Arguably: Selected Essays (42 page)

That last observation prompts another—namely, Waugh’s familiarity with the outlines of the emerging modernity that he came to detest. Aesthetically he was one of the earliest to register the effect of T. S. Eliot and
The Waste Land
. In
Brideshead Revisited
, Anthony Blanche reads the Tiresias section of that poem through a megaphone; the title of
A Handful of Dust
is annexed directly from one of Eliot’s more ominous stanzas (the whole stanza appears on Waugh’s title page).

This brings us eventually to the matter of Roman Catholicism. In
Decline and Fall
, Waugh treated all devotional matters as the raw material of farce. But the concept of a capricious cosmos was already jostling in his mind with the notion of original sin. Thus, in that book a little boy named Lord Tangent (the son of Lord and Lady Circumference: Waugh both ridiculed and revered the nomenclature of English nobility) is grazed by a bullet during a sporting event, is reported as having had his foot turn black, and is subsequently said to have suffered first amputation and then death. All this is deadpan, callous humor, most of it offstage, as if Waugh half believed in those Fates that animated Greek drama and did not stop to explain themselves. As his work progresses, however, dreadful outcomes seem to be connected to a warped idea of divine justice. Basil Seal, in
Black Mischief
, doesn’t actually
know
that he is eating his old girlfriend at a cannibal repast, but it’s in the ironic nature of things that he should be dining in this way. In
Brideshead
, Sebastian Flyte squanders his beauty and charm on alcohol and indigence, and eventually in masochistic self-sacrifice, because he has been rashly fleeing the vocation for the priesthood that his elder brother would have so humbly welcomed.

Waugh was not a mere propagandist, and we would not still be reading him if he had been. The ends that he reserves for the meek and the worthy and the innocent are condemnations of the worldly and the vain, as surely as in John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
, but they are also highly diverting for their own sake. William Boot, in
Scoop
, is given a thorough drubbing by reality the moment he risks leaving the shelter of Boot Magna Hall, his bucolic den. Tony Last, in
A Handful of Dust
, is a doomed man once he agrees to give up his country seat of Hetton and embark on a venture of overseas exploration. The element of what we glibly call
noir
is a fluctuating one: Both Boot and Last (cobbler’s names) are treated with extraordinary cruelty by the women they love, but the outcomes are arranged along the spectrum between pity and terror. Waugh’s mastery is most often shown by the light flick with which he could switch between the funny and the sinister. And the delicacy of this touch is shown by the breathtaking deftness with which he handled profane subjects. I have already mentioned that the gross pedophilia of
Decline and Fall
is so artfully suggested that an adolescent might read it unawares. And many adult reviewers of
Brideshead
have somehow managed to describe it as a languorous evocation of the “platonic” nature of English undergraduate affection.

But toying with his innocents, and showing how cleverly and suddenly their creator could bring them low, was for Waugh part of a serious mandate. He wanted to bring the Book of Job to life for those who had never read, or who feared, it. And he chose a time—the mid-twentieth century—when the Church he had joined was very plainly marked not just with a nostalgia for the days of Thomas More or even of Thomas Aquinas but by a reactionary modernity of its own. It is for this reason, I propose, that Waugh and Eliot still seem fresh while G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc appear quaint and antique. The plain fact is that both felt and transmitted some of the mobilizing energy of fascism.

The tweedy, fogy types who make an affectation of Waugh are generally fondest of his almost camp social conservatism: his commitment to stuffy clubs, “home” rather than “abroad,” old clothes, traditional manners, ear trumpets, rural hierarchy, ancient liturgy, and the rest of it. Their master ministered very exactly to this taste in the undoubted self-parody that adorns
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
and is titled “Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age.”

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz—everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the thirties: “It is later than you think,” which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought.

His face eventually grew to fit this mask, but Waugh had been very much “of” the Jazz Age, and brought it hectically to life, most notably in
Vile Bodies
and
Brideshead
. Sexual experiments, fast cars, modern steamships and airplanes—these, plus a touch of experience with modern warfare, gave him an edge that the simple, fusty reactionaries did not possess. Thus he celebrated Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia as in part a victory for progress and development, defended Franco’s invasion of Spain as a stand for tradition and property, and, in his travel book
Robbery Under Law
, denounced the Mexico of Cárdenas as an anti-clerical socialist kleptocracy. On some things he was conservative by instinct. (He always abominated, for example, the very idea of the United States of America.) But the dynamic element in modernism was not foreign to him, much as he later liked to pretend otherwise. And he made excellent use of this tension in his writing.

Another tension or contradiction also occurs in both the life and the work. Waugh was a celebrated misanthrope and an obvious misogynist, capable of alarming and hateful bouts of anger and cruelty toward friends, children, and colleagues. When his friend Clarissa Churchill married a divorced man, he wrote to her saying that she had deliberately intensified “the loneliness of Calvary.” During his wartime service—which, it must be said, was often conspicuous for its gallantry—he almost had to be protected from assassination at the hands of the soldiers under his command. Permanently injured by the flagrant adultery of his first wife, and almost certainly a badly repressed homosexual, he made a living example of Cyril Connolly’s “Theory of Permanent Adolescence,” whereby Englishmen of a certain caste are doomed to re-enact their school days. The vices of the boy are notably unappealing in the grown man, and Waugh was frequently upbraided for the apparent contrast between his extreme nastiness and his ostentatious religiosity. To this he famously replied (to Nancy Mitford) that nobody could imagine how horrible he would be if he were
not
a Catholic. A nice piece of casuistry, but not one that bears much scrutiny. In at least two cases—his support for the Croatian Fascist Party during his wartime stint in the Balkans, and his animosity toward Jews—there was a direct connection between his spleen and his faith. And in at least two of the novels,
Helena
(which is based on the life of the early Christian empress of that name) and
Brideshead
, the narrative is made ridiculous by a sentimental and credulous approach to miracles or the supernatural. This is what Orwell meant by the incompatibility of faith with maturity.

A further proof of this point, from a somewhat different angle, might be Waugh’s lamentable inability to write about sex, along with his insistence on trying to do so. A properly reticent traditionalist should have avoided the topic altogether, or dealt with it by the faintest possible allusion. Waugh once tried to take refuge in a Jamesian hideout, stating rather too finally that “our language took form during the centuries when the subject was not plainly handled with the result that we have no vocabulary for the sexual acts which is not quaintly antiquated, scientific or grossly colloquial.” Never mind what Chaucer or Shakespeare or Swift or Burns or Byron might have made of that piece of evasion; the fact is that Waugh knew his readers and also knew that they employed pungent and emphatic and sometimes hilarious words for the obvious. Thus there is no conceivable excuse for passages like this one:

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 there was a formality to be observed, no more. It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed.

Or this one:

The silk rustled again as though falling to the ground. “It’s best to make sure, isn’t it, darling, before we decide anything? It may just be an idea of yours that you’re in love with me. And you see, Paul, I like you so very much, it would be a pity to make a mistake, wouldn’t it?”

Or this:

No sign or hint betrayed their distress but when the last wheels rolled away and they mounted to their final privacy, there was a sad gap between them, made by modesty and tenderness, which neither spoke of except in prayer. Later they joined a yacht at Naples and steamed slowly up the coast, putting in at unfrequented harbors. And there, one night in their state room, all at last came right between them and their love was joyfully completed.

The writhe-making aspects of these passages (drawn, respectively, from
Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall
, and
Men at Arms
) are in bold contrast to the somewhat swaggering and sniggering mentions of surreptitious sex in Waugh’s posthumously published
Diaries
. Evidently, he distrusted either his readers or himself, or perhaps both, when it came to the fictional crux. I admit that I found the second passage powerfully erotic when I first read it—but I was then under monastic tutelage and worse, and was, as I have said, only twelve. It’s somewhat confirming to read of Waugh’s rather bizarre second marriage, to an odd woman who bore him numerous children with no great evidence of relish on her part or pride on his—as if, indeed, offspring were to be regarded as random gifts, wanted or unwanted, from the divine. (By what is perhaps an unconscious inversion of the same dispensation, Waugh makes most of his protagonists into orphans or half orphans, missing at least one parent.) “Family values,” too tedious for straight depiction, nonetheless had to be upheld for reasons of propriety.

There is evidence that he knew not to push this kind of religiosity too far. In a conversation between Waugh and Graham Greene, recorded by Christopher Sykes, Greene described the plot of his then impending novel
The Quiet American
, and observed that it would be “a relief not to write about God for a change.” To which Waugh rejoined, “Oh, I wouldn’t drop God if I were you. Not at this stage anyway. It would be like P. G. Wodehouse dropping Jeeves halfway through the Wooster series.”

It is notable, for example, that none of Waugh’s fictional Catholic clergy are morally impressive. (The “priests,” as Orwell pointed out, are “not superhuman.”) They tend to be simple-minded or (in the case of
Men at Arms
) resentful Irishmen. In
Vile Bodies
there is a caricature of a scheming, socially smooth Jesuit, but he is given the distinctly un-Romish name of Father Rothschild. We meet him carrying a suitcase that contains a false beard and “six important new books in six languages,” and we learn that he has the precious gift of recalling “everything that could possibly be learned about everyone who could possibly be of any importance.” To this incarnation of venality is given an astonishingly solemn short speech as the frivolity of the 1930s dies away, and the jazz band starts to pack up, and the sounds of war begin to be heard.

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence … We long for peace, and fill our newspapers with conferences about disarmament and arbitration, but there is a radical instability in our whole world-order, and soon we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions.

For the generation that was young in the 1920s and 1930s, and for whom Waugh was in some ways the blithe spirit, the unresolved question was this: Were they living in a postwar world or a pre-war one? The suppressed hysteria of this time—the echo of the preceding bloodshed and the premonition of more impending—was never captured better, except perhaps by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

If one adopts Graham Greene’s distinction between “novels” and “entertainments” in his own fiction, and applies it experimentally to Waugh, then the two world wars become the crucial points of reference.
Brideshead
was published toward the end of the Second World War, but it evokes almost to perfection the atmosphere of Oxford just after the First World War, populated by young men who are acutely conscious of having barely missed the great test of combat. This type or “set”—Paul Pennyfeather, Adam Fenwick-Symes, Ambrose Silk, Basil Seal—provides the figures of the “entertainments.” Charles Ryder, in
Brideshead
, is no longer young and epicene when he becomes a junior officer and has to embrace responsibility.
Put Out More Flags
concludes with many callow and superficial former partygoers behaving better than might have been expected of them (if only to point up a contrast with W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, “Parsnip and Pimpernell,” who committed what was to Waugh a double offense by avoiding military service
and
emigrating to America). Dennis Barlow, the cynical protagonist of
The Loved One
, has learned the craft of poetry in the British Army from 1939 to 1945. (I should add that Waugh’s Catholicism, however lightly or invisibly worn, was obviously a stylistic and aesthetic advantage in that novel. It enabled him to confront the sheer wasteland of a Hollywood funeral industry that idiotically, hedonistically, denied death.)