but it had taken root the year before, when Waugh, who spent much of the nineteen-thirties in a punishing series of explorations, stumbled across a desolate Brazilian ranch and discovered Mr. Christie. With his loosely extended family, curious theories on the doctrine of the Trinity, and a winning way with rum and lime, Christie was a gift; he stewed in Waugh’s mind and emerged as McMaster, who dopes an English visitor, Paul Henty, with strong brews and never lets him go. In reality Waugh set out freely after a night in Christie’s company; but reality was always too meagre for the writer’s liking, and he made it the business of his fiction to think along paths not taken—to wonder just how infernally, with a little help from mischance and a touch of sunstruck malice, life might have turned out. And so “The Man Who Liked Dickens” underwent a final fermentation, and became the penultimate chapter of “A Handful of Dust,” with Henty becoming Tony Last—another dreamy cuckold on the run—and McMaster retransfigured into the morbidly named Mr. Todd, requesting one more recitation of “Little Dorrit” from his helpless guest.

It is as plausible a portrait of damnation as you could wish for; even now, however, we have not reached the end of the affair. “The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh” has an eight-page offering, “By Special Request,” that was used as a quiet climax to the serialized version of “A Handful of Dust.” This time, there is no Brazil; no Christie, no McMaster, no Todd; merely the glum prospect of Tony returning to his errant wife, and the resumption of their stony existence. “All the old faces,” she remarks as they sit down in a new restaurant, amid the tribal savagery of a London lunch. The story ends with Tony taking over the apartment that his wife had found so useful for infidelity. Again, we are left to fill in the details, but it is a good bet that the cycle of deceit will lurch into motion all over again. To the comfortless, Waugh offers little more than a choice of living death: malarial mire or furnished flat? A delicious story of 1932, “Incident in Azania,” makes the parallel explicit, and sniggers at the blessings of civilization:

Far away in the interior, in the sunless secret places, where a twisted stem across the jungle track, a rag fluttering to the bough of a tree, a fowl headless and full spread by an old stump marked the taboo where no man might cross, the Sakuya women chanted their primeval litany of initiation; here on the hillside the no less terrible ceremony was held over Mrs Lepperidge’s tea table.

This balanced disdain must be kept in mind as we enter the treacherous terrain that is ruled by Waugh the snob. A skim through his journals will provide ample proof that he was a racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist reactionary; but that is the trouble with skimming. The deeper you plunge into him, the more you realize that no one was spared the knife. His novels rejoice in the fact that the sinned against are as open to the attentions of satire as the sinning. Having joined the Catholic Church in 1930, Waugh saw no reason to be softer on the shortcomings of others than he was on his own. The trouble with liberalism, for example—and one can hardly begin to imagine the fun that Waugh would have had with the political dispensations of today—was that it provided unfair exemptions to original sin. If he laughed at the mimicry of European customs which he saw at the coronation of Haile Selassie, and which found full expression in “Black Mischief,” how much harder he laughed at the inability of Europeans to unbend in the presence of the alien. Waugh is fond of Mr. Youkoumian, the Armenian fixer who pops up in “Incident in Azania” and, later, in the pages of “Black Mischief,” but his real venom is reserved for the English community: “It did them good to find a foreigner who so completely fulfilled their ideal of all that a foreigner should be.”

As the years progressed, Waugh himself swelled into the sort of Englishman who fulfilled a foreigner’s ideal of all that an Englishman, if left rank and unweeded, might become. It was a sight guaranteed (and probably designed) to perplex the nineteen-fifties: pink and apoplectic, armed with cigar and ear trumpet, Waugh laid into the decline of modern manners with ill-mannered contempt. No one who claimed to prefer his books to his children (“A child is easily replaced”) can have been that easy to love, and his journal adds to the insult, describing his own brood—he had six children by his second wife, Laura—as “feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.” All in all, the privilege of reading Waugh is rivalled only by the relief of never having had to encounter such a rare, irascible beast in person; the privilege is all the more acute because, with age, his fiction starts to shimmer with self-consciousness—a quickened Falstaffian shame, far beyond the reach of your average club bore—about the monstrous figure that he knows he must cut. That is why this volume contains no senilia. “Basil Seal Rides Again,” written three years before Waugh’s death, is crisp with mischief and suffused with wintry regret:

His voice was not the same instrument as of old. He had first assumed it as a conscious imposture; it had become habitual to him; the antiquated, worldly-wise moralities which, using that voice, he had found himself obliged to utter, had become his settled opinions. Reading this, you ask yourself what manner of fear and uncertainty could lead someone—especially so lithe a social animal as the young Waugh—to wall himself in against the assaults, real and imaginary, of a hostile world. Waugh’s biographer Martin Stannard passes a particularly harsh sentence: “His art was a theatre of cruelty; his temperament instinctively uncharitable.” That sounds decisive, but it drags Waugh toward the arena of Artaud and Genet, where he most definitely does not belong. For one thing, his unkindness is made compelling by the pitch and frequency of his jokes—seldom registered by Stannard, whose industry is untroubled by humor. Dip at random into the letters, some of which are right up there with the great wit-shows of Horace Walpole and Sydney Smith, and you will immediately stumble upon plain events blooming into the surreal. When Lady Mary Lygon was elected to the London Library in 1946 (not a major achievement), Waugh wrote to congratulate her:

I hope you will always remember to behave yourself with suitable decorum in those grave precincts. Always go to the closet appointed for the purpose if you wish to make water. Far too many female members have lately taken to squatting behind the Genealogy section. Never write ‘balls’ with an indelible pencil on the margins of the books provided. Do not solicit the female librarians to acts of unnatural vice.

Is this “instinctively uncharitable”? I think I smell the milk of human kindness: faintly curdled, perhaps, but brimming with licentious glee. During the Second World War, the novelist was described by his commanding officer as “so unpopular as to be unemployable,” yet he was also a byword for physical courage, and, in the years that followed, his cruelty began to be infiltrated, if not by charity, at least by a nagging sense of those occasions which would be improved by goodness and mercy. The “Sword of Honour” trilogy, published between 1952 and 1961, is a masterpiece of ruefulness; who but Waugh could have woven the surrender of spiritual hope into the winning of a global fight? The stories from that era are suffused with a similar disillusion; “Scott-King’s Modem Europe,” about an English schoolmaster adrift in a sunny totalitarian state, is written with the peculiar shade of purple that Waugh could summon at moments of high irony—Latinate, unglutinous, and so steeped in the mock-heroic that susceptible readers may be moved by its dust-covered grandeur. “No voluptuary surfeited by conquest, no colossus of the drama bruised and rent by doting adolescents, not Alexander, nor Talleyrand, was more blasé than Scott-King.” More mouse than man, Scott-King joins the caged, uncomplaining collection of Waugh protagonists: Paul Pennyfeather, in “Decline and Fall”; Adam Symes, in “Vile Bodies”; William Boot, in “Scoop”; Guy Crouchback, in “Sword of Honour”—mock heroes by any standard, each of them a blend of prig and punching bag. The “Complete Stories” has a roster of new recruits: the narrator of “Work Suspended,” for instance, a writer of detective fiction who tucks himself away in a Moroccan hotel, and Major Gordon, the stolid Scot at the center of “Compassion.”

This last tale is reason enough to buy “The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh.” Unlike “Work Suspended,” “Scott-King’s Modern Europe,” and ten others, it was tricky to find before the book came out. You could read it, more or less, in “Unconditional Surrender,” the last third of “Sword of Honour,” where it is split and scattered among other strands of plot; here it comes in concentrated form, tense with moral stupefaction. Major Gordon, like Waugh himself, is sent to wartime Yugoslavia—Northern Croatia, to be exact, where Tito’s partisans are filling the vacuum left by departing Nazis. Gordon, like everyone else, is fouled up in the political tangle, but there is one issue he needs to straighten out: a band of Jewish refugees, desperate to find a home. Nobody wants them, not least Gordon; his first instinct is to wash his hands of them, with “their remnants of bourgeois civility.” Slowly, against all odds, this unimaginative man takes up their case, and then their cause; by the end, they are all that matters to him in a dishonored conflict. “He 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.” Even then, by one of those stabs of lousy luck which Waugh likes to inflict, the Major lets his charges down. He achieves almost nothing, and you could say the same of Waugh; how can all the casual anti-Semitism, the slangy thirties use of lower-case “jew” that darkens his letters and journals, possibly be redeemed by this one tale? I can only point to the drama of Gordon’s conscience; if he had been tolerant to begin with, the story would be an easy read, but there is something overwhelming in the erosion of prejudice and the dawn of unlikely love:

Major Gordon did not forget the Jews. Their plight oppressed him on his daily walks in the gardens, where the leaves were now falling fast and burning smokily in the misty air . . . . By such strange entrances does compassion sometimes slip, disguised, into the human heart. I would not be so precipitate as to claim the discovery of a new and unsuspected creature: a nice Evelyn Waugh. For every Major Gordon, there are a dozen bigots and yellowbellies rustling in the background, and, without them, we would miss the extensive and brightly feathered range of mortal sinners that readers have always sought in Waugh’s menagerie. If he had entertained a profound respect for the Welsh, we would have no “Decline and Fall”; without his unsqueamish autopsy of California culture, “The Loved One” could not exist. Waugh was well aware of the price that had to be paid by anatomists such as himself:

Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice—all the odious qualities—which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in so doing he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of artistic achievement.

With the publication of the “Complete Stories,” the paradox of Evelyn Waugh is given another twist. That he enriched us with the unalloyed gleam of his prose—far purer than any of his leaden imitators can manage—is now beyond debate. He could certainly be odious, even to those who found him amiable; many friends were shocked by the lashes that he meted out in the diaries. But who can tell whether a soul was lost? In his short novel “Helena,” underrated by all but the writer himself, the heroine offers a tremulous prayer to the Magi: “How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts! . . . For His sake who did not always neglect your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate.” Those who know only the Waugh of popular myth—the hard, the unhappy, the truculent—should prepare to be shocked by his delicacy. It may at times be the delicacy of the dagger, but, for all his preposterous opinions, there is not a thud of clumsiness in his work, and the figures who wander through it, grievously tricked or drunkenly dim, will continue to console us with their company. He recognized that the struggle between low brutish beings and what he called “an almost fatal hunger for permanence” was both too solemn and too hilarious ever to be resolved. Waugh himself died on Easter Sunday, 1966, after Mass, in the lavatory; he could not have dreamed of a more fitting passage to the life to come. ♦