Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles (2010)

According to legend Carthage was founded in 814 BC. Its history came to an end in 146 BC, the year in which Rome defeated and utterly destroyed it. Richard Miles is a young historian whose book, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, sets out to record everything we know about Carthage, from the legends of its founding, through its umpteen wars, up to the final catastrophe.

Carthage Must Be Destroyed is long, 373 pages of text, 77 pages of notes, 34 page bibliography and a 66-page index = 521 pages.

It is not a social or political history. There is hardly anything about Carthage’s form of government, a reasonable amount about its economy (trade and some agriculture), a surprising amount about the evolving design and metallurgy of its coinage (in the absence of other evidence, coins are a good indicator of cultural changes and economic success), and quite a lot about its religion, in particular a recurring thread about the syncretistic melding of the Phoenician god of Melqat with the Hellenistic demigod Heracles, about which Miles has a real bee in his bonnet.

But what the text is really filled with is relentless details of Carthage’s endless wars, wars, wars. It is an overwhelmingly military history. Countless battles, an apparently endless stream of generals with the same four names (Hannibal, Hamilcar, Hasdrubal or Hanno) and gruesome references to torture. Failed generals, defeated enemies, rebellious mercenaries, overthrown tyrants, unlucky hostages or ambassadors, an endless stream of unfortunates are publicly tortured, beheaded or crucified (pages 131, 147, 152, 165, 173, 203, 208, 211, 212, 219, 273, 358). The ideal reader of this book will really love details of ancient wars and sadistic punishments.

The single most surprising thing about the history of Carthage is how much of it took place on the island of Sicily. The western half of Sicily was colonised by Carthage from about 900 BC, the eastern half by Greek colonists from different mother cities from about 750 BC, and the economic and territorial rivalry led to almost continuous warfare between the two sets of colonists between 580 and 265 BC, a period known as the Sicilian Wars.

If you know nothing whatever about Carthage, here are the key facts:

The Phoenicians

is the general name given to the people who, 3,000 years ago (1,000 BC) inhabited the trading cities situated along the coast of modern-day Lebanon, ports like Byblos, Sidon and Tyre. The Phoenicians invented new types of more efficient sailing ships with which they established trading routes all round the Mediterranean, trading in precious metals and manufactured goods such as jewellery, ceramics, and food. The high point of Phoenician culture and sea power is usually placed between about 1,200 to 800 BC. They founded trading settlements on all the Mediterranean islands (Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia) and as far afield as Gades (modern Cadiz) beyond what the ancients called the Pillars of Hercules, i.e. beyond the Mediterranean, onto the Atlantic coast of modern-day Spain.

Carthage

The most successful of these settlements was Carthage. Carthage was founded in the 9th century BC on the coast of North Africa, in what is now Tunisia, by traders from Tyre in Phoenicia (Phoenicia being the coastal strip of the what is now Syria and Lebanon). It was a pivotal position, half way along the trade routes from east to west and also handy for the short routes north to and south from Italy and its two big islands, Sardinia and Sicily.

Map of the Mediterranean showing position, central to various trade routes (source: Politeia website)

In the following centuries Carthage became independent of its mother city (which was eventually subjugated by the Asian empire of Assyria) to become a trading empire in its own right, creating its own colonies around the Mediterranean and spreading inland from its coastal location to conquer territory originally occupied by Libyan tribes.

New city

Carthage’s status as a colony or settlement is indicated by its name: the Punic term qrt-ḥdšt directly translates as ‘new city’, implying it was a ‘new Tyre’ (p.62). The city states of Phoenicia – the leading ones being Sidon and Tyre – had thrived in the vacuum caused by the late Bronze Age collapse (about 1,200 to 1,100 BC). But from 900 to 800 onwards the big land empires returned, namely Egypt to the south and Assyria to the east, and repeatedly invaded and conquered the city states. Miles shows how they allowed some, Tyre in particular, a measure of independence because the Assyrian rulers relied on the luxury goods, and especially the rare metals, which were brought in from their trade around the Med (copper from Cyprus, silver from southern Spain).

Nonetheless, as the mother city, Tyre, lost power, its strongest child, Carthage, grew.

Punic wars

From the 300s BC onwards Carthage found its maritime empire threatened by the fast-growing new power of Rome, half-way up the west coast of the Italian peninsula. The Romans used the adjective poenus to refer to the Phoenicians and, by extension, the Carthaginians, and so the three wars Rome fought against Carthage are referred to as ‘the Punic Wars’:

First Punic War (264–241 BC)
Second Punic War (218–201 BC)
Third and final Punic War (149–146 BC)

Rome wins

Rome won the Third Punic War, stormed the city and utterly destroyed Carthage in 146 BC, leading away the survivors into brutal slavery and razing the buildings to the ground. During the final war a leading Roman politician, Cato the Censor, made a reputation by, whatever subject he was nominally addressing in the Senate, ending all his speeches with the same words, ‘Carthago delenda est’, meaning ‘Carthage must be destroyed’. It is this famous catchphrase that gives this book its title.

Not only did the Romans destroy all buildings, but all statues, inscriptions and records, emptying the libraries of Carthage and giving away the manuscripts and codices to local tribes. None have survived. This explains why, despite its long history and one-time predominance, the historiography of Carthage is so shadowy, and has to be reconstructed from references in the writings of its enemies or from the often obscure or ambiguous archaeological evidence.

Archaeology

The victorious Romans razed Carthage to the ground. Generations later, the first emperor, Augustus, ordered the erection of a new city on its ruins, Colonia Iulia Concordia Carthago (p.364). Both are now embedded in the huge modern city of Tunis, capital of Tunisia (current population 11 million), which makes archaeological investigation difficult to this day. However, the Carthaginians had established many of their own colonies both across northern Tunisia and on many Mediterranean islands, and from time to time new Punic sites are discovered, or new discoveries are made at existing sites, which provide information which keep our view of Carthage’s history slowly changing and updating.

Punic gods

All written records were destroyed, all the poems and hymns and inscriptions which we have for the Greek or Roman pantheons. From archaeological evidence and references in Greek or Roman works it appears the main gods of Carthage were a couple, the god Baal Hammon and the goddess Tanit (list of 3 triads of gods on page 289).

Baal was a Phoenician name for ‘Lord’, so there were a lot of gods whose first name was Baal. In fact the common Carthaginian men’s name Hannibal is a combination of the Carthaginian name Hanno with the word ‘Baal’.

Melqart was the tutelary god of Carthage’s mother-city, Tyre, sometimes titled the ‘Lord of Tyre’ (Ba‘al Ṣūr), King of the Underworld, and Protector of the Universe. Miles shows how worship of Melqart was encouraged at all Phoenician colonies across the Mediterranean as a way of binding them together culturally.

Miles also shows how Melqart became identified and merged with Greek worship of Heracles, the hugely popular Greek figure who could be taken as both a demigod or a mortal hero, depending on context, and who was the signature figure for Greeks colonising westwards through the Mediterranean in the sixth century and later (pages 105, 221). Heracles was even adopted as a patron and icon by Alexander the Great.

In fact the prevalence of Melqart-Heracles becomes a recurring theme of Miles’s book, popping up wherever Carthage creates colonies, for example becoming the god/face or brand of the new colony in south Spain in the third century (p.221), depicted on the coins of Hannibal (p.227), and then co-opted by the post-Punic emperor Augustus. Miles develops what almost amounts to an obsession with Heracles, turning his myths and legends into a kind of central narrative to the five or six centuries leading up to the Christian Era which are fought over by Greeks and Carthaginians and Romans in turn, who each seek to commandeer and appropriate him as ancestor and avatar for their own colonial ambitions.

By contrast with the hundreds of mentions and extended passages about Heracles, the goddess Astarte is only mentioned a handful of times. She was a goddess of the Levant, of not only Phoenicians but the Canaanites too, rather than distinctively of the Phoenician diaspora. Still, I could have done with more about Astarte.

Carthage as ‘the other’ for Rome

Miles’s central point is that, for the reasons explained above, almost everything we know about ancient Carthage comes down to us from Greek, and then Roman sources, and that both of them were bitter rivals of Carthage’s trading and military might. In other words, all the written evidence we have about Carthage comes from her enemies.

Miles uses ideas derived from Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism about how colonial conquerors project onto their victims their own vices, to suggest that in these accounts the ancient Greeks and Romans projected onto the Carthaginians all the moral and social sins and transgressions and weaknesses they could think of. These included cruelty, dishonesty, effeminacy, luxuriousness, barbarity, sexual immorality, and so on. The notion of the unreliability or deceitfulness of the Carthaginians gave rise to a Roman proverb, fides Punica, meaning Punic or Carthaginian ‘faith’ – ironically indicating the exact opposite. Towards the end of the book he spends three pages describing how the Roman comic playwright Plautus’s play, The Little Carthaginian, performed in the lull between the second and third Punic wars, attributed all these perfidious characteristics to the hapless protagonist (pages

So Miles’s mission is to use the latest up-to-the-minute archaeological and scholarly knowledge to penetrate back through centuries of Greek and Roman prejudice and anti-Carthage propaganda to try and establish who the Carthaginians really were.

There are two problems with this approach:

1. It assumes that you are already fairly familiar with all the Roman prejudices against Carthage which he is setting out to overthrow. If you’re not familiar with Roman slurs against Carthage, then the book has to explain the prejudiced view first, before going on to rebut it and, in doing so, it turns out that the accusations of the Greeks and Romans are often so florid and vivid that you remember them more than Miles’s myth-busting antidotes.

2. This is especially the case when Miles’s anti-prejudice myth-busting is not as exciting or as clear-cut as you might hope, substituting a clearly defined line with the uncertain speculations of modern scholars.

The most obvious example is when Miles sets out to undermine the Greek and Roman accusation that the Carthaginians practised the ritual sacrifice of babies. But to do so he has to present all the evidence supporting the baby-killing view and this turns out to be pretty persuasive. He explains that a ‘tophet’ was the general term the Carthaginians used for a site where infants were sacrificed. It was a Hebrew term derived from a location in Jerusalem in the Gehinnom where worshippers, influenced by the ancient Canaanite religion, practised the human sacrifice of children to the gods Moloch and Baal by burning them alive.

Miles then goes on to look very thoroughly at the archaeological evidence from the cemeteries which have been found in Carthage itself and in the surrounding towns, where urns have been found which contain the ashes of infants. Up-to-the minute scholarly research using DNA and other types of scientific technology seem to have established that many of the infants who were (undoubtedly) burned to ashes, were so young as to maybe have been still-born. Maybe it was only still-born infants or infants who died within months of birth (i.e. who were already dead) who were burned as offerings to the gods. But still… the accusation is not completely baseless… the Carthaginians did burn babies… So Miles’s attempt to overthrow a modern ‘prejudice’ against the Carthaginians ends up bringing the prejudice more prominently to my attention and not really decisively rebutting it.

The endlessness of scholarly debate

And that’s the trouble with any book which sets out to take us into the heart of scholarly debate – the trouble is that scholarly debate is endless. And it is particularly exacerbated with a subject like Carthage where the Romans went out of their way to destroy every building, statue, stele or inscription, and all the books and manuscripts which recorded Carthaginian religion, culture or history.

What we are left with is an admittedly copious amount of archaeological evidence from the city itself and its numerous colonies around the Mediterranean, but evidence which is always partial, fragmentary, complex and open to differing interpretation.

Therefore Miles’s book doesn’t tell ‘the’ story of Carthage, it tells one possible story and, as his narrative proceeds, it is very scrupulous in pointing out where scholars differ and mentioning different interpretations. In fact he does this so often you feel you are reading not one but multiple versions, multiple possible histories of Carthage.

Take something as simple as the start of the Punic period itself, the period of Phoenician economic hegemony in the Mediterranean, presumably, after two and a half thousand years, historians are fairly clear when this began, right? Wrong.

The advent of what we call the ‘Punic’ era is notoriously difficult to define. (p.88)

Presumably historians have a clear sense of what ‘Punic’ culture was, right? Wrong. Turns out that Punic culture was highly ‘syncretic’ i.e. incorporating elements from many other Mediterranean cultures:

What we refer to as ‘Punic’ culture is an umbrella term for a whole series of diffuse cultural experiences that took place all over the western and central Mediterranean. (p.89)

In other words, wherever you look in the subject of Punic or Carthaginian history, there are scholarly problems of interpretation which the steady trickle of modern archaeological discoveries only makes more complex, sometimes bewilderingly so. In fact rather than one coherent story, the text can more accurately be described as a succession of puzzles, historical teasers for which Miles presents the evidence for and against particular solutions or interpretations.

For example, does the existence of the Ara Maxima altar and temple in the Forum Boarium in Rome testify to the early Roman adaptation of a local legend about a hero-brigand with the Greek legends about the wandering hero Heracles? Or, on the contrary, might it point towards early Rome being a mish-mash of Etrurian, Greek, Phoenician, Punic and other peoples in a typically Phoenician cosmopolitan trading community?

Miles devotes pages 108 to 111 to presenting the evidence for either interpretation, which were intriguing to follow but, ultimately, quite hard to remember or care about – and my point is that a good deal of the book is like this, a sequence of puzzles and mysteries and obscurities which scholars are wrangling over right up to the present day, and which Miles shares with us in some detail.

There is no consensus on the meaning of the Nora stone… (p385)
There has been considerable debate over the provenance of the Cacus myth… (p.404)
The identification of the goddess figure has been controversial… (p.405)

Greece, the first rival

For centuries before Rome rose, Carthage’s rival was Greece or, more precisely, the numerous Greek colonies around the Mediterranean. Not a lot of people know that the Greeks colonised or, more accurately, set up trading centres which became towns and sometimes fortified citadels, at points all round the Mediterranean coast, the ones Carthage clashed with dotting the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily. I’m always surprised to reread that the southern coast of Italy was for centuries known as Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece, because of the dominance of Greek towns.

The ubiquity of Greek colonisation was reflected in the spread of the cult of the Greek hero and demi-god, Herakles, whose legendary travels, labours and womanising, as Miles shows, became a symbol of ‘the Greek colonial project’, the ‘Greek colonial endeavour’ (p.171). Temples were built for him all over the Mediterranean littoral and local towns and cities and even ethnic groups claimed descent from the far-travelling bully. A particularly striking example is the way that the Celtic race claimed to be descended from Heracles after he slept with the daughter of the king of Galicia and fathered a son named Kelta (p.399).

Sicily, the endless battlefield

Sicily is separated from Italy by a strait just 1.9 miles wide at its narrowest point and is only 87 miles from the African shore.

Around 500 the narrative emerges from speculation based on archaeology into more reliable history documented by Greek sources, in the form of military campaigns in Sicily. A glance at the map shows why Sicily was important to anyone trying to set up a trading empire in the Mediterranean and Miles devotes several chapters to accounts of the long-running conflict between towns founded by Carthage in the west of the island, and towns founded by Greeks in the east, specifically Syracuse, founded by Greek settlers from Corinth.

The Sicilian Wars, or Greco-Punic Wars, were a series of conflicts fought between ancient Carthage and the Greek city-states led by Syracuse over control of Sicily and the western Mediterranean between 580 and 265 BC. (Wikipedia)

The Carthaginians set up small trading settlements on Sicily as early as 900 BC but never penetrated far inland. They had traded with the local peoples, the Elymians, Sicani and Sicels. Greek colonists began arriving after 750 BC.

580 BC – The Phoenicians in Sicily and the Elymians unite to defeat the Greeks of Selinus and Rhodes near Lilybaeum, the first such recorded incident in Sicily
540 – Carthaginian Malchus is said to have ‘conquered all Sicily’ and sent captured booty to Tyre
510 BC – Carthage helped the town of Segesta defeat the expedition of the Greek Dorieus
early 5th century; the higher 400s BC were the era of Sicilian ‘tyrants’ i.e. rulers who ruled a town and its surrounding area without consulting the landed elite; examples of these ‘tyrants’ crop up in the writings about contemporary political theory of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle; for example, Gelon who captured the main Greek city, Syracuse, in 485 BC and then deployed a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing, deportation and enslavement’
483 – Terrilus, tyrant of Himera, was deposed by the tyrant Theron of Acragas, and called on Carthage to help; Carthage was motivate to defend its Sicilian territory against Theron who threatened to take over; Carthage sent a large army, maybe as many as 50,000, many mercenaries, under general Hamilcar; the fleet suffered heavy losses en route to Sicily and was then slaughtered at the Battle of Himera; the defeat was a catastrophe and had political ramifications back in Carthage, leading to the replacement of government by an aristocratic elite with the institution of a special form of republic managed by a Council of 104 and an Assembly of Elders (pages 116, 130, 215); Carthage didn’t intervene in Sicily for 70 years, allowing the Greeks to undergo an era of expansion and building, although they themselves then collapsed into a dozen or so bickering commonwealths
410 – Carthage got involved in the complicated internecine Sicilian wars when Hannibal Mago helped the town of Segesta defeat the town of Selinus and then destroyed Himera, thus avenging the disastrous defeat of 73 years earlier
406 – second expedition led by Hannibal Mago was ravaged by plague which killed Hannibal but his successor Himilco, captured and sacked Akragas, then captured the city of Gela, sacked Camarina and repeatedly defeated the army of Dionysius I, the new tyrant of Syracuse, before plague brought the fighting to a halt

And so on for another 150 years. I’m not going to explain the details of this map from the Turning Points of Ancient History website, I’m including it to show how the island of Sicily was characteristically divided up into a surprising number of territories and towns all of which were, at some point, attacking each other, besieged, surrendered, burnt down and so on during the 300 years of the Sicilian Wars. Basically, for most of that period Carthage held the west of the island, various Greek rulers held Syracuse in the south-east, and then they got embroiled in scores of alliances to try and grab as much of the territory between them.

Map of Sicily 483 BC showing its division between different rulers.

What was surprising to me about this was:

realising just how much of a colonising, imperialist peoples the Greeks were: I had a very limited image of the ancient Greeks as philosophers in togas strolling round the agora in Athens or heroically defending themselves against the Persians at Thermopylae; it’s chastening to read about their ambitious imperial aims and their success at founding Greek towns on coastlines all around the Mediterranean; in this respect the long chapter Miles devotes to the cult and legends of Herakles and the way his cult was used to both explain and justify Greek imperialism, is genuinely eye-opening
and of course, where you have colonies you have people being colonised; Miles’s book and the Wikipedia article devote all their time to the names of Carthaginian and Greek leaders and their battles and only in passing mention the names of the local ‘peoples’ whose land and livings were stolen from them by one or other set of invaders – the natives being the Elymians, Sicani and Sicels – having read so much about the European colonisation of Africa recently, I was struck by the similarities, only on a much smaller scale, in the sense that we hear a lot about the colonists because they were literate and left records, and almost nothing about the illiterate subject tribes who have gone down in history without a voice

Rome’s civic nationalism

Most people think of Carthage in connection with its rivalry with Rome, which led to the three Punic wars (264 to 146 BC) and which climaxed in the conquest and utter destruction of the city. Miles describes the long prehistory to the conflict, describing the slow but steady rise of Rome from a Carthaginian point of view.

Putting to one side the blizzard of dates, events and individuals, what is fascinating is Miles’s analysis of Rome’s success. It had a number of causes. One was that Rome was ruled by a pair of consuls who were elected for one year’s service. This meant they were in a hurry to make their name in history and were encouraged to aggressive policies now. A contrast to most other polities led by kings or tyrants who could afford to take their time. Miles explains that this ‘war without respite’ was a new thing, and economically exhausted Carthage (p.192).

Another was that when the Romans were defeated they simply raised more troops and came back to avenge the defeat, unlike the Carthaginians who tended to withdraw.

Another big reason for Rome’s success was its astonishing ability to integrate newly conquered territory and peoples into the Roman state (pages 158-9 and 197). This was done via infrastructure – conquered territory soon benefited from the building of the famous roads and aqueducts and laying out towns rationally and efficiently. But also by law, whereby newly integrated populations became equal under Roman law. Rome espoused what Michael Ignatieff calls ‘civic nationalism’ – all Roman citizens were treated equally under the law regardless of race or religion – as opposed to the ‘ethnic nationalism’ which most other states (then and for most of history) employed to unite its populations.

The ancient Latin identity survived, but only as a set of duties, rights and privileges enshrined in Roman law. (p.159)

A huge consequence of this is that Rome was able to recruit its armies from citizens, albeit only recently incorporated into the Roman state, but still, freeborn Roman citizens, who were inculcated with a sincere belief in Roman laws and values. This was in striking contrast to most other Mediterranean powers, including Carthage, which relied heavily on mercenaries to fill their armies, mercenaries who were both unreliable (often mutinied or defected) but also very expensive (a fact pointed out by the contemporary historian Polybius, quoted page 241). One of the reasons for Carthage’s relative decline was it bankrupted itself paying mercenaries to fight the wars against Rome.

(The best example of this was the Mercenary War which began at the end of the first Punic War when a huge force of some 20,000 mercenaries mutinied and turned on Carthage because they hadn’t been paid. Under canny leaders, who allied with neighbouring African tribes who would benefit from the overthrow of Carthage, it turned into a full-blown war on its own account which lasted from 241 to 237 BC when the mercenaries were finally defeated and massacred. Miles describes it in vivid detail pages 200 to 211. The mutiny contributed to the further weakening of Carthage in her long-running feud with Rome and vividly demonstrated the weakness of relying on foreign mercenaries. It is also the vivid and barbaric background to Gustave Flaubert’s novel, Salammbô.)

To be honest, this was one of the seven main things I took away from this long detailed book:

The Carthaginians sacrificed (or were widely accused of sacrificing) babies to their gods.
The huge cultural importance of the figure of Heracles to Greek imperialism and how he was incorporated into the Carthaginian cult of Melqart.
Rome’s success was in large part to its efficiency at incorporating conquered territory and peoples into the civic nationalism of its polity.
Rome’s military success was attributable, in part, to the way they just would not stop or admit defeat, put pressed on relentlessly till they won. (A point seconded by Adrian Goldsworthy’s book about the Punic Wars.)
The gigantic role played by Sicily in Carthage’s history.
The Mercenary War.
The origins and career of Hannibal Barca.

The Punic Wars

Obviously Miles gives a very thorough account of the Punic Wars although here, as in his account of the Sicilian Wars, the immense detail and the explanation of scholarly debate about various key points and cruxes, often threatened to obscure the outline of the bigger picture. For example, in Miles’s narrative, it wasn’t exactly clear when each of the Punic wars either started or ended, since they merged into peace negotiations and visits by ambassadors and skirmishes and violent rebellions or coups and so on.

The overall message seems to be that the three Punic wars accelerated the rise of Rome, in all sorts of ways, militarily, culturally, economically and culturally.

The first war (264 to 241 BC) was fought mainly on the island of Sicily. Rome’s involvement was the first time that a Roman army was sent outside Italy (p.357). However, even having just read about it, it pales into the background compared to the second one (218 to 201 BC) which is dominated by the ‘romantic’ figure of Hannibal. Part of the reason is that, apparently, we have far better sources for the second war, not least because a number of biographies of the famous Hannibal survive in whole or part.

Slavery

In case it’s not clear, all these societies the ancient Greeks, the Romans and the Carthaginians, relied on slaves. In all the wars, the populations of captured towns and cities were routinely sold into slavery by the victors (pages 127, 140, 281, 296, 315, 347, 352).

Iberia

A fascinating aspect of the final period of Carthage was the success of its sub-colony in the south of Spain, which was established and triumphed due to the region’s extensive silver deposits. The Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca invaded and subdued the locals in 237 BC, putting them to work on the silver mines on an industrial scale. Eventually there were something like 40,000 slaves working in the silver mines to generate the precious metal to prop up Carthage and its military campaigns. (The town of Cartagena in south-east Spain was founded by Hamilcar as qrt-ḥdšt, which the Romans called ‘Cartago Nova,’ which was corrupted by the locals to Cartagena. So the city of Cartagena in Colombia owes its name to the same origin in the Phoenician language of the Middle East, page 224.)

The Barcids

Hamilcar’s success really brought to prominence the family of Barca whose era or influence is referred to by the adjective ‘Barcid’. Hence ‘Barcid Spain’. In fact the most famous Hannibal of all, the one who took his elephants over the Alps in 218 BC, was a Barcid, the son of the Hamilcar Barca who subjugated the Iberian tribes. When Hamilcar died in the early 220s, his son-in-law Hasdrupal took over, with Hannibal becoming a senior officer in the army aged just 18. When Hasdrupal was assassinated in 221 Hannibal was acclaimed leader by the army (and promptly issued new coinage depicting Heracles/Melqart, just one of the way in which Hannibal consciously associated himself with the oldest iconography of Carthaginian power, pages 227, 245, 247, 250-258).

Hannibal and the second Punic war (218 to 201 BC)

I remember Hannibal taking his elephants over the Alps from boyhood history books. I must have wondered why he did it. This book makes things clear.

1. Hannibal was seeking revenge or, more accurately, restitution from the peace settlement of the first Punic war (264 to 241 BC) which had given Sicily to Rome as a Roman province – the first ever Roman province – and cemented Rome as the leading military power in the western Mediterranean and, increasingly, the Mediterranean region as a whole. (Coming 20 years after the end of the first war, and seeking to correct the ‘injustices’ of the peace treaty which ended it, reminds me of the 20 year gap between the first and second world wars.)

2. Having been acclaimed general of the Carthaginian army in Spain Hannibal was ambitious to make his mark and confident, having been raised in an army family, gone on campaigns from an early age and been an officer at age 18, that he could do it.

3. But instead of trying to invade and conquer Sicily – graveyard of so many Carthaginian campaigns in the past – he would strike direct at the enemy and invade Italy.

4. But why over the Alps? Simples. The Romans controlled the seas. A sea-borne invasion was just too risky.

As it was, as soon as Hannibal’s left Carthage-occupied Spain they were attacked by Celtic Iberian tribes. Crossing the Pyrenees was dangerous. Then crossing the entire south of France, again, involved armed confrontations with a succession of local Gaulish tribes. Finally they were shown by guides how to ascend one side of the Alps, go through passes, and descend into Italy in late autumn 218, with 20,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, and an unknown number of elephants – the survivors of the 37 with which he left Iberia.

Here Hannibal spent several years marching and fighting and campaigning. He won one of the most famous victories of the ancient world, crushing a Roman army at Cannae in 216 BC, but the description of the war quickly gets bogged down and complicated. Overall the war makes the point that you can be the best general of your day and win stunning battles but still lose a war which is being fought on numerous fronts. While he was in Italy the Romans shrewdly sent an army to Iberia; although they suffered numerous setbacks, the Iberian tribes the Carthaginians had oppressed were happy to defect to them and so, eventually, the Romans defeated them, and, despite mutinies in their own army and local rebellions, eventually forced all Carthaginian forces, led by Hasdrubal Gisco, out of Iberia. The thirty-year Punic occupation of south Iberia was over, and it became a Roman province, as Sicily had at the end of the first war.

Hannibal was in Italy from 218 to 203. 15 years. Long time, isn’t it? Lots of battles. Early on the Roman authorities panicked and appointed Quintus Fabius Maximus as dictator. Fabius introduced the strategy of avoiding open battle with his opponent, instead skirmishing with small detachments of the enemy. This was unpopular with the army, public or Roman elite, as Hannibal marched through the richest and most fertile provinces of Italy wreaking devastation as he went. (This softly, slowly approach explains the name of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884 as a British socialist organisation which aims to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow.)

At one point he seized key towns in the very south, Magna Graecia, notably Capua, not as Punic fiefs but giving them their independence. His aim was not to destroy Rome but to mortally weaken it by giving Rome’s Latin and Italian allies their independence. This explains why he only once marched on the actual city and then was rebuffed by its thorough defences. In the end, though, all the cities he’d liberated ended up being retaken by the Romans.

Nonetheless, in the book’s conclusion, Miles says that these fifteen years during which an alien invader roamed more at less at will across the sacred territory of Rome left a deep psychological scar on the Roman psyche which took generations to exorcise (p.361).

In 203 Hannibal was recalled to Africa because in his absence, Publius Cornelius Scipio who had led the Romans to victory in Iberia, had led a force to Africa. Scipio destroyed an army of 50,000 sent against him but failed to capture the town of Utica and realised that besieging Carthage itself would probably be a long drawn-out process, costly in men and resources.

Thus both sides had fought themselves to a standstill and were ready to sue for peace. The Romans imposed very harsh terms but when Hannibal finally arrived back in Carthaginian territory the stage was set for a massive battle between the two old enemies. At the Battle of Zama in October 202 BC Scipio won a decisive victory and brought the war to an end (p.316).

Wikipedia has a cool animated graphic which sums up the change in territorial holdings over the course of the wars:

Changes in Rome and Carthage’s territories during the three Punic Wars, 264 to 146 BC. (Image by Agata Brilli ‘DensityDesign Integrated Course Final Synthesis Studio’, Polytechnic University of Milan)

The third Punic war

Surprisingly, shorn of its empire, Carthage flourished after the second war, quickly paying off the reparations owed to Rome and actively supplying her with vast amounts of wheat and food to support Rome’s wars against Macedon and other kingdoms in the East. When the end came it was entirely of Roman prompting. Factions in the Senate warned endlessly of the threat Carthage could still pose. Cato visited Carthage and was appalled at its prosperity. Eventually argument in the Senate led to an embassy being sent to demand impossible conditions of the Carthaginians – to uproot their city and move inland and cease to be an ocean-going, trading nation at all.

The embassy withdrew into the city and a 3-year siege commenced. Scipio adopted grandson of the great Scipio Africanus. Eventually stormed the walls and broke into the city and destroyed it and massacred its population. There is no doubt in Miles’s mind the Carthaginians did everything they could to abide by the letter of the treaties and to avoid war, and that the Romans would accept nothing but utter destruction. Once again it was Roman inflexibility and relentlessness which triumphed. Miles notes how this was recorded around the Mediterranean where Rome’s determination was noted but many lamented its bad faith, its falling short of the values it claimed to promote, of fairness and good faith.

Appropriating Carthage

At the end of the book, Miles shows how Carthage served numerous ideological purposes for Rome. For a start, in later works it became THE enemy which Rome had to overcome to in order to become great. In a sense, if Carthage hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary to invent her (p.373).

Closely connected, as mentioned above re. Said, even as it was being besieged and for centuries afterwards, Carthage became the anti-type of all the virtues the Romans congratulated themselves on, perfidious compared to Roman fides, with a disgusting baby-killing religion compared to Rome’s dignified ceremonies. Rome’s self-image was built by contrasting itself with the imagined vices of Carthage.

Third, however, a series of poets and historians wondered whether, in defeating Carthage, Rome had somehow peaked. The existence of a potent rival in a sense kept Rome on her toes, not just militarily but morally. For some later moralists, the defeat of Carthage marked the start of the internal squabbles, factions and corruption which were to lead to the civil wars, starting in the 80s BC.

The many dead

Deep down, the book made me marvel and gape at just how many, many men, throughout history, have miserably lost their lives in war. As Adrian Goldsworthy writes in his book on the Punic Wars:

In just one battle, in 216, the Romans and their allies lost 50,000 dead. During the second Punic war a sizeable part of Rome’s adult make population perished, mostly in the first few years of the conflict.

Between one and a quarter and one and three quarter millions of men died in the 120-year war. God knows how many civilians perished or were sold into slavery.

Evelyn Waugh: A Biography by Selina Hastings (1994)

He even became quite fond of several of his pupils, and described to like-minded friends the pleasure he took in caning them.
(Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, page 139)

Evelyn Waugh 28 October 1903 to 10 April 1966 (aged 62)

This is a long book, 724 pages, 627 of actual text i.e. without notes and index, but a hugely enjoyable read. I began to write my review as a chronological account but, as with my reviews of lives of Ian Fleming and Somerset Maugham, it just got too long. Too much happened to these fascinating authors. Instead I’m going to do it by themes.

Selina Hastings

It helps that Hastings is herself part of the posh world she describes, being the titled daughter of an earl – Lady Selina Shirley Hastings, eldest daughter of Francis, 16th Earl of Huntingdon – herself educated at private school and Oxford. (Indeed, according to her Wikipedia entry, ‘She and her sister, Lady Harriet Shackleton, are in remainder to several ancient English baronies, including those of Hastings and Botreaux.’) Hence the ease and confidence with which she writes about Waugh’s world, and the aristocratic characters and notable dynasties in it. She writes about this or that eminent personage of Waugh’s generation as if they’re old friends.

‘That’

After a while I noted a stylistic tic Hastings has which is to say of this or that person of the time (the 1930s, 40s and 50s) that they are ‘that noted figure’, ‘those notorious sisters’, and so on. She is signalling that she is inside this world, she is part of this world, that for her, with her privileged upbringing confidently swimming in the world of the English aristocracy, these figures from the literary world or aristocratic world are so well known that she assumes everyone knows about them.

…that most influential reviewers, Arnold Bennett (p.180)
Peter Rodd’s father was that exquisite flower of diplomacy, one-time ambassador in Rome, Sir Rennell Rodd. (p.260)
Evelyn, together with Duff and Diana and Chips Channon, stayed at the Palazzo Brandolini as guests of that indefatigable social climber, Laura Corrigan… (p.265)
Gabriel Herbert was 22, a handsome, amusing, athletic girl, daughter of that dashing adventurer, Aubrey Herbert 285
the fourth Earl of Carnarvon had purchased a large expanse of that beautiful peninsula 287

This biography puts forward no great theories or revelations, but invites you to immerse yourself at great length (the Minerva paperback edition is 724 pages long) in Waugh’s world. It is a big, juicy Christmas cake of a book and a hugely enjoyable read. I like biographies which give you the confident feeling, no matter how spurious, that human beings and the society they move in can be understood.

Father, Arthur Waugh

Evelyn’s father, Arthur, was a author, literary critic, and publisher. Arthur attended Sherborne public school and New College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry for a ballad on the subject of Gordon of Khartoum in 1888. Arthur wrote a biography of Tennyson and achieved notoriety by having an essay included in the notorious Yellow Book magazine. From 1902 to 1930 he was Managing Director and Chairman of the publishing house Chapman and Hall, the publishers who were to publish most of his son’s novels. In 1893 Arthur married Catherine Raban and their first son Alexander Raban Waugh (always known as Alec) was born on 8 July 1898. Our hero, Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, was born five years later on 28 October 1903.

Bad relations with father

Evelyn’s relationship with his father was difficult and strained for at least 4 reasons:

1. Arthur idolised his first son, Alec, who went on to fulfil every paternal dream, becoming head boy at his school, playing for the First XI and First XV, writing poetry and generally being an all-round star pupil. For his boyhood and adolescence Evelyn was always in the shadow of his brother, a situation he exaggerated and dramatised in the short story ‘Winner Takes All’.

2. Arthur didn’t hide that he wished his second child had been a daughter.

3. As a young man Arthur delighted his friends with reading from literature in which he did all the voices. As a father of small children this was entertaining, but as he got older his manner hardened into a perpetual playing, mimicking, quoting and play-acting. After dinner the whole family would be taken to the ‘book room’ and subjected to readings from Pinero or singalongs from Gilbert and Sullivan. This began to grate on Evelyn’s nerves when he was a boy and by his later teenage years he had developed a real antipathy to his father (p.449). He hated the way it was impossible to break through Arthur’s pose of bonhomie to have any genuine communication. When he was irritated with him, Waugh referred to his father as ‘Chapman and Hall’, the publishing firm he was managing director of.

4. Easygoing, joking, Gilbert and Sullivan Arthur found his son’s character unnecessarily hard, haughty, vindictive and cynical. Once he became successful and well known Evelyn In the manner of the Bright Young Things he often said the kind of wounding and hurtful things which his hardened peers accepted and enjoyed, but which made Arthur very uncomfortable.

Home in North London

Initially the family lived in Hillfield Road, West Hampstead but in 1907 moved to a house Arthur designed and had built and named Underhill in the London suburb of Golders Green, which still abutted farms and fields. From 1910 to 1916 Waugh attended Heath Mount preparatory school. Although physically on the short side, Waugh didn’t lack confidence in his intellectual powers. He was a bully, he physically bullied smaller boys, including the famous photographer Cecil Beaton who never forgot or forgave him.

Family holidays were spent with the Waugh aunts at Midsomer Norton in Somerset. Here Waugh became deeply interested in high Anglican church rituals and served as an altar boy at the local Anglican church.

Waugh’s diary

But the key fact about him is that he wrote: he kept a detailed diary (which has survived), he wrote stories and poems which were published in the school magazine, which he edited, he wrote all the time, perfecting a style of clipped, witty gossip.

Lancing College

Alec had been sent to the same public school as his father, Sherborne, but in 1915 he was discovered in a homosexual relationship and expelled. All would have been hushed up if Alec hadn’t gone on – after joining the army and in intervals of officer training – to write a novel, The Loom of Youth, openly describing the gay affair at a school which was recognisably Sherborne. The result was that Waugh , much to his irritation, couldn’t go to Sherborne and instead was sent to Lancing public school on the South Downs (just the kind of aggrieved second bestness which he dramatised in ‘Winner Takes All’).

These days a year at Lancing College costs £37,000 plus all the extras (uniform and kit) x 6 years = easily £225,000.

Hastings is very good at conveying the atmosphere of Lancing which was founded in 1848 by Nathaniel Woodard, a member of the Oxford Movement in the Anglican church which aimed to reintroduce the pageantry and beauty and mystery which had been lost at the Reformation. The school is noted for the enormous chapel which dominates all the other buildings and, being built on a hill, the entire locality. The foundation stone was laid in 1868 but wasn’t completed and dedicated (to St Mary and St Nicholas) until 1911, shortly before Waugh arrived.

What comes over from Hastings’ evocative account is:

the extreme religiosity of the school, with compulsory attendance at daily prayers plus the full roster of Anglican feasts
the fantastic complexity of the rules and regulations which governed every aspect of dress and behaviour, with different rules for each year group and even for each of the four houses within the years – reading Hastings you begin to understand why order and ritual in every aspect of their lives, continued to structure the perceptions and ideas of this generation for the rest of their lives
the boys were treated as ‘men’, and much was expected of them in terms of duty and responsibility
the variety and eccentricity of many of the masters
the overwhelmingly arts and humanities nature of the syllabus
the surprising amount of homosexuality: it’s hard to understand why Alec was expelled from Sherborne when Hastings describes in detail, with quotes form letters and diaries, intense love affairs which Waugh had with a number of his fellow pupils: pretty younger boys were liable to be courted and wooed by rivalrous older boys, which resulted in all kinds of emotional tangles

Maybe what comes over most, though, is that although Waugh write continuously, pouring out stories and poems which populated the school magazine and continuing his astonishingly precocious diary, his first love was art and design. He was extremely interested in calligraphy and scribing. He was encouraged by masters of an artistic bent and spent some time visiting an eccentric aesthete who lived near the school and owned a full range of pens and knives and inks and precious papers. Waugh developed a real skill for art and design, designing the covers for books and magazines. He was thrilled when one of the masters took receipt of an old-style luxury printing press and was allowed to use it.

All of this is described in detail in the abandoned fragment ‘Charles Ryders’ Schooldays’ which appears to be a straight from life description of a few days from Waugh’s last year at Lancing.

Hertford College, Oxford

The drinking and writing continued on to Oxford. Waugh attended Hertford college. What surprised me is the extent of the homosexual activity. There are lots of descriptions of parties where the men danced with each other or snogged in corners or on sofas, descriptions of Evelyn rolling on sofas tickling the tonsils of another undergraduate. He had intense, long affairs with Richard Pares and Alastair Graham.

Graham was a small, beautiful young man who matched Evelyn in drinking but with pronounced aesthetic tastes. Graham sent him love letters with photographs of himself naked. It is from the period of this affair that Evelyn based his image of perfect, heady Romantic Oxford, and the portrait of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead is based on Alastair Graham.

Waugh did next to no work, no one ever saw him with a book open or reading and repeatedly came close to being expelled. He had won a £100 annual scholarship to study History, a subject in which, it turned out, he had absolutely no interest, to the immense frustration of the senior history don C.R.M.F. Cruttwell. The pair quickly came to dislike each other, Cruttwell’s lofty criticism of his attitude driving Waugh to real hatred. Hastings amusingly shows that Waugh got his revenge by naming a whole series of negative characters Cruttwell, for example the murderous lunatic in Mr Loveday’s Little Outing was originally named Cruttwell.

Instead of reading and studying, Waugh drank heavily all the time (see his recommendation to Tom Driberg to be drunk p.91 and his advice to be drunk all the time p.97).

Hastings describes the immense influence on his peers of the aesthete Harold Acton, part of the set of rich young aesthetes known as the Georgeoisie, also featuring Brian Howard, founder member of the Hypocrites Club. Acton dedicated his 1927 book of poems, Five Saints, to Waugh and Waugh dedicated his first, breakthrough novel, Decline and Fall, to Acton. As the years went by Acton was to surprise everyone who knew and adulated him at Oxford by never really making his mark in the world of letters, whereas Waugh surprised everyone who’d known him as a hopeless drunk at Oxford by turning out to be one of the most notable writers of the mid-century.

In the summer of 1924 Waugh took his final exams and got a solid Third after which his tutor cancelled his scholarship for the ninth and final term which he required to qualify for a degree. He left in high dudgeon with no prospects of a career.

Nicknames

Hastings brings out the way this post-war generation revelled in consciously infantile behaviour and language. They gave nicknames to each other and wrote and talking in a deliberately juvenile manner. Waugh loved nicknames, which pack his letters and diaries and fictional characters. As examples, he nickamed:

his father ‘Chapman and Hall’, after the firm he worked for
his brother ‘Baldhead’ or ‘Baldie’
among the Lygon set Waugh nicknamed himself ‘Boaz’ or ‘Bo’, Maimie Lygon became ‘Blondy’, Dorothy Lygon ‘Pollen’ or ‘Poll’, Maimie’s Pekinese dog was ‘P.H.’ (standing for Pretty Hound)
in his letters to Diana Cooper he was known as ‘Mr Wu’
his future wife’s mother, Mary Herbert, was known as ‘Mrs What What’ as this is what she said all the time
once remarried, Waugh’s pet name for his second wife, Laura, was ‘Whisker’
the house he bought at Stinchcombe was nicknamed ‘Stinkers’
it ran in the family: in letters to Alec’s wife Joan, Arthur Waugh refers to his wife, Kate, as ‘Mrs Wugs’ (p.412)

Teaching

Waugh left Oxford in the summer of 1924 with no plans and no career and no training. Exactly like the hero of his breakthrough novel, Decline and Fall, he looked for work as teacher in the kind of private school he attended and an agency found him a post at ‘Arnold House’, a preparatory school at Llandullas on the ‘bleak, beautiful Denbighshire coast’ where he commenced duties in January 1925 (p.127).

Thus commenced four years of drift and unhappiness. He was alright at the teaching although useless at games which never interested him. He savoured the quirkiness and eccentricities of the other masters, all fodder stored away for his first novel, but he was miles away from his partying friends in Oxford and London.

What made things worse was that when, during the holiday, he returned to London he had gotten embroiled in a love affair with the sexy, promiscuous, hard drinking but aloof Olivia Plunkett-Greene who slept with everyone but him, making him fall deeper and more bitterly in love with her. She was the basis for the fabulously fearless Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies.

‘Olivia as usual behave like a whore and was embraced on a bed by various people.’ (Waugh’s diary quoted p.141)

He took with him to Wales the manuscript of a novel titled The Temple at Thatch, but when he sent a copy to his friend the influential aesthete Harold Acton, Acton’s comments were so critical and dismissive that Waugh burned the only manuscript in the school furnace (p.135).

What really comes over from Hastings’ account of this period is the intensity of Waugh’s drinking. He got very drunk every night, and often started during the day. Some friends were scared by the intensity of his intake and his diary records thoughts of suicide. His autobiography records a particularly vivid suicide attempt, where he went down to the Welsh coast, stripped off and waded out to sea intending to drown himself (p.136).

All this was expressed in the relationship with Olivia, who herself drank till she passed out (by 1936 she had become an alcoholic and retired from society to live with her mother).

Writing

Waugh quit the post at Arnold House in order to be closer to London and took a job at a school in Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. His diary records that his status among the boys was transformed when he bought a motorbike (p.143) but he had only been here a few weeks when he sacked for allegedly making a drunken pass at the school matron (p.149).

He then secured a teaching post at a school in Notting Hill at £5 a week. Between all these short jobs he came home to stay with his parents at Underhill, the family home in Golders Green, under the increasingly disapproving glare of his father.

He still regarded himself as first and foremost a draughtsman, and enrolled in London courses in printing, cabinet-making and carpentry. Throughout his life Waugh applied metaphors and similes from carpentering and cabinet making to constructing well crafted novels.

His writing career didn’t exactly blossom. Having destroyed his draft novel, he managed to get a highly experimental short story, ‘The Balance’, published in a 1926 anthology published by his father’s publishing house, Chapman and Hall (p.145). He researched and wrote an extended essay on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which was printed privately by his lover, Alastair Graham. And it was on the basis of this that an Oxford acquaintance, Anthony Powell (Eton and Oxford) now working for the publishers Duckworths, commissioned a full-length biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which Waugh wrote during 1927 (pp.158 to 160).

It’s worth pausing at this point to reflect on how he got started as a writer. Obviously he had to be able to write and to have written things worth reading, but he had huge advantages: his father was managing director of the publishing house which published his first short story; his brother was an established novelist ready with tips and advice; his lover privately published his first extended work; and a friend from Oxford commissioned him to write his first published book.

The Establishment

That is how it works; the network of families and friends met through public school and Oxford which dominated the literary world, the professions, politics and the City for most of the twentieth century. Arguably Waugh’s main subject was also the focus of his life, which was gossip and stories about the intricately interlinked network of aristocratic families which dominated English life, linked via marriage, school, Oxford, the army, business and politics into a great matrix of power and influence wielded to protect and promote each other. The network of power and influence which satirists of the 1960s called ‘the Establishment’ and which still dominates English to this day: David Cameron Eton and Oxford; Boris Johnson Eton and Oxford.

Giving individual examples is not very impressive because it’s only the sheer number of examples of the intermeshing of families of power and influence on every page, it’s the cumulative affect of the matrices of power, which really conveys the ubiquity and control of this class.

Journalism

Waugh was never a qualified, full-time journalist. During this unsettled period he spent a couple of months (April to May 1927) as a trainee journalist at the Daily Express, during which, by his own account, he filed no stories and spent a lot of time at the cinema. Or, as usual, getting drunk (p.151). It was the first of several skirmishes with journalism which were to build up to his comic masterpiece, Scoop. The general conclusion is clear: the journalists he saw in action were lying scoundrels who mostly fabricated their stories or exaggerated trivial events into ‘stories’ using a defined and limited set of rhetorical sleights of hand. He wrote pieces for magazines and newspapers to the end of his career, but never lost his amiable contempt for journalism and journalists.

First marriage, to she-Evelyn

In 1927 he met the honourable Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner, the daughter of Lord and Lady Burghclere, who was sharing a flat with Pansy Pakenham (p.153). Waugh was on the rebound from the final failure of his intense and troubled relationship with Olivia Plunket-Greene, Gardner was tiring of being pursued by half a dozen suitors. Photos of her at the time confirm written accounts that she was boyish in appearance and no conventional beauty. She’s was described as unusually immature, almost childish (‘young for her age’, p.155), she referred to Proust as Prousty-Wousty, to all her acquaintance as angel face or sweety pie – and this in a generation which Hastings goes out of her way to describe as consciously, modishly immature and childish.

Portrait of the two Evelyns by Olivia Wyndham (1928)

Hastings gives a fascinating account of Evelyn’s proposal which was so casual as to be barely noticeable, along the lines of, ‘Why don’t we try it and see how it goes?’ Gardner, who had (allegedly) already been engaged nine times, thought about it over night and next day replied, ‘Yes, why not?’ (p.163).

They were both 24, very immature, on the rebound from other relationships and also both wanted to escape the smothering tutelage of their parents. They both thought that getting married would set them free of parental restraint and define their adult identities.

Unfortunately, it didn’t, but first ‘the Evelyns’ had to negotiate permission to marry with Gardner’s mother, the formidable Lady Burghclere. She successfully blocked Waugh getting a job at the BBC (p.168). When Waugh submitted the MS of Decline and Fall to the publisher Duckworth’s, the head of the firm, Gerald Duckworth’ brother was married to Evelyn Gardner’s aunt, Margaret, and was well aware of the family’s snobbish disapproval of Waugh, and so turned the novel down. This is how it, the English establishment, works. Someone’s cousin, brother, sister, mother, friend they were at public school or Oxford with intervenes to help out, give a leg up, or block their ambitions, in which case your turn to another set of brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts or uncles to help you out.

27 June 1928 the Evelyns got married despite all Lady B’s objections, almost on a whim, in a disgustingly low church (St Paul’s, Portman Square, p.175)), with few friends or family present. The writer Robert Byron (Eton and Oxford) gave Gardner away. Harold Acton (Eton and Oxford) was the best man. Brother Alec (Sherborne and Oxford) was a witness. A friend, Joyce Fagan, had moved out of a bijou little apartment in Canonbury and passed it on to the newly-married couple at a rent of £1 a week.

September 1928 Decline and Fall published to universal good reviews, from old timers such as Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestly to new kids on the block like Cyril Connolly (Eton and Oxford). Waugh invited these important contacts to dinner or luncheon at the flat, and they were all enchanted by the 25-year-old pixies.

Literary agent

Alec introduced Waugh to his literary agent, A.D. Peters ( Haberdashers’ Aske’s and Cambridge) who was to be central to his career (p.182). Peters immediately started finding Waugh commissions to write articles about the younger generation for magazines and papers. Hastings features numerous passages describing Peters’ complex and aggressive negotiations on his client’s behalf with newspapers, magazines and publishers, both in Blighty and America. Several themes emerge:

the books were divided into two categories:
- hardly anybody liked his travel books, they didn’t sell, and Peters failed to find American publishers willing to take several of them on at all
- the novels were mostly well reviewed and received but during the 1930s he never had a bestseller and so was permanently strapped for cash
this explains why Waugh continuously hustled for jobs from papers and magazines, endlessly coming up with ideas for features and articles: the problem here was that he often knocked them off at such great speed that magazines (such as Vogue, Harpers, Nash’s and so on) quickly became cautious and took to turning down Waugh articles and stories
and this relates to something Hastings doesn’t explicitly state, but which becomes apparent as you read through the book, which is that Waugh didn’t really have many opinions about anything, or not opinions that could be translated into interesting articles; fresh off the back of Decline and Vile Bodies he could make some quids by claiming to be a spokesman for the generation of Bright Young Things; but by mid-1930s his actual opinions – conservative, reactionary Catholic in thrall to a rose-tinted image of the landed aristocracy was not very saleable

Travel books

Waugh came up with the idea of writing articles about a cruise, which could then be compiled into a book as he was, throughout the 1930s, to come up with wizard wheezes for travel books. A number of his pals were good at this – Hastings refers to ‘the intellectual avidity of Robert Byron…the exuberance of Peter Fleming’ (p.269) [both of whom went to Eton and Oxford] – and it was an obvious way to go on an adventure and be paid for it.

The odd thing is that Hastings makes it crystal clear that Waugh hated travelling. He invariably ended up feeling sad and lonely and was often excruciatingly bored. In fact the account of his first trip to Abyssinia, Remote People, includes three short interludes entirely devoted to the problem of boredom. Reviewing the book Rebecca West made the witty point that a writer who writes about boredom almost invariably creates boredom in the reader (p.240), but I found this to be wrong.

I have travelled widely on my own (Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Thailand) and can vouch for the fact that there often are moments or days of excruciating loneliness and boredom. So I found the short passage in Remote People about boredom more interesting than some of the straight travel writing. It felt more personal and more true in much the same way as his reporting on the coronation of Haile Selassie was painfully accurate about its shabbiness and lack of glamour, or his description of the ‘famous’ monastery at Debra Lebanos as sordid and squalid.

Although he fibbed about some of the details, there is, overall, about the travel books, as the letters and diaries, a fundamental honesty, a self-exposing, excoriating, merciless honesty about himself and others in Waugh’s writing which is, even when it’s unattractive, admirable.

Anyway, it’s interesting to learn that his four travel books were not well received. Publishers and reviewers didn’t like them as much as the novels and they didn’t sell anywhere near as well. I agree they don’t have the well wrought artfulness of the novels but I enjoyed the three that I read for what you feel is the blunt unvarnished truth of Waugh’s reporting and therefore accurate descriptions of faraway places in a long ago time which will never return.

His wife’s betrayal

Wasn’t a sudden, impulsive thing. Hastings gives good reasons why the Honourable Evelyn Gardner became unhappy.

She never really loved Waugh, she liked him and admired him.
She was a sickly child. In February 1929 they boarded the Stella Polaris for a cruise round the Mediterranean. This turned into a nightmare as Gardner fell very seriously ill and by the time they reached Port Said was taken off the ship and stretchered to the British hospital with double pneumonia and pleurisy. Despite his intense concern and nursing his sick wife every day, Waugh managed to turn in a creditable travel book, Labels, but Gardner continued to be frequently ill when they got back to London. A subconscious plea for more attention? Or indication of underlying unhappiness?
Trouble in the bedroom: Hastings doesn’t give details but quotes Gardner saying Waugh was no good in bed and her suspicions that this was because he had learned all his sexual technique from sex with men (p.196); elsewhere Hastings links this with his sexual shyness and lack of confidence around women.
Both Gardner and Waugh married to escape from being at home and dominated by parents. They thought it would make them free and independent. Instead, once the initial euphoria had worn off, they realised they were alone and in difficult financial straits, as neither of them had a job.
Gardner’s loneliness. Precisely in order to earn some money Waugh had to take himself off to a study or, more often, go out of London altogether, to stay with friends or in country inns, so he could concentrate on writing. Gardner was a fun-time 1920s party girl, and hated being left at home all alone night after night.

Hence, Waugh encouraged her to go out and socialise, recommending a close cadre of ‘safe’ male friends, one of whom was John Heygate (Eton and Oxford) (p.192). She spent more and more time with him, dashing, clever (job as assistant news editor at the BBC) and eventually, in July 1929, sent Waugh a letter saying she’d fallen in love with Heygate and wanted a separation (p.193).

Waugh was devastated. The cosy new base he’d built for his professional and personal life came crashing down. Hastings quotes friends who say that from that point onwards, a new note of cynicism and anger entered his personality and his work. Disgusted, he managed to see Gardner only once more in the rest of their lives (at the legal divorce proceedings).

Waugh based the very commonplace, drab and casually immoral character John Beaver in A Handful of Dust on Heygate. It is interesting to learn from Heygate’s Wikipedia article that:

He did marry Gardner, in 1930, which was jolly decent of him – but they were divorced in 1936.
He was very right-wing, a Nazi sympathiser, and attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally in the company of his friend the writer Henry Williamson, next to Unity and Diana Mitford. Lovely people.

Childishness

Hastings repeatedly emphasises the childishness of Waugh and his friends (p.251-25 3). From one point of view the whole affair with and marriage to Gardner was an apotheosis of childishness. She was famous in her circle for her lisping childish pronunciation, for giving everyone nursery nicknames, for looking and dressing like a pre-pubescent boy (a page boy, in Diana Mitford’s description).

But it wasn’t just them. Hastings considers their entire generation cultivated a childish irresponsibility. Maybe it was a rebellion against their heavy Victorian and Edwardian parents, and against the enormous tragedy of the Great War which their older brothers fought and died in. But calculated frivolity and heedless hedonism was, of course, the signature mode of the bright young things of the 1920s, and much of this had a deliberately childish aspect, a refusal to grow up or take anything seriously.

In Waugh’s fiction this is probably best exemplified in various plotlines in Vile Bodies but in his social life Hastings shows how it was a deliberately cultivated pose in some circles of friends, for example the Lygon sisters. Hastings quotes postcards and letters they sent each other written in fake baby language, or with the interpolations of a fictional stupid character named Tommy (actually a joke at the expense of a neighbour of the Lygons, Tommy MacDougall, ‘a dashing master of foxhounds’, p.252) who interrupts the main text to ask stupid questions rendered in misspelt capitals:

When we meet again it will be gay and terribly exciting and not at all like a biscuit box
WY LIKE A BISKIT BOCKS PLESE?
Wait till you are a little older Tommy and then you will understand.
(quoted page 252)

I am going to live in Oxford all the summer and write a life of Gregory the Great.
WHO WAS GREGRY THE GRATE?
He was a famous pope, Tommy.
(quoted page 301)

This style of gushing naivety is used by Waugh in the funny short story ‘Cruise’ which consists of postcards from an archetypally dim, naive, semi-illiterate flapper on a cruise back to her parents. The story uses a phrase which recurs in the actual Lygon correspondence, obviously a catchphrase of their group or the time, which is to use the gushingly simple-minded phrase ‘God how sad’ for anything which goes wrong from tea not being nice to riots in foreign cities (eventually abbreviated in letters to ‘G how s’.p363). If you say it in a posh 1920s flapper voice it is quite funny.

Another notable group slang phrase was ‘lascivious beast’ for priest. For the rest of his life, in letters to close friends, Waugh regularly referred to priests he was meeting in England or abroad and even in Rome, as ‘lascivious beasts’ or just ‘beasts’.

The three Lygon sisters and their fabulous country estate at Madresfield were very important psychologically to Waugh after the trauma of his divorce from Gardner. He recreated a fake childish world with them, which was maintained in their lively correspondence, and he dedicated Black Mischief to ‘Mary and Dorothy Lygon’ when it was published in October 1932.

Conversion to Catholicism

Obvious roots:

He was a very earnestly seriously Christian schoolboy.
Many people of his generation and in his immediate circle converted to Catholicism in the late 1920s.

The most interesting thing about Waugh’s conversion is that it wasn’t romantic or mystical, it was entirely intellectual (pp.225, 227, 229). Talking it over with Catholic friends and then with one or two high society Jesuits he came to the intellectual conviction that:

Christianity explained the world, humans and morality
Catholic Christianity, established in Rome by the martyr Saint Peter, was the oldest, truest, most universal, most enduring form of Christianity (p.225)

And that was it. From this intellectual conviction he never strayed. Details of liturgy and practice, aspects of theology, his emotions or feelings about religion, all these could change and he could happily take the mickey out of them because none of it altered his deep intellectual conviction about the fundamental truth of Roman Catholicism.

Evelyn always insisted that his response to his faith was purely intellectual and pragmatic. (p.487)

Thus Waugh could jokingly refer to priests as ‘lascivious beasts’ and any amount of levity and satire about individual churchmen without a qualm because it wasn’t a question of respecting this or that piety; for Waugh Catholicism simply was the universal truth about the world, whether he was serious and solemn about it or messing about with friends. His own personal attitude didn’t change the Truth. The Truth carried on regardless of anything he wrote or thought or said, that was its appeal.

It didn’t do any harm that entering the Catholic church meant joining a small, embattled, unfashionable elite, and that Waugh identified solely with the old, aristocratic Catholic families and with only the best high society Jesuits – that suited his snobbish elitism very well. But it wasn’t the fundamental motive.

Politics

Waugh wasn’t very interested in politics (‘contemptuous as he was of political life and all politicians’, p.495). Arguably the one enduring subject of his work, diaries and letters was Gossip about people he knew or knew of. Even when he was ‘reporting’ from Abyssinia what excited him most was the court gossip as bruited among the catty diplomatic circles.

His politics followed his religion in the sense that he believed that Absolute Truth resided elsewhere, the human nature is fallen and deeply flawed, that perfection can never be achieved in this world and all attempts to achieve it inevitably end in repression. He handily defined his credo in an extended passage from the travel book he was commissioned to write about Mexico, Robbery Under Law, published in 1939 just as the world plunged into another world war. Because it’s so central to everything he wrote it’s obviously a carefully worded and thorough credo, it’s worth repeating in full:

Let me, then, warn the reader that I was a Conservative when I went to Mexico and that everything I saw there strengthened my opinions.

I believe that man is, by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth; That his chances of happiness and virtue, here, remain more or less constant through the centuries and, generally speaking, are not much affected by the political and economic conditions in which he lives; That the balance of good and ill tends to revert to a norm; That sudden changes of physical condition are usually ill, and are advocated by the wrong people for the wrong reasons; That the intellectual communists of today have personal, irrelevant grounds for their antagonism to society, which they are trying to exploit.

I believe in government; That men cannot live together without rules but that they should be kept at the bare minimum of safety; That there is no form of government ordained from God as being better than any other; That the anarchic elements in society are so strong that it is a whole-time task to keep the peace.

I believe that the inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and that it is therefore meaningless to discuss the advantages of elimination; That men naturally arrange themselves in a system of classes; That such a system is necessary for any form of co-operation work, more particularly the work of keeping a nation together.

I believe in nationality; not in terms of race or of divine commissions for world conquest, but simply thus: mankind inevitably organizes itself in communities according to its geographical distribution; These communities by sharing a common history develop common characteristics and inspire local loyalty; The individual family develops most happily and fully when it accepts these natural limits.

A conservative is not merely an obstructionist, a brake on frivolous experiment. He has positive work to do.

Civilization has no force of its own beyond what it is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all.

Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity.

Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace.

Fascist Spain and Italy

This explains Waugh’s support for Mussolini, when Fascist Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935, and for the forces of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Waugh visited Abyssinia three times and was appalled at the poverty, cruelty (read the description of Addis Ababa prison in Remote People) and barbarity of much of the country, which wasn’t a country at all but an empire of subject peoples held together by force. He saw Italy as bringing European law and order and culture and, above all, Religion, to a corrupt and failing country.

I was shocked when I first read of his support for the ‘noble cause’ of Franco and the nationalists in Spain but it, of course, makes perfect sense. The Spanish socialist government may have been democratically elected but it embarked almost immediately on a campaign of closing churches and arresting priests. If you believe the Catholic Church is a vital connection between the creator God and his people, as Waugh very deeply did, then this simply could not be allowed and Franco’s intervention to restore law and order and preserve the church of course received Waugh’s initial support. Until it became clear that the Franco forces were committing atrocities every bit as bad or worse than the communists he vilified – at which point he washed his hands of the whole affair.

Waugh’s Second World War

One quote says it all:

The ordinary soldiers disliked [Waugh] to such an extent that for a time [his superior officer, Lieutenant] Laycock felt obliged to set a guard on his sleeping quarters. (p.445)

Despite being every bit as committed to the war effort as his alter ego, Guy Crouchback, in the Sword of Honour trilogy, and despite showing real bravery in the face of enemy attack (Stuka divebombing in Crete) Waugh was universally disliked in the army. He had no idea how to deal with the ordinary working class soldiers, veering between heavy sarcasm and shouted orders, both of which failed to command affection or respect (‘He bullied and bewildered them’, p.445). His commander in 8 Commando, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Laycock (Eton and Sandhurst), told him he was so unpopular as to be virtually unemployable in the army (p.445).

He was an outsider to all the regular soldiers, bluff philistine types who instinctively took against this ‘bookish chappie’ with his smart repartee and corrosive cynicism. And when he did manage to wangle a place in a commando unit (as Crouchback does) Waugh was easily outclassed by genuine aristocrats such as Lord Randolph Churchill. His brown-nosing snobbish hero worship of these real blue blood types was so obvious, and repellent to onlookers, that Hastings is able to quote several written accounts describing it. His toadying to anyone with a title was a running joke with the WAAFs at the headquarters of Combined Operations (p.419).

Lord Lovat (Ampleforth and Oxford), the deputy brigade commander, wrote of Waugh:

‘I had known him vaguely at Oxford, and, while I admired his literary genius, had marked him down as a greedy little man – a eunuch in appearance – who seemed desperately anxious to “get in” with the right people.’ (quoted page 450)

I was surprised to learn that when Lovat ordered the scruffy, ill-disciplined Waugh to go to a barracks in Scotland to re-undergo basic training, and Waugh objected and took his complaint to Lovat’s superior, General Haydon, the latter sacked him on the spot for insubordination. This was August 1943. Waugh remained in the army but without a post or position. This marks the end of his romance with the army. From now on he just wanted to get out, to return to civilian life and resume his career as a writer.

This disillusion and demotivation is strongly conveyed in the short prologue and epilogue to Brideshead Revisited where it is assigned to the novel’s narrator, Charles Ryder.

Waugh’s real wartime career closely followed the narrative of the Sword of Honour trilogy, or the trilogy was very closely based on his own experiences. But having read Hastings’ account makes you realise that Waugh’s greatest achievement in the novel was putting Crouchback on the same social level as the blue blood heroes he describes, and accepted by his fellow officers. Waugh was an outsider because he was a social-climbing, bookish cynic. In the trilogy Waugh converts the reasons for Waugh’s outsiderness – bookish, sarcastic, cynical, bad at handling soldiers – into the far more noble and romantic and acceptable reasons for Crouchback’s outsiderness, namely long-running depression over being dumped by his wife and a stern commitment to Catholic values which none of the other officers understands.

Sex

It’s strange that sexual problems in the bedroom appear to have contributed to the swift collapse of Waugh’s first marriage, and that Hastings periodically thereafter describes him as lacking sexual self-confidence, strange because his diaries and letters are full of sexual encounters – homosexual ones at school and Oxford and for a while afterwards in London, and then various encounters with prostitutes abroad. In Tangier, January 1934, Waugh explored the red light district and visited a brothel where he bought a 16 year old girl for 10 francs:

but I didn’t enjoy her very much because she had a skin like sandpaper and a huge stomach which didn’t show until she took off her clothes & then it was too late.
(Diary quoted p.297)

He then takes a 15 year old concubine whose face is entirely covered in blue tattoos and he thinks about setting up in an apartment of her own for his sole use (p.297). I was very struck by Waugh’s own account of being in an Italian brothel and paying for a big black guy to sodomise a white youth on a divan, all artfully staged and arranged for the viewing pleasure of Waugh and his friends.

I suppose there’s all the difference in the world between staging such events or, in more general terms, paying for sex, and having to manage consensual sex with a female partner, with someone you have to talk to later, arrange all the domestic chores, go out to dinner with and so on. That is an infinitely more complex situation to deal with and Waugh wouldn’t be the first man to find it demanding and intimidating.

Waugh writes the word ‘fuck’ quite a lot. One of his female correspondents deprecated his use of the word in a letter to her, so it was obviously not freely used in his posh circles. I was struck by the bluntness of a letter Waugh wrote his second wife, Laura, about taking leave from the army at Christmas 1942, just after she had given birth to their third child:

There is an hotel at Shaftesbury with a very splendid sideboard. I think we might take a week end there soon when you are fuckable. (quoted page 444)

which certainly gives an indication of the way he wrote to her, and maybe spoke to her, but it is not necessarily indicative of the bluntly physical attitude he actually took to sex because we know from his countless other letters, that he cultivated a range of voices and styles (baby talk, high gossip, satire, facetious descriptions of army life) in his letters, depending on who they were written to. Everything he wrote was written for effect.

(The really surprising thing about that letter is that it was preserved and published. Who gave permission for it to be published? I wouldn’t want my casual notes or texts to my wife to be published for the world to read.)

Music

Strikingly, Waugh had no feel at all for music and hated almost all forms of it. At one point he comments that listening to Palestrina was purgatory while, at the other end of the musical spectrum, he loathed the loud jazz which became more and more dominant in London nightclubs as the 1920s progressed.

If you don’t perceive music as the complex interlinking of melody, harmony, rhythm and syncopation, you tend to register it simply as noise and ‘racket’. Waugh’s loathing of music took most concrete form in his detestation of the ‘wireless’, the new-fangled radio which came in during the 1920s and became more and more and more popular during the 1930s and 40s. His was one of the few middle class households in the country which didn’t possess a wireless and so didn’t listen to Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast about the outbreak of war in September 1939 (p.383).

Witness his short story ‘The Sympathetic Passenger’, lampooning a man who hates the wireless; or the scenes in Unconditional Surrender where Guy is convalescing in an RAF hospital whose ‘long-haired boys’ have radios everywhere in the building cranked up to full volume blaring out jazz music which drives Guy so mad he phones a friend and begs to be taken away.

Anti-Americanism

‘God, I hate Americans’, quoted on p.299

The brash, superficial, loud, vulgar consumer capitalism of America came to epitomise everything Waugh hated about the modern age (p.221). Like most British writers he came to rely on sales in America to keep him solvent but that didn’t stop him being very rude about America and Americans in correspondence and, sometimes, to their faces.

Evelyn had always referred with patronising contempt to Alec’s fondness for America, and since the war had come to regard the United States as the apogee of everything that was tasteless, vulgar and barbaric. (p.511)

This is exemplified in the easy-to-overlook joke at the start of The Loved One where the two British protagonists are depicted on the verandah of a rundown bungalow at dusk, surrounded by decay, thick vegetation and the sound of cicadas, so that you think they must be in some god-forsaken colony in darkest Africa or the Far East and only slowly do you discover that they are in fact in Hollywood. Hastings pulls out some choice quotes from his huge correspondence:

The great difference between our manners and those of the Americans is that theirs are designed to promote cordiality, ours to protect privacy. (p.512)

My book [Brideshead Revisited] has been a great success in the United States which is upsetting because I thought it in good taste before and now I know it can’t be. (letter to John Betjeman, quoted p.512) [Betjeman went to Marlborough and Oxford]

Post war

The last 100 pages of the novel are marked by three themes:

1. Writing for money

Waugh continued to write a lot but the quality was often poor. Hastings records the umpteen commissions he received from magazines and newspapers, driving a very hard bargain, demanding the maximum rate possible, and then very often disappointing with work which was so hurried or roughshod, the magazines quite frequently refused to publish it or asked for their money back.

Of similar dubious or debatable quality are his handful of post-war stories, the novellas ‘Scott-King’s Modern Europe’ (genesis, writing and reviews summarised pages 500 to 502) and ‘Love Among the Ruins’ (in Hastings’ opinion, ‘a nasty little tale’, p.553) and the oddity which is The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (origin and writing described pages 560 to 567).

The Loved One is another oddity, which begins well and is full of lusciously funny details, but somehow fizzles out: he fails to find a plot to match the comic richness of his subject (American funeral homes). (Its genesis, writing and reception described on pages 514 to 522.)

Students and fans often overlook the overtly Catholic books he wrote, such as the novel about the Roman Empress Helena, discoverer of the ‘True Cross’ (1950) which was slammed in his own day and has never sold well (described pages 538 to 541). The 1930s biography of the Elizabethan martyr Thomas Campion (1935) and the biography he promised to write of his good friend, Catholic convert and Jesuit priest Ronald Knox (The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox, 1959) [Knox attended Eton and Oxford].

Then there were two poorly received travel books ‘The Holy Places’ (1952) and ‘A Tourist in Africa’ (1960). In 1961 he was paid £2,000 by the Daily Mail to go back to British Guiana on the eve of independence and write five articles on his impressions. These were so flat and incurious the Mail printed only one and demanded their money back (p.606).

The exception to all of this, and all the more remarkable for the mediocrity of the rest of his post-war output, are the three novels of the Sword of Honour trilogy (Men at Arms, described page 546 to 551; Officers and Gentlemen pp.571 to 573; Unconditional Surrender pp.594 to 599) which I find magnificent, richly funny, fascinating with social history, and deeply moving.

2. Comic dislike of his children

Waugh genuinely disliked small children and his own were no exception.

I abhor their company because I can only regard children as defective adults, hate their physical ineptitude, find their jokes flat and monotonous…The presence of my children affects me with deep weariness and depression. (quoted op.527)

The Waugh children (all 6 of them) were exiled to the nursery and, as soon as possible, sent off to prep schools. Waugh hated Christmas because of all the noise and disruption and had a little private party when they went back to their schools (p.527ff.). Waugh cultivated the pose of a father who detested his children and, although this must have been horrible to experience, it is often very funny to read about, especially when expressed in his deliberately outrageous letters.

His eldest son, Auberon Waugh (1939 to 2001: Downside and Oxford) went on to become a novelist, journalist and literary editor. He wrote an autobiography describing his unhappy childhood in detail and said that, as a boy, he would happily have swapped his father for a bosun’s whistle (p.528).

3. Boredom and depression

Above all, Waugh was bored bored bored, often bored to death. He drank to excess to stave of boredom and depression, and the against-the-fashion pose of young fogey he cultivated in the 1930s, and which came to seem out of place during the People’s War, crystallised into the persona of an angry, overweight, red-faced old buffer after the war. Waugh knew what he was doing; the persona he cultivated is described with precision in the self-portrait which opens The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold:

It was his modesty which needed protection and for this purpose, but without design, he gradually assumed this character of burlesque. He was neither a scholar nor a regular soldier; the part for which he cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously, before his children at Lychpole and his cronies in London, until it came to dominate his whole outward personality. When he ceased to be alone, when he swung into his club or stumped up the nursery stairs, he left half of himself behind and the other half swelled to fill its place. He offered the world a front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass.

Hastings picks up the word ‘pomposity’ and quotes a passage from a letter to Diana Cooper:

Women don’t understand pomposity. It is nearly always an absolutely private joke – one against the world. The last line of defence. (p.568)

All this is interesting because you don’t find in fiction, or anywhere nowadays, a sympathetic explanation of the quality of pomposity. The idea of it being a sort of private joke is thought provoking, an insight into the way all kinds of people’s odd manners might be taken as very personal jokes against the world…

Hastings gives example after example of Waugh’s astounding rudeness to everyone he met, no matter how powerful and influential – the bitter arguments he had with even his closest friends, and the well-attested rows he had with his long-suffering wife, Laura.

One of the most loyal friends of his later years was the tough-minded socialite Ann Charteris (1913 to 1981) who had three husbands, first Lord O’Neill, secondly Lord Rothermere and then the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming (Eton and Sandhurst). Hastings quotes comments about Waugh from several of his close woman friends such as Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford, but Ann Fleming put her finger on it when she wrote to her brother, Hugo, in 1955:

‘Poor Evelyn, he is deeply unhappy – bored from morning till night and has developed a personality which he hates but cannot escape from.’ (quoted p.558)

Not only was he a martyr to boredom but to insomnia and since the late 1930s had been taking various sleeping draughts which he mixed, against all medical advice, not in water but with creme de menthe. It was when he began, in addition, dosing himself with bromide that he developed first the physical and then the mental symptoms so accurately described in Pinfold.

He was invited to stay at the Flemings house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica where he was irascible and ungrateful. Ann Fleming again: ‘Poor Evelyn – killing time is his trouble and not a night without sleeping pills for twenty years’ (quoted p.571).

And when Nancy Mitford asked him, after he had paid her a bad-tempered visit in Paris, how he could reconcile behaving so badly and speaking so spitefully about everyone with his religion’s words about loving your neighbour as yourself:

‘He replied rather sadly that were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible…& anyway would have committed suicide years ago.’ (quoted p.505)

Credit

Evelyn Waugh: A Biography by Selina Hastings (1994) was published by Sinclair-Stevenson in 1994. All references are to the 1995 Mandarin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on January 19, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Biography, Literature

Tagged A Handful of Dust, A Tourist in Africa, A.D. Peters, Abyssinia, Addis Ababa, Agatha Runcible, Alastair Graham, Alec Waugh, Ann Charteris, Ann Fleming, Anthony Powell, anti-Americanism, Arnold House, Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, Arthur Waugh, Aston Clinton, Auberon Waugh, “Wireless”, Black Mischief, Bo, Boaz, boredom, Brian Howard, Brideshead Revisited, Bright Young Things, C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, Canonbury, Catherine Raban, Catholic Christianity, Cecil Beaton, Chapman and Hall, Charles Ryder's Schooldays, Crete, Cruise, Cyril Connolly, Daily Express, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Debra Lebanos, decline and fall, Depression, Diana Cooper, Diana Mitford, Dorothy Lygon, Duckworths, Eton College, Evelyn Gardner, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, Fascist Italy, Fascist Spain, funeral home, General Franco, Golders Green, Guy Crouchback, Haile Selassie, Helena, Henry Williamson, Hertford College, Hollywood, homosexuality, Hypocrites Club, Ian Fleming, Jazz, Jesuits, Joan Waugh, John Beaver, John Betjeman, John Heygate, Labels, Lady Burghclere, Lady Selina Hastings, Lancing College, Laura Herbert, Llandullas, Lord Burghclere, Lord Lovat, Lord Randolph Churchill, Love Among The Ruins, Madresfield, Maimie Lygon, Mary Herbert, Men at Arms, Mexico, Midsomer Norton, Mr Wu, Nancy Mitford, Nathaniel Woodard, Nazis, Neville Chamberlain, New College, Officers and Gentlemen, Olivia Plunkett-Greene, Olivia Wyndham, Oxford, Oxford Movement, Pansy Pakenham, Peter Fleming, private school, Remote People, Richard Pares, Robbery Under Law, Robert Byron, Robert Layock, Roman Catholicism, Ronald Knox, Scoop, Scott-King's Modern Europe, Sebastian Flyte, Second World War, Selina Hastings, Sherborne school, Spanish Civil War, Stinchcombe, Stukas, suicide, Sword of Honour, The Balance, the Holy Places, the honourable Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner, The Loom of Youth, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, The Temple at Thatch, Thomas Campion, Tom Driberg, Tommy MacDougall, travel books, Unconditional Surrender, Underhill, Unity Mitford, Vile Bodies, war, West Hampstead, Winner Takes All, Yellow Book

Posted by Simon on January 19, 2022

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The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh

Waugh was a professional writer from the year he published his first short story in 1926 till his death in 1966. During that period he published some 26 short stories. There are several editions of his collected short stories, notable the Everyman one and the Penguin one. I read the Penguin one but the Everyman edition (which includes a few more stories than the Penguin) is the one that’s available online.

What all the editions tend to highlight is that Evelyn Waugh did not, in fact, write many short stories. All the editions include the juvenilia written at school, and the half dozen stories written at Oxford, to bulk up the books. And for real aficionados and completists it’s good to have everything in one volume like this. But the fact remains that in a writing career of 40 years he only published 26 short stories.

Spin-offs from novels or no short stories at all

Not only that, but when you look more closely, you realise that a number of the stories are offcuts of the novels and so closely linked as to be barely standalone narratives.

Thus ‘Incident in Azania’ is set in the fictional country created for the novel Black Mischief and feels very much like an anecdote which could have been included in that novel but was cut as surplus to requirements. ‘Cruise’ is a short squib, a lampoon consisting entirely of postcards written by a gushing, silly, posh young lady on a cruise round the Med, an idea recycled from one of his travel books. ‘Charles Ryder’s Schooldays’ is quite obviously a spin-off from Brideshead Revisited and ‘Basil Seal Rides Again’ is a final flurry for the character at the centre of Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags.

So four of the 26 are direct spin-offs from novels.

More than that, three of the stories are actual extracts from the novels: ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ is an early version of the final chapters of A Handful of Dust and ‘By Special Request’ is not a standalone story at all, but the original ending of A Handful of Dust as it first appeared when the novel was serialised in Harper’s Bazaar. ‘Compassion’ was recycled in its entirety into the end section of Unconditional Surrender.

So seven of his adult short stories aren’t really standalone narratives but either rely on the novels they derive from or are actual excerpts from them. Leaving 19.

Two of these 19 aren’t really short stories at all. The post-war narratives ‘Scott-King’s Modern Europe’ and ‘Love Among The Ruins’ are far longer than your normal short story, certainly than the other stories included here, and so are generally categorised as novellas. Leaving 17.

And lastly, by far the longest item in the collection, at around 80 pages, is ‘Work Suspended: Two Chapters of an Unfinished Novel’ which, as the title suggests, is not and was never intended to be a short story, but the first sections of an abandoned novel.

Leaving only about 16 short stories gleaned from a career which lasted nearly 40 years.

Commissions

Finally, the notes in the Penguin edition reveal one more fact about the ‘short stories’, which is that quite a few of them were commissions, not written off his own bat. Now there’s nothing wrong with a story being commissioned – both Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four were commissioned over the same historic dinner (30 August 1889) with the magazine editor, J. M. Stoddart. However, all of Waugh’s commissioned stories only make sense, or make a lot more sense, when you learn they were commissioned as part of series on a set theme:

Thus:

‘A House of Gentlefolks’ was commissioned for a series titled The New Decameron
‘The Kremlin’ was commissioned for a series titled Real Life Stories by Famous Authors (which explains its opening sentence: ‘ This story was told me in Paris very early in the morning by the manager of a famous night club, and I am fairly certain that it is true.’).
‘Too much tolerance’ was commissioned for a series titled The Seven Deadly Sins of Today and only really makes sense in that context
and ‘The Sympathetic Passenger’ was written for the Tight Corner series in the Daily Mail, ditto

The short story not Waugh’s metier

So the conclusion I draw from this little statistical analysis is that Waugh was very much not a short story writer, certainly not in the manner of Saki or Somerset Maugham or Kipling or J.G. Ballard, writers who produced a tremendous output of short stories but, more importantly, who suited the short story format. All four of those authors, in their different ways, knew just how to manage their material into artefacts which create maximum artistic and psychological impact and a range of effects. Waugh not so much.

In fact I’m afraid to say I found a lot of Waugh’s stories disappointing. A few I didn’t even understand, I didn’t see the point of them.

In a novel like Vile Bodies Waugh took scores of anecdotes about the shallow, heartless behaviour of his upper class Bright Young Things and combined them in such a way as to produce a kind of group portrait which was much larger than the sum of its parts. But broken down into short, isolated texts, most of these anecdotes feel much weaker, and sometimes pretty lame.

For me the stories’ value was analytical, they gave me a greater understanding of what you could call the ‘mosaic technique’ of Waugh’s novels, what I’ve referred to as the importance of gossip, not only as subject matter of the novels but as a key element of his technique. The way the central events of the novels are always commentated on by the shoals of secondary characters which fill his novels, gossiping at parties and restaurants and balls and dinners, mingling catty comments about the central events of the novel’s narrative with deliberately throwaway mentions of the trials and tribulations of other, unrelated people to give a powerful sense of their ultimate irrelevance; or the way all stories, and all lives in the modern world are swamped and trivialised by the sheer number of people and tragedies and stories we’re meant to pay attention to.

This technique has multiple benefits: from the point of view of literary realism, it helps create the illusion of the throng, of the crowdedness of London High Society, where everyone knows everyone else, goes to each other’s parties and dinners, where everyone spends a lot of time energetically gossiping about each other’s ups and downs and affairs.

Seen in terms of technique it has at least two benefits: it allows Waugh to skip or cut briskly between scenes with great dramatic effect, just as films can cut from one scene to another in a split second. This encourages or suits Waugh’s tendency to be concise and clipped, so that some of his best scenes are only half a page long before they cut away to something completely different. Technique and style are perfectly combined.

(Waugh’s debt to cinema technique becomes overt in some of these texts, not least in ‘Excursion in Reality’ which is a Vile Bodies-era satire about a hapless young writer who gets caught up in the 24/7 crazy world of film production; and the very first text in the collection is a kind of commented-on version of the screenplay of a black-and-white, silent movie.)

Waugh’s understated debt to Modernism

The second benefit of Waugh’s ‘mosaic technique’ is the way this approach subtly incorporates some of the best features of the previous generation’s Modernism. Modernism refers to a movement in literature during and after the Great War which sought to depict the hectic, frantic, fragmented, fractured experience of living in big cities in styles or narrative structures which reflected psychic collapse and disintegration. Thus the disintegration of a highly sensitive mind portrayed in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, the extreme fragmentation of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the collapse of a unified narrative and then of the English language itself in James Joyce’s Ulysses, or the collapse of the patriarchal Victorian tone of voice into the swirling stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf’s novels.

Waugh swallowed Modernism whole, experimented with it, and then adapted it for his own purposes, keeping only what he needed. The very first story in the collection, ‘The Balance’, published in 1926, is the best example (described below) in the way it is broken up into short snippets headed by the captions of the silent movie it describes. This immediately recalls the clever use of newspaper headlines in the ‘Aeolus’ chapter of Ulysses and anticipates the blizzard of newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, popular songs and so on which litter the classic example of German high Modernism, Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, published a few years later in 1929.

My point is that this technique of fragments, of consciously breaking up the text of a narrative into a mosaic of short clipped scenes, of cutting away from the main protagonists of an event to a group of their friends heartlessly laughing about their fates, a technique exemplified in Vile Bodies but which appears, with greater or lesser frequency throughout all his fiction, this was Waugh’s version of Modernist fragmentation and alienation.

Waugh and mental breakdown

And although Waugh has the (deserved) reputation of being a great comic writer, actually rereading the novels as I’ve been doing, it has been a shock to realise just how much misery, suffering and pain they include.

There are scores of examples but, focusing literally on mental breakdown, I think of the devastating impact on Tony and Brenda Last of the tragic death of their son in A Handful of Dust. Take the scene where they return from their son’s inquest to big, empty Hetton Hall and Brenda barely makes it into the entrance hall before sitting down in a decorative chair which nobody usually sits on, sitting there and looking around her in a daze. Or immediately after Tony gets news of his son’s death and trembles on the brink of going to pieces, is only saved by the compassion of ‘the Shameless Blonde’, the sturdy American woman aviator who stays with him and forces him to play cards all afternoon. A scene of tremendous psychological power.

Or take Vile Bodies which is all very hilarious up till the racing car crash which precipitates the concussion and nervous collapse and eventual death of the bright, confident heroine Agatha Runcible.

A key strand in the similarly polyphonic novel Put Out More Flags is the psychological decline of Angela Lyne, up to that point a confident, dominating presence in London High Society, whom the advent of war reduces to an alcoholic wreck, hiding out in her serviced apartment, drinking all day in dark glasses with the curtains closed.

A central thread in Brideshead Revisited is the agonising decline of the bright and beautiful young undergraduate Sebastian Flyte into a shambling, poverty-stricken, feverish wreck in the slums of Tunis.

And then, of course, Waugh wrote an entire novel dramatising his own mental breakdown, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold in 1957.

So for a writer who’s (correctly) associated with the reactionary views of England’s moneyed upper classes and (correctly) famous for his high-spirited comedy, it’s worth repeating that Waugh also wrote throughout his career about extreme tragedy, psychological trauma and mental collapse, and did so using his own version of the polyphonic, mosaic narrative technique – both a subject matter and a technique more usually associated with the avant-garde.

Anyway, to return to the short stories, my point is simply that if most of them had been included in one of his novels, they would have made one more hilarious scene amid the general mayhem of the polyphonic, multi-stranded plots and contributed to the complex artistic and psychological impact of the novels. But given here, as standalone short stories, as just one bald anecdote, a surprising number of them come over as lame and flat.

Which is why I wouldn’t really recommend these short stories to anyone. I’d recommend reading pretty much all the novels first, before you bother with them.

Pre and post-war

One last point. The stories can also be divided in chronological order into those written before the Second World War and those written after. At a glance you can see that he was far more prolific in short stories before (21) than after (5). (For the period of the war itself he was either serving in the Army or, from December 1943 to June 1944, entirely busy writing his magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited.)

If we count Scott-King’s Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins as novellas, then he can only be said to have written three short stories between 1945 and 1966, confirming my feeling that the short story was emphatically not his genre. That said, all three post-war short stories are good.

Short stories 1. Pre-war

1. The Balance (1926)

Born in 1903, Waugh was only 22 when he wrote this, by far his most experimental and avant-garde text.

In the cinema

Very much in the style of Vile Bodies, this fairly long text uses a number of highly experimental narrative techniques. Most of it, the long first part, consists of scenes from an imagined film. It opens with a cook and a house parlour maid (Gladys and Ada) making their way to their seats in a cinema and then making cheerily working class comments on the action of the movie they’re watching. Somewhere behind them (in the more expensive seats) sits a Cambridge student who drawls knowing intellectual comments (pointing out the debt to European Expressionism of some of the shots, explaining what steak tartare is). And the text is punctuated by the captions in CAPITAL LETTERS which are appearing onscreen, as this is a black-and-white, silent film.

Thus the text consists of: capitalised captions, interspersed with the narrator’s description of what is happening onscreen, interspersed with the working class comments of the two servants given in italics, and the occasional sardonic comment from Mr Cambridge.

The ‘story’ is made up of clichés and stereotypes, which allows his working class women to spot in advance what’s going to happen, the Cambridge man to make superior comments, and Waugh to mock all of them.

Adam is at art school. He loves Imogen. Imogen’s mummy tells her she must stop seeing him. They share a cab to Euston where she catches a train to the country. Ada, catches cab to home near Regent’s Park, goes up to room, melodramatically considers suicide by pills, imagines the vulgarity of family breaking down door, calling police, thinks again. Scoops up his best books and takes them to a luxury second-hand bookseller, the fussing about first editions suddenly reminding me of The Picture of Dorian Gray. He gets a tenner for his books, then a cab to Paddington and train to Oxford and goes to see, one by one, his incredibly posh undergraduate friends. Old Etonians, the Bullingdon Club, chaps who hunt, who paint, who drink very heavily.

The window blind has become stuck halfway up the window so that by day they are shrouded in a twilight as though of the Nether world, and by night Ernest’s light blazes across the quad, revealing interiors of unsurpassed debauchery.

Yes, Dorian Gray. Waugh is channeling Wilde turned into a 1920s silent movie. And deliberately elitist or excluding references to aspects of Oxford life. Eights week. Commem. The Bullingdon. The Canning. All the posh young men he tries are busy till he resorts to visiting the rooms of Ernest Vaughan.

They go for dinner at a local pub, get plastered, go on to some rough proletarian pubs, play darts, get into loud arguments, get kicked out, catch a cab back to the colleges, gatecrash a party, pour drinks on the carpet, nearly get into another fight till Ernest walks dignifiedly out into the quad, throws up and passes out.

Cut to the next evening when the pair gatecrash a Liberal Association party at Oxford town hall. Having irritated the guests and got blind drunk they walk outside where Ernest steals a car, drives it haphazardly down St Aldate’s before mounting then kerb and crashing into a shop window. Police close in and arrest him. Adam walks very depressed back to his hotel room. He uncaps the bottle of poison and drinks the contents down in one.

End of film. Glady and Ada and the smart Cambridge graduate and a hundred others exit the film, all chatting about it, the two women to make their way back to their shared rooms in Earls Court where they’ll carry on discussing it over cups of cocoa.

Adam outside the film

At which point the text cuts and changes to a series of three sections of parts. Part one finds Adam in the hotel bedroom piecing together the fragments of the last 24 drunken hours and then remembering standing by the bedroom window in a storm of nausea before throwing up through it into the courtyard, presumably evacuating the poison from his system.

A boyhood memory

In the short part two he has a vivid memory of being a 7-year-old boy and playing a game with the family cat, Ozymandias, which consisted of locking it and himself in his bedroom then chasing it round the room terrorising it at every stop; only then did the real game begin, which was the challenge of trying to coax it back to a state of relaxed affection. And the particular memory which floats into his head as he lies on the bed recovering from his failed suicide attempt, is of the time that Ozymandias escaped to the top of the wardrobe, so the 7-year-old Adam pulled his table over to the wardrobe and put a chair on top of the table and climbed up on both and reached out for the cat and… the whole lot collapsed to the floor and he fell and knocked himself out. Vivid as yesterday he remembers the sensation of slowly ‘regaining consciousness’ and piecing together like a jigsaw the scattered flowing bodily sensations till he had attached particular pains to particular parts of the body and his ego was once again in control.

This early experience of psychological fragmentation, flotation and reassembly recurs at moments of drunkenness, as now. Now he gets up and has breakfast in the hotel still in a hallucinatory state:

He had breakfasted in a world of phantoms, in a great room full of uncomprehending eyes, protruding grotesquely from monstrous heads that lolled over steaming porridge; marionette waiters had pirouetted about him with uncouth gestures. All round him a macabre dance of shadows had reeled and flickered, and in and out of it Adam had picked his way, conscious only of one insistent need, percolating through to him from the world outside, of immediate escape from the scene upon which the bodiless harlequinade was played, into a third dimension beyond it.

Adam talks to his reflection

Adam walks out of Oxford along the towpath. He had written a letter to Imogen begging her to come back. He crosses a bridge over the canal and looks at a swan sailing by whose reflection is broken and fragmented. He tears up the letter and chucks the fragments into the river, then has a brief conversation with himself. He supposes tearing up the letter means he is over Imogen, and the fact that he’s here at all means he’s resolved to go on living. Was there no moral influence on his decision to live, no wish not to burden his loved ones, no profound insight into the meaning of life? No. Simply a rest, a sleep, a change of scenery. Ultimately, those are the small measures which make all the difference. No intrinsic motives from the soul. Just as random as…circumstance.

A shift of perspective

And then in its last two pages the text does what I mentioned so many of them doing: it switches perspective altogether to create a deliberate alienation effect. Suddenly we are at a country house named Thatch and Mrs Hay has invited her undergraduate son Basil and one friend for luncheon but a whole carload has turned up, gossiping and smoking all the time.

The point being, they are all telling each other about the other night when horrible Adam gatecrashed lovely Gabriel’s party with some ghastly man named Vaughan who was offensive to everyone then threw up. Here, right at the start of his career, we find Waugh using a technique which will serve him again and again, which is spending a lot of time on a close account of the incidents and thoughts of one or two protagonists; and then suddenly cutting far away to hear the same events being retold as throwaway gossip by people who don’t give a damn about the characters we’ve just been following and have invested so much time and trouble in.

It’s a very simple technique but very modernist in feeling, pulling the rug from under our feet, suddenly making us realise how silly and trivial the little trials and tribulations we’ve been following are in the great scale of things. Making the entire fictional edifice in which we had been investing time and emotion seem infinitely fragile and inconsequential.

Short conclusion

Arguably, and certainly to someone like myself, soaked in early twentieth century modernism, this is the most interesting of all the stories in the book. It clearly foregrounds three things: one, the very self-conscious modernist technique which Waugh studied, copied and assimilated; two, the interest in altered and extreme psychological states, reflected not only in Adam’s drunkenness but the much more interesting and vivid descriptions of regaining consciousness after his concussion as a small boy; three, the determinedly, almost offensively, upper class nature of the settings and characters – Mayfair, Lord and Lady this, Old Etonians at Oxford etc.

Of course it was this latter strand, the supremely upper class settings and characters, which were to characterise the rest of his writings. But this, Waugh’s first published short story, makes abundantly clear the surprisingly experimental nature of his early literary taste.

And also shows how an interest in morbid or damaged psychology was not just a personal thing, but has its roots in the fin-de-siecle obsession with decadence, its hyper-Gothic interest in altered states and very deeply troubled psyches, epitomised by Wilde’s novel Dorian Gray which leaves stray echoes in some of the self-consciously aesthetic moments this text – but reborn thirty years later in the era of Freudian psycho-analysis, jazz nightclubs and cocktail bars.

For these reasons I found it by far the most interesting, and intellectually stimulating, story in the collection.

A House of Gentlefolks (1927)

Only a year later and Waugh has swallowed, assimilated and concealed his learnings from Modernism (although there is a surprising reference to the famous Modernist author, Gertrude Stein, on the second page).

This is a first-person narrative which, in style at least, is thumpingly traditional, telling a simple narrative in chronological order with no fancy tricks. The narrator arrives by train at a rural station, it is raining, catches a taxi to Stayle, a grand country house surrounded by a wall, entry via umpteen gates, seat of the Duke of Vanburgh.

The narrator tells us his name is Ernest Vaughan, same name as the drunk in the previous story and, as he tells us he was sent down from Oxford for bad behaviour, it is presumably an early example of Waugh’s career-long habit of populating his fictions with recurring characters.

Anyway, sent down from Oxford, Ernest is at a loose end when his godmother tells him the Duke of Stayle is looking for a tutor to take his 18-year-old grandson and heir to the earldom on a tour round Europe. The only snag is the boy is mad. They now introduce him to the young fellow, actual name George, who has, it must be said, odd manners. Ernest feels sorry for him, as he only attended school for a term and is obviously ill at ease with strangers. He decides to take the job on.

Within a few hours they’re on the train to London, Ernest with a check for £150 in his pocket, where they check into a hotel and Ernest takes George on a tour of London’s attractions, revues, nightclubs and parties with his super-posh friends. Plus the very best tailors to get formal suits and travelling clothes made up. Over the next few days Ernest watches George blossom, learning about food, restaurants, fine wine, and party etiquette before his very eyes.

At one point they have a candid conversation in which he suggests that he isn’t mad at all; maybe it’s his grandfather and his great-aunts (who Ernest met in the first scene) who are the eccentrics, and this certainly seems likely to Ernest and to the reader.

Then it all grinds to a halt. In an ending almost as crass as saying ‘and then I woke up and it was all a dream’, Ernest gets a letter from old Lord Stayle saying the family’s thought better of the experiment and are cancelling the trip. George is to come home straight away. A lawyer arrives to cancel all obligations and take him off. George’s parting words are that in 3 years time he’ll come of age and be able to do what he wants.

In a way the most telling moment comes in the final sentence:

Five minutes later Julia rang up to ask us to luncheon.

This has the brisk brevity of Vile Bodies, powerfully conveying the sense that, oh well, that adventure’s over, he’s mad, she’s dead, they’ve gotten divorced, Harry’s married Margot, he died in the war, she’s pregnant, whatever – conveying the dizzy speed of the high society social life Waugh dedicated himself to.

The Manager of ‘The Kremlin’ (1927)

The unnamed narrator likes going to a restaurant in Paris. One night he stays late and the manager, Boris, tells him his story. He was a student when the revolution joined out and joined a white army fighting the Bolsheviks. It was a motley crew which included various foreign nationals including a Frenchman. Boris helped save this man’s life by lending him his Russian uniform when they travelled through the most backward parts of Asiatic Russia. They were forced to flee east. Once in Japanese territory they shake hands and part. Boris took ship to America where he hoped to join his mother who had fled there early in the revolution. He does not thrive and after a couple of years takes ship to France, travelling to Paris where he hears there is a large diaspora. Here he really runs out of money and is down to his last 200 francs. In a very Russian gesture, he decides to blow it on one last luxury meal. As chance would have it the Frenchman he saved those years ago is dining at the next table. He accosts his old colleague and asks him how he’s doing. Boris explains he’s skint. The Frenchman runs a motor car company and toys with offering him a job but reflects that a man who could blow his last francs on an exquisite French meal is really cut out for the restaurant business. And so he loans Boris the money to start a restaurant and Boris employs some Russians he knows and now he is rich. Which is the story he tells the narrator in the early hours, as the ‘Kremlin’ restaurant closes up.

Love in the Slump (1932)

Big gap between the previous story published in 1927 and this one in 1932. During that time Waugh published his biography of Rossetti, Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), travelled to Abyssinia and produced Remote People (1931).

Originally titled ‘The Patriotic Honeymoon’, this is broad farce. An eligible if unremarkable young couple get married, decide to spend a patriotic honeymoon in England then experience a series of farcical mishaps. The portrait of the young wife is obviously a lampoon but nonetheless interesting social history about just what subjects were lampooned back then – portrait of a frustrated singleton c.1932:

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

It’s interesting that what spurs Angela on to take the initiative and propose to bland, boring, safe, accountant Tom Watch is that he father has announced he has to make economies and will probably be closing the London house in order to retrench to his place in the country, sack a few of the servants, live a simpler life. Angela doesn’t want to live a simple life. So she combines her £200 a year with Tom’s £800 a year which they reckon they’ll be able to live on, just about, though not being able to have a child.

It rains on the wedding. They catch a train to Aunt Martha’s house in Devon. At some remote rural stop Tom gets out to check if they need to change and is buttonholed by an old school acquaintance who insists on buying him a drink then another at the station bar. When they come out on the platform the train’s gone, along with his baggage and bride!

He reluctantly accepts the old school chum’s back to his place and stay over. They drink a lot. He wakes up to discover his host is going hunting. Against his better nature he dons a hunting outfit, is loaned a mare, and has a good day’s run till he’s thrown and the mare trots off. He makes his way across country to an inn, the Royal George Hotel Chagford, where he’s taken in and given a bed for the night. Next morning he discovers the stop for his aunt’s place is no fewer than three changes from his present location so he sets off on slow local stopping trains not arriving at the station till late at night. He has travelled all day in wet clothes. No car is available. He decides to stay the night in the station inn.

Next morning Tom wakes hoarse and feverish. A taxi takes him to Aunt Martha’s where he discovers that… his beloved fiancée has left, having received a telegram from his first host saying Tom had met with an accident, she has travelled to his (the first host)’s house. Tom is too coldy to do anything and goes to bed. Next day, the sixth of the honeymoon, he begins to feel it’s not working our quite as he expected. His aunt’s maid suggests the host’s name will be inside the jacket he lent Tom and so there’s a brief exchange of telegrams with Angela a) saying she’s having a lovely time and b) no point meeting up now, wait till they meet up back in London. Which they do the next day.

And, as so often, the story cuts away from the main protagonists so that we learn from a conversation between Angela’s parents that she’s been given access to a lovely cottage in Devon, quite near the estate of the chap she stayed with. Won’t that lovely? The implication is that, after less than a week of honeymoon, Angela has found someone richer and more exciting than Tom to have an affair with.

Too Much Tolerance (1932)

The narrator is stopping between ships at a stifling little port on the Red Sea. It’s important to know that this ‘story’ was commissioned for a series about the Seven Deadly Sins and as such is a lampoon on the idea of tolerance, too much tolerance. It’s a simple idea. The narrator falls in with the only other European in his hotel, an amiable round-faced moustachioed commercial agent and this man displays the virtue of tolerance to excess. He likes all the races and creeds he meets.

In a gesture towards psychology Waugh explains that he had been brought up by elderly parents, retired from India, who held very fixed beliefs about etiquette and social distinctions. So as a young man he set out to consciously rebel against all that, to be open, and tolerant and accepting.

Slowly the narrator learns how this attitude has led to the man being hopelessly abused and reduced in life. Out of kindness he took a fellow into partnership in the business he’d set up with the legacy from his parents, but while he was serving in the Great War the fellow ran it into bankruptcy. Strange thing, though, almost immediately afterwards, his partner set up a new concern and is now a rich man.

In a similar vein, he reveals he has a 27-year-old son who’s never had a job, wants to be something in the theatre, gads around London with well-off friends. So our chap sends him as much money as he can to support him.

Lastly, he has a wife, or had a wife. His father had strict moral principles about who could and couldn’t be introduced at home, but he thought that was all rubbish and encouraged his wife to have her own friends and go out and about on her own. She liked dancing, he didn’t, she went to dance lessons and then dance clubs and then left him for a chap who was good at dancing and had a bit of a fast reputation.

So here he is. Reduced to ‘selling sewing machines on commission to Indian storekeepers up and down the East African coast’, a victim of his own niceness and credulousness:

a jaunty, tragic little figure, cheated out of his patrimony by his partner, battened on by an obviously worthless son, deserted by his wife, an irrepressible, bewildered figure striding off under his bobbing topee, cheerfully butting his way into a whole continent of rapacious and ruthless jolly good fellows.

Excursion in Reality (1932)

Struggling young novelist Simon Lent, living in a pokey mews flat and managing a relationship with demanding Sylvia, is hired out of the blue by British movie mogul Sir James MacRea. He is collected from his mews flat and plunged into a mad whirligig of meetings, missed appointments, canteen breaks, tours round film studios and sets, a whirlwind affair with Macrae’s secretary, Miss Grits, all based on the nonsensical notion that he should write an updated version of Hamlet, with modern dialogue, with a bit of Macbeth thrown in. Lent demurs. Sir James steamrollers over him:

“Ah, you don’t see my angle. There have been plenty of productions of Shakespeare in modern dress. We are going to produce him in modern speech. How can you expect the public to enjoy Shakespeare when they can’t make head or tail of the dialogue. D’you know I began reading a copy the other day and blessed if I could understand it. At once I said, ‘What the public wants is Shakespeare with all his beauty of thought and character translated into the language of everyday life.’”

For three weeks Lent throws himself into the ridiculous project, working hand in glove with Miss Grits and summoned to meetings at any hour of day or night. And then, as suddenly as he was summoned Lent is dropped by the director and studio, his contract terminated, and returns to the calm life of a struggling novelist, living in a tiny mews flat and having long moody dinners with Sylvia again.

Incident in Azania (1933)

Azania is the name of the fictional African country Waugh invented as the setting for his fourth novel, Black Mischief, loosely based on Zanzibar which he had visited on his 1930 trip to East Africa, recorded in Remote People.

The story is so inconsequential, I wondered if I’d read it right. Into the small colonial society of Matodi, port city of Azania, arrives the strapping blonde Prunella Brookes, attractive feisty daughter of the local oil company agent. Since there are only eight Englishwomen in the entire town, including a 2-year-old and all the rest married, her arrival inevitably causes a stir and soon there is gossip about which of the most eligible bachelors she is likely to date.

Then she disappears, then ransom letters arrive at the club. She has been kidnapped by bandits, led by the notorious Joab! They want £10,000 for her safe return.

The story is picked up by the wider press and a strapping Australian journalist flies in, a reporter for the Daily Excess. In a repetition of the satire on the press which featured in Black Mischief and was to form the central theme of Scoop, this chap writes a series of sensational and utterly invented descriptions of the bandits and their squalid caves and their fearsome leader.

Finally, he collects the ransom money, takes a jeep and the local Armenian businessman and all-round fixed Mr. Youkoumian up in the hills determined to find and confront this Joab, hand over the ransom and free the lovely young virgin. Instead, in a tremendous anti-climax, they encounter Miss Brooks stumbling down the track towards them, apparently freed and unharmed. With complete illogicality, instead of turning and heading back to town, Prunella insists they are surrounded by Joab’s snipers and so Youkoumian had better take the car and ransom and drive further up the hill to the bandit camp.

During the wait Prunella gives the ardent journalist a detailed and obviously completely fictional account of her stay among the bandits. Then Youkoumian returns, Prunella declares the snipers have all withdrawn, they get in the car and return to Matodi.

Much fuss and bother about her, the memsahibs clucking like hens, the chaps congratulating themselves on job well done, the journalist files his last triumphant story and departs, and a couple of months later Prunella quietly sails back to Blighty.

Only slowly does it dawn on some of the senior members of the ex-pat community that they have been diddled. There’s no proof and it isn’t explicitly stated, but the implication is that the entire ‘kidnapping’ was a con set up by Prunella with Mr Youkoumian, who split the £10,000 ransom between themselves.

Bella Fleace Gave a Party (1933)

Miss Annabel Rochfort-Doyle-Fleace or Bella Fleace as she is known to the entire countryside, is a very old lady, ‘over 80’ (p.103), who lives alone in a grand house which somehow survived the upheavals surrounding Irish independence, in a place called Ballingar.

One colourless morning in November she decides to give a Christmas party in the old style. The preparations are elaborate and described in length, along with pen portraits of the house’s staff (butler Riley), the caterers and so on.

The preparations were necessarily stupendous. Seven new servants were recruited in the village and set to work dusting and cleaning and polishing, clearing out furniture and pulling up carpets. Their industry served only to reveal fresh requirements; plaster mouldings, long rotten, crumbled under the feather brooms, worm-eaten mahogany floorboards came up with the tin tacks; bare brick was disclosed behind the cabinets in the great drawing room. A second wave of the invasion brought painters, paperhangers and plumbers, and in a moment of enthusiasm Bella had the cornice and the capitals of the pillars in the hall regilded; windows were reglazed, banisters fitted into gaping sockets, and the stair carpet shifted so that the worn strips were less noticeable.

Bella takes a great deal of trouble writing the invitations by hand and considering who to invite and who to exclude, which leads to more brief portraits of the inhabitants of the grand houses in the area, including the various arrivistes and nouveaux riches.

The great night comes, the mansion is illuminated by candles, decorated by swags of flowers, the staff are ready, the expensive food is cooking but…nobody comes, nobody that is except the two arrivistes she had specifically excluded from inviting, but who are attracted by the lights and music from the old house. Puzzled, then perplexed, the old lady slumps on the sofa in the hall. Next day she dies. Her heir, a distant cousin and Englishman named Banks, arrives to make an inventory of the house and its contents. Tucked away in Bella’s escritoire, beautifully written, stamped and addressed he finds the invitations to the party, unsent.

Cruise, or Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure (1933)

Consists entirely of a series of letters and postcards sent home by a silly young woman on a Mediterranean cruise. Must have seemed very clever when it was published. Still pretty funny.

POSTCARD

This is the Sphinx. Goodness how Sad.

POSTCARD

This is temple of someone. Darling I cant wait to tell you I’m engaged to Arthur. Arthur is the one I thought was a pansy. Bertie thinks egyptian art is v. inartistic.

POSTCARD

This is Tutankhamens v. famous Tomb. Bertie says it is vulgar and is engaged to Miss P. so hes not one to speak and I call her Mabel now. G how S. Bill wont speak to Bertie Robert wont speak to me Papa and Lady M. seem to have had a row there was a man with a snake in a bag also a little boy who told my fortune which was v. prosperous Mum bought a shawl.

The Man Who Liked Dickens (1933)

A version of the story which ends the novel A Handful of Dust namely the man, named Mr McMaster here, Mr Todd in Handful, who lives an extremely isolated life among the Shiriana Indians in the Amazonas for 60 years. One day the Indians bring an Englishman to him who has staggered out of the rainforest, shattered, suffering from shock and exposure, an explorer whose partner Anderson has died.

This Paul Henty has a very similar backstory to Tony Last in Handful i.e. his wife left him for another man and, in the first flush of embitterment he got talking to a chap in his club who was planning an expedition to Amazonia and here he is.

The details of the ‘expedition’ are different. There were initially more members, who are all given pen portraits and to whom various misadventures happened, eventually depriving Henty and Professor Anderson of colleagues and a lot of supplies. And in this version Anderson simply falls ill of malaria and dies, compared to the version in the novel where it is the main hero who falls ill, and the expedition leader, Dr Messinger, who sets off to find help in a canoe and is washed over a waterfall to his death. Here the Indians who had brought him this far overnight abandon Paul, taking the canoe, leaving him to stumble along the river bank, becoming increasingly starved, feverish and hallucinatory. This, also, is less effective than the devastating description of the state of utter, helpless misery Tony Last is reduced to after Dr Messinger disappears.

As in the novel the McMaster/Todd figure has power over the local Indians because he fathered most of them – and he has a gun. He informs Henty that a black man stayed with him and read to him every afternoon. Henty is happy to do the same and is shown the man’s ant-eaten collection of Dickens novels. At first all goes well, but by the time they’re into the second volume of Bleak House Henty is restless. He brings up the idea of him leaving and returning to civilisation and for the first time McMaster becomes slightly menacing. Yes. The black man had the same ideas. Then he died. McMaster says he will get the Indians to build a canoe. The months drag on. Then the rainy season arrives and McMaster says it will be impossible to travel. He tries to communicate with the Indians but they don’t even understand sign language. He finds a token left in Martin Chuzzlewit which is a pledge McMaster gave to the black man, Barnabas Washington, that he would be allowed to leave at the end of reading that book. When Henty insists that McMaste lets him leave McMaster simply tells the Indians to stop making him food, to stop bringing him the same breakfast, lunch and dinner he’s been having as McMaster. Henty is forced to resume.

Then a lonely wandering prospector arrives at the camp. McMaster is vexed, gives him something to eat and sends him on his way in under an hour. But that’s time enough for Henty to scribble his name on a piece of paper and press it into the man’s hand. From that moment he lives in hope that his name will eventually reach civilisation, the towns on the coast, and an expedition will be launched to find and rescue him. Thus encouraged he accepts McMaster’s invitation to a feast given by the Indians. He eats and drinks heartily.

When he wakes up it is days later and his watch has gone. McMaster explains that while he slept a little expedition of three Englishmen arrived looking for him. His wife in England is offering a reward. McMaster shows the men the grave of the black man, saying it was Henty’s, and gave them Henty’s watch as proof that the poor man had gotten ill, died and been buried there. The Englishmen went off well contented with the story, the evidence and the proof. No-one else will come looking for him. Ever. He is doomed to spend the rest of his life reading Dickens to a madman in the depths of the Amazon jungle.

So in all important points it is identical with the text used as the final part of A Handful of Dust. And, as there, the final speech where McMaster explains how he tricked him and that he is now doomed meets with no reply from Henty, no indication of his reaction, making it a thousand times more powerful. In much the same way that there is no response from Basil Seal when the old native in Black Mischief explains he’s just taken part in a cannibal feast and eaten his own girlfriend. None needed. This situation itself is shock enough.

Out of Depth (1933)

This is an oddity, a science fiction story, a time travel story. It starts conventionally enough in Waugh’s usual environment, the posh upper classes. Rip is an ageing American who always dines with Lady Metroland when he’s in London (Margot Metroland having weaved in and out of Waugh’s stories since Decline and Fall). When he arrives for dinner he finds most of the other guests gathered round an unusual figure:

An elderly, large man, quite bald, with a vast white face that spread down and out far beyond the normal limits. It was like Mother Hippo in Tiger Tim; it was like an evening shirt-front in a du Maurier drawing; down in the depths of the face was a little crimson smirking mouth; and, above it, eyes that had a shifty, deprecating look, like those of a temporary butler caught out stealing shirts.

Lady Metroland introduces him as Dr Kakophilos, a magician. She is very proud of the sensation he creates, but Rip finds him a sinister, repellent person with a thin Cockney voice. At the end of the party a very drunk Rip finds himself driving Dr Kakophilos and old friend Alistair Trumpington home. Kakophilos invites them in and in his sitting-room is suddenly dressed in magician’s garb, ‘a crimson robe embroidered with gold symbols and a conical crimson hat.’ He launches on a discourse about time and space, recites words of power, while Rip and Alistair giggle drunkenly. As they get up to leave, the magician asks them both if they have a favourite period in time. Alistair says the time of Ethelred the Unready, Rip prefers to go forwards, to five hundred years in the future, thinking it a load of gibberish then stagger to their car and Alistair drives off very drunk and crashes into a van in Shaftesbury Avenue.

When Rip comes to he finds himself in London five hundred years hence, a deserted city in ruins which has been reclaimed by nature. Piccadilly Circus is covered in hummocky turf and a few sheep.

The entrance of the Underground Station was there, transformed into a Piranesi ruin; a black aperture tufted about with fern and some crumbling steps leading down to black water. Eros had gone, but the pedestal rose above the reeds, moss grown and dilapidated. (p.137)

He walks down to the river, almost all the buildings have gone, it is wild. He finds a cluster of huts built on stilts. At dawn the inhabitants emerge, savage tribal people dressed in skins. He walks forward and they surround him, offering no violence, just puzzled. Rip is convinced this is a drunken hallucination but it just won’t wear off.

Days then weeks pass as he is fed fish and coarse bread and beer. Finally there is a great fuss and some educated people arrive. The big thing in the story is that they are black. For a start the boat they arrive in is mechanically driven i.e. far above the scope of the savages, and they were wearing uniforms of leather and fur and well organised under a commanding leader. They trade with the natives, exchanging manufactured goods for gewgaws the natives have dug up and also taking Rip from them.

In other words, the tables have been turned, the roles reversed, and instead of technologically advanced white men penetrating darkest Africa and trading with primitive blacks, now it is the whites whose society has collapsed and the blacks who penetrate up the wide lazy Thames.

Eventually their ship arrives at a military station on the coast, in the style of the early western outposts in Africa. There is a steamer, a black anthropologist with glasses studies him, they get him to read old books with what is obviously, to them, an ancient accent, they measure his skull with calipers. In every way a reversal of white colonial practice.

Then, described in the briefest way, barely a paragraph, he is in a Christian mission and finds the congregation of illiterate whites staring at an altar where a black priest in the outfit of a Dominican friar conducts a Mass, something Rip remembers from his youth, something which has obviously not changed for 2,500 years.

Then he comes round in a hospital bed to find a priest by his bedside, obviously calling into question the extent to which anything he’s just experienced was ‘real’. But when the priest tells him that Alistair, also in hospital, has woken from a dream of being in the middle ages, Rip in a panic thinks maybe it was true, maybe his consciousness was thrown forward in time.

I have seen this described as Waugh’s most overtly Catholic story, which it might well be. But it was the vision of an England fallen back into uncivilised savagery, and visited by colonising technologically advanced Africans which caught my imagination.

By Special Request (1934)

This was the original ending of A Handful of Dust as it appeared in the original magazine serialisation in Harpers’ Bazaar. It feels very flat and banal compared to the horrifying reading-Dickens ending which he eventually chose. Above all, this original final version of the story is very, very short at just eight pages.

In this version, Tony takes the elaborate steps to secure a divorce which feature in the novel but then, when he realises how avaricious and selfish Brenda has become, he calls off the divorce settlement negotiations and – this is the point of divergence, does not set off on a hair-brained expedition to Brazil, but instead (much more likely) treats himself to a long and leisurely cruise.

The story commences as Tony’s liner returns to Southampton. He is met by his chauffeur but surprised to learn that his estranged wife, Brenda, is in the car. They are frightfully decent and polite to each other. Brenda explains she just had to give up that flat, it smelt so frightfully of hot radiators. He knows this is a Decision Moment: should or should he not take Brenda back and forgive her? But in reality, he falls asleep in the warm soft back of the car and only wakes when they reach Hetton.

Where they are greeted by the butler and the luggage unloaded and then he and Brenda inspect the work which has been done in the renovated bathrooms, checking the taps and so on like a, well, an old married couple.

After dinner they sit in the library and Brenda timidly hopes Tony wasn’t in a rage with her when he left, isn’t in a rage now. Course not, he replies, and asks after Beaver, her one-time lover. Well, it all ends up being about money. Tony cut her off without a cent and Beaver didn’t have any money, was blackballed from clubs, she tried to get a job with Mrs Beaver who turned her down, then working in her friend Daisy’s restaurant but that didn’t last.

Then Beaver met the Shameless Blonde and fell madly in love and chucked Brenda, who was now on the brink, living on scraps from the delicatessen round the corner. But the Blonde wouldn’t have anything to do with him and so his mother eventually sent him off to Europe to be a buyer for her business. And so here she is, penniless and without prospects. During the recitation Tony begins to nod off again and so she says, ‘Come on, let’s go up’, and as simply as that their marriage resumes.

In a 3-page coda months have passed and Tony and Brenda are happily married and have popped up to London to do some shopping. Brenda is on at Tony to do something about the flat she leased a year ago for her affair with John Beaver. So at last Tony goes round to see Mrs Beaver, who owns the apartment block. Only instead of simply cancelling the lease, he comes to a discreet arrangement with Mrs Beaver…to have his name removed from the lease and name board of the block, for a fee. Tony rejoins Brenda after her shopping and they catch the train back their country house.

And the train sped through the darkness towards Hetton.

Clearly that is a metaphorical darkness, for the transaction inaugurates a new era of infidelity and betrayal in their marriage. On the one hand this ending is obviously much more realistic than the reading-Dickens ending. But you can also see why it’s unsatisfactory in several ways.

At a stroke it wrecks Tony’s character, his position as the unchanging moral rock at the centre of the story. And in doing so undermines the… the moral or psychological structure of everything which had preceded it.
And undermines the value of the death of their son. That was such a shocking, staggering event that for the entire story to fizzle out in Tony’s go at having an affair feels cheap and nasty. The reading-Dickens ending may be weird, wildly implausible, bizarre and cruel but it has the great advantage of matching the cruel death of little John. In its madness and cruelty it is a far more fitting ending to the novel.

Period Piece (1936)

Lady Amelia, an old lady, likes having stories read to her by Miss Myers. She likes crime stories, often quite violent ones, American ones with ‘brutal realism and coarse slang’, ‘narratives of rape and betrayal’. I suppose, in Waugh’s circle and for his audience, this idea itself might be quite amusing.

When Miss Myers one day ventures the opinion that the story she’s just finished reading was far fetched, Lady Amelia replies that if you recounted stories from the lives of the people around them, you’d probably call them far-fetched. She then tells the story of ‘the extremely ironic circumstances of the succession of the present Lord Cornphillip.’

Etty a cousin of her mother’s marries Billy Cornphillip, a phenomenally boring man. Lady Amelia was a bridesmaid (p.155). Their marriage upset Ralph Bland who was Billy Cornphillip’s nearest relative and stood to inherit his fortune if he’d died without an heir. He has a wife and children to support and not much money. Over the years, though, Etty fails to become pregnant so Ralph bucks up.

Ralph comes to stay one Christmas but his 6-year-old son gives the game away when he tells Billy that, when he (Billy) inherits, he’ll pull the whole place down. At that point there is a complete breach between the two men and war declared. Billy is a Conservative and Ralph comes down to stand in his constituency as a Radical (and wins). At which point Billy accuses Ralph of corruption during the election and successfully gets him unseated.

Ralph takes this very badly and takes to attending speeches Billy is giving and laughing of clapping in the wrong place, he gets drunk in the local pub and is found asleep on Billy’s terrace. All this is very difficult for skinny Etty who had been friends with Ralph.

One bonfire night Ralph got drunk and made a load of threats against Billy, who called the police and had him up in magistrates court and he was given a banning order but amazed everyone by leaving that very afternoon for Venice with Billy’s wife, Etty! However, the affair was not a success, they stayed in an insanitary palace, Etty fell ill, Ralph ran off with American lady who was much more his type, and so Etty returned to England. She tries to find friends to stay with but, eventually, everyone hears she was back with Billy and about to have a baby. It is a boy i.e. a son and heir.

So this is very broadly the same plot as in Unconditional Surrender – a posh chap accepts the child his wife has had by another man she’s been having an affair with.

But the point of the story, or maybe its literary feature, is the way it veers away at the very end from what might well be the most bombshell part: which is that the boy never knew he wasn’t the son of his father, and which is described only indirectly:

until quite lately, at luncheon with Lady Metroland, when my nephew Simon told him, in a rather ill-natured way. (p.159)

It is very characteristic indeed of Waugh that these kind of bombshell moments are told at one remove or prompt little or no response. Blink and you might miss them. Imagine the impact on the son, his confused feelings, the agonised conversations when he confronts his mother and father. Absolutely none of that is here, all left to the reader to work out, that’s if he or she even notices this revelation, given the way it is tucked away at the end of the little story as a throwaway sentence.

On Guard (1934)

Millicent Blade is a lovely girl but she has a small shapeless nose. In another example of the way Waugh, when reaching for a comparison for anything, thinks first of his prep or public school, his description of Millicent’s nose goes:

It was a nose that pierced the thin surface crust of the English heart to its warm and pulpy core; a nose to take the thoughts of English manhood back to its schooldays, to the doughy-faced urchins on whom it had squandered its first affection, to memories of changing room and chapel and battered straw boaters.

Hector kissed her reverently on the tip of this nose. As he did so, his senses reeled and in momentary delirium he saw the fading light of the November afternoon, the raw mist spreading over the playing fields; overheated youth in the scrum; frigid youth at the touchline, shuffling on the duckboards, chafing their fingers and, when their mouths were emptied of biscuit crumbs, cheering their house team to further exertion…

Hector gazed at her little, shapeless, mobile button of a nose and was lost again . . . “Play up, play up,” and after the match the smell of crumpets being toasted over a gas-ring in his study . . .

A good deal of the upper-class pose in Waugh’s fiction derives from the failure of all these public schoolboys to ever grow up and genuinely confront a wider world; their preference to stay within the safe sanctuaries of Oxbridge colleges or Westminster common rooms or Inns of Court chambers or their gentlemen’s clubs, mentally prisoned in their boyhoods, never growing up.

Anyway, Millicent’s fiancé, Hector, is off to Africa, buying a farm off a chap named Beckthorpe who has consistently bad luck with it. Dining with Beckthorpe at his club, Hector wonders what he can give Millicent as a memento, to make her remember him till he’s well off enough to invite her over. Some jewellery? A photo?

Beckthorpe suggests a dog, and so as to ram the point home, name it Hector. Next day Hector goes to one of London’s largest emporiums and, in rather a panic, buys a poodle. When he leans down to commune, the little perisher takes a snap at him which he adroitly avoids. Hector tells the doggy to prevent any other men getting at Millicent.

Millicent, characteristically, goes to the wrong station so misses seeing Hector off on the train to the port to the ship which will take him to Africa. Hector gives the poodle to Beckthorpe to give to Millicent. Millicent writes to tell him she loves it and it has already bitten a ‘man called Mike.’

The narrative now steps back to reveal that Millicent’s passions for men generally last about 4 months and was reaching that period when Hector’s last minute flurry of activity to find a job slightly renewed it. The comic conceit of the story is the idea that the puppy heard and understood Hector’s injunction not to let other men near Millicent.

The rest of the text develops this idea via mishaps with a series of suitors. Hector the dog adopts strategies to be the centre of attention so no suitor stands a chance: he makes a fuss of the sugar bowl, goes to the door and scratches to be let out then scratches to be let back in, or pretend to be sick, gagging and retching so that Millicent carries him from the room thus destroying any attempt at humour.

As for Hector the supposed fiancé, Millicent soon forgets about him. He writes weekly from the farm in Kenya where things are hard, but Millicent rarely even opens the envelopes and never reads to the end. When friends ask her about Hector, she increasingly thinks they’re referring to the dog not her beloved:

it came naturally to Millicent to reply, ‘He doesn’t like the hot weather much I’m afraid, and his coat is in a very poor state. I’m thinking of having him plucked,’ instead of, ‘He had a go of malaria and there is black worm in his tobacco crop.’

If young men she’s met at parties call, Hector learns to mimic taking a call, cocking his head on one side, so that Millicent gets into the habit of putting the receiver to the dog’s muzzle, deafening the (hungover) young men with a barrage of barks. If men invite Millicent for a walk in the park, Hector goes on ahead, carrying her bag and periodically dropping it so the young man has to pick it up.

Two years pass. Suitors come and go each of them, eventually, foxed by the dog. She has long ago stopped caring about her lover in Kenya. At last Hector meets his match in the person of the middle-aged Major Sir Alexander Dreadnought, Bart., M.P., a man routinely put upon by friends and family from an early age who had developed a forebearing nature.

Hector tries out all his tricks but Dreadnought simply finds him charming. Dreadnought invites Millicent and her mother to his place in the country where Hector does everything he can to be obnoxious, ragging the carpet, rolling in poo in the grounds then coming back and soiling every chair in the house. He howled all night, killed some partridges, hid so the household were up half the night looking for him. Dreadnought takes it all in good part.

Back in London Hector the poodle ponders his options and realises that, all his strategems having failed, there was only one last desperate way for him to keep his promise to his original master, his purchaser, Hector. And so the next time Millicent leans over to nuzzle him, Hector makes one quick snap and bites Millicent’s pretty little snub nose clean off! A plastic surgeon repairs it but creates a new type of nose, strong and Roman. Gone is all Millicent’s schoolboy charm. Hector achieves his aim, and turns her into a suitorless spinster:

Now she has a fine aristocratic beak, worthy of the spinster she is about to become. Like all spinsters she watches eagerly for the foreign mails and keeps carefully under lock and key a casket full of depressing agricultural intelligence; like all spinsters she is accompanied everywhere by an ageing lapdog. (p.171)

Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing (1935)

Has a great comic opening line:

‘You will not find your father greatly changed,’ remarked Lady Moping, as the car turned into the gates of the County Asylum.

Ten years earlier Lord Moping had attempted to hang himself after a particularly distressing annual garden party had been ruined by squally weather. He was taken away and housed in the wing of the asylum reserved for wealthier lunatics where the Lady Moping visited him periodically. This is the first time their grown-up daughter, Angela.

Lord Moping is brought to the doctor’s office where they wait by a kindly old gent with lovely white hair who the doctor tells them is named Mr Loveday. He has become Lord Moping’s assistant in the asylum, patient and kind.

Lord Moping is huffy and busy with all his ‘work’, under the delusion that he needs to do a great deal of research about rivers and fisheries and send off letters to important people such as the Pope. He claims not to recognise or know Angela and hurries back to his room, but Mr Loveday very kindly comes back a few minutes later to see Lady Moping and Angela and assure them that his lordship will like to see them again, it’s just he’s very busy and distracted at the moment.

When he’s gone the governor tells him Loveday is not a warder or nurse, as they thought, but himself an inmate. Why? Twenty years earlier, when a young man, he knocked a young woman off her bicycle and strangled her. Gave himself up immediately.

Angela is a noble spirit, a compassionate soul. She thinks it’s unfair such a sweet kind old man as Mr Loveday should be locked up. She studies the laws surrounding lunacy. She makes an excuse to pop over to the asylum again and asks to ‘interview’ Mr Loveday. When she asks him if he’d like to be free, Loveday replies that, yes, he has one little ambition he’d like to fulfil before he dies.

Angela leaves with the tears of the sensitive in her eyes. She studies more, lobbies the various important personages who come to stay at their house over the summer. Finally she gets her way and it is announced Mr Loveday will be released. There is a big ceremony with the governor, Angela and various lunatics in attendance, then Mr Loveday walks free.

A few hours he is back, handing himself in. He took advantage of his hours of liberty to strangle another young lady who happened to ride by.

Gruesome, in the manner of Roald Dahl’s boom-boom Tales of the Unexpected.

Winner Takes All (1936)

A tale of two brothers, Gervase and Thomas Kent-Cumberland, the first much favoured, feted, celebrated and blessed with all the gifts a grand family can bestow; Thomas an unwanted second child which his mother hoped would be a girl. Throughout their lives Gervase receives all the benefits and gifts:

Gervase is born in an expensive nursing home with all the trimmings, his birth celebrated with a bonfire on the beacon hill, his christening with a garden party leading to fireworks; Thomas in a shoddy modern house on the East Coast delivered by a repellently middle class doctor
when their uncle buys Thomas the big red model car he’s always wanted for Christmas, their mother assumes he’s got it wrong and changes the labels so Gervase receives the grand toy
when their father dies during the Great War their mother becomes extremely parsimonious and obsessed by the threat of Death Duties, cuts are instituted all through the grand household and in their school activities, so that poor Gervase doesn’t inherit the debts – ‘ “It is all for Gervase,” Mrs. Kent-Cumberland used to explain’
Gervase is sent to Eton, to save money Tom is sent to a much cheaper, modern school
Gervase goes up to Christ Church Oxford where he consorts with other magnificent Etonians in the Bullingdon Club; when Tom goes to visit him he is intimidated and drinks too much in a corner
marooned at home after school, his mother sets Tom to reorganising the family library; in it he comes across a manuscript journal kept by a Colonel Jasper Cumberland during the Peninsular War; Tom does a lot of research, identifies maps of the campaign and a picture of the Colonel and writes an introduction and notes to it; all this is taken off him and given to Gervase who publishes it under his own name and gains all the praise and kudos
swiftly followed by Gervase’s 21st birthday party whose celebrations are lengthy and elaborate; Tom’s old bedroom is given to a guest and he has to sleep in the local pub
meanwhile Tom had been found in a motor manufacturing firm in Wolverhampton and found digs over a fruitshop on the outskirts of town

After a while you realise Waugh has just sat down and made a list of every single humiliation a younger son can be put through, and then inflicted in his fictional Tom. The sequence of humiliations rises to a sort of climax when Tom falls in love with a very ‘common’ girl from the motor manufacturer works, Gladys Cruttwell. When he, finally, reluctantly, takes Gladys home to meet his mother, Mrs Kent-Cumberland is, as you might expect, appalled.

With the result that Tom is swiftly removed from the motor business and dispatched to a farm in Australia! Meanwhile Gervase has come of age and now owns and runs the estate at Tomb with lavish prodigality, extending buildings, buying hunters, contemplating a swimming pool, entertaining lavishly each weekend.

Meanwhile years pass and Mrs Kent-Cumberland does not notice from his letters (which she rarely reads) that Tom has fallen in love with an Australian girl, that he is sailing with her and her father to London, that they have arrived!

She sends Gervase to meet them who reports back that they are a) staying at Claridges (rich and b) going to stay in the country with the Chasms (socially connected). Eventually they arrive, tall Mr MacDougal and daughter Bessie. What quickly emerges is they own vast territories in Australia and are loaded. Bessie is a comically naive and impressionable young woman, impressed by everything she sees. But the more she sees of England the less remarkable Tom seems. The more his brother stands out as a copy of him but with more life. When Mr MacDougal has a confidential chat with Mrs Kent-Cumberland and informs her that his annual revenue is somewhere around £50,000, a twinkle comes into her eye.

She makes plans and carries them out. She encourages Gervase to be very nice to Bessie, drops hints to Bessie about the advantages of being attached to the eldest son and then carries off her masterstroke – she returns from London one day to tell Tom she has just bumped into Gladys Cruttwell! Of course she arranged a luncheon and told Gladys that Tom had never got over him. Now she lies to Tom and tells her Gladys never got over him. She has invited her to come and stay for a few days. She plays on Tom’s sense of guilt and fair play, asking whether he had not, in fact, led on the poor girl and then dumped her.

When they are reunited and left alone they both proceed along these carefully arranged lines with the result that two weeks later Tom and Gladys are married. Mrs Kent-Cumberland explains everything to the MacDougals, not least that Gervase, the taller, handsomer brother is free and available. They are married after 6 weeks engagement. He and Bessie have two children and six racehorses. Tom and Gladys are packed off to Australia where MacDougal gives him a junior management job on a remote ranch in the middle of nowhere.

Not so much a tale of sibling rivalry as of sibling crushing defeat. And the indomitable figure of the scheming upper class mother.

An Englishman’s Home (1939)

Mr Beverley Metcalfe made his pile in the cotton trade in Alexandria and then bought a large acreage and house in the quaint Cotswold village of Much Malcock. He is nouveau riches, he insists on calling the nice Georgian house he’s bought Much Malcock Hall, although all the locals, including his ineffective gardener Boggett, insist on referring to it by its traditional name, the Grumps. The narrative paints a lazy, comic picture of the village and its inhabitants, at least those of the ‘card-leaving class’ aka ‘the gentry’, namely Lord Brakehurst, Lord Lieutenant of the County, his wife Lady Brakehurst had, Lady Peabury (‘a diligent reader of fiction, mistress of many Cairn terriers and of five steady old maidservants’) and Colonel Hodge, and ‘the Hornbeams at the Old Mill were a childless, middle-aged couple who devoted themselves to craftsmanship’, vegetarians and bohemians. Everyone cordially dislikes everyone else. It’s all very English.

Into this placid little world drops a bombshell – a young man has bought one of old farmer Westmacott’s fields and is planning to build an estate of suburban villas there! Now this field abuts at different points the properties of Metcalfe, Peabury, Hodge and Hornbeam and so they convene a series of meetings at which they agree to find out what can be done to prevent the development, contact the local council, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and so on.

Eventually it becomes clear they are going to have to buy the field off its purchaser in order to keep it undeveloped. Colonel Hodge is sent by the committee to meet the purchaser, Mr. Hargood-Hood at the village’s one pub, the Brakehurst Arms. Here Mr. Hargood-Hood very successfully terrifies the Colonel by showing him what he intends to build: it’s not an estate it’s an experimental industrial laboratory, complete with two great chimneys to emit the poison fumes, a water tower to get high pressures, and six bungalows for his staff.

The text then includes correspondence between Metcalfe and Lady Peabury in which it is revealed that Mr Hargood-Hood wants £500 for the field (and lawyer’s fees and cost of the architect’s drawings). (Back when he bought his Georgian house Metcalfe had been offered the option of buying Westmacott’s field for some £170 but turned it down because of the expense; so this represents a tripling of the asking price.)

Peabury refuses Metcalfe’s offer to go halves on the purchase – the two obstinately refuse to co-operate – with the result it looks like the development will go ahead and both Peabury and Metcalfe begin to make plans to sell their homes and move out of the village when Colonel makes a last-ditch bid to avert building going ahead. He comes up with a solution to the great Peabury-Metcalfe standoff which is to purchase the field in order to build a scout hut on it: Lady Peabury will contribute £250, Metcalfe £500, and the other families a few pounds. This allows the field to be purchased from Hargood-Hood and disaster averted, while Metcalfe gets to have the new building named after him and can swank round the village as a public benefactor.

Only in the last few paragraphs do we learn that it was a scam all along. Hargood-Hood’s ‘lawyer’ is in fact his brother and they make a tidy living by descending on idyllic country villages, buying up a plot with suitably loaded neighbours, then threatening to build their toxic factory and letting the gentry buy back the field at a grossly inflated rate. it’s a scam, a con, although, as ‘Jock’ admits, they cut this one pretty fine. The gentry of Much Malcock squabbled for so long that the brothers were nearly left holding the baby!

The Sympathetic Passenger (1939)

Mr James hates the radio, the endless blare of music from wirelesses owned by his wife and daughter. (Dislike of wirelesses which are on all the time blaring out music being a theme which also crops up ‘Tactical Exercise’ and is prominent in the final volume of the Sword of Honour trilogy)

With relief he leaves his house and sets off to drive to the local train station. On the way he sees a man trying to flag down lifts. He stops and offers him a lift to the station. What follows is the dialogue of these two people in a car. Mr James casually mentions his dislike of the radio and this triggers the hitchhiker into an increasingly demented rant, in which he accuses the BBC of mind control and other wild, delusional accusations. A car overtakes them playing loud blaring music and the hitchhiker orders Mr James to chase it and overtake it so they can kill the heathen driver. Mr James is by now terrified but his car simply won’t go faster at which point the hitchhiker says he will kill Mr James.

They arrive at the station and Mr James leaps out but the other guy is quicker and is closing in on him when…a load of policemen sortie from the station entrance and pounce on the man, Oh yes, he’s a well known lunatic, the policeman tells him cheerily. In fact Mr James is lucky to be alive.

Mr James drives home a chastened man and when he arrives, for once, doesn’t complain about his wife or daughter playing the radio. In fact he now finds it strangely reassuring.

Work Suspended (1942)

This is a long piece and reviewed in a separate blog post.

Charles Ryder’s Schooldays (written 1945, published 1982)

I’ve mentioned the struggle many privately educated writers of Waugh’s generation had in escaping the mental world of their prep and public schools and this is a kind of quintessence of that world and that problem. The thirty or so pages of this fragment are set at a private school named Spierpoint Down which is pretty obviously Waugh’s own public school, Lancing on the South Downs. Crucially, unlike Brideshead Revisited, it is not a first-person narrative told by Charles, but a third person narrative about him. Charles is in the Classical Upper Fifth.

It is the first day back after the summer holidays, Wednesday 24 September 1919. We are treated to an excruciatingly tedious exposition of life at Spierpoint, with its hundred and one stupidly named buildings (Head’s House, Old’s House) and petty regulations and privileges for the different year groups or prefects and so on (the way one is allowed to wear coloured socks or walk arm in arm with a friend once one has graduated to this or that privileged class or clique).

It is a world of private rules designed to create a strong esprit de corps among those who are in the know and exclude everyone outside. It is drenched in hyper-privileged assumption that all the pupils are rich, know London’s restaurants and theatres, belong to a network of extended families which run everything and know each other, and the assumption that all these insufferable fifth formers will, in due course, go on to ‘the university’ meaning Oxford.

Charles likes Art and Drawing. He helps a rather over-confidential master, Mr Graves, assemble a small printing press and sort out the moveable typepieces into different fonts. There is Sunday morning communion with a lavish description of the vast Victorian and unfinished chapel. Charles and two friends are caned for refusing to say their evening prayers when ordered to by their head of house.

The diary of classes, sports, book reading, conversations and petty jealousies continues for another few days until Sunday 28 September and abruptly halts, exhausted by its own tedium. This fat chunk of public school fetishisation lacks any of the wit or humour or fun or lightness which characterises the best of Waugh’s writing. it feels intolerably smug and superior and self-satisfied. You can see why he never published it during his lifetime.

Short stories 2. Post-war

Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947)

A novella – reviewed in a separate blog post.

Tactical Exercise (1947)

This is good story, in a grim, grand guignol sort of way. John Verney hates his wife Elizabeth. He was wounded in Italy. The pain of the wound leads to outbursts of anger. He returns home to have to live with her family in house in Hampstead. Everything infuriates him: the back garden is a bomb crater, all the glass in the back windows are broken. A grimy life of rationing. John stands as Liberal in a county constituency but loses badly to a Radical who happens to be a Jew. His bitterness against life makes him increasingly antisemitic.

Meanwhile, his wife Elizabeth works in something clandestine in the Foreign Office. She’s clever, she’s a linguist. When John learns her boss is a Jew it crystallises his hatred of his wife. She becomes a symbol of everything he hates with all the resentment and bitterness of the war, his coming down in the world, his political failure. For John his wife becomes a representative of the shabby socialist bureaucracy which shackles him, she is helping communist regimes in eastern Europe, and she works for a Jew!

Still they manage to just about be civil to each other and live together. They both go to see a film, a trite murder mystery in which the wife drugs the husband and throws him out of the window of a holiday home overlooking a cliff. He falls to his death. She inherits his wealth. This gives John the idea of copying it.

A month or so later they go on holiday to a holiday cottage at the edge of a cliff. John thinks he’s being clever by softening up the locals for the crime he plans to commit by telling everyone that his wife sleepwalks, telling chaps at the golf club, down the pub. One of them even recommends him to go talk to the local doctor, a nice chap.

The twist in the tale is that she has been planning to murder John all along. She brought a bottle of whiskey along as a treat and John has been having a glass every evening before supper. Now, when he finishes the glass he starts to feel strangely woozy. She helps him to the sofa, by the window, the window overlooking the cliff, and the long fall to the jagged rocks below…

This macabre little tale is one of several which anticipate the twisted stories of Roald Dahl.

Compassion (1949)

This narrative was recycled in its entirety, and almost verbatim, into the final part of the third novel in the Sword of Honour trilogy, Unconditional Surrender.

In the novel the events involve the trilogy’s protagonist, Guy Crouchback; here they involve a Major Gordon. The basic narrative is identical: Gordon is posted as British Military Mission i.e. liaison with the communist Yugoslav partisans in a place called Begoy in Croatia. He describes the wrecked town and the heavy-handed Partisan authorities who call themselves ‘the Praesidium’. To be precise:

Begoy was the headquarters of a partisan corps in Northern Croatia. It lay in a large area, ten miles by twenty, of what was called “Liberated Territory,” well clear of the essential lines of communication. The Germans were pulling out of Greece and Dalmatia and were concerned only with main roads and supply points. They made no attempt now to administer or patrol the hinterland. There was a field near Begoy where aircraft could land unmolested. They did so nearly every week in the summer of 1944 coming from Bari with partisan officials and modest supplies of equipment. In this area congregated a number of men and women who called themselves the Praesidium of the Federal Republic of Croatia.

Gordon is assigned a creepy interpreter named Bakic who spies on him. The narrative concerns the 108 Jewish displaced persons Major Gordon discovers in the town. Their representative, an anxious young woman named Mme. Kanyi, tells Gordon they want to leave, to get away to Italy. Mme. Kanyi’s husband is an engineer and does his best to keep the struggling power plant going.

Gordon becomes obsessed with helping the Jews but is blocked at every turn, especially by the communist authorities who are very suspicious of his motivation. He manages to get two representatives out on a flight to Bari, but by the time the authorities give permission for the rest to be flown out the autumn fogs and then winter snows prevent planes landing at the airstrip.

When his mission is wound up and he is transferred back to Bari Gordon eventually learns that the Jews were in the end evacuated and sent to a camp for displaced persons near Lecce. When he visits the camp the Jews he helped crowd round but Mme. Kanyi and her husband are not there. All they know is that they were taken off the lorries evacuating them from Begoy at the last moment.

At this point occurs the biggest difference from the narrative as it appears in the novel. Here Gordon gets a cousin in the newly opened embassy in newly liberated Belgrade to do some digging for him. This cousin writes him a letter which is quoted verbatim in which he reports that the Kanyis were executed by the communist authorities. The husband was blamed for sabotaging the power plant and the wife was accused of having an affair with the British liaison officer and for concealing counter-revolutionary propaganda. Now we and Gordon know that the husband was the only person keeping the wretched power plant going, and that the wife was not at all having an affair with him, they just spoke a few times. As for the ‘counter-revolutionary propaganda’ that was a load of old London magazines Gordon left with her to help her while away the long winter nights. Their execution is, in other words, a farcical tragedy and an enormous injustice.

In the story he recounts all this to his regiment’s second in command and the chaplain. When he says it was a complete waste of time, the chaplain gives him a more subtle theological interpretation, saying that no matter how pointless it may seem, the situation a) prompted good works by Gordon but also b) that the Kanyis in some way did him good, drawing out of him a new feeling for compassion and charity which hadn’t been there before. Hmm. Thought-provoking.

In the novel the facts remain mostly the same but the treatment feels completely different. The final scene with the bluff second in command and the chaplain offering words of comfort are completely absent from the novel. But it’s not the absences, it’s the positive additions in the novel which transform the story.

We have known Guy intimately for almost three novels. Everything which happens resonates with his character of sterling integrity and quiet determination.
In the novel Guy has other Brits around him, namely the squadron leader and de Souza who add a kind of variety to his responses, so his obsession with saving the Jews becomes one action among multiple ones carried out by the British Mission.
The final scene with the chaplain is swept away and replaced by a more complex final arrangement: in this, instead of getting a written and therefore rather bland report about the fate of the Kanyis, it is told to him by a lickspittle functionary of the army who we have, through the course of the book, come to realise is a communist fellow traveller or stooge. Unlike the anonymous cousin in Belgrade of the story, this creep, Gilpin, the coward who had to be kicked out of the plane on his first parachute jump then lied to everyone about his ‘bravery’, it is this character who Waugh has gone to great lengths to build up as a representative of the corrupt ‘values’ of the new era, who tells Guy to his face about all the ‘evidence’ of the Kanyis’ counter-revolutionary activity, and smirks that they got the revolutionary justice they deserved. It is a vastly more powerful and disgusting experience to read the version in the novel, and very effectively crystallises all the morel, military, political and social failures and compromises which he sees the end of the war as bringing.

So this is an interesting enough story, but you shouldn’t read it here, you should read The Sword of Honour trilogy where the same basic story acquires multiple extra resonances and meanings from its inclusion in a novel.

Love Among the Ruins (1953)

A novella – reviewed in a separate blog post.

Basil Seal Rides Again (1963)

This was Waugh’s last published work of fiction. All critics quote Waugh’s own description of it in the dedication to old friend Ann Fleming, as: ‘a senile attempt to recapture the manner of my youth’. It certainly contains a roll call of well-loved characters from the 1930s comic novels, including Peter Pastmaster, Parsnip and Pimpernell (the joke names he gave the left-wing 30s writers Auden and Isherwood), Lady Metroland, Sonia Trumpington and numerous others, indeed the narrative opens with Peter and Basil attending a banquet to celebrate the award of the Order of Merit to Ambrose Silk (the lisping aesthete character Waugh based on Brian Howard). Peter and Basil have let themselves go: ‘They were two stout, rubicund, richly dressed old buffers’.

Critics have judged the story harshly but I found some of it funny, for example the opening dialogue between the two old boys as they suffer through long speeches then go for a pee at the same time, gossiping all the time in an amusingly drunken senile way:

‘This Albright married someone — Molly Meadows, perhaps?’
‘I married Molly Meadows.’
‘So you did. I was there. Well, someone like that.’

Returning to his wife, Angela, in their London house, Basil, having caught sight of himself in the toilet mirrors, is more than usually aware that he is fat and unwell. Basil reviews his life and we learn that he blew all the toes off one foot while demonstrating an explosive device during the war, hence his family nickname of ‘Pobble’ and the need to walk with a cane. Suddenly he realises he is old:

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. It had begun as nursery clowning for the diversion of Barbara; a parody of Sir Joseph Mannering; darling, crusty old Pobble performing the part expected of him; and now the parody had become the persona.

He and Angela agree to try out one of those health clinics, sanatorium thingies. They drive down to Kent, check in and have an interview with the presiding doctor:

‘You complain of speechlessness, a sense of heat and strangulation, dizziness and subsequent trembling?’ said this man of science.
‘I feel I’m going to burst,’ said Basil.

For 3 or 4 days they put up with the diet of carrot juice and raw eggs but then, in an entirely predictable bit of comic business, Basil procures some brandy off the young man who runs the resort gym and runs a tidy black market in illicit booze and grub. He drinks it down in one and passes out. The sanatorium doctor expels him. Basil and Angela return to London.

Here he discovers his daughter, 18 year old Barbara, is in love with a ghastly, uncouth young man, Charles Albright. Late at night Basil discovers the pair rummaging around in his wine cellar, basically stealing some booze to take to a ‘happening’. This is barely into the 1960s so it’s not a psychedelic 60s happening, it’s a beards-and-jazz, beatnik 50s happening.

Basil insists on having an interview with the young man by himself, a solemn occasion for both parties at which Basil is disconcerted to find himself being bested. He looks into the young man’s eyes and face and recognises himself.

After a boozy lunch Basil drops in on Sonia Trumpington who lives alone, with her son, doing charitable works and sewing. He asks Sonia is she knows this Charles Albright, she replies yes, he’s a friend of her son, Robin. When Basil whiningly asks what his daughter can see in the scuffy, beardy young man, Sonia robustly replies, you! He looks, speaks and behaves just like a young Basil.

Sonia says she has photos somewhere of the mother and digs up an old photo album from the 1930s. She identifies the young woman as Elizabeth Stayles, there’s a photo of Basil about to throw her into a lake at some gay 1930s house party.

Seeing the photo awakens an old memory in Basil’s mind. Elizabeth Stayles, yes, didn;t he have an affair with her, all those years ago?

Basil thanks Sonia and returns to his London house whence he invites young Barbara for a chat in Hyde Park by the Serpentine. Here he informs his daughter that her lover is his, Basil’s son. He had a brief fling with Elizabeth Stayles when he got out of hospital after the toes incident, during the Blitz winter of 1940. Only lasted a week then Basil took back up with Angela and Elizabeth (Betty) rooted around for someone else and ended up marrying Clarence Albright, killed in action 1943. Betty herself died young of cancer in 1956. The point is there’s no-one to gainsay his story.

His story being that his daughter, Barbara, has been going out with, and fooling around with, her half-brother. Barbara gets up from the park bench and stumbles across the park. Basil catches a cab to Bellamy’s club for an egg nog, and then onto Claridge’s to meet his wife. She says their daughter returned home looking tragic and locked herself in her room. ‘What she needs,’ says Basil, ‘is a change of scene. I’ve bought all three of us tickets to Bermuda.’

To be honest, from the text I’m not sure whether Charles really is Basil’s son or whether it’s the last in Basil’s long list of outrageous lies and scams. If it is an outrageous lie he has conjured up to scupper his daughter’s relationship with the young man, then it is obviously cruel and heartless. If is isn’t a lie, if it’s true, it’s still a pretty heartless story for Waugh to concoct; told from the father’s point of view it completely ignores the emotional devastation the revelation must have on his daughter.

But I don’t quite understand the handful of critics I’ve read who say the story is ‘disgusting’, as if it was an entirely new note in Basil or Waugh’s career. They seem to forget that Waugh has Basil unknowingly EAT the young woman he fancies in Black Mischief after she’s been caught, killed and cooked by a tribe Basil is staying with. That book was published in 1932, precisely 30 years before this story. Or that in Waugh’s first novel the kindly Mr Prendergast has his head cut off with a hacksaw by a psychotic prison inmate. Or the short story about the polite and docile Mr Loveday who strangles young women to death. Or the devastating ending of Handful of Dust. Or the heartless death of Angela Runcible in Vile Bodies. Or the not one but two suicides in The Loved One.

In other words I wasn’t upset by the story’s apparent cruelty because casual cruelty had been a stock in trade for Waugh’s fiction right from the start.

So: I like the bufferish tone of the story and I liked the old-boy banter between Peter and Basil and especially between 60-something Basil and his wife. It felt both sweet and charitable to the infirmities of age, as was the brief sad interlude where they visit old Margot Metroland and find her sitting in the dark hunched over a television set (as so many lonely old people become addicted to doing).

On the other hand, all the dialogue with his daughter struck me as hopelessly unrealistic, stiff and unnatural, really false although – but how can I know how 60-something posh fathers spoke with their debutante daughters in 1962?

And as to the harsh, cruel sting in the tail, well, it doesn’t feel to me like some sad falling-off of Waugh’s powers at all but entirely in keeping with the cruelty and sadism lurking in the wings of all Waugh’s 1930s novels and of a piece with macabre little horrors such as ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’ (1935) or ‘The Sympathetic Passenger’ (1939).

Credit

The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh was first published by Chapman and Hall in 1947. All references are to the 2018 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on January 17, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Short stories

Tagged A boyhood memory, A Handful of Dust, A House of Gentlefolks, Abyssinia, Alfred Döblin, Alistair Trumpington, Amazonas, Ambrose Silk, An Englishman’s Home, Angela Lyne, Ann Fleming, Auden, “Wireless”, Bakic, Ballingar, Bari, Basil Seal Rides Again, BBC, Begoy, Bella Fleace, Bella Fleace Gave a Party, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Beverley Metcalfe, Billy Cornphillip, Black Mischief, Boggett, Brian Howard, Brideshead Revisited, Bullingdon Club, By Special Request, Cantos, Charles Albright, Charles Ryder's Schooldays, Christ Church, cinema, Clarence Albright, Claridges, Colonel Hodge, Colonel Jasper Cumberland, comedy, Compassion, Croatia, Cruise, Cruise or Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure, Daily Excess, decline and fall, Dorian Gray, Dr Kakophilos, Dr Messinger, Duke of Vanburgh, elitism, Elizabeth Stayles, Elizabeth Verney, Ernest Vaughan, Eton, Evelyn Waugh, Excursion in Reality, Ezra Pound, fiction, Gertrude Stein, Gervase Kent-Cumberland, Gilpin, Gladys Cruttwell, Guy Crouchback, Harpers Bazaar, Hector, Hetton Hall, High Society, incest, Incident in Azania, insanity, irony, James Joyce, Joab, John Verney, Lady Amelia, Lady Brakehurst, Lady Metroland, Lady Moping, Lady Peabury, Lancing, Lord Brakehurst, Lord Cornphillip, Love Among The Ruins, Love in the Slump, madness, Major Gordon, Matodi, Mayfair, Millicent Blade, Miss Annabel Rochfort-Doyle-Fleace, Miss Grits, Miss Myers, Mme. Kanyi, Modernism, Mr Graves, Mr Hargood-Hood, Mr Loveday, Mr McMaster, Mr Todd, Mr Youkoumian, Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing, Mrs Kent-Cumberland, Much Malcock, murder, narrative, novella, On Guard, Out of Depth, Oxford, Parsnip, partisans, Paul Henty, Peninsular War, Period Piece, Peter Pastmaster, Piccadilly Circus, Pimpernell, Pobbles, Professor Anderson, Prunella, Put Out More Flags, Ralph Bland, Remote People, Roald Dahl, Rossetti, satire, science fiction, Scoop, Scott-King's Modern Europe, Sebastian Flyte, Second World War, Shakespeare, Shameless Blonde, Shiriana Indians, short stories, short story, Simon Lent, Sir Alexander Dreadnought, Sir James MacRea, Sir Joseph Mannering, snobbery, Sonia Trumpington, Spierpoint Down, Sword of Honour, T.S. Eliot, Tactical Exercise, Tales of the Unexpected, The Balance, The Complete Short Stories, The Man Who Liked Dickens, The Manager of 'The Kremlin', The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, The Patriotic Honeymoon, The Sympathetic Passenger, Thomas Kent-Cumberland, Tony Last, Too much tolerance, Ulysses, Unconditional Surrender, Vile Bodies, Virginia Woolf, Waste Land, Waugh, Winner Takes All, Work Suspended, Work Suspended: Two Chapters of an Unfinished Novel, Yugoslavia, Zanzibar

Posted by Simon on January 17, 2022

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The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: A Conversation Piece by Evelyn Waugh (1957)

‘Why does everyone except me find it so easy to be nice?’
(Mr Pinfold after an uncomfortable visit to his mother, in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold)

As I’ve commented umpteen times while reviewing his oeuvre, Evelyn Waugh had a lifelong (fictional) interest in mental illness, with numerous of his characters going mad, having nervous breakdowns, becoming alcoholics, committing suicide or being locked up in asylums. The sequence came to a head in his 1957 novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, in which the protagonist undergoes a full-blown mental collapse and becomes subject to auditory hallucinations i.e. hearing voices, lots of voices, threatening with all kinds of violence and humiliation.

Terminology

‘Pinfold’ is a rare English word which means ‘a pound for stray animals, a fold, as for sheep or cattle, a place of confinement or restraint’ so for a while I thought it was an abstruse but apt word indicating the character’s confinement in his cabin and in his madness. But Selina Hastings’ biography of Waugh says it was the name of the Catholic family who originally owned Waugh’s country house at Stinchcombe in Gloucestershire.

Gilbert appears to be a reference to the popular Edwardian music hall song about a certain type of Edwardian dandy and ne’er-do-well (which, as it happens, is mentioned several times in the comic novels of Saki).

‘I’m Gilbert, the filbert,
The knut with the K,
The pride of Piccadilly,
The blasé roué.’

Waugh sub-titled Pinfold ‘a conversation piece’. This is the name of a specific genre of art. According the Tate website, a conversation piece is:

an informal group portrait popular in the eighteenth century, small in scale and showing people – often families, sometimes groups of friends – in domestic interior or garden settings. (Tate)

‘Small in scale’, well it is the shortest of Waugh’s novels. Most of them (apart from the bloated Brideshead Revisited) clock in around 240 pages in the Penguin editions. At 157 pages Pinfold is around 60% the usual length (which explains why the Penguin edition is bulked out with the post-war short story Tactical Exercise and novella Love Among The Ruins.)

Gilbert Pinfold

It’s a transparently autobiographical book, but with modifications. Gilbert Pinfold is a moderately successful novelist with 12 books to his name (like Waugh) turning 50 when the story begins. It’s interesting to read Waugh’s portrait of his character, presumably fairly self-portraying.

he had written a dozen books all of which were still bought and read. They were translated into most languages and in the United States of America enjoyed intermittent but lucrative seasons of favour. Foreign students often chose them as the subject for theses, but those who sought to detect cosmic significance in Mr. Pinfold’s work, to relate it to fashions in philosophy, social predicaments or psychological tensions, were baffled by his frank, curt replies to their questionnaires; their fellows in the English Literature School, who chose more egotistical writers, often found their theses more than half composed for them. Mr. Pinfold gave nothing away. Not that he was secretive or grudging by nature; he had nothing to give these students. He regarded his books as objects which he had made, things quite external to himself to be used and judged by others. He thought them well made, better than many reputed works of genius, but he was not vain of his accomplishment, still less of his reputation. He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to produce a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but, Mr. Pinfold maintained, most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters–Dickens and Balzac even–were flagrantly guilty.

Pinfold lives in Lychpole, a secluded village some hundred miles from London and some time is spent, in a leisurely civilised old fashioned way, describing the local gentry, most living in ‘reduced circumstances’ since the war and being: Colonel and Mrs. Bagnold, Mr. and Mrs. Graves, Mrs. and Miss Fawdle, Colonel and Miss Garbett, Lady Fawdle-Upton and Miss Clarissa Bagnold.

Pinfold’s Catholicism

Who knows whether this is how Waugh saw himself, but his portrait of Pinfold’s faith is shy and private.

The Pinfolds were Roman Catholic, Mrs. Pinfold by upbringing, Mr. Pinfold by a later development. He had been received into the Church–‘conversion’ suggests an event more sudden and emotional than his calm acceptance of the propositions of his faith–in early manhood, at the time when many Englishmen of humane education were falling into communism. Unlike them Mr. Pinfold remained steadfast. But he was reputed bigoted rather than pious. His trade by its nature is liable to the condemnation of the clergy as, at the best, frivolous; at the worst, corrupting. Moreover by the narrow standards of the age his habits of life were self-indulgent and his utterances lacked prudence. And at the very time when the leaders of his Church were exhorting their people to emerge from the catacombs into the forum, to make their influence felt in democratic politics and to regard worship as a corporate rather than a private act, Mr. Pinfold burrowed ever deeper into the rock.

Pinfold’s friends

But Mr. Pinfold was far from friendless and he set great store by his friends. They were the men and women who were growing old with him, whom in the 1920s and ’30s he had seen constantly; who in the diaspora of the ’40s and ’50s kept more tenuous touch with one another, the men at Bellamy’s Club, the women at the half-dozen poky, pretty houses of Westminster and Belgravia to which had descended the larger hospitality of a happier age.

Where Bellamy’s is the name of the fictional London gentleman’s club which features in many of Waugh’s fictions, not least the Sword of Honour trilogy which he was writing at the same time as Pinfold.

Grumpy old man

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 ’30s: ‘It is later than you think’, which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought. At intervals during the day and night he would look at his watch and learn always with disappointment how little of his life was past, how much there was still ahead of him.

A protective shell

In an earlier review I wrote of the practical usefulness of adopting the persona of a grumpy old man. Playing a predictable and grumpily humorous role means you never actually have to be yourself, never have to reveal your true feelings. It is fascinating and moving to read Waugh’s own description of this:

As a boy, at the age of puberty when most of his school-fellows coarsened, he had been as fastidious as the Bruiser and in his early years of success diffidence had lent him charm. Prolonged prosperity had wrought the change. He had seen sensitive men make themselves a protective disguise against the rebuffs and injustices of manhood. Mr. Pinfold had suffered little in these ways; he had been tenderly reared and, as a writer, welcomed and over-rewarded early. It was his modesty which needed protection and for this purpose, but without design, he gradually assumed this character of burlesque. He was neither a scholar nor a regular soldier; the part for which he cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously, before his children at Lychpole and his cronies in London, until it came to dominate his whole outward personality. When he ceased to be alone, when he swung into his club or stumped up the nursery stairs, he left half of himself behind and the other half swelled to fill its place. He offered the world a front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass…

As a little boy he had been acutely sensitive to ridicule. His adult shell seemed impervious. He had long held himself inaccessible to interviewers and the young men and women who were employed to write ‘profiles’ collected material where they could. Every week his press-cutting agents brought to his breakfast-table two or three rather offensive allusions. He accepted without much resentment the world’s estimate of himself. It was part of the price he paid for privacy. (p.15)

A protective disguise, a front of pomposity – quotes worth bearing in mind when you read Waugh’s biography, letters or diary.

Structure

This short novel is divided into eight chapters:

Portrait of the artist in middle-age (see the excerpts above)
Collapse of elderly party (he becomes ill)
An unhappy ship (hears voices on the cruise ship)
The hooligans (hears voices of hoodlums threatening to break in and beat him)
The international incident
The human touch
The villains unmasked — but not foiled
Pinfold regained

2. Collapse of elderly party

The setup is straightforward. Pinfold has trouble getting to sleep and has been dosing himself for years with a sleeping draught which he dissolves in Crême de Menthe. In the evenings he drinks wine and brandy with dinner. He was fit in his 20s and 30s but now spends most of his day slumped in an armchair. He smokes cigars. He starts to suffer from insomnia, waking up, padding round, sleepily taking another draught.

Things take a turn for the worse when his joints begin to ache, specially his feet and ankles and calves. The local doctor, Dr Drake, prescribes some ‘rheumatism pills’, large grey pills, supposedly very strong. He takes both the sleeping draughts and pills in haphazard amounts, often far more than prescribed. He becomes clumsy. He becomes forgetful and cantankerous. He develops crimson patches on the back of his hands. His face turns an unhealthy purple colour.

And it is the depths of winter, freezing cold in the house so that he and his wife hunker down in just two rooms where they can afford to light a coal fire.

With the result that he becomes obsessed with getting away from this cold climate and taking a cruise to somewhere hot. Now it has been emphasised from the start that his wife is the practical one, who manages all the affairs of the small farm on their land. What’s more there’s been a period of litigation about land they let during the war and now want back. Managing all this means she won’t be able to come with him.

There’s a lot of peripheral detail about hassling the travel company in increasingly clumsy desperation and then going to see his mother, who he doesn’t get on with, at her house in Kew, to say goodbye, in a short-tempered fractious way which he regrets as soon as they leave. His wife packs for him since he’s become incapable of doing it himself. They stay overnight in a hotel in London where he struggles to cope, is too ill to go downstairs for dinner which is wife has by herself. Next morning she sees him to the train to the port. He can barely climb onto it. He drops his luggage. He keeps lighting cigars, forgetting about them and dropping them.

3. An unhappy ship

Finally he makes it aboard the SS Caliban, run by captain Steerforth, a basic steamer taking passengers to Rangoon and stopping at ports en route. It is not luxurious. There is no en suite, he has to share a bathroom. Plenty of plumbing and cabling is visible on the ceiling. He takes more of the pills and passes out of his bed.

Next morning he dressed and staggers to the captain’s table for breakfast, gets talking to the chap he shares a bathroom with, a Mr Glover, solid colonial chap who runs a business in Ceylon and plays golf. Glover tells him the passengers are a regular bunch, and all know each other.

Mr Pinfold begins to experience aural hallucinations. He thinks he can hear a jazz band playing from a wireless or gramophone. He can hear a dog barking. Waking in the darkness he can hear an entire evangelical church service being carried out somewhere beyond the bed. Worse, he overhears a vicar having a one on one interview with a sobbing schoolboy who he is counselling to stop masturbating.

At the next meal, when he mentions the dog and the jazz music and the church service to his neighbour, Glover, the latter has heard nothing. He struggles to stand up from the table. At after dinner drinks he suspects all the other guests of laughing at him. Or conspiring against him. Paranoia.

More hallucinations. He thinks he hears yells and roars from the deck above more suitable to a pirate ship. One of the black sailors appears to be injured. He hears the captain explaining to the passengers that he will be sent back to England and given the best medical treatment available. Then he hears the captain talking to a woman with a hard grating voice, telling her the injured sailor is actually being sent to a hellhole. Pinfold worries whether he should tell someone, but then the jazz music cuts in, deafeningly loud as if being played right there in his cabin.

Looking at the tangle of wires and cables on his ceiling he wonders whether they carry communications from all over the ship and have somehow gotten fused or damaged so that he can hear conversations (and music and religious services and confessions).

The days pass in a daze and the hallucinations become more florid, as lying on his bed in his cabin he hears a choral performance, or two old generals gossiping about him and how ‘tight’ he looks. He is oddly relaxed about all this, after all he has made a career out of gossip, or fictions about gossip:

The voices of the two old gossips faded and fell silent. Mr. Pinfold lay smoking, without resentment. It was the sort of thing one expected to have said behind one’s back–the sort of thing one said about other people. (p.57)

One morning he hears the Captain and a sadistic, harsh-voiced woman whom Pinfold nicknames ‘Goneril’, at first interrogating and then torturing one of the ‘coloured’ seamen. (‘Coloured’ in this context, appears to mean from India.) Presumably this scene of erotic torture, like the one with the schoolboy being questioned about masturbation, are straightforward Freudian projections of Pinfold’s own fantasies or repressed memories (?).

When the pair have apparently tortured the seaman to death, Pinfold hears the voice of a kindly nurse called Margaret, and then of the ship’s surgeon saying he only obeys orders and will record a natural death.

And then, for some reason, as if by magic, the pains in his legs and feet disappear. He is able to stand up straight and immediately goes for a joyful walk around the decks, feeling healthy and happy.

4. The hooligans

But the aural hallucinations do not desist. When he is dressing in his cabin he hears clear as day the voice of a literary critic Algernon Clutton-Cornforth really laying into his book on a BBC radio programme.

But the centre of this chapter is the arrival of new voices, a couple to teenage boys who he hears threatening to break down his cabin door and thrash him. They accuse him of being a Jew named Peinfeld. They accuse him of being a sodomite. They accuse him of stealing a moonstone and abandoning his mother to die a pauper. They blame him for the death of a neighbouring farmer back near his place in the country. He is an arriviste, the kind of man destroying the English countryside. The hooligans dance with hatred and anger, threatening to break his cabin door down and whip him to within an inch of his life.

But then they try the cabin door and announce it is locked. In reality, the door isn’t locked at all, and yet in the fantasy it is what prevents the fantasy from being disproved.

What gives the book its peculiar quality is the way that Pinfold, in the grip of his delusions, takes all this at face value and literally. At one point he hears the voice of an old general trying to calm the young hoodlums down and then, at the end of the fantasy, one of them goes off to be sick over the railings and then is comforted by the soothing voice of his mother. So far so fantastical. What makes it an odd mix of odd, funny or sad is that Pinfold then gets a copy of the passenger list and tries to figure out who this family could be, who the mother, who the old general, who the young thugs.

In the same way he is convinced that the scene he overheard in which the captain and the woman he nicknamed Goneril torture a steward, apparently, to death – he is convinced it was real.

All this gives rise to a sort of comedy, on the face of it the same kind of social comedy at which he excelled in the 1930s novels, when he finds himself at dinner with the captain, a drops a few heavy hints about stewards, and murder at sea, and disposing of bodies. The captain answers in polite generalities but the other guests at the table are puzzled, as you or I might be. But in Pinfold’s paranoia, he reads into their puzzled expressions the fear that they are all in on it!

Then the voices of the young women chatting about how they’re going to give him gifts to make up for the fright the young men have caused him. When he returns to his cabin, he of course finds nothing, but the girls voices urge him to look, look.

In the dining room the voices pursue him. In the lounge he hears the hooligans or the old generals or Margaret and her friend. Back in his cabin he hears a radio programme hosted by someone he knows where people read out letters from celebrities and, of course, they’re all from him, so he is forced from the cabin and to take strolls round the ship.

He continues his attempts to rationalise all these voices. Maybe it’s not a question of faulty wiring of the ship’s communications but maybe some of it is a play: that would explain the melodramatic aspects of some of the incidents, for example the torturing of the steward. Maybe it wasn’t the captain after all.

In a particular corner of the lounge he hears the lead hooligan and his father discuss the best ways to punish Pinfold for being such a beast, which include taking him to court. Bide your time, says the father. We’ll get him eventually.

5. The international incident

His hallucinations escalate. As they pass the straits into the Mediterranean Pinfold thinks he overhears the fact that the ship has been boarded by the Spanish navy and commanded to steam to Algeciras. The captain has refused and so the ship is becalmed while the matter is escalated to NATO and the UN. When he goes up on deck Pinfold is surprised to observe that there is no Spanish ship in sight (obviously it must be hiding below the horizon), nobody else has noticed any Spaniards, the ship appears to be steaming steadily East and the captain is calm and relaxed at dinner. Everyone is behaving as if nothing has happened. All very strange!

But as soon as he’s back in his cabin, the plot resumes and now Pinfold overhears the conversation between the captain and his chief officers. To his amazement he learns that the passenger who eats at a table by himself is a VIP government agent. It’s him the Spanish are after. What the captain proposes is that they will substitute Pinfold for the agent, pull him from his cabin, dress him similarly, stuff identical papers in his pockets and hand him over to the Spanish authorities. They’ll fake a tussle on the gangplank to the other ship as if trying to save him but in fact ensure that the Spaniards secure him and sail off. Apparently he has a wife and children but some story will be concocted to cover his disappearance.

Pinfold is a patriot so he’s happy to impersonate the agent, if the latter truly must be saved. but only if he’s consulted and asked in a formal way. He makes up his mind to confront the captain. He hears the Spanish corvette he’s to be transferred to coming alongside, hailing of crews, throwing of ropes, clattering of gangplank. Brave and determined, Pinfold leaves his cabin to confront the situation…

Only to find the corridor, the gangways and the decks utterly deserted. Nobody else in sight, no other ship, no gangplanks, no Spanish, no nothing. For a moment he is gripped by real, genuine, heart-stopping fear. Maybe he is going mad. Seconds later what you could call the secondary mind, the rationalising mind, takes over and he decides the Spanish spy scenario doesn’t exist, it’s true – because it was all concocted by the young hooligans! who have somehow taken over control of the radio apparatus and are playing hoaxes and tricks on him.

In this way his tortured mind establishes two levels of hallucinations, the ones which are real, and the trick ones being perpetrated by the hooligans.

6. The human touch

Margaret emerges as the kindly sister of one of the teenage hooligans. She is countered by ‘Goneril’, the tough woman who supervised the torture. In an anticipation of the final part of Unconditional Surrender Goneril accuses Pinfold of wanting to die, of going up on deck to throw himself overboard.

When he walks round the deck he thinks everyone is talking about him, judging him, accusing him of being gay, wearing make-up, being a religious hypocrite, drunk, impotent, a fascist blackshirt, involved in a scandal in the army, a communist, a Jew, a clapped-out author, on the scrapheap…and so it goes on.

But while most of the voices vilify him, one, Margaret’s, becomes more and more concerned and eventually declares she is in love with him. ‘Can they meet?’ he asks. ‘No’ she says, that would be against the rules. Later she returns chaperoned by her mother who insists that Pinfold declares his love for her daughter. But he can’t he says; he’s a married man. Pinfold gets fed up and calls the mother an old bitch. To his surprise, this makes her husband, the old colonel, burst out laughing. There’s an unnerving element of sex in her father’s talk, telling young Margaret that she needs an older man to induct her into the mysteries of sex.

All this develops into Margaret being undressed and clad in epithalamium weeds, while Pinfold goes through an array of emotions, recalling his promiscuous twenties (he frequented brothels abroad) through to his Catholic faith and then his fidelity to his wife. Nonetheless the expectation of a pretty pink nymph coming to his bed excites him, then she hesitates to come in, asks him to say something kind.

This passage really goes on and on, dragging out this scene where in his head he is preparing to seduce a teenage virgin.

Eventually he gets bored, puts his pyjamas on and gets into bed. As he’s drifting off, he thinks he sees the cabin door slip open for a second then shut; then hears Margaret’s voice wailing that she did, she did go to him but he was snoring, the General upbraiding him, saying the snoring was a sham. It’s because he’s impotent, ‘Aren’t you, Gilbert, aren’t you?’

7. The villains unmasked – but not foiled

Next morning he is determined to move cabin, but not before he hears a new scene, which is the telegraph officer reading out loud his messages to his wife (and earlier, when he was still in England) out loud to the group of bright young things associated with the jazz music.

Pinfold manages to confront the captain, accusing the telegraph officer of reading out his telegrams, saying he is the victim of all kinds of accusations and the ship’s communications are faulty since he can overhear conversations from all round the ship in his cabin. He asks to move cabin. The captain arranges it straightaway.

Back in his cabin the voices are sad to see him go. But the new cabin is no quieter. In fact the move escalates the number and location of voices. Everywhere he goes on the ship he hears voices., He becomes convinced it’s all being controlled by a young man from the BBC who came to interview him at Lychpole a few weeks before he left and who, he thinks, must have smuggled himself aboard with a voice projection device. It’s something to do with the wireless, the wire-less.

In a series of operations a carefully co-ordinated sequence of voices follow him round the ship or all its passengers take part in co-ordinated conversations against him as he passes. But the strategy is starting to wear thin. One night Pinfold confronts Angel, saying he knows who he is and what he’s trying to do.

And then he gains the upper hand. He writes a long letter home to his wife explaining that the BBC chap Angel is aboard with some kind of new-fangled device the Germans and Russians were working on during the war to project voices into people’s heads and soften them up for interrogation. He announces he has been persecuted since he’s been aboard so he’s going to leave the ship at Port Said and fly to Colombo.

He has his last dinner at the captain’s table and is civil to everyone. the voices in the cabin warn him that he can’t escape but he puts out the light and sleeps. On his way to the cabin he meets the dark-suited figure who had eaten apart and discovers he is Mr Murdoch, a northern industrialist. Murdoch is being collected by a company car and asks Pinfold if he would like a lift. Pinfold gratefully accepts.

the next day they are driven in the company car through a landscape Pinfold finds more heavily armed and warlike than during the Second World War, with barbed wire fences and checkpoints at repeated intervals from Port Said to Cairo. Pinfold experiences a wonderful sense of liberation of being free of the voices. But that night Murdoch takes him to dinner with business associates at Ghezira. But as Pinfold starts to mention a mutual friend (who is a lord) Goneril interrupts him. I.e. they have followed him.

8. Pinfold regained

So Pinfold flies on to Colombo but a reduced set of voices accompany him all the way and talk to him almost continuously, mostly hateful Goneril and lovely Margaret. Margaret now claims all the other male voices were done by her brother, Angel, who is a great mimic. And her brother is married to Goneril (Mr and Mrs Angel), so that’s how the three of them are linked.

In Colombo he writes a telegram to his wife explaining about the ‘box’ which is projecting the voices into his head but saying it’s mostly alright now. He meets an acquaintance from New York who invites him to go visit some ruins with him. Later in the day a telegram arrives form his wife imploring him to return home. Obviously, to her, his telegrams appear quite deranged. By now he is used to the voices. They witter on during that evening’s meal with the American, but no longer frighten or worry him. Now they just bore him.

He gets another telegram from his wife saying she’s flying out to join him but that decides him to return and he telegraphs her to that effect. One last day in Colombo, then by ship to Bombay, Karachi, past Aden and into the Med. Rome. Plane to Paris. The voices talk to him, wheedling and cajoling but he ignores them.

Finally Angel explains that it was all a scientific experiment which has gone badly wrong. When they get back to Blighty he will turn the box off and Pinfold will never hear from any of them again as long as he promises to tell no-one about the experiment, about his – Angel’s – role in it. But as the plane circles over London Pinfold refuses: he says Angel has behaved very badly and he is going to expose him.

He takes a car to the taxi where he and his wife always stay. It is all frightfully British. She has checked with a friend in the BBC and the Angel who came to interview at Lychpole has never been out of the country. She tells him they don’t exist. The voices he heard are only in his head. None of these people exist. And as she says it, Margaret agrees.

‘It’s perfectly true, darling,’ said Margaret. ‘I never had a brother or a sister-in-law, no father, no mother, nothing… I don’t exist, Gilbert. There isn’t any me, anywhere at all… but I do love you, Gilbert. I don’t exist but I do love… Goodbye… Love…’ and her voice too trailed away, sank to a whisper, a sigh, the rustle of a pillow; then was silent.

Pinfold tells his wife they’ve gone, and he knows, for certain, that they have, completely. She’d come to town with a view to getting him admitted to a nursing home. Now he says he just wants to go home. The pack bags, go to Paddington and catch the train home. He explains his sudden return to a few neighbours. Then spends whole evenings reliving the experience, telling his wife every detail, wondering about bits, for example why the attacks and criticism on him were so crude and generic when he himself knows much worse things he’s done.

It ends with him going to see the local doctor, not a very advanced thinker but in tune with Pinfold’s conservatism. He says it simply sounds like mixing the medicines did it. Has he stopped taking the grey pills? Yes. And have the voices stopped? Yes. Well, there you are then.

‘Those voices were pretty offensive, I suppose?’
‘Abominably. How did you know?’
‘They always are. Lots of people hear voices from time to time–nearly always offensive.’
‘You don’t think he ought to see a psychologist?’ asked Mrs. Pinfold.
‘He can if he likes, of course, but it sounds like a perfectly simple case of poisoning to me.’

Well, there you go. The voice of incurious English philistinism. It’s not much advanced on ‘then I woke up and it was all a dream’. Next day, after Mass, he settles himself in the library, spreads a new quire of foolscap before him and writes in his neat, steady hand the title of this book, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.

Thoughts

The auditory hallucinations are, apparently, closely based on what Waugh himself experienced.

It’s my (limited) understanding that psychotics often identify the problem with the latest gadgets or technology, through which they hear voices, often persecuting. Thus Pinfold for a long time thinking the voices he’s hearing are coming from the ship’s internal communications system which, in his delusions, he thinks, by a freak engineering accident, is audible in his cabin and at a certain place in the lounge.

Then he goes on to associate it more specifically with a new piece of technology accessed by Angel through his position at the BBC and brought with him aboard the ship. Or, later, being deployed against him from a distance. In other words the delusion of some kind of device being used to create the voices persists despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Slurs

Modern readers might bridle at the way some of his hallucinatory persecutors ‘accuse’ Pinfold of being a Jew or a homosexual. But at the time of writing casual antisemitism was still common in the kind of social circles Waugh frequented and homosexual acts were still a criminal offence. To be precise, the accusation that he’s Jewish is spoken not by him but by two foul-mouthed, angry hooligans threatening violence, And finally, these are only some of the accusations his unconscious hurls at him, which also include countless other insults as well (being a thief, abandoning his mother, being a snob, a fake, and so on), which are themselves only part of a florid array of scenarios (torture, murder, deflowering a virgin and so on) which his unconscious throw at him.

Aboard ship

One of the things which interests me most about Pinfold is the way it is set aboard a ship, on a cruise into the warm Mediterranean. It brings back all Waugh’s other descriptions of being aboard ship and sailing across the Med in Labels, Remote People, Black Mischief, Waugh in Abyssinia and Scoop. In all those books being aboard ship signified freedom and escape. But here the ship signifies the opposite, which is being trapped, ‘cabined and confined’.

But the setting aboard ship also solves a problem. If the episodes had happened at home it would have been pretty dull for the reader reading descriptions of his bedroom and landing and bathroom and so on. And his wife would have intervened in the first half hour to tell him it’s all nonsense and then send for a doctor.

So the setting aboard ship does at least four things.

It is an unusual and exotic setting, unlike home.
It means he doesn’t have the comforts of home, wife and doctor, who would damp down the incidents and stifle the narrative before it got started.
Instead the comforts of home and familiar faces are replaced by the discomforts of a strange place which brings out and reinforces the disconcerting alienness of his experiences.
Lastly – and given Waugh’s focus on social interaction, this may be the most positive reason for the setting – it provides a large cast with whom Pinfold can have comic misunderstandings and comic interactions.

Madness like being an author

There is an obvious literary interpretation which is that writing a novel is a little like being mad in the sense that you invent characters and everything they say and do. Some authors describe hearing their characters speak in their heads, many authors have reported that their characters become more ‘real’ and present to them than ‘real’ people. Many authors base their fictions on their own lives and freely incorporate not only their experiences but their feelings, feelings of guilt and regret and persecution. Well, Pinfold’s ‘madness’ can be seen as, in one way, only a small step beyond the cultivation of characters and voices which novelists practice as a profession.

Is that it?

Ultimately, this short novel has the same feel as his other longer post-war fictions, Scott-King’s Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins. They feel like good ideas, which are professionally worked through and contain many pretty details and are written in a lovely clear prose style and yet…lack punch. Lack conviction or depth or real feeling. Maybe I ought to be moved by Pinfold’s plight but I am not, at all.

The Loved One is much funnier and the Sword of Honour trilogy is a magnificent achievement. Beside either of them, Pinfold feels shallow and, crucially, not, in the end, very entertaining. Presumably Waugh’s awareness of this is part of the reason he wittily sub-titled Pinfold ‘a conversation piece’, but conversation pieces are designed to be warm and charming. The opening chapter profiling Pinfold certainly has these qualities; but the extended portrait of a man suffering from paranoid hallucinations on a long sea cruise is, in the end, neither warm nor charming. The relationship with his wife never comes alive. In fact none of it really comes alive for me. It all feels somehow small.

And as to it being in the slightest bit useful or interesting as a depiction of actual mental illness, no. The ending when his doctor says, ‘Well, just don’t mix your medicines, old boy’, is dishearteningly bathetic. If you want to see how English prose can convey off-the-scale states of mental extremity, try reading Samuel Beckett’s novels The Unnamable (1953) or How It Is (1964), published while Waugh was alive but coming from a different galaxy altogether. Compared with them, Waugh’s novel reads like an odd but comforting children’s story.

Credit

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1957. All references are to the 1984 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on January 14, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Novel

Posted by Simon on January 14, 2022

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What is Waugh satirising in ‘Love Among The Ruins’?

Maybe it’s worth taking a moment to explain what Waugh was targeting in his 1953 satirical novella Love Among The Ruins. This essay is in three parts:

Waugh’s conservative values
The state of Britain after the war i.e. Labour represent everything Waugh detests
Specific topics satirised in Long Among the Ruins

1. Waugh’s conservative values

Elitist

Waugh was an elitist in the literal sense of believing that Britain should be run by its hereditary elite, the landed gentry and aristocracy. He thought they were the best educated, the most responsible and, because of their ties to the land and to grand houses, mansions and parishes across the country, were the most representative of a kind of mystical ideal of the English population and English values.

Snob

Waugh was a snob. It is well-documented that he liked to hobnob with the aristocracy and namedrop and social climb as much as possible. His father was ‘only’ the managing director of a medium-sized publishing company, so Waugh was a long way lower on the social ladder than the lords and viscounts and earls that he liked to litter his novels with.

Catholic elitism

Waugh was a Christian who showed an unusual interest in church architecture and ritual as a boy, even before he was sent to one of the country’s most High Church public schools (Lancing). A number of his friends converted to Catholicism in the late 1920s so there was a certain inevitability about his Christian traditionalism eventually manifesting itself in his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930.

Waugh’s Catholicism was linked with his other values in a multi-faceted belief in old, traditions, the values of country living, the natural innate superiority of the landowner to his tenants and farmers. He valued luxurious good living, grand country houses, fine wines, the best food, the impeccable manners of the highest in society, and the aristocratic values of nonchalance and superiority.

Catholic belief

Beyond that, however, Catholicism was based on certain inflexible, timeless values. To start with, on the sanctity of human life. This meant no abortion or euthenasia. It is not for man to determine the start or end of human life. All human life is sacred. God is at the centre of all systems of value, underpinning all morality. Removing God, declaring an overtly atheist ideology, begins the process of undermining human life and all morality. Various forms of state-approved murder soon follow, abortion and assisted suicide being the two most obvious.

Individual responsibility and expression

Connected with all this is Waugh’s conservative idea of individualism. In the kind of society Waugh liked, one that implemented a low-tax, laissez-fair regime which allowed the aristocracy and upper middle class to flourish, there was lots of scope for the privileged in society, for the grand old families in their country houses and the bright young things they sent to public school and on into London’s party and cocktail bar circuit, to develop charming idiosyncracies and eccentricities.

In a sense, Waugh’s fiction is devoted to the oddballs, eccentrics and chancers who are able to flourish in the wealthy, blessed, privileged, over-educated and under-worked circles which he described. Take the outrageous practical joker Basil Seal in Put Out More Flags or the eccentric Apthorpe in Men at Arms, or, in a slightly different vein, the camp aesthetes Anthony Blanche (Brideshead) and Everard Spruce (Flags).

For Waugh, it is only his idealised conservative society that true individualism, individual tastes, aestheticism and connoisseurship are able to flourish.

The British Empire

On the global stage i.e. in international politics, Waugh saw Britain and the British Empire as embodying the finest values of civilisation, gentlemanly democracy and individual freedom. In his travel book Remote People it is very striking that Waugh unequivocally supports the right of the white settlers in Kenya to live the life of Riley at the expense of the native African population. He mocks the British Empire as everyone of his generation did, confident in the knowledge that it was here to stay forever. Its actual dismantling after the war came as a great shock.

The international alternatives

In Waugh’s fiction English gentlemanliness is contrasted with:

the irritating, bubble-gum and Coca Cola trashiness of American soldiery (in Sword of Honour) and of superficial, vacuous American consumer culture (in The Loved One)
the terrifying totalitarianism of the post-war communist states, with their utterly amoral commitment to seizing complete power and reducing entire populations to modern slavery (embodied in the Yugoslav communists in Unconditional Surrender)

So that’s a brisk run through Waugh’s conservative Catholic values. Now let’s set these values against the reality of Britain in 1950, when he wrote the first draft of Love Among The Ruins.

2. The state of Britain after the war i.e. the Labour government represented everything Waugh detested

The impact of the Second World War

The Second World War was a disaster for all Waugh’s values. Britain went bankrupt, was only kept afloat by ruinous loans from America, and emerged from the war with her role greatly diminished, a diminution symbolised by the relinquishing of India (and Pakistan) in 1947.

Not only the country but large numbers of landed families were financially ruined, first by the collapse in the economy, in particular the agricultural sector many relied on, and also by the collapse in value of the stocks and shares in British companies whose dividends they’d lived on between the wars and whose value now plummeted.

The Labour Party’s socialist policies

But the greatest cataclysm was the coming to power of the Labour Party in the 1945 general election. The Labour Party embodied everything Waugh despised, disliked and even hated about the modern world. It was the antithesis of everything he valued. In those days the Labour Party contained real socialists who genuinely wanted to nationalise everything, to impose state control of huge sectors of industry (coal, steel, shipbuilding) and the professions (doctors).

Nationalisation

In its first five years in power the Labour government enacted a broad swathe of socialist policies. It nationalised the coalmining industry and the trains. More was promised in a government which pledged to take over ‘the commanding heights’ of the economy. Owners of private companies the length of the land were forcibly bought out.

The theft of private property

Conservatives like Waugh saw this not as contributing to some vague notion of social justice but the very real confiscation of people’s property and businesses.

The faceless bureaucracy

The new ministries set up to run the economy were stuffed with bureaucrats and ideologues. Quite quickly the bureaucracy of the nationalised industries became a joke. ‘The man from the ministry’ came to symbolise the interfering, know-nothing, centralised bureaucracy which conservatives like Waugh contrasted with the personalised relations between landed gentry and local tenants and populations whose names and faces and traditions and values they knew and shared, which Waugh depicted in his idealised version of rural patriarchy. Human interaction was replaced with uncaring forms and procedures.

The NHS

The Labour government’s most famous achievement was the creation of the National Health Service but people tend to forget the immense amount of pressure, which could easily be seen as state intimidation, which was brought to bear on the medical profession. Again, to a conservative like Waugh this meant that a personal relationship with a local doctor who had individual responsibility to run his own practice and, for example, to carry out works of charity, to moderate his fees according to patients’ ability to pay, was replaced by outsiders parachuted into a large, faceless bureaucratic system.

This attitude – the preference for individual and established relationships over modern bureaucratic arrangements – is typified in a passage from The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold where the narrator describes Pinfold’s relationship with his local doctor:

Mr. Pinfold seldom consulted his doctor. When he did so it was as a ‘private patient’. His children availed themselves of the National Health Act but Mr. Pinfold was reluctant to disturb a relationship which had been formed in his first years at Lychpole. Dr. Drake, Mr. Pinfold’s medical attendant, had inherited the practice from his father and had been there before the Pinfolds came to Lychpole. Lean, horsy and weather-beaten in appearance, he had deep roots and wide ramifications in the countryside, being brother of the local auctioneer, brother-in-law of the solicitor, and cousin of three neighbouring rectors. His recreations were sporting. He was not a man of high technical pretensions but he suited Mr. Pinfold well. (Chapter one)

The way the local doctor has deep roots is obviously described, but let us dwell on the phrase ‘his medical attendant’. The implication is that Pinfold prefers Dr Drake because he is more like a servant than a bossy, hurried NHS doctor would be.

To summarise: in a broad swathe of Labour Party policies a conservative like Waugh saw nothing of ‘social justice’ being implemented but only that individual relationships, individual responsibilities and individual freedom of action were being taken away by an overbearing state and replaced by surly, bad-mannered state interference.

Rationing

Rationing had been introduced under Winston Churchill’s wartime government and, of course, destroyed at a stroke the wonderful world of fine wines and expensive meals depicted in Waugh’s 1930s novels. As Waugh himself points out, one aspect of his nostalgia fest Brideshead Revisited, is the description of sumptuous meals and fine vintages which the author, writing in tightly rationed, blacked out Britain of 1943, could only fantasise about.

Waugh like many Britons hoped that rationing would end with the end of the war but it didn’t. In fact it intensified as Britain’s ruined economy struggled to rebuild itself in a world which was also ruined. Rationing was extended to more foods and services, in a world which began to seem like it was going to be grey and shabby forever.

Shabby housing

The most visible sign of the war was the ruins to be found in every British city. The Labour government came to power promising a huge programme of housebuilding and this overlapped with ambitious plans by developers and architects to implement new continental ideas of town planning and design. A series of new towns was conceived, designed and built. Every town and village in the land acquired a penumbra of council houses built on council estates.

Unfortunately many of these developments quickly developed bad reputations, council estates for poverty and chavvy behaviour, the new town towns for being soulless concrete jungles. Tower blocks which looked gleaming symbols of modernity in the architecture magazines turned out to be badly designed, badly built, quickly stained. The windows leaked and the lifts broke.

In his post-war correspondence Waugh summed up all these changes with the satirical notion that Britain was being changed into a new state named ‘Welfaria’.

3. Specific topics satirised in Long Among the Ruins

The name of the new state, ‘New Britain’, has a suitably Orwellian, totalitarian overtone.

The replacement of traditional oaths with ones using ‘State’ instead of God indicate how the genuine source of morality and meaning in Waugh’s Catholicism has been replaced by the corrupt, fallible, pretentious and doomed-to-fail worship of the State (in oaths such as ‘Great State!’, ‘State be with you’ and ‘State help me’).

But the state has usurped not just God but all kinds of relationships, large and small. It is symptomatic that Miles Plastic is an orphan because parents interfere with the upbringing of children, do it well or badly, introduce an element of personal duty and responsibility, and also introduce that human variety and individuality which Waugh values.

The abolition of individualism

In his satirical New Britain, the State interferes everywhere to abolish individualism. So instead of individuals the State’s aim is to produce millions of identikit citizens. Hence the throwaway reference to the way everyone in New Britain speaks with the same ‘flat conventional accent of the age’.

For Waugh, this is a nightmare vision, the death of colourful individualism and the soul-destroying reduction of all human beings to the same, dull, identikit lowest common denominator.

And not just people. Where there had been a plethora and range of goods and services now there is only one brand of everything, the State brand (exactly as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with its Victory brand of goods). Thus the State wines and State sausages and State clothes of Waugh’s fantasy.

The abolition of personal responsibility

The abolition of individual responsibility is, of course, the target satirised in the long opening passage about Mountjoy Prison, in which Waugh satirises the belief that criminals are not responsible for their actions, society is, so that any given crime is not the fault of the criminal but indicates a failure of the welfare system. And hence the satirical details, which flow from it, such as prisoners who are clearly old lags now living in the lap of luxury with prisons replaced by lovely houses in beautiful grounds and nothing more taxing than sessions of ‘Remedial Repose’ to attend and the governor isn’t called a prison governor but ‘Chief Guide’.

(The State confiscation of private property is included in the satire of Mountjoy prison when we learn that Mountjoy Castle had been the ancestral seat of a maimed V.C. of the Second World War, who had been sent to a Home for the Handicapped when the place was converted into a gaol. Obviously the fact that the former owner was a war hero is designed to maximise the reader’s outrage at this typical act of State theft.)

The abolition of personal responsibility is further demonstrated by the way Miles’s criminal act of burning down the RAF barracks where he was stationed and burning to death half the inhabitants is dismissed by the State’s psychologist as perfectly natural adolescent behaviour.

The failure of modern architecture and town planning

It typifies the socialist removal of individuality and character and texture and colour and interest that once Miles is rehabilitated, he is not sent to a named specific town but to ‘the nearest Population Centre’ which has the generically futuristic name of ‘Satellite City’

It is also symptomatic that all the architects’ grand plans have resulted in a shoddy, half-built reality. The so-called ‘Dome of Security’ has blacked out windows, broken lifts and shabby rooms. All around it the rest of the gleaming modern town has failed to be built at all and instead the Dome is surrounded by slums made of huts, the use of the word ‘huts’ suggesting not even English habitations but African shanties.

There were no workers’ flats, no officials’ garden suburb, no parks, no playgrounds yet. These were all on the drawing boards in the surveyor’s office, tattered at the edges, ringed by tea cups; their designer long since cremated. (p.441)

It is similarly symptomatic that when Miles moves in with Clara they share a cramped compartment of a world war Nissen Hut. More than a decade after the war the coalition government has miserably failed to build adequate homes for the population.

The rise of State murder

It is no surprise that the busiest part of the local authority is the Euthenasia Department. In other words, the socialist regime has created a society which people would rather die than live in. For a Catholic like Waugh euthenasia is a sin. Only God decides when people should die. The State offering people the service of assisted suicide is not only repugnant to secular liberal values, but a sin.

State sterilisation

Same goes for sterilisation. A good Catholic believes in using no form of contraceptive device and abortion is a sin. From the same point of view, seeking to permanently sterilise people, or yourself, is a crime against nature and against God.

The irreligious amorality of modern science

The entire idea that the ‘heroine’ of the story should be beautiful but with a lush curly beard caused by the side effects of an operation to be sterilised combines at least two elements: disgust at the notion that women should sterilise themselves in order to further their career (Clara is sterilised in order to become a better ballet dancer); and the beard idea is a ludicrous satire on the unintended side-effects of modern science, in this case the fictional ‘Klugmann’s Operation’.

After the war there was a boom in the idea that ‘modern science’ would solve our social problems. As a Catholic Waugh takes a pessimistic view of human nature and of humanity’s ability to change or cure itself. Only God can do that via divine grace.

On this view there is something both blasphemous and pathetic about modern science’s hubristic claims to be able to cure the modern world. Much the same critical worldview underpins and informs C.S. Lewis’s post-war satire and fable That Hideous Strength (1945).

For Christians like Waugh and Lewis almost all the ills of the modern world stem from man’s foolish attempts to deny the reality of God and try to set up mankind in God’s place.

On a more mundane level, the inevitable failure of modern science is embodied in a) the side effects of the Klugmann Operation i.e. Clara growing a beard; and then b) the grotesque results of the ‘plastic surgery’ carried out to remedy this, which replaces Clara’s soft and beautiful face with an inflexible mask of tough, salmon-coloured rubber. Yuk.

The feeble replacement of Christmas

It’s a small detail but indicative of the whole situation that the State thinks it can simply ‘replace’ the word Christmas and Christmas trees with ‘Santa-Claus-tide’ ‘Goodwill Trees’. It’s pathetically unimaginative in itself but also indicates a deeper failure to understand the nature of human society, the way traditions and beliefs are handed down through the generations. It is exactly as shallow and doomed to fail as the French revolutionaries’ trying to replace the Catholic Church with the cult of the Supreme Being or Lenin and Stalin’s attempts to replace the Russian Orthodox Church faith in The Soviet or the Great Leader. Abolishing the church and Christian festivals masquerades as liberal and progressive but is the precise opposite: destroying history, destroying tradition, destroying diversity, destroying people’s freedom to choose their beliefs and ideas, all swept away in the name of one, centralised, totalising ideology of Unity and Progress.

Summary

Some of Waugh’s points are still relevant today. Even people on the progressive wing of politics lament the depersonalising affect of bureaucracy and form-filling which came in with the welfare state and has never gone away. None of us remember the profound poverty and immiseration of the 1930s which the nationalisation of key industries, the establishing of a welfare state and a national health service were designed to address.

It’s possible, therefore, to profoundly disagree with Waugh’s politics (such as they are) but sympathise with this or that detail of his complaint. Then again, like any satire on a dystopian future, even when it’s intended to be biting we can distinguish the political point (which we might disagree with) from the satirical humour (which we still find funny).

In some ways, then, the text is a handy checklist of issues or topics which a Christian conservative like Waugh objected to in the post-war world and post-war politics. It’s a useful primer on the conservative point of view which was, of course, to triumph in the 1951 general election, when Labour were thrown out and Winston Churchill’s Conservatives returned with a majority. And a primer on the perennial concerns of the conservative frame of mind.

And to return to its literary effects – although, in the end, Love Among The Ruins fails as a story, it is entertaining enough, especially in the dense opening passages, for the vigour of its attack and satirical vehemence.

Credit

Love Among the Ruins by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1953. All references are to its place in the 2018 Penguin paperback edition of the Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on January 12, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Literary criticism, Literature

Tagged Abortion, Anthony Blanche, Apthorpe, assisted suicide, Basil Seal, Brideshead Revisited, Bright Young Things, British Empire, bureaucracy, C.S. Lewis, Catholicism, Christians, Clara, Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh, conservative values, Dome of Security, dystopia, elitism, euthanasia, Euthenasia Department, Evelyn Waugh, Everard Spruce, George Orwell, God, Goodwill Trees, India, individualism, Kenya, Klugmann’s Operation, Labour Party, Lancing, Long Among the Ruins, Love Among The Ruins, Men at Arms, Miles Plastic, morality, Mountjoy Castle, Mountjoy prison, National Health Service, nationalisation, New Britain, Nineteen Eighty-Four, novella, Pakistan, personal responsibility, Politics, Put Out More Flags, rationing, religion, Remote People, Roman Catholicism, Santa-Claus-tide, Satellite City, satire, science fiction, Second World War, snobbery, sterilisation, Sword of Honour, That Hideous Strength, The Loved One, theology, Unconditional Surrender, Winston Churchill

Posted by Simon on January 12, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/12/what-is-waugh-satirising-in-love-among-the-ruins/

Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future by Evelyn Waugh (1953)

‘State be with you.’
(Blessing in the New Britain satirised in Love Among The Ruins)

Waugh knocked off Love Among the Ruins as a response to the Labour Party’s victory in the February 1950 general election, which threatened five more years of socialist rule. It is another novella satirising the modern world, comparable in length to Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947).

Love Among The Ruins is obviously intended to be a scathing satire on the direction post-war Britain was taking but it prompted a very negative response from the publishers Waugh sent it to. One said: ‘It seems to me sad that this man’s talent should be wasted on such a story’. Another: ‘The theme is almost implausibly apt for satire by Waugh and yet his handling of it is, for the most part, dull-witted and tedious.’

In response Waugh quickly withdrew Love Among The Ruins from the market. He spent three years revising it and then issued it as a volume in its own right in 1953. The volume was notable for its satirical use of illustrations. It took illustrations from a book about the statues of the 18th century sculptor Canova and gave them satirical titles or adjustments, as in the depiction of the bearded heroine, Clara.

Waugh’s humorous reworking of a Canova image to depict the bearded ‘heroine’ of ‘Love Among the Ruins’

Having read some of these negative comments I was expecting Love Among The Ruins to be bad, but I enjoyed it. Sub-titling it ‘a romance of the near future’ links it to the fictions of H.G. Wells who called his science fictions ‘romances’. But its vision of a technocratic future, no matter how light and satirical, evokes other resonances and echoes, from Brave New World (1932) to Nineteen Eight-Four (1949) and associates it with contemporary science fiction visions of troubled futures, such as the all-female future depicted in John Wyndham’s novella, Consider Her Ways (1956).

The plot

Mountjoy prison

We are in England in the near future. Waugh tells us the current government is the Bevan-Eden coalition (p.444) – so it’s not set in the middle future under unknown leaders, but only a few years hence under very well-known political leaders. Its most popular stroke was the Incitement to Industry Act of 1955 which has consolidated the now-permanent government, so only a few years after he was writing…

The narrative opens in a ‘modern’ prison, Mountjoy, which is run according to all the latest fashionable principles, based on the foundational idea that people are not responsible for their actions; if they commit crimes, it is due to failings in the social services.

‘In the New Britain which we are building, there are no criminals. There are only the victims of inadequate social services.’ (p.437)

Thus the prison is a place not of punishment but rehabilitation and ‘Remedial Repose’ (at moments the satire on progressive, modern attitudes to crime and rehabilitation reminded me of Kingsley Amis’s We Are All Guilty).

Thus Mountjoy prison is at first deliberately described so that the reader mistakes it for a luxury hotel, what with its fountains, and flower gardens and a string quartet playing in the grounds, its stables and its chandeliers. In fact it becomes clear it is what was once a grand country houses belonging to the old aristocracy, which has been requisitioned and turned into a rehabilitation centre for criminals, a place for Preventive Custody and Corrective Treatment. (To be precise, Mountjoy Castle had been the ancestral seat of a maimed V.C. of the Second World War, who had been sent to a Home for the Handicapped when the place was converted into a gaol. Waugh neglects no opportunity to ram home the amorality and shabbiness of the new regime).

Miles Plastic

The narrative opens on the night before the criminal in question and hero of the story, Miles Plastic, is due to be released back into the community, allowed to resume being A Citizen, now he is a fully rehabilitated man. Miles is the epitome of The Modern Man. His parents were ruined by the State (presumably death duties, land taxes and all the other impositions of Socialism), reduced to poverty, forced to divorce, he was handed over to an aunt who died of boredom from working in a factory, and so he was raised in an orphanage.

Huge sums were thenceforward spent upon him; sums which, fifty years earlier, would have sent whole quiversful of boys to Winchester and New College and established them in the learned professions. In halls adorned with Picassos and Légers he yawned through long periods of Constructive Play. He never lacked the requisite cubic feet of air. His diet was balanced and on the first Friday of every month he was psychoanalysed. Every detail of his adolescence was recorded and microfilmed and filed, until at the appropriate age he was transferred to the Air Force. There were no aeroplanes at the station to which he was posted. It was an institution to train instructors to train instructors to train instructors in Personal Recreation. (p.434)

I can see how more critical reviewers might have thought this was a bit obvious, but I thought Waugh carried it off. It has a nice tone of amusement throughout, amusement laced with contempt for the people he is satirising.

Mountjoy doesn’t have punishment breaking of rocks, it has community singing. The governor isn’t a governor, he’s a ‘Chief Guide’.

Miles’s trial

Thus when Miles carried out an act of arson, burning down the air force buildings and killing half the people in it, he wasn’t treated as a psychopath, but handled sympathetically and diagnosed by a psychologist who judged that incendiarism was a perfectly normal part of adolescence which shouldn’t be bottled up. Now, after two happy years of luxury living, Miles is being ‘released’ or returned to the community.

Soapy and Mr Sweat

There is a comic passage where a couple of the old timers, Soapy and Mr Sweat commiserate with Miles for being let out; they love it here, living in the lap of luxury; they love it so much they want to stay forever and, with that aim in mind, have recently undertaken a little foray and massacred the peacocks which used to stroll round the grounds. If anyone tries to tell them they’re reformed and ready for release, they’ll show the dead birds and thus ensure a lovely further extension to their sentences. The old lags lament the good old days when committing a crime made you a criminal and prison meant prison, you knew where you were; now the authorities call you an ‘antisocial phenomenon’ and say you are ‘maladjusted’ and instead of hard time you get a luxury hotel and ‘Remedial Repose’.

The Minister of Welfare and the Minister of Rest and Culture

Miles’s release ceremony is attended by the Minister of Welfare and the Minister of Rest and Culture of the coalition government. They emphasise that the new programme has its critics, which is why Miles is important. He is considered the First Success of the new way, a ‘vindication of the Method.’

Miles is being sent to Satellite City, the nearest Population Centre. He is issued a Certificate of Human Personality and told to report to the Area Progressive. Transport has been laid on.

Satellite City

Mockery of a new town. The grand architect’s plans have given rise to a shabby reality of glass and concrete. A vast Dome of Security was built but the dome itself is not only invisible from street level but all its windows have been blacked out during various international crises and the concrete has stained and blotched. As to the surrounding buildings:

In Waugh’s description of the general air of shabbiness you can maybe detect the influence of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with its descriptions of a future of permanent shabbiness, degradation, pokey apartments in poorly maintained tower blocks. More close to home, it reminds me of the 1970s new town I grew up in, all stained concrete and broken lifts smelling of pee.

The officials subsisted in perpetual twilight. Great sheets of glass, planned to “trap” the sun, admitted few gleams from scratches in their coat of tar. At evening when the electric light came on, there was a faint glow, here and there. When, as often, the power station was “shedding its load” the officials stopped work early and groped their way back to their darkened huts where in the useless refrigerators their tiny rations were quietly putrefying. On working days the officials, male and female, trudged through cigarette ends round and round, up and down what had once been lift-shafts, in a silent, shabby, shadowy procession. (p.441)

There are endless strikes which bring this or that service to a halt. Reminds me of my boyhood in the 1970s. Similarly, Satellite City’s hospital, ‘one of the unfinished edifices, all concrete and steel and glass in front and a jumble of huts behind.’ Use of the word ‘hut’ links it to the kind of structure Waugh saw in Africa and the Amazon i.e. British society is reverting to the level of savages.

The Euthenasia Department

It’s pretty funny that Miles is sent to the Euthenasia Department. And Waugh develops the comic implications very drolly:

Under the Bevan-Eden Coalition the service came into general use and won instant popularity. The Union of Teachers was pressing for its application to difficult children. Foreigners came in such numbers to take advantage of the service that immigration authorities now turned back the bearers of single tickets.

Miles finds himself widely envied by colleagues:

‘Great State! You must have pull. Only the very bright boys get posted to Euthanasia.’
‘I’ve been in Contraception for five years. It’s a blind alley.’
‘They say that in a year or two Euthanasia will have taken over Pensions.’ (p.444)

Contraception is a dead end ha ha. It is run by a Dr Beamish:

Satellite City was said to be the worst served Euthanasia Centre in the State. Dr. Beamish’s patients were kept waiting so long that often they died natural deaths before he found it convenient to poison them. (p.445)

Miles’s job is to open the doors to batches of new clients, make them comfortable, turn on the telly, offer cups of tea while they wait to be ushered through the final door, with its whiff of cyanide, and then the roar of the crematorium ovens…

Clara

Dr Beamish tells him a special client has been sent. Miles fetches her from the VIP waiting room, a beautiful trim young woman with…a golden beard! Dr Beamish is impressed. Obviously a result of ‘Klugmann’s Operation.’ This, apparently, is an operation to sterilise young women which was forced on her when she said she wanted to pursue a career in ballet. A ludicrous symbol of a world which has lost all touch with nature and human nature, which fetishises sterility and death.

The bearded lady makes it quite clear she’s only come because of pressure from the head of her drama department and ballet – after the botched sterilisation procedures they’re all sure she must want to die – but has no intention of being euthenised. Dr Beamish wonders why the silly girl is wasting his time and throws her out. She explains to Miles how much she likes dancing. She finds that Art makes her value life all the more. Her name is Clara.

Lovers

They become lovers. Clara can no longer dance (a ballerina with a beard!) but she helps out at the ballet school. They cohabit in a cubicle of a Nissan hut (a chronic shortage of houses and accommodation being a result of the war which dragged on for years afterwards; another idea embedded in Nineteen Eighty-Four).

Sex is nothing new for Miles, he has been taught about it since toddler years. What surprises him is love, which he’s never been taught about, but which Clara has an instinctive feel for. She has prints of Old Master paintings (sounds like a Fragonard or Watteau) contrasted with the stern, machine-age Legers and Picassos Miles has been subjected to all his life.

They live a simple frugal life, going to their daily jobs, in the evening lying in the fields under the big moon and making love. Summer turns to autumn, and then November, ‘season of strikes’. Clara is growing fat. She goes to see the doctor. On her return they share a glass of wine. (In another instance of the Modern State totalitarianly dominating every aspect of existence, the state now chooses and names the vintage, so this one is called Progress Port.)

Doctor told her she’s pregnant. They are both sad their child will not be born an Orphan, which is much the most preferred way for infants in the New Britain. Then Clara leaves, clears out, disappears without trace. Miles is at first upset, then concerned, then angry, then indifferent.

Clara’s face replacement

Santa-Claus-tide approaches and the shops are full of shoddy goods. Christmas trees have been renamed Goodwill Trees. Someone he works with tells Miles Clara is in hospital. He goes to visit her. The porter doesn’t bother to look up from his television. The corridors are full of muzak from the wireless. Waugh’s vision of uncivil, modern barbarism.

Miles discovers the doctors have performed an abortion on his child, but almost as bad, or worse, they have cut off Clara’s beard and replaced the whole lower part of her face with a rubber flesh-substitute.

Her eyes and brow were all that was left of the loved face. Below it something quite inhuman, a tight, slippery mask, salmon pink. (p.459)

Miles gets up and walks out, walks out the hospital, walks away from Satellite City, walks for hours through the countryside till he is surprised to read a sign saying Mountjoy Castle is nearby. The gates are always open and welcoming in the way of the New Penology, so he walks right up to the building and sets it on fire. Uses a lighter he carries with him to set afire the dry curtains and soon the whole lots goes up. ‘The murderers were leaping from the first-storey windows but the sexual offenders, trapped above, set up a wail of terror.’

Once it is utterly burned to the ground Miles turns and walks away, walking the long road back to Satellite City feeling light of heart and with a smile on his face.

Back to work

Next day Miles wakes to the smell of cheap State sausages cooking in his hostel, dressed and goes to work. I was astonished when there is a reference to Parsnip, the comic name he gave to his caricature of the famous 1930s poet W.H. Auden in Put Out More Flags. Now he is described as a shabby has-been who wants to kill himself, joins the queue for the Euthenasia department but always bottles out. Not today.

Miles turned to the periscope. Only one man waited outside, old Parsnip, a poet of the ’30s who came daily but was usually jostled to the back of the crowd. He was a comic character in the department, this veteran poet. Twice in Miles’s short term he had succeeded in gaining admission but on both occasions had suddenly taken fright and bolted.
‘It’s a lucky day for Parsnip,’ said Miles.
‘Yes. He deserves some luck. I knew him well once, him and his friend Pimpernell. New Writing, the Left Book Club, they were all the rage. Pimpernell was one of my first patients. Hand Parsnip in and we’ll finish him off.’
So old Parsnip was summoned and that day his nerve stood firm. He passed fairly calmly through the gas chamber on his way to rejoin Pimpernell. (p.464)

Clara again

After a hard day at work Miles goes back to the hospital to see Clara. She has succeeded in painting the rubber mask to make it impressively lifelike. He feels cold and distant from her.

Promotion

Next day Miles is told he’s been promoted, is given a suit and bowler hat and a driver who drives him up to the London where he enters the imposing ‘Ministry’. Miles is surprised to discover that the burning down of Mountjoy prison has become a real talking point. And it has changed his status. Instead of being the first of many rehabilitated patients, he is now the Only One. The New Penology has always had its critics and so now, to counter them, the ministers intend to send him the length and breadth of the country to lecture about its wonderful benefits.

They unveil a model of the New Mountjoy they are planning to build and it is, in fact, merely a cardboard packing case. But it stirs something in Miles’s soul, his entire upbringing up to this date is summed up in the object. Stripped of all ornament and pleasure, a fitting place to consign the lifeless inhabitants of a lifeless society.

‘Does he have a wife?’ the minister asks him, ‘Folk like a man with a wife.’ ‘No,’ replies Miles. Well, on the spot they fit him up with Miss Flower, the ‘gruesome’ secretary who has been assisting at the meeting. And off they’re whisked to the registrar office and are half way through the service when… when Miles realises he is fidgeting with a hard object in his pocket. With a cigarette lighter. He clicks it to light a small flame. A flame. A fire. An earnest of the future.

Thoughts

Endings are difficult. I thoroughly enjoyed the first half, up to Clara disappearing before being discovered at the hospital. Up to that point the story flowed very naturally and contained lots of humorous touches. Up to that point it had been a kind of sci fi-political farce, funny because ridiculous. With the running off of Clara the storyline somehow became more serious, almost as if trying to be a serious fiction, with serious people and serious emotions. Once that possibility was allowed in, Love Among The Ruins felt like it lost a lots of its cartoonish spontaneity and sparkle.

Although it ends with a wicked glint in its eye, somehow the end doesn’t quite fit the beginning and certainly doesn’t match the more ‘serious’ tone which threatened to emerge during the Clara-absconding -and-Miles-feeling-bereft passages. It doesn’t quite resolve properly.

Love Among the Ruins is obviously not a classic text by any means. It’s not in the same ballpark as Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is a frippery, a squib, an entertaining lampoon and, like most of his post-war fictions it feels incomplete, lacking something, some quality of real humour or resonance.

Waugh’s animosity against all the aspects of the modern world which he can cram into the narrative feel real and alive, specially in the opening passages but, as soon as he tries to concoct a plot to carry it forward, the text feels contrived.

Credit

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on January 10, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Literature, novella

Posted by Simon on January 10, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/10/love-among-the-ruins-evelyn-waugh/

Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh (1961)

‘Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians–not very many perhaps–who felt this. Were there none in England?’
‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.’
(Mme. Kanyi talking to Guy Crouchback in Unconditional Surrender, page 232)

The second novel in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy followed on from the first with hardly a break, commencing on the afternoon of the same day the previous one ended. Here things are very different. At the end of the previous book, the ‘hero’ of the trilogy, Guy Crouchback, had arrived back in England eight weeks after hearing of the German invasion of Russia, on 22 June 1941, so roughly 22 August 1941. Unconditional Surrender only really gets going in August 1943, two years later i.e. there is a big gap, the central years of the war.

The book is divided into five sections or parts:

PROLOGUE. Locust Years
BOOK ONE. State Sword
BOOK TWO. Fin de Ligne
BOOK THREE. The Death Wish
EPILOGUE. Festival of Britain

1. Prologue: Locust Years

This brief introduction reviews Guy’s recaps the previous 2 years, describing Guy’s lack of direction when he got back from Crete in 1941, touching base with his father at his seaside hotel. He ends up helping to assemble and train a new generation of officers and men for the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. But in August 1943 he is told he is too old to accompany them abroad. More precisely, the new CO was his superior in Freetown back in 1940 and remembers the unfortunate incident of Guy giving a very sick colleague, Apthorpe, a bottle of whiskey with which he proceeded to drink himself to death. Further clarifying the timelines, Guy takes some leave and is at Matchet with his father when Italy surrenders on September 8 1943. Jumbo Trotter visits the barracks later the same month and fins Guy miserable so tells him to move in with him in London, while they find a new role for him. At his London club, Bellamy’s, he bumps into Tommy Blackhouse, a commanding officer in the commandos, about to leave for Italy, but Guy burned his bridges when he turned down an offer to join them two years earlier, preferring to return to the Halberdiers. He’s really screwed up his choices. But it is Tommy who suggests he might find a post in HOO HQ.

2. Book One: State Sword

HOO HQ Brompton

Anyway, as the narrative proper opens Guy is rising 40. In fact early on he has his 40th birthday, 29 October 1943, the day after Waugh’s own birthday.

Guy has come to rest in one of the many departments belonging to Hazardous Offensive Operations Headquarters (HOO HQ) which has grown and spread since we first met it in 1940. Now it occupies multiple buildings in central and west London. Guy finds himself with a cramped office:

in the Venetian-Gothic brick edifice of the Royal Victorian Institute, a museum nobly planned but little frequented in the parish of Brompton.

A cramped space he shares, surreally, with ‘a plaster reconstruction of a megalosaurus’. His job appears to be to receive memos and reports from other departments, sign or stamp or comment on them, before shuffling them along to other departments. Guy goes for a stroll round the building, which is a peg to introduce several other minor characters and for Waugh to describe the way a number of them are out and out communists. The alliance with Soviet Russia has allowed this political view to both spread and be more openly espoused and discussed, and not just among the ‘working classes’. He imagines one particular lofty bureaucrat, Sir Ralph Brompton, the diplomatic adviser to HOO HQ who promotes alliances and support for communist forces everywhere, picturing Guy being put up against a wall and shot, in the best Soviet manner (p.29)

His stroll round the premises leads up to a conversation with Mr. Oates, who has recently installed an Electronic Personnel Selector, an early example of a computer and, as in a stage comedy or sitcom, he demonstrates its purpose in finding the right personnel for new jobs by discovering that there is a vacancy for a man with experience of Italy and some experience of the commandos – for Guy, in fact (p.31).

The sword of Stalingrad

Waugh novels are always multi-stranded or at least contain a number of characters and storylines. The central symbol of this book is the Sword of Stalingrad, a huge sword commissioned by the King himself and to be sent to Stalingrad in Russia as a symbol of solidarity with our Russian allies and testament to their fortitude in the brutal 6-month long siege. Silver, gold, rock-crystal and enamel had gone to its embellishment and throughout the novel it is placed on a fake altar in Westminster Cathedral where long queues of proles queue for a sight of it.

This sword, in Guy’s view a spurious product of press relations and alliance with an immoral beast is contrasted with the noble and pure sword of Sir Roger of Waybroke, an Englishman who travelled on crusade but never made it to the Holy Land, was shipwrecked on the Italian coast, fought and fell for the local count who buried him in the local church of the little island, Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, where Guy spent the 1930s. Over the years Guy developed a religious/superstitious attachment to the knight and attributed to him the finest feelings of nobility and chivalry. At the start of the first novel in the trilogy, Men at Arms, before he leaves Santa Dulcina delle Rocce Guy touches the stone effigy of the knight and his sword, asking Sir Roger to pray for him and his embattled kingdom (i.e. Britain).

So the symbolism of the two swords, one ancient, venerable and noble, the other a modern, factitious and flashily popular fake, run through the text, symbolising the two sets of values, the two worldviews, the novel and Guy finds himself betwebelen, the dying old world and the new meritocratic one struggling to be born.

Ludovic

We are reintroduced to Ludovic, slippery, mysterious figure from book 2, who saved Guy when the two drifted across the Mediterranean in an open boat after the disastrous fall of Crete. We learn that he appears to have been picked up by the Sir Ralph Brompton we met a few pages earlier, way back in the 1930s, when he was a tall handsome junior officer in the Halberdiers. It is not stated but strongly implied that this was a homosexual affair, with the richer older man extracting Ludovic from his regiment and taking him abroad for five years to be his valet or secretary, depending on the situation, grooming and educating the lower class but handsome boy.

A decade has passed and Ludovic is a more imposing figure. He was given the Military Medical for conspicuous bravery for rescuing Guy and promoted. For a while the army couldn’t find a role for him but he was eventually put in charge of a training base in the country which teaches army and partisan groups to parachute, a job which gave him plenty of time to write and hone his literary skills. Despite all this, when in London, he still looks up old Sir Ralph for tea.

Everard Spruce

Sir Ralph is, of course, well connected, and tells Ludovic he has passed on the latter’s philosophical musings (which we saw Ludovic sketching out in the previous novel) on to the noted literary editor, Everard Spruce, editor of the fictional arts magazine Survival. This is a pretty obvious reference to the real-life noted editor Cyril Connolly and his arts magazine Horizon. Everard liked his Pensées and would like to meet him, though he thinks the title should be changed to something more modishly technical, like ‘In Transit’ (the sub-title, as it happens, of the second and final book of poems by Welsh war poet Alun Lewis).

(Waugh had already satirised Connolly and Horizon as Ambrose Silk and his magazine Ivory Tower in the 1942 novel, Put Out More Flags. Connolly was to devote the entire February 1948 issue of Horizon to Waugh’s novel, The Loved One, so he had a keen understanding of Waugh’s importance. It is interesting that Waugh describes Spruce/Connolly as ‘a man who cherished no ambitions for the future, believing, despite the title of his monthly review, that the human race was destined to dissolve in chaos’, interesting if true of Connolly. p.39. It may be also worth noting that, despite finding himself satirised in Waugh’s novels, Connolly still described the trilogy as ‘Unquestionably the finest novel to come out of the war’, top quote on the cover of all three Penguin editions.)

Ludovic walks from Sir Ralph’s rooms in Victoria to Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where Spruce lives and works, tended on by four young bohemian secretaries, just in time for a posh party. He notices the flimsy blackout curtain, the manuscripts and mess everywhere, the posh guests. He notes and observes. What makes Ludovic so compelling is the way he is the coldest of cold fish, cold and aloof.

The Kilbannocks

We met Ian and Kerstie Kilbannock in the previous book, with their house in Eaton Terrace. Kerstie is now a cipher clerk, Ian has steadily worked his way up the pole of military press and PR. They have struggled but been sensible and make do.

Virginia Troy comes round, Guy’s ex-wife, who deserted him for Tommy Blackhouse, went on to have a string of affairs, married an American named Troy, has lived separated from him for ages. Now Troy reveals he’s had private detectives trailing her and is divorcing her on the grounds of infidelity. She will be left without a cent. For the first time in her life she’s panicking, She’s come round with all her possessions to ask Kerstie to help her go through them and decide what to pawn.

For the last few years she has been forced to support Trimmer, the ‘hero’ of a farcically incompetent ‘raid’ on the French mainland, as he tours the factories of England to boost morale, but is hopelessly in love with her. It’s Ian, as her employer at HOO HQ, who obliged her to ‘support’ Trimmer and the implication seems to be, obliged her to ‘keep him happy’ i.e. sleep with him (Trimmer).

The Loot

Waugh’s anti-Americanism came out so fiercely in the caricature of three slobbish American journalists at the end of Officers and Gentlemen. It recurs here:

London was full of American soldiers, tall, slouching, friendly, woefully homesick young men who seemed always to be in search of somewhere to sit down. In the summer they had filled the parks and sat on the pavements round the once august mansions which had been assigned to them. For their comfort there swarmed out of the slums and across the bridges multitudes of drab, ill-favoured adolescent girls and their aunts and mothers, never before seen in the squares of Mayfair and Belgravia. These they passionately and publicly embraced, in the blackout and at high noon, and rewarded with chewing-gum, razor-blades and other rare trade-goods from their PX stores.

‘Ill-favoured’ lol, that’s a nice phrase. And again when de Souza describes the experience of fighting in Italy:

‘And then in Italy there were Americans all over the place clamouring for doughnuts and Coca-Cola and ice cream.’ (p.95)

Anyway, towering above the general swarm of Yanks is a central and recurring figure, Lieutenant Padfield. The ‘Loot’ is a phenomenon, supernaturally present at every party, luncheon and dinner, knowing everyone in London, a finger in every pie. Incongruously, he goes to Everard Spruce’s party, turns up at Guy’s father’s funeral, and turns out to have been gathering evidence against Virginia for Mr Troy’s law firm.

Guy meets Ludovic

It is Guy’s fortieth birthday. He sallies forth to Bellamy’s where he meets Ian, just kicked out of his house for the evening by Kerstie who wants a girlie tete-a-tete with Virginia. Together with the Loot, Guy and Ian take a cab to Chelsea to Spruce’s party. Spruce had just gotten round to finding time to talk to Ludovic who he thinks is a very important New Writer. There is a droll bit of dialogue where Spruce thinks the lead images in Ludovic’s book of pensées (French for ‘thoughts’) are highly symbolic and/or derived from psychological sources, namely the theme of the drowned man and of the cave, while the reader of the trilogies knows that, in the last days of the ill-fated Crete campaign Ludovic holed up with other AWOL soldiers in safe caves, and then, in the local fishing boat which they got working in order to escape the advancing Germans, more than likely threw the 2 or 3 other sailors overboard in order to preserve himself and Guy. Spruce thinks these are deep symbolic images; whereas we know they are blunt facts.

‘And besides these there seemed to me two poetic themes which occur again and again. There is the Drowned Sailor motif–an echo of the Waste Land perhaps? Had you Eliot consciously in mind?’
‘Not Eliot,’ said Ludovic. ‘I don’t think he was called Eliot.’
‘Very interesting. And then there was the Cave image. You must have read a lot of Freudian psychology?’
‘Not a lot. There was nothing psychological about the cave.’

When Guy appears at Spruce’s party, Ludovic is almost paralysed with horror. The implication is that Ludovic did bump off the other men in the boat and is convinced Guy knows this and has tracked him down to confront him about it. Of course, Guy knows nothing and so is as puzzled as Spruce when Ludovic simply gets up and walks out of the party.

3. Book Two: Fin de Ligne

Virginia is pregnant

Virginia goes to a doctor who confirms she is pregnant. Must be by Trimmer. Yikes.

Guy is selected for parachute training

Guy goes for an interview about the job spat out by Mr Oates’s Electronic Personnel Selector. Something about parachuting into north Italy. He’ll need to go and do parachute training. Since the narrator has told us that Ludovic now manages a parachute training centre…

Guy’s father’s funeral

When Guy returns to the Transit Camp he finds a telegram from his sister telling him his father has died peacefully in his sleep. So he catches a train to Matchet with Box-Bender to attend the funeral whose Catholic elaborations are described in great detail. The county lord-lieutenant, a representative of the cardinal etc are in attendance and so, incongruously, is the Loot, who turns up everywhere. Angela and Guy are both astonished at the number of thank you letters their father has received; seems he quietly performed countless acts of charity, as well as giving a lot of his income to the needy.

Quantitative judgments don’t apply

The last time they’d met, Guy and his father had a little disagreement about the policy of the Popes concerning compromising with the values of the modern world. Guy argued that the popes should have stood aloof from all politics since Italian unification (1871). A few days later his father writes him a kindly letter explaining that, in his opinion, this is not how Catholicism works. It works in the world and through the world. It cannot disengage and hold itself in an ivory castle. Who knows how many souls came to the Church and so were saved because of successive Popes’ interventions:

Quantitative judgments don’t apply. If only one soul was saved, that is full compensation for any amount of loss of “face.”

This is a very important quote. Guy will repeat it to himself over and again as the novel progresses, regarding Virginia and in Yugoslavia.

The first abortionist

Kerstie prises the address of an illegal abortionist out of her very reluctant doctor, but when Virginia takes a taxi to the address it is bombed out. When she pops into nearby Claridge’s she finds the Loot, who tells her about attending Mr Crouchback’s funeral, and also the surprising news that he was quite well off. Planting a seed…

The voodoo abortionist

When Virginia tries a Black doctor who Kerstie’s cleaner recommends as an abortionist, there is broad farce when Virginia discovers he has been hired by HOO HQ to perform voodoo ceremonies in order to give the Nazi leaders bad dreams! He asks her whether she has brought the scorpions he’s requested as part of his ceremonies. No, replies Virginia. No, I haven’t brought scorpions.

The witch doctor sits alongside Dr Glendening-Rees, the forager sent to teach the commando how to eat seaweed and heather in Officers and Gentlemen, in Waugh’s gallery of military eccentrics.

Ludovic and the parachute training centre

It is November 1943 (p.117). Ludovic lives a quiet civilised life at his parachute training base in Essex (officially known as ‘Number 4 Special Training Centre’). Until he receives notification that none other than Guy Crouchback is among the next batch of trainees. He is horrified, convinced it is fate.

In the bus en route to the training centre, Guy bumps into an old hand from the Halberdiers, de Souza who becomes very confidential, saying a number of the 12 ‘candidates’ for the course probably know Sir Ralph Brompton. It’s becoming pretty obvious Brompton is more than a communist sympathiser, but maybe a Soviet spy.

Sustained and very evocative description of parachute training. Also a sustained running joke about Ludovic’s fantastically chilling effect on all around him. In fact, upon learning that Guy is coming for training he orders his staff to remove his name from all official documents, noticeboards, not to refer to him by name and to have his meals sent up to his room. De Souza notices this and makes a very funny running joke about their commanding officer having been overthrown in a coup and now being held hostage in his own room.

When it comes turn to do his first parachute jump Guy twists the same knee he injured all those years ago in the Halberdier barracks and is sent off to hospital whereupon Ludovic deigns to come down from his rooms and dine with the other 11 trainees, casting a wonderfully ghoulish coldness over the assembly. De Souza nicknames him Major Dracula. His number two seriously considers the possibility that his commanding officer has gone mad (mental illness and madness being, as we have so often observed, a recurrent theme in Waugh’s work). As de Souza puts it:

‘In my experience the more responsible posts in the army are largely filled by certifiable lunatics. They don’t cause any more trouble than the sane ones.’ (p.109)

Ludovic, like Apthorpe in the first book, only in a very different way, is a comic creation of genius. He consolidates his reputation for weirdness by insisting on buying a Pekinese dog. He clinches his second in command’s view that he’s gone mad when he exits the dinner singing the music hall song:

Jumbo rescues Guy who moves in with Uncle Peregrine

Guy hates it in the RAF hospital where the officers are rude and lackadaisical and which is bombarded all day long with the throbbing and wailing of jazz music from the wireless. He gets de Souza to pass on a message to Jumbo Trotter who promptly comes down to rescue him and take him back to his digs. However, Guy becomes depressed, so depressed that he takes up the offer of his uncle, his father’s brother, the notorious bore Peregrine Crouchback, to move in with him in his house in Bourne Mansions, Carlisle Place. It is the time of the Tehran Conference 28 November to 1 December 1943.

Virginia pops in on Guy. She takes to popping in every day, bringing cards and gin. She inveigles dear old Uncle Peregrine into taking her out for dinner and explains that she is thinking of becoming a Catholic so she can return to being married to Guy. She is quite candid about being skint, needing money and being tired of gallivanting around. Peregrine is a bit put out because, in his ancient innocence, he’d been rather thinking she’d been popping in to see him.

Then one day she tells him the truth. Asks if he loves her. Very unusually for Waugh, there is a reference to sex, when she runs her hand up his leg under his bedclothes (Guy is still restricted to bed because of his knee) and gets no response. In fact Guy instinctively shies away from her. No attraction at all. It is then she makes the Great Revelation of the novel and tells him she is pregnant, with Trimmer’s child.

To the astonishment of everyone in the know, namely Ian and Kerstie Kilbannock, Guy agrees on the spot to take her back, to get remarried in a civil ceremony (they were never parted, according to this theology). So Virginia and Ian, returning from Christmas 1943 discover Virginia has moved out of their house (where shes’ been staying, much to Ian’s mounting irritation) and moved straight into Uncle Peregine’s house, room next to Guy’s.

Kerstie goes straight round, Virginia is out, and she tells him point blank about Virginia’s baby by Trimmer and is flabbergasted that Guy knows. He tries to explain. For over a decade he was lived alone, depressed, morose, occasionally wishing there was one good deed he could do in the world, one good deed which was genuinely selfless, entirely about helping someone else. By helping Virginia in her time of need, and by becoming father to the child, he helps a vulnerable woman and a baby who would be fatherless.

Kerstie says wartorn Europe is full of helpless women and orphans. But Guy says he can’t help all of them. But he could help Virginia. He repeats the words of his father:

Quantitative judgments don’t apply. If only one soul was saved, that is full compensation for any amount of loss of “face.”

Remarrying Virginia and fathering the child are good deeds; loss of face before the whole world is secondary.

4. Book Three: The Death Wish

It is late February 1944 and Guy is flown in a Dakota plane via stopovers in Gibraltar and North Africa to Bari in Italy. Reports for duty to the Headquarters of the British Mission to the Anti-fascist Forces of National Liberation (Adriatic). He’s been dispatched here because a) Ludovic lied about his success in parachute training in order to get ride of him (as we saw, Guy failed to complete the course due to a knee injury); and b) because in the bowels of HOO HQ Sir Ralph and colleagues think Guy will make a good clean cover for what they’re really up to i.e. aiding the communist partisans.

Having signed in and met the Brigadier and the keen information officer Joe Cattermole, he is filled in about the Yugoslavs or ‘Jugs’ as the Brits call them. Keen to take all the help they can from the British, but their true leaders are the Russians, pan-Slavism. The partisans offer a permanent irritation to the Germans, who periodically carry out sweeps into the mountains. But the Germans’ central aim is to keep communications with Greece open. Earlier in the war they were going to use this as a jumping off point for the Middle East, for Palestine or Egypt. Now, with the tide strongly against them, they need Yugoslavia open so when the time is right they can withdraw their Greek army out and up into mainland Europe.

Guy us kept hanging round. He socialises with the Brigadier who has a WAAF mistress, he lunches and dines out, though the food is as thin and grim as back in England. He meets the bloody Loot who, improbably enough, is being paid to recruit a full orchestra and revive Italian opera, with the aim of winning over Italian hearts and minds. It’s proving difficult to find any singers.

In March 1943 Guy is informed he is to be parachuted into Croatia. He visits a church to make a last confession. He surprises us by confessing that he wants to die. It’s important to catch all the nuances of this surprising declaration to so I quote at length:

Guy had no preparations to make for this journey except to prepare himself. He walked to the old town, where he found a dilapidated romanesque church where a priest was hearing confessions. Guy waited, took his turn and at length said: “Father, I wish to die.’
‘Yes. How many times?’
‘Almost all the time.’
The obscure figure behind the grill leant nearer. ‘What was it you wished to do?’
‘To die.’
‘Yes. You have attempted suicide?’
‘No.’
‘Of what, then, are you accusing yourself? To wish to die is quite usual today. It may even be a very good disposition. You do not accuse yourself of despair?’
‘No, Father; presumption. I am not fit to die.’
‘There is no sin there. This is a mere scruple. Make an act of contrition for all the unrepented sins of your past life.’ (p.170)

Guy’s title is Military Liaison Officer, his job is to report on the military situation from the British Mission at a place called Begoy. Also to transcribe, encypher and send to Allied HQ in Italy the partisans’ often exorbitant and detailed requirements. He is grudgingly accepted by the ‘Jugs’. He is given a Serb ‘translator’ who speaks English with a brutal Noo Yawk accent and is, of course, a spy.

Time passes. One day the translator tells him a group of Jews is outside. A deputation ask him for help to travel to Italy. He explains that only the wounded and soldiers are flown out on the daily plane, it is not for civilians. They go away disgruntled. A month later he is asked to report on displaced persons in his area (UNRRA stands for United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration):

U.N.R.R.A. research team requires particulars displaced persons. Report any your district. This phrase, which was to be among the keywords of the decade, was as yet unfamiliar.
‘What are “displaced persons”?’ he asked the Squadron Leader.
‘Aren’t we all?’ (p.179)

Guy goes to see the hundred or so Jewish refugees who are living in absolute squalor. His visit annoys the partisan authorities who call him to a meeting more like an interrogation and tell him it is not his place to interfere in internal matters of what will become their country. Guy explains he was only following direct orders from UNRRA and gets cross.

That night he gets a telegram saying Virginia has given birth to a son. The Crouchback line will be continued. It is 4 June 1944, the day Allied forces enter Rome.

Waning force

Waugh describes a general sense of power moving away from many of the London characters. On the eve of Operation Overlord pretty much everything HOO HQ ever cooked up seems redundant. General Whale has creates of old files burned. Ian Kilbannock tries to get a posting to follow the troops to Normandy: first-hand D-Day experience will be like gold dust in a post-war career.

Ludovic and Brideshead Revisited

Ludovic has been writing a novel and sending the instalments off to a typist in Scotland to type up the manuscript. It has a plot of Shakespearian improbability and is told in over-the-top prose. Waugh tells us half a dozen other novelists were working in the same vein of over-written nostalgia:

Had he known it, half a dozen other English writers, averting themselves sickly from privations of war and apprehensions of the social consequences of the peace, were even then severally and secretly, unknown to one another, to Everard Spruce, to Coney and to Frankie, composing or preparing to compose books which would turn from drab alleys of the thirties into the odorous gardens of a recent past transformed and illuminated by disordered memory and imagination…Nor was it for all its glitter a cheerful book. Melancholy suffused all its pages and deepened towards the close. (p.188)

I wonder if Waugh is describing his own magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited, which he wrote in an intense burst of work from December 1943 to June 1944. In his preface to the 1963 edition Waugh himself described Brideshead in similar terms:

It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful.

Ludovic titles his over-written melodrama The Death Wish. To Ian Kilbannock’s surprise, his exhausted superior General Whale one evening confides he is so tired he just wants to die (p.191). Virginia gives birth to her baby son and has a nurse and has people round to see it and it is christened into the Catholic faith, but she can’t bring herself to look at it, refers to it as ‘it’ rather than ‘he’.

Germany commences its operation of sending V1 rockets to land on London. Members of Bellamy’s are not so exuberant as during the Blitz at the start of Officers and Gentlemen. The war is obviously winding down and the best is behind them. Opportunities are closed. Their record is their record. They listen to each night’s series of random explosions glumly. Each night Virginia wonders if the next one she hears will be the one to kill her (p.191). She sends the baby with Angela down to her place in the country for safety.

Virginia’s death

Sure enough a doodlebug kills Virginia, landing on the house in Carlisle Place one morning at 10am, killing Peregrine and the housekeeper, too. Angela sends an air mail latter which Guy opens after the daily plane has touched down with supplies. There is a very moving passage where Guy remembers what happened when Virginia moved in with him after their simple registrar ceremony of remarriage i.e. they went to bed together. Over the next few weeks his knee healed but so did a big hole in his heart.

Without passion or sentiment but in a friendly, cosy way they had resumed the pleasures of marriage and in the weeks while his knee mended the deep old wound in Guy’s heart and pride healed also, as perhaps Virginia had intuitively known that it might do. January had been a month of content; a time of completion, not of initiation. When Guy was passed fit for active service and his move-order was issued, he had felt as though he were leaving a hospital where he had been skilfully treated, a place of grateful memory to which he had no particular wish to return. He did not mention Virginia’s death to Frank then or later. (p.196)

I found this very moving indeed, the complexity of adult, mature, married love, after a lifetime of unhappiness and tribulation. Like many other moments in the trilogy it seems to me to strike exactly the right note of melancholy healing and closure.

Catholic convert Eloise Plessington asks Angela Box-Bender if she can take little baby Gervase off her hands, he is her godson after all. Their conversation is a pretext for speculating that maybe, from a theological point of view, this was the perfect moment for Virginia to be killed, when she was happy and had done a noble deed, a moment of maximum grace.

Some Jews escape

Guy is less moved by Virginia’s death than the fact the UNRRA asked for 2 representatives of his displaced Jews to be sent back on the same flight. the partisans refuse to let the young, best educated couple leave because the husband is the only one who can keep the generator going which (intermittently) keeps the lights on in the little cluster of buildings they all inhabit. So Guy sends two other Jews off to Italy to plead the cause of their colleagues with the authorities.

De Souza

The same flight brings in Frank de Souza who Guy and we have known since the first book when they were new officers in the Halberdiers together. De Souza has been promoted and is now Guy’s superior officer. He puts Guy in the picture. The British have leaned on the Serb government in exile in London, complete with king, to accept a new set of ministers and advisers who are more friendly to the communists and the partisans and deprecate the Jug royalists, the Chetniks. Tito is going to meet Churchill. Basically de Souza is a representative of a government which is going to sell out the Yugoslav nation to the communists.

Guy visits the local priest to arrange a mass to be said for his dead wife. The communist partisans are deeply suspicious, arrest the priest, confiscate the food Guy gave him and de Souza gives him a dressing down. The key thing is not to offend the communist partisans. Guy is disgusted.

This whole sequence leads up to a showcase military operation put on to impress the Americans and persuade them of the British support for the partisans. The communists line up an attack on an isolated guardhouse, not manned by Germans or even by the Croatian fascist Ustaše but by the pretty hopeless Croatian home guard.

It is fitting that this fiasco is witnessed by Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke, now reduced to a shambling wreck of his former self, and by Ian Kilbannock, hyper ambitious to establish himself as a wide-ranging political commentator, along with the Loot, of course, and quite a throng of other military top brass (even someone from the Free French).

The plane crash

The plane Kilbannock, Ritchie-Hooke and his aide, the Loot and his tame British composer, the American general and his staff, a photographer and the Free Frenchman are flying in crashes in a field. It is very vividly described from the point of view of Ian who comes round to find himself lying hear the burning plane. The American general got most of them out. The crew were killed. Guy and staff from the British Mission and partisans arrive to help them onto stretchers and to a nearby sick bay.

The staged attack

The attack on the ‘enemy’ blockhouse, which is really more by way of being a small ancient castle, is, as you might expect, a fiasco. There are meant to be two brigades of partisans. One is on time the other is late, when the second one arrives the first opens fire on it. Precisely at 10am two RAF planes scream out of the blue and fire two missiles, the first pair completely missing the blockhouse, the second hitting the massive stone walls and barely scratching them. News arrives that a German patrol is on its way, at which point Waugh delivers a lovely comic exchange between the American general who’s been flown all this way to observe the indomitable partisans in action and his partisan translator:

‘A German armoured column has been warned and is on its way here.’
‘What do your men do about that?’
‘Before a German armoured column they disperse. That is the secret of our great and many victories.’ (p.221)

The partisans are sneaking away and de Souza announces lunch, when everyone sees an extraordinary spectacle. Revived by his close shave with death the night before, Ben Ritchie-Hooke advances across the bridge towards the solid little castle all alone except for the American photographer who tumbles around him like a dwarf in a medieval court. Ben assumes the partisans will be following his gallant charge but they have disappeared and he is shot down in a hail of Croat bullets. The German patrol which arrives a little later is mystified by this single-handed attack on a fortified position by a British major-general, attended in one account by a small boy, in another by a midget. War as farcical tragedy, tragic farce. Chatting with the General’s aide later, Guy learns he had, for some time, expressed a wish to die in battle. Like so many others, he, too, had a death wish.

The Jews

There’s a funeral service for the dead in the plane then things settle down. The Germans are withdrawing. The American general gives the go-ahead for the partisans to receive many more supplies. These are flown in on a daily basis. There’s little form Guy to do except watch. August turns into September 1944. Guy asks de Souza to send messages about the transport of the hundred Jews to Italy. Messages go back and forth.

At the end of September de Souza leaves. He explains that Tito has gone over to the Russians lock, stock and barrel. Winston had hoped to set up a coalition government in Belgrade comprising different ethnic groups and a political mix i.e. democrats and liberals. Not going to happen now: it’s going to be a Soviet dictatorship.

Things go quiet. The local priest is gone, who knows where, his house requisitioned by communists. Guy is followed everywhere by his translator-minder, who he likes to torment by going for long tramps through the wet countryside. On his 41st birthday, 29 October 1944, Guy receives the thrilling news that four Dakota planes will fly in to evacuate the Jews. The Jews are rounded up and marched to the landing field but a very thick fog prevents their despatch. Twice in the next couple of weeks the planes arrive but cannot land. Guy is obsessed. He prays to God to clear the fogs. God doesn’t listen, Then the first snows fall. There will be no more landings till the spring.

Then news comes of a special air drop of supplies solely for the Jews. But the partisan general in charge of the committee which liaises with the British Mission refuses to accept this and, when the supplies are parachuted in, confiscates them all.

Also in October 1944 Belgrade was liberated by the Soviet Red Army, Yugoslav Partisans, and the Bulgarian Army. With no explanation the Jews are suddenly given the supplies which had been impounded and for a week they appear in public wearing a bizarre array of English clothes and properly fed for the first time in a year. Then they disappear. The creepy young translator to the communist commissar explains that partisans and fighting forces complained that they had no boots or winter coats. The goods have been redistributed and the Jews moved to other accommodation.

A few days later Guy encounters the young Jewish woman who speaks Italian and, the first time he saw them, translated. She explains it was the peasants who complained about the largesse shown to the Jews and the partisans are dependent on the peasants for food. She explains the Jews have been moved to a former Nazi prison camp. Guy is horrified and says he will kick up a fuss when he is flown back to Italy. At which point this Jewess, Mme. Kanyi, delivers the moral of this part of the novel and maybe of the sequence as a whole:

‘There was a time when I thought that all I needed for happiness was to leave. Our people feel that. They must move away from evil. Some hope to find homes in Palestine. Most look no farther than Italy–just to cross the water, like crossing the Red Sea. Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These Communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians–not very many perhaps–who felt this. Were there none in England?’
‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.’ (p.232)

The coast

Guy is ordered to leave Begoy. He drives through ruined villages to the coast at Split. He is ordered to Dubrovnik to liaise between a small British force which had landed under the impression it was among friends only to find itself impounded by the communist partisans.

In mid-February 1945 he is withdrawn along with the British party and finds himself in Bari a year after he arrived. There he learns that the Jews of Begoy were finally liberated when a private American sponsor paid for an expedition of trucks to drive from Italy to collect them, bribing the partisans to release them. When Guy visits them he finds them in yet another camp guarded by soldiers, albeit British. But Mme. Kanyi and her husband are not among them. Through an interpreter Guy learns they were taken off the truck by the partisans of Begoy.

The fellow traveller

Finally he gets some sense from an odious functionary named Gilpin who we first met at the parachute training centre where Guy overheard him whispering to de Souza, linking both to Sir Ralph Brompton and his set of communist agents. Now this self-satisfied lickspittle rattles off a list of typically inaccurate communist accusations – that she was the mistress of the British Liaison Officer (meaning him, Guy), that her husband sabotaged the power plant (when he was the only engineer who could keep it going), that she was caught in possession of counter-revolutionary propaganda (before leaving Guy had given her the Mission’s collection of American glossy magazines). It is a pack of lies which Gilpin goes on to compound when Gilpin goes on to say that Guy himself was almost had up on a disciplinary charge for consorting with her, but one of the other communist officers decided to let him off. He goes on to say that the couple were tried by a Peoples’ Court and ‘You may be sure that justice has been done.’

This is such a travesty of the truth, such an inversion of ‘justice’, such a betrayal of any ideas of a just war and honour, all delivered with an unctuous smile by a vile and vindictive little functionary that Guy clenches his fist to punch him. But what would be the point? It is the final absolute crushing of all Guy’s ideals of honour, charity and justice in this world.

5. Epilogue: Festival of Britain

The Festival if Britain took place in London starting in May 1951. In this novel it is the occasion for a party when Tommy Blackhouse, now a much-decorated general, assembles 15 old comrades for dinner at Bellamy’s. On the same evening Arthur Box-Bender is giving a party for his daughter’s 18th birthday, which is, the narrator emphasises, absolutely nothing like the glittering ‘coming out’ balls held for the young ladies of his generation. Disgusted by the manners and clothes of the younger generation, Box-Bender takes the first opportunity to get away from it and strolls down to St James’s Street and into Bellamy’s just as the raucous Blackhouse party comes tumbling out of its room. Typically quick drunken conversations allow Waugh very beautifully and neatly, as in an old fashioned novel, to tell us the post-war fates of his characters:

Tommy Blackhouse had returned to England in May. He was retiring from the army with many decorations, a new, pretty wife and the rank of major-general.
Ivor Claire had spent six months in Burma with the Chindits, had done well, collected a D.S.O. and an honourably incapacitating wound. He was often in Bellamy’s now. His brief period of disgrace was set aside and almost forgotten.
Trimmer had disappeared. All Tommy’s enquiries failed to find any trace of him. Some said he had jumped ship in South Africa. Nothing was known certainly.
Box-Bender lost his seat in parliament in the great Labour landslide of 1945.
Box-Bender was defeated by Gilpin, the revolting wretch who gloatingly told Guy about the execution of the Kanyis. He is now a Labour MP, not popular in the House but making his mark and had lately become an under-secretary.
Guy has sold the Castello Crouchback. To Ludovic of all people.
Ludovic’s long novel, The Death Wish, which we saw him working on, old nearly a million copies in America and they’ve just filmed it. He’s rich.
Improbably, but in a gesture towards poetic justice, it appears ‘the Loot’, Lieutenant Padfield, has become Ludovic’s fixer and general factotum.
Guy has married Domenica, daughter of Lady Plessington, a family friend and godmother to Gervase (Guy’s son by Virginia). He has taken back the property at Broome and is just about making a go of running the farm. In the end, after all his tribulations, things turn out well for Guy.

Summary

Taken individually all three novels are brilliant, combining comedy, complicated storylines, vivid characters and an extraordinary grasp of the complexities of military and social life during the war. Taken together, the Sword of Honour trilogy is surely one of the greatest achievements of English literature in the twentieth century.

The final sequence of events in which Guy agrees to marry Virginia and thus do the one good, selfless deed he had been seeking to do since the start of the war, in which she is then killed by a V rocket but the baby saved; and his long attempts to do right by the Jews in Croatia; all make for a very moving, sometimes overwhelming cocktail of emotions. It feels deep and rich and true to the complex mix of hopes and hard work and frustration and small victories which life is really like. The trilogy as a whole is an extraordinary achievement.

History of the language

New phrases

It’s a very minor point, but these books contain occasional references to phrases which have just entered the language at the moment he’s describing. Thus book one refers to ‘the already advertised spirit of Dunkirk’. The second half of book two is titled ‘In The Picture’, a phrase Waugh ironically describes thus:

Trimmer remained quiet while he was ‘put in the picture’. It was significant, Ian Kilbannock reflected while he listened to the exposition of GSO II (Planning) that this metaphoric use of ‘picture’ had come into vogue at the time when all the painters of the world had finally abandoned lucidity.

As this snippet suggests, Waugh is old bufferishly critical, disdainful or contemptuous of these new-fangled phrases, using antiseptic speech marks to handle them with. Same happens in this book, when the literary editor Spruce is said to receive ‘fan letters’ (p.42). When he refers to Guy taking the ‘tube railway’ (p.47) he sounds like a ridiculous old fuddy-duddy. Or when Virginia says:

‘I just feel I ought to have what Mr. Troy calls a ‘check-up.'”

He tells us the working class term ‘ducks’ had become prevalent during the Blitz. Here’s Mrs Bristow, Kerstie Kilbannock’s cleaner:

“Just off, ducks,” she said using a form of address that had become prevalent during the blitz.

In fact Waugh gives us more samples of the working class speech of the time than in the previous books:

‘Sorry, sir,’ said the [the Staff Captain’s batman] as he discovered the tousled figure. ‘Didn’t know you was here.’ (p.114)
‘Cor,’ he said, ‘just take a dekko at the little perisher.’ (p.115)

Americanisms

Having had occasional contact with the film world during the 1930s (and having, outside the timeline of the novel, been to Hollywood in 1947) Waugh has picked up plenty of Americanisms which he handles with distaste:

Stirred by the heavy North African wine, de Souza’s imagination rolled into action as though at a “story conference” of jaded script-writers. (p.111)

Other Americanisms are handled with care:

Here was something most unwelcome, put into my hands; something which I believe the Americans describe as ‘beyond the call of duty’; not the normal behaviour of an officer and a gentleman… (p.151)

And American food, creeping in everywhere:

A civilian waiter brought them their pink gins. Guy asked him in Italian for olives. He answered in English almost scornfully: “No olives for senior officers,” and brought American peanuts. (p.157)

It is sweet that he uses phrases like ‘motor bus’ and ‘wireless’. In this respect Waugh is a good example of the futility of thinking that if you use old-fashioned words and are openly contemptuous of new-fangled phrases, you can somehow prevent social change. No-one can prevent social change nor the steady evolution of the language. King Canute on the beach.

The wireless

It is interesting that Waugh detested the earliest signs of muzak. This occasionally crops up in the other novels, where he had shown a fuddy-duddy objection to the ‘wireless’ and, surprisingly for a member of the late 1920s Bright Young Things, an antipathy to jazz. It becomes more noticeable in this novel. Thus the ageing Guy shows a mild resentment of:

The new young officers were conscripts who liked to spend their leisure listening to jazz on the wireless.

And at the parachute training centre the incessant music from the ‘wireless’ infuriates the usually mild-mannered Guy:

‘Can’t you stop this infernal noise?’
‘What noise was that?’
‘The wireless.’
‘Oh, no. I couldn’t do that. It’s laid on special. Piped all through the camp. It isn’t all wireless anyway. Some of it’s records. You’ll soon find you get so you don’t notice it.’

It is characteristic of Waugh that he associates enjoyment of ‘wireless’ programmes to the uneducated lower classes, for example, Kerstie Kilbannock’s cleaner:

Kerstie did not sleep long, but when she came downstairs at noon, she found that the lure of Bellamy’s had proved stronger than Ian’s caution and that the house was empty save for Mrs. Bristow, who was crowning her morning’s labour with a cup of tea and a performance on the wireless of “Music While You Work.” (p.90)

Ian and Kerstie Kilbannock returned to London from Scotland on the night of Childermas. He went straight to his office, she home, where Mrs. Bristow was smoking a cigarette and listening to the wireless. (p.148)

Credit

Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1961. All references are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on January 7, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Literature, Novel, Second World War

Tagged Alun Lewis, Ambrose Silk, Angela Box-Bender, antisemitism, Apthorpe, Begoy, Belgrade, Bellamy’s, Ben Ritchie-Hooke, Bourne Mansions, Brideshead Revisited, Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke, Carlisle Place, Chetniks, Cheyne Walk, comedy, Crete, Croatia, Crouchback, Cyril Connolly, D-Day, de Souza, Death Wish, Dr Glendening-Rees, Electronic Personnel Selector, Eloise Plessington, Evelyn Waugh, Everard Spruce, Festival of Britain, Frank de Souza, General Whale, Gilpin, Hazardous Offensive Operations Headquarters, HOO HQ, Ian Kilbannock, Italy, Ivor Claire, Jews, Joe Cattermole, Jumbo Trotter, Kerstie Kilbannock, Lady Plessington, Lieutenant Padfield, Ludovic, Marshall Tito, Matchet, Men at Arms, Mme. Kanyi, Mr. Oates, Mrs Bristow, Music While You Work, novel, Operation Overlord, partisans, Politics, Red Army, Royal Corps of Halberdiers, Royal Victorian Institute, Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, satire, Second World War, Sir Ralph Brompton, Sir Roger of Waybroke, social history, Soviet Russia, Sword of Honour trilogy, sword of Stalingrad, Tehran Conference, the Loot, Tito, Tommy Blackhouse, Trimmer, Uncle Peregrine, Unconditional Surrender, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, UNRRA, Ustaše, Virginia Troy, Westminster Cathedral, Yugoslavia

Posted by Simon on January 7, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/07/unconditional-surrender-evelyn-waugh/

Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh (1955)

Tommy Blackhouse declared: ‘It’s going to be a long war. The great thing is to spend it among friends.’
(Officers and Gentlemen, page 47)

Officers and Gentleman is the second novel in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. As its predecessor, Men at Arms was divided into three parts with a prologue and epilogue, so Officers and Gentlemen is divided into two halves, ‘Happy Warriors’ (London and Scotland) and ‘In The Picture’ (Egypt and Crete), with a small interlude and an epilogue.

Like Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen is entirely about the army and the adventures in it of the trilogy’s dour, self-conscious, 35-year-old, divorced, Catholic ‘hero’, Guy Crouchback – and yet the majority of the book features no fighting. Instead, like its predecessor, it is overwhelmingly about the absurdities of army bureaucracy, politicking and infighting, with a fair admixture describing the absurdities of civilian life during war.

Indeed, the larger presence of scenes of civilian life, in the form of the social circle of Guy’s former wife, Virginia, in London, and of the legendary Mrs Julia Stitch in Alexandria (when the action moves, in the second half, to Egypt)shifts the style and feel of the book noticeably back towards the more obviously silly social satire of Waugh’s 1930s comedies.

Book One – Happy Warriors

The previous novel ended with Guy aboard a flying boat carrying him back from Sierra Leone to England. Officers and Gentlemen opens on the evening of the same day. Guy arrives in the afternoon and makes his way straight to London in time for a big air raid during the Blitz. The novel opens with Guy standing on the steps of his London club, Bellamy’s, admiring the night sky over London lit up by German bombers, explosions, searchlights and anti-aircraft flak, quite a show of fireworks.

Stiff upper lip

Part of the humour derives from the stiff upper lip detachment of most of the characters and the narrator. This sense of ironic detachment is apparent from the opening scene. For many Londoners the Blitz was a time of terror and tragedy. Waugh completely transmutes it into a festival of fun. It’s there in individual sentences:

Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.

In sardonic satire:

On the pavement opposite Turtle’s a group of progressive novelists in firemen’s uniform were squirting a little jet of water into the morning-room.

Or in the extended comic tone of the opening scene when members of Bellamys watch the rival club, Turtles, down the road, burning merrily, and then confront a bedlam of rumours that wine and brandy are flowing in the gutters, the comic spectacle of the night porter, Job, having drink far too much and attempting to keep a straight face and voice, and the farcical spectacle of Ian Kilbannock’s superior officer, an Air Vice Marshall in the RAF, hiding from German bombs under the club billiard table.

At the end of the Evelyn Waugh Wikipedia article, his lifelong friend Nancy Mitford is quoted as saying: ‘What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything.’

Apthorpe’s last request

A central figure of Men at Arms was the often absurd figure of Apthorpe. In hospital and knowing he was dying, Apthorpe made Guy promise to carry out his dying wish and take his legendary collection of kit and equipment to a chap called ‘Chatty’ Corner (real name, James Pendennis). Apthorpe had brought this chap to a drunken dinner given by the regiment he and Guy are both members of, the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Waugh expresses it with characteristic levity:

A spirit was to be placated. Apthorpe’s gear must be retrieved and delivered before Guy was free to follow his fortunes in the King’s service. His road lay backward for the next few days, to Southsand and Cornwall. ‘Chatty’ Corner, man of the trees, must be found, somewhere in the trackless forests of wartime England.

This is the rather slender pretext for the first half of the book which is Guy’s quest to track down this ‘Chatty’ fellow and hand over Apthorpe’s huge pile of clobber.

Recurring characters

In the first novel there was quite an array of characters, who kept changing with the changing configuration of Guy’s regiment. In this novel the focus is a bit more on civilian life and so it feels like there’s a smaller number of characters who keep recurring up. These include:

Ian Kilbannock – early in the war wangled himself a job in the RAF and, during the course of this book, gets himself a cosy niche as information officer
Tommy Blackhouse – the man Guy’s wife, Virginia, left him for, but they’ve both gotten over this, Tommy is a member of Guy’s club, Bellamy’s, so they keep bumping into each other and the central event of part one is when Guy finds himself seconded to the commando group Tommy is commanding in Scotland
Virginia aka Mrs Troy, shallow-minded socialite ex-wife of Guy’s (‘It was the present moment and the next five minutes which counted with Virginia’, p.78)
Arthur Box-Bender – Conservative MP married to Guy’s sister, Angela, successful if often obtuse older man in his 50s
Miss Vavasour – the concerned old lady who resides in the same hotel as Guy’s father in the seaside resort of Matchet (his daughter, Angela, has dropped hints that she might be in love with him)

Guy spends that night in a hotel then next day Guy takes a train from Charing Cross and reports at the Royal Halberdier barracks. No one is expecting him or knows what to do with him. Guy explains his quest to find Chatty Corner to the Adjutant who promptly gives him some leave, so Guy turns right round, gets a taxi to the station and back to London.

Guy’s father and the Cuthberts

There is a prolonged storyline concerning Guy’s father. Years ago he had been forced to quit the old family home at Broome, let it to a convent, and settled as a long-term resident in a hotel in the coast town of Matchet. The storyline concerns the narrow-minded, uncharitable and profiteering attempts of the owners of the hotel, the Cuthberts, to eject Mr Crouchback from his room and make a lot more money charging it out by the week at the new higher wartime rates.

The general purpose of this recurring storyline is to emphasise what a jolly decent old buffer Guy’s father is (‘He was a man of regular habit and settled opinion. Doubt was a stranger to him.’) and what a thoroughly mean-spirited and greedy lot the horrid working class Cuthberts are.

His daughter, Guy’s sister, Angela, has three daughters by her husband, Box-Bender. All three have been evacuated to the safety of New England. From there they have sent a package containing American products which Mr Crouchback can’t make head or tail of.

He receives a letter from Angela enclosing a message they’ve had from Tony, her only son, who surrendered along with his regiment at Dunkirk and is now in a German prisoner of war camp.

Meanwhile wheels are moving. The Prime Minister, no less, orders that Brigadier Ritchie-Hook be rehabilitated. Along the complex hierarchy of bureaucracy this urge to find something for him to do spins off to affect Guy. Orders are drawn up for him to attend HOO HQ. These are top secret and must be delivered by hand. Who is there to deliver them? Well, old ‘Jumbo’ Trotter, a superannuated retired Colonel who returned to the barracks as soon as war broke out and has been hanging round under-employed ever since. He’s only too happy to be given something to do, namely sit in a car driven by an army driver all the way to the Marine Hotel Matchet where Guy is known to be taking his leave.

And thus Jumbo Trotter enters the lives of not only Guy but his father. For when he arrives in Matchet it rather inevitably turns out that he knows Mrs Tickeridge, wife of the colonel who resides at the hotel along with Guy’s father and was, in fact the man who wangled him a post in the Halberdiers.

The arrival of Jumbo overlaps with the storyline about the Cuthberts wanting to oust Mr Crouchback from the hotel because they have progressed as far as getting a Quartering Commandant, a Major Grigshawe, to force him to leave so his rooms can be taken by more ‘important’ (and higher paying) guests. But Jumbo knows this man Grigshawe, spots him in the bar, calls his name, Grigshawe jumps to attention, and Jumbo has a few words with him which result in Mr Crouchback’s future at the hotel being assured. All without Mr Crouchback knowing it even happened. Why? Because as soon as Mrs Tickeridge introduces Jumbo to Guy’s father, Jumbo recognises him as ‘a good type’; not only the father of a Halberdier but a man fit to be a Halberdier himself. Contacts.

Anyway, you can see why describing this as a ‘war novel’ would be very misleading. For long stretches it’s more of a comic novel about civilian life during wartime.

Guy’s quest

Meanwhile Guy’s quest takes him to some of the barracks the Halberdiers were posted to in the first book. At Brook Park he collects a stash Apthorpe had left, before moving on to Southsand where the Commodore of the Yacht Club is only too glad to be relieved of three taxis’ worth of clutter Apthorpe had left there. And here Guy finds himself becalmed because military orders had it that no soldier should carry more than a haversack. He had assembled all Apthorpe’s gear alright, but isn’t allowed to move it. All Souls Day, 2 November 1940, comes and goes and, ‘ever prone to despond’, Guy broods.

Finally Jumbo Trotter arrives, having tracked him down, and delivers his secret message ‘by hand’. It is instructions to report to HOO HQ at Marchmain House, London. Now this is a tiny but significant detail because readers of Brideshead Revisited will remember that the family title was Marchmain, that their London house was called Marchmain House, and that old Lord Marchmain had been obliged to sell the house to developers who knocked it down and built a block of modern flats. Well, this is the same place, the top floors having been commandeered by Hazardous Offensive Operations (HOO) Headquarters. It’s not only an example of the way all of Waugh’s fictional oeuvre inhabits the same ‘universe’ with multiple cross-references and recurring characters, but also an indication of the way Officers and Gentlemen is a bit more tied into his pre-war comedies than Men at Arms.

Anyway, here occurs one of the many comic misunderstandings which litter Waugh’s stories. Guy tells him that the secret message instructed him to report to London, but he has a devil of a lot of kit. He takes Jumbo to see the kit and Jumbo is suitably impressed:

Together they visited the baggage store and stood in silence before the heap of steel trunks, leather cases, brass-bound chests, shapeless canvas sacks, buffalo-hide bags. Jumbo was visibly awed. He himself believed in ample provision for the emergencies of travel. Here was something quite beyond his ambition. (p.42)

Because Guy doesn’t explain about Apthorpe, Jumbo thinks all this kit is part of a top secret mission Guy is on. Therefore he pulls strings and secures the services of a five ton truck and driver and next morning all this kit is loaded into it and they are driven to London.

When Guy finally reports to a functionary of HOO HQ in Marchmain House, he is told he is being sent on temporary attachment for training purposes to X Commando on the (fictional) Scottish Isle of Mugg, where he will report to Colonel Tommy Blackhouse who, by huge coincidence, the reader will remember, is the man who took Guy’s wife away from him.

When he hears the news Jumbo is thrilled and offers to come with him, extending the use of the three-ton lorry and RASC driver has found him. So they head north.

The Isle of Mugg

After several overnight stops, they arrive at Inverness, where the ferry for Mugg departs. Jumbo volunteers to stay on the mainland with the lorry and Apthorpe’s gear, while Guy takes the ferry to the island.

Once on the little island, Guy makes his way to the only hotel where he’s told the commando is posted. Here he finds Ivor Claire, the famous international horserider (who won medals with his mount, Thimble). After chat with him, Trimmer enters. We know him from the first book, where he was an unpopular officer. Here again he is much disliked, but is masquerading as a Scotsman and (indicative of his slipperiness) is calling himself McTavish. Trimmer is not actually as part of the commando, his regiment were sent to Iceland but he’d sprained a wrist and stayed on here.

Trimmer tells him it’s a small world because a chap’s there who was at the Halberdiers’ guest night the night Guy sprained his knee and, by a massive and implausible coincidence, Chatty Corner is there. Up here his nickname is Kong, short for King Kong. Trimmer offers to take Guy across to his digs, which turn out to be the ‘Old Castle’ a walk away through freezing night along a sheet ice path. And indeed James Pendennis Corner is inside, nursing a heavy cold, wrapped in blankets, with his feet in a mustard bath. He explains he was an old Africa expert, that’s he got to know Apthorpe, and came back as soon as war broke out and began to give Africa training but after Dunkirk somehow the army got it into its head that he knew about mountaineering so they sent him here to teach it. He’s a big hairy man who likes climbing up things, and that’s the reason for the nickname King Kong.

With delight in his heart, Guy gets Corner/Kong to sign a document officially taking ownership of Apthorpe’s stuff. His legal and moral debt is paid. It is, in the chronology of the novels, 7 December 1940.

Back at the hotel Tommy invites Guy to dinner with the old laird, Mugg, who lives in the new castle. It is a spectacular comic passage as they make their way through to the snow and ice to the impressive pile, where the door is opened to the deafening sound of bagpipes. The laird is obsessed with dynamite, he thinks the way to transform the island’s economy is to blast away the tons of rock covering what was once a lovely sandy beach pipes at dinner (later the laird takes Guy on tour of the island and explains it was he who dynamited the old stables and caused the rockfall which has buried the beach). Over the very tough and indigestible venison, he is introduced to the laird’s great-niece Katie Carmichael who is an ardent Scottish nationalist and so a vehement supporter of Hitler.

Next day Tommy finds the letter sending Guy to Mugg but sadly says he isn’t to become one of them, he is assigned to Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook, once he’s better. Meanwhile what Tommy really needs is an old hand who knows his way round the system. Guy describes Jumbo, and Tommy leaps at the opportunity of nabbing him for his commando, and dispatches Guy back to the mainland to fetch him.

Trimmer gets leave and goes to Glasgow. Waugh doesn’t like Trimmer. Here he is among the crowds at the station hotel:

He passed on with all the panache of a mongrel among the dustbins, tail waving, ears cocked, nose a-quiver. (p.73)

In an upmarket place, the Restaurant de Madrid, with another tremendous coincidence, Trimmer bumps into Virginia, Mrs Troy, Guy’s ex-wife. At one point in his career slippery Trimmer was the hairdresser on an ocean liner, the Aquitania, going under the name of Gustave, and used to regularly do her hair and give her a massage. They get talking and Virginia is perfectly prepared to leave behind the crowded, sordid world of the current war in memories of happier times aboard luxury cruise liners. They have dinner then go back to her hotel room.

Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole

There is a comic running thread, which kicked off in the first book and runs through this one, about a top secret intelligence unit based in London, led by this Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole, which gathers intelligence from all over. It gained stray information about Guy and Apthorpe to open a file on him, completely misinterpreting the various events that happen to him, and interpreting them in a sinister light as if Guy is involved in some kind of sinister conspiracy.

In a way it is a distillation or exaggeration of the misinterpreting, distancing effect of gossip which I have identified as a key element in Waugh’s fiction. It is also a satire on the conspiracy theory mindset:

Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end; and there would be no more war. (p.79)

After four days of sensual bliss, Trimmer runs into the commanding officer he thought was far away in Iceland in the hotel bar. The man is incredulous and inclined to be angry, Trimmer makes up a cock and bull story about having been co-opted into the commando, manages to get away, and tells a not very surprised Virginia that he has to leave straightaway. He hastily writes a letter to Tommy actually requesting to join the commando. Jumbo and Guy see this, and advise against it.

The commando begin training in earnest for a landing on a Mediterranean island. Claire cheats in a night-time exercise to travel to a spot 12 miles distant, by commandeering a civilian bus and getting there before any other squad. This irks all the other officers involved in the exercise and, in his isolation, pushes Claire towards deeper friendship with Guy. They both feel like outsiders.

Trimmer returns and Tommy finds a place for him with a group loosely called ‘Specialists’. The head of this, Major Graves, says Trimmer can have charge of his sappers. A few days later Guy calls in on the laird and realises he’s been chatting to Trimmer. Thinks him an awful fake but he is in charge of the sappers and so has access to the laird’s obsession, explosives, so they are becoming matey. The laird takes him out to the cliffs to show him the spot where he dynamited the old cliffs onto the beach.

Guy has a surreal encounter with a tall, wild hatless man on the beach who turns out to be an expert in dietetics, Dr Glendening-Rees, a forager avant la lettre who’s been sent there by HOO HQ and is going to recommend to the troop that they abandon their usual diet and try to survive on limpets, seaweed and heather roots. It is decided that Trimmer and his little troop of sappers will be the victims of this experiment so they are dispatched into the wilds under the direction of Dr Glendening-Rees.

Improbably, surreally, a luxury yacht appears off the island, the Cleopatra. It used to belong to the famed socialite Mrs Julia Stitch (who played a pivotal role in the earlier novel, Scoop), but she is nowhere in sight. Instead it has been commandeered by a troop of top brass, consisting of Tommy Blackhouse, an admiral, General Whale, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. Even Ian Kilbannock is included. He comes ashore, Guy takes him for lunch and he explains he finally escaped his dreaded Air Marshall and has got a new job as press liaison.

Navy ships arrive. For several days there is speculation. Tommy is told they are embarking on a ship-borne exercise and makes detailed plans. But this is a decoy. Once all the men from the various troops of the commando are aboard ship it is announced there will be no exercise. Instead they are sailing for real combat. They are to be collectively titled ‘Hookforce’.

Before embarking Tommy had an uncomfortable interview with Jumbo where he told him he wouldn’t be wanted. Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke had specifically said no, too old. Instead he is to report to HOO HQ in London. Ritchie-Hooke has personal command over Guy who has been given a role as Intelligence Officer.

The ships sail before trimmer and his little squad of sappers stagger back into Mugg town, haggard and unshaven after their seven-day experiment living wild in heather.

Interlude in South Africa

February 1941. Nine weeks after embarking, the three ships carrying the commando battalions have docked at Cape Town which, with its blazing lights at night and shops full of nice products is the opposite of blackout rationed Britain. It’s nine weeks since they left Mugg but four of them were spent ashore on Scapa Flow while Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke put them through training, up ‘biffing’ the surrounding hills day and night. The ships are taking the long way round Africa to the Suez Canal and the Middle East.

Guy has become even more friendly and confidential with Ivor Claire. They have a leisurely conversation in the hotel bar, then wandering round the streets, then back at the hotel, and then in the garden under the southern stars, which is actually a stylish way for Waugh to drop in the backstory of what happened in the intervening weeks.

Colonel Tommy turns up with the bad news that Ritchie-Hooke and the Brigade Major took off by plane from Brazzaville and haven’t been heard of since, presumed crashed, presumed dead.

A couple of fellow officers, Eddie and Bertie, spent the afternoon getting drunk, then trying to sober up again in order to take out a couple of young ladies, then they turn up back on the ship at the end of the evening, walking round the deck trying to sober up while, paradoxically, swigging from a bottle of powerful local liquor they’ve bought because it was named ‘Kommando’.

Book Two: In the Picture

Waugh shows how at a meeting of the top brass in Easter 1941, several further incidents involving the commandos (referred to as Special Service Forces) were reviewed, all of them unfortunate, such as the way that a) they lost their brigadier, Ritchie-Hooke b) when they arrived at the Suez Canal it was closed and c) when the canal was cleared their ships were commandeered to ferry Australian troops to Greece.

Major-General Whale, Director of Land Forces and nicknamed ‘Sprat’, defends his boys and manages to avoid getting them broken up. But he returns to his office aware they need to achieve a success of some kind, preferably one which can be promoted by the Ministry of Information in the press. He calls together his senior planners and asks them to recommend something which can achieve a quick win. Someone digs up ‘Operation Popgun’, a small assault on an unmanned island near Jersey.

Sprat approves it and tells Ian Kilbannock (who is now his chief information officer) it will be led by this MacTavish chap (who we also know as Trimmer) who’s in charge of the sappers unit (we saw how casual his appointment was back on Mugg.

Then the narrative cuts back to our hero, Guy, as he wakes in the commando’s temporary base in Sidi Bishr, then in the desert just outside the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Guy is still Intelligence Officer, Tommy Blackhouse is Deputy Commander with the acting rank of full colonel, and a new character is introduced, a small, bald, youngish man named Hound who is the Brigade Major. Major Hound does not like the irregular setup and behaviour of the commandos:

They had no transport, they had no cooks, they had far too many officers and sergeants, they wore a variety of uniforms and followed a multitude of conflicting regimental customs, they bore strange arms, daggers and toggle-ropes and tommy-guns.

Reading this little sequence about official disapproval of the commandos suddenly made me realise why Waugh was drawn to make them central to his big war trilogy – because they are unconventional, because there’s more scope for mischief, anarchy and comedy.

After some business establishing the fractious relations between Guy, Hound (who disapproves of the entire commando), Major Graves (who thinks he ought to be in command of X commando) and a new member of the commando, pale-eyed, journal-keeping Corporal-Major Ludovic, Tommy sends Guy into Alexandria to check up on Ivor Claire who managed to trip over a tent rope and twist his knee and chosen to instal himself in a private nursing home.

En route he drops into a Catholic church to make confession to a French priest who seems to ask rather too many questions about Guy’s brigade. Guy thinks he’s a spy and tries to track him down to the local clergy-house but gets no joy from the Arab doorman.

When he visits Ivor in his private hospital the latter informs him that the egregious Mrs Julia Stitch is in town, a one-woman dynamo of high socialising and bravado behaviour. She once visited the Castello Crouchback on her yacht with some very posh friends. Now, nearly 10 years later, she remembers it perfectly. She remembers everything perfectly. She is a comic prodigy.

Kissing Claire goodbye, she dragoons Guy into her car and for a mad drive across Alexandria, stopping at random moments and blocking all the traffic in order to point out to Guy ancient sites mentioned in the rare copy of E.M. Foster’s guide to Alexandria which she is reading. (Readers of Scoop will remember that, in that book, she drives a kind of baby motor car which she manages to drive into a downstairs men’s public lavatory.) Here she upsets all the local drivers and, in quest of a shoe shop she’s been told about, drives down an alleyway which becomes too narrow her car becomes wedged fast in it.

She obtains the shoes, or rather carpet slippers, she wants then forces Guy to hurry to catch a taxi back to the villa she and her husband have been assigned a little outside of town. It is a typical Stitch luncheon party, featuring a the Commander-in-Chief, a young Maharaja in the uniform of the Red Cross, a roving English cabinet minister, and an urbane pasha, and two little local millionairesses, sisters, who hang on Mrs Julia Stitch’s every word, comically misinterpreting them. They think Guy must be her lover, only reason such a lowly undistinguished officer could be there.

This leads to the comic incident whereby, when lunch is over, the Commander-in-Chief (presumably of the entire army in North Africa) offers Guy a lift back to his base and even directs his driver to go right into the base and drop him at his barracks – to the initial disbelief of captious Major Hound.

It is Holy Saturday, 12 April 1941. We know this because there is a brief description of Guy’s father, venerable old Mr Crouchback, breaking his lenten fast with lunch, a pint of burgundy and a luxurious pipe.

Kerstie Kilbannock

The scene suddenly cuts back to London, to describe the life of Kerstie Kilbannock, dutiful wife of Ian Kilbannock who we’ve met as information officer to Special Service Forces. Kerstie has taken two friends named Brenda and Zita into her house in (very smart) Eaton Terrace as paying guests, and to work alongside her, unpaid, in the canteen at No. 6 Transit Camp, London District. When she meets Virginia Troy at the Dorchester Hotel during an air raid, visibly hard up, she invites her to come and join the female menage.

Kerstie tells Virginia about a regular customer, a quite frightfully awful man they’ve nicknamed ‘Scottie’ and the reader is not altogether surprised when, a week or so later, this ‘Scottie’ saunters into the busy canteen at No. 6 Transit Camp, London District and turns out to be none other than Trimmer. He is momentarily taken aback, but nothing daunts Virginia and she says hello. She is obviously going to keep silent about their four days of passion in a Glasgow hotel in November, but that’s no reason not to be civil.

Trimmer is back in the frame because he is called in by General Whale and told he is to carry out a little operation, which will involve a journey by submarine. He is to take his squad and report to Portsmouth. Ian Kilbannock will be, as we’ve seen, accompanying him. Trimmer is taken as the epitome of a bad officer since he has mislaid his ‘section’, never calls them together, never inspects them, is only really semi-attached to the army at all.

In yet another coincidence, Kilbannock says he’ll need to prepare a bit of a profile for the press about Trimmer and asks him to pop into his place for a drink before going onto Portsmouth and, of course, when Trimmer thus pops in, it is to discover Kerstie and Virginia. There is a passage of social comedy, not least the way Ian Kilbannock realises from Trimmer, Kerstie and Virginia’s conversation that something is going on but can’t work out what.

Back in Egypt the small incident of the priest Guy thought was asking too many questions comes back to haunt him. Tommy calls him in to say the priest has definitely been identified as a spy and he has been reported talking to him. Guy says yes, he thought he was a spy, and he reported it to Major Hound. Major Hound who had, until that moment been quietly gloating in a corner of the room is now put on the spot and has to admit to Tommy that, yes, Guy did mention something about it. Tommy tells Hound to write a formal letter to HQ exonerating Guy. Eventually a copy of this letter finds its way to Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole who adds it to his ever-expanding file on Guy Crouchback.

Operation Popgun

Trimmer and his little squad of eight men is kept hanging around at Portsmouth for weeks. Finally they are sent aboard a submarine, along with Ian Kilbannock and a lot of explosives. His description of a journey by submarine is interesting. Basically, boring with no sense of movement. After quite a few hours they surface at night but can’t find the island which is the objective. It is very foggy. An atmosphere of farcical amateurishness. Ian has had quite a few whiskeys to fortify himself i.e. is tipsy during this military operation.

‘I don’t like this at all,’ said Trimmer. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
‘You’re in command, old boy. In your place I’d just push on.’
‘Would you?’
‘Certainly.’
‘But you’re drunk.’
‘Exactly. If I was in your place I’d be drunk too.’

They are fired on from her window by an old lady with a shotgun who swears at them in French. Turns out they are not on a little Channel island at all but have landed on mainland France. They run and tumble down a slope into a railway cutting. A slow train passes as they hide. It takes them 25 minutes to make it back to the beach. Trimmer is revealed as a catastrophically bad officer, with no idea what to do, lets the soldiers smoke once they’re ashore, runs away at the first shot etc. What Jumbo Trotter would call a ‘wrong ‘un’.

In his absence his sergeant led the men a little way inland and blew up the railway line then calmly returned to the beach where Trimmer was waiting impatiently, and embarked in the dinghies back to the submarine. The submarine signals ahead that the mission was a great success, and on arriving in Portsmouth McTavish / Trimmer and his men are hailed as heroes by Major Albright, GSO II (Planning), HOO HQ, and the General tells Ian to a) write it up and b) write citations for medals for the sergeant and Trimmer. Farce. Absurdity.

This is then wonderfully embellished by Kilbannock in the press release he gives to the papers (shades of Scoop and its satire on the fabulous lies routinely told by newspapers, shades crystallised when one of the characters mentions the Daily Beast and its proprietor Lord Copper). Then, in a sweet piece of plotting, is read by none other than Mr Crouchback in distant Matchet, who tells his friend Mrs Tickeridge what a fine fellow this Captain McTavish must be. Then it is relayed to the commando in Egypt where the colonel who suggested McTavish be included swanks himself on his ability to spot men and ridicules Guy’s scepticism about Trimmer’s abilities.

In fact the Trimmer affair becomes a stick to beat all Waugh’s enemies with. Head of the commando emphasises that news of the operation must be passed to the Spanish veterans who’ve been assigned to the unit. And the Labour members in the House of Commons get wind of the fact that Trimmer was rejected from the Halberdiers because of his working class background as a hairdresser i.e. snobbery and the old school tie.

He becomes so popular that a very senior meeting is convened to find him an appropriate post and General Whale is appalled to find himself being ordered to give him a senior command, maybe of an entire commando battalion. Ian Kilbannock helps his boss out with a wizard wheeze: Trimmer has a certain confident breezy style: how about sending him to America to promote Anglo-American friendship.

In Waugh’s hands the war is a kind of Engine of Absurdity; it takes ordinary peacetime absurdity and cranks it up to completely new levels.

The fall of Crete

Out in the real world Greece quickly falls to a well planned and executed German invasion 6 to 30 April 1941. 7,000 British and Australian troops are captured. There’s a panic-stricken evacuation of the rest. Guy’s commando is put in charge of defending Alexandria as the war in North Africa turns in the Germans’ favour.

Quite suddenly X commando are told they are to be embarked and sail to the relief of Crete which the Germans, following the total capture of Greece, are now attacking. The complicated business of embarking the entire commando and setting sail, but next morning Guy wakes to find they’re sailing back to Egypt, the ship’s engines have become faulty. Tommy and Guy go for a splendid meal.

Next morning, rather hungover, they embark on a new ship and steam in a heavy swell to the waters round Crete. Here Colonel Tommy slips off a ladder and breaks his leg. Guy finds a haggard senior officer, a Lieutenant-Commander from Crete, in conversation with the captain, saying it’s all a shambles. A motor launch comes alongside their ship, they think it’s for them to embark in but in fact it’s full of walking wounded who painfully come aboard, overfilling the ship. Its skipper says he has another run to make then has orders to scuttle the launch. He tells Guy it’s all over: Crete has fallen.

Nonetheless X commando’s orders are to embark so they climb down and in and are ferried to the wrecked quay which is packed with wounded men clamouring to get on the boat and away. Hound and Guy shout for any representatives of B commando and a battered weary man replies who tells them its commanding officer Prentice is dead, killed during an attack on an airfield. It is 26 May 1941.

The disintegration of Major Hound

In Tommy Blackhouse’s absence Major Hound is in charge of X commando and the core of this long complex account of the collapse and evacuation of Crete is a painful description of the mental and moral collapse of Major Hound. Very early on he tries to cultivate a friendship with Guy by asking if he can address him by his first name (fine) and telling guy his own nickname is Fido. From that first misplaced confidence, it is steadily downhill (p.175).

Under the stress of the chaos and confusion, and huge columns of men marching to the sea, and the constant attacks of Stuka dive bombers, the lack of sleep and, very quickly, the hunger and the thirst, all Major Hound’s book training goes out of the window, he makes foolish decisions, he makes wild decisions, stabbing randomly at a map to indicate where they’ll set up their HQ, then hunger drives him to muck in with the ordinary soldiers and lose all authority.

And then he abandons his post, abandons his men, and begins a wild hallucinatory march to the sea and escape. At one point he slips off a path and falls through the branches of a tree into a deep gully, and I expected him to die. He is thoroughly looted by a huge Cretan peasant and then, to my surprise, is discovered by Corporal-Major Ludovic.

Ludovic has already impressed everyone he meets as an odd fish, a sense confirmed by the philosophical journal he keeps and which Waugh quotes for the reader. When Major Hound insists on driving his men in a lorry up to a location he has almost arbitrarily chosen will be the commando’s HQ, Ludovic begins to display his skills at scrounging and at talking to the common soldiers in their own ‘plebeian’ tongue, or to Australian or New Zealand troops, as easily as talking posh to the officers.

Anyway, Ludovic discovers Major Hound lying bruised in this valley and helps him back to what turns out to be a very cosy cave Ludovic and half the rest of the Major’s troop have assembled up the hill. Seeing which way the land lay, they set about looting and scrounging within a day of arriving and have built up an impressive supply of food. His ulterior motivation emerges when Ludovic frankly tells him that they’ve tried to get aboard one of the launches evacuating men, but there are thousands waiting on the quays and the guards are only letting through troops of men accompanied by an officer. Aha.

Guy among the Halberdiers on Crete

Meanwhile Guy very much does not go to pieces. After Major Hound disappears, Guy makes his own way back towards the sea in the three-ton lorry they’d set out in, having a series of chaotic encounters, for example picking up a venerable old Greek general and giving him and his ADC a lift, running into a German motor cyclist, both sides eyeballing each for a moment before turning round and retreating. He stumbles into an abandoned Greek village and finds two brown-eyed girls guarding the body of a dead soldier. Guy notices he is a Catholic and say a prayer over his body. In some ways he likes travelling alone and travelling light.

But eventually he finds himself at the headquarters of his old regiment, the Halberdiers. Just to be clear, Guy was a proud member of the Halberdiers until he blotted his copybook at the end of Men at Arms, and was then seconded to the commandos, X commando in particular, the one led by Tommy Blackhouse up in the Isle of Mugg. The overall title given the commandos is ‘Hookforce’, even after it becomes known that Ritchie-Hooke has gone missing presumed dead in Africa.

So Guy is delighted to be suddenly among friends again when he discovers the Halberdiers HQ at a place called Babali Hani, men like Colonel Tickeridge and number of the men, including some from his own D company. But when he asks to take part in a forward movement against the enemy he is turned down. He is not part of the regiment any more and the middle of a battle is no place to start swapping units. And he feels the familiar Guy Crouchback of being an outsider, an alien, with no family, that has dogged him all his life:

A few hours earlier he had exulted in his loneliness. Now the case was altered. He was a ‘guest from the higher formation’, a ‘Hookforce body’, without place or function, a spectator. And all the deep sense of desolation which he had sought to cure, which from time to time momentarily seemed to be cured, overwhelmed him as of old. His heart sank. It seemed to him as though literally an organ of his body were displaced, subsiding, falling heavily like a feather in a vacuum jar; Philoctetes set apart from his fellows by an old festering wound; Philoctetes without his bow. (p.210)

At least Tickeridge allows him to accompany him in a visit to the front line, Halberdier units spread across a shallow valley, coming under mortar fire from the Germans opposite. Guy observes the Halberdiers withdraw their line a little. The plan is for the Halberdiers to withdraw through Hookforce who will provide a last line of defence. Guy returns to his own troop to begin to organise them. The absence of Major Hound is not mentioned as he briefs reliable Sergeant Smiley.

Trimmer the PR phenomenon

Cut to London. Ian Kilbannock is touting Trimmer the war hero round the press, and has a date to meet three hard-bitten American journalists at the Savoy. Trimmer has become infatuated with Virginia who says he disgusts her. This is the opportunity for some pretty crude satire of American journalists, who Waugh has named Scab Dunz, Bum Schlum, and Joe Mulligan and who Ian is trying to persuade that Trimmer is the heroic face of a new classless Britain. The ramshackle journalists get drunk and sentimental, a crude caricature of belligerent, ignorant Yanks.

But Trimmer is genuinely haunted by his four days of love with Virginia in Glasgow. He can’t concentrate and Ian is worried because Trimmer is about the only good news propaganda coup he and his department have had all year. All this he explains to Virginia when he gets back to his HOO HQ office in Marchmain House for he has got her a job working as his secretary. She did it precisely to get away from the bloody canteen and avoid Trimmer, but now Ian tells her she has to do her patriotic duty and see him, cheer him up, gee him up to perform better in his visits to munitions factories and so on. the war effort depends on it!

Guy at Sphakia

It is 31 May 1941. Guy has kept in touch with moving HQ and followed orders to march his men down to this hill overlooking the sea. Their task is to hold up the enemy while the last stragglers leave the beach and then surrender.

He has a last chat with Ivor Claire, both speculating what it will be like in a prisoner of war camp, then he falls exhausted, like everyone else, shattered.

Dawn finds Guy in the wrecked harbour with thousands of other abandoned and exhausted soldiers, foraging for food and water, smashing their weapons and any other smashable equipment so the Germans don’t get it, the enormous litter of war.

After gazing at the twinkling Med for a while he decides on a whim to go for a swim, luxuriating in the clear water of a cove round the corner from the filthy harbour, floating on his back looking up at the cloudless blue sky. Beautiful evocative description. Eventually he swims over to a spur of rock sheltering the cove and is just pulling himself out onto a rocky shelf when to his amazement a hand is stretched out to help him and it is…Corporal-Major Ludovic.

Up and out he gets and they talk. The subject of Major Hound is raised and discussed in a sentence, the reader getting the strong impression Ludovic used him to get to the beach and then… dumped him…or murdered him? Guy asks him what the devil he’s doing here and Ludovic, in that unnerving way of his, replies that he was contemplating suicide, diving into the sea and swimming south till he drowns. He asks Tony whether that would count as suicide, theologically speaking.

Tony doesn’t know and moves the conversation onto swapping survival stories, then Guy fills him in on the final orders i.e. surrender to the Germans. They both sit surveying the scene of hundreds of men engaged in various pointless activities, including some soldiers fixing a local fishing boat. After a while he notices they’ve manhandled it down the beach and into the sea and are fiddling with the engine. It kicks into life with a puff of black smoke. The little sapper who’s been leading the team and shouts at the beach that they’re taking the boat to freedom, anyone want to come?

Guy consults his men who all prefer to take their chances on dry land then wades out and hauls himself over the side of the boat. Only then does he realise Ludovic has followed him having heard something, but both men are drowned out by the enormous racket of the diesel outboard motor. They start to chug away from the beach and then Guy sees what suddenly motivated Ludovic. Out of the sky appears a wing of Stukas which proceed to systematically dive bomb the beach and harbour, massacring the men waiting there, mangled bits of body thrown into the air. One Stuka makes a strafe over the little boat but then returns to the richer picking onshore. And so, having narrowly escaped annihilation, the little local fishing boat puts out of the picture, one of the last survivors of the ghastly fiasco and failure which was the defence of Crete.

Hospital in Alexandria

Part two chapter seven opens with an absolutely brilliant description of Guy coming round in the hospital in Egypt, of the world of silence and great distance which he inhabits as he recovers from shock and exposure.

Confused memories drift through his mind – he refuses to talk. Then one day Mrs Stitch breezes into his room, repeating the famous quote from the incident on the Italian island and without thinking Guy replies. It is one of the most wonderful moments in a wonderful book – now he can talk again he pops down the hall to see Tommy Blackhouse who’s still laid up with his broken leg. Tony tells him he was carried ashore by Ludovic when their ship finally reached shore in Egypt. Of the four or five other chaps on the boat there was no sign. In the third book in the trilogy it is darkly hinted that Ludovic did away with them, though we never find out for sure.

The Ivor Claire affair

Tommy and Guy discuss the case of Ivor. There is a great scandal because Ivor’s troop were unambiguously ordered to wait till the last minute and then surrender to the Germans. Mrs Stitch tells Guy that Ivor made his way to the beach for last orders and there found a launch leaving whose captain ordered him to get aboard and be saved, claiming another launch was on its way to collect his men. Of course the second launch never arrived and so Ivor stands accused of disobeying a direct order and abandoning his men.

Guy is appalled and disillusioned. He considered Ivor a flower of English gentlemanliness, but turns out to be a sneak and cad. To be honest, I spent the last pages confused because I couldn’t see the difference between Guy who left his men on the beach (to be bombed to death) and made it back to Alex, and Ivor who left his men in the hills and made it back to Alex. What would Ivor letting himself be captured have done for the war effort? This is the common sense view taken by Mrs Stitch who appears to have been involved in spiriting Ivor away to distant India on some secondment, where he can sit out the war among people who know nothing of the story and don’t care.

Staying with Mrs Stitch

Mrs Stitch insists Guy comes and stays with her at the swish villa assigned to her or, more accurately, her very well connected husband Algernon (Algie). It is a comic conceit that Julia has inherited from her strict Victorian grandparents a belief that bachelors should not be pampered and so awards him a squalid concrete bunker of a room, down at basement level, liberally populated by cockroaches.

But he gets to lie on their chaise longue, be waited on hand and foot and to attend some truly swanky parties. One day Julia returns from town with the staggering news that Germany has invaded Russia, 22 June 1941 (p.239).

Mrs Stitch asks Guy if there’s anyone he’s like to see and he says old Major Tickeredge – so he comes to lunch and is awed by the VIPs around him, but after lunch stuns Guy by saying Ben Ritchie-Hook is alive after all!

With the wiping out of X commando Guy is looking forward to being returned to the Halberdiers so is very upset to receive a letter delivered by motorcycle courier ordering him to join a ship the following morning which is to take him back to Blighty. He drives into town to see the officer who signed the order, who tells him it comes from the very top. He begs Mrs Stitch to fix it but she can’t. Very upset. There is a whiff of implication that Mrs Stitch in fact arranged it in order to get Guy completely out of circulation while she spirited her favourite, Ivor Claire, off to safe obscurity out in India.

Epilogue

It takes eight long weeks sailing in a rusty old hulk, Canary Castle, right round Africa with a long stopover in Durban to be refitted. But eventually Guy arrives back in England, back in London and back in his club, Bellamy’s.

This brief epilogue opens with no narratorial introduction, just dialogue. We have got to know the so well we can identify the speakers. It recalls the liberal use of the same technique in Vile Bodies, the early 1930s novel this shares a surprising amount with.

And of course there is a simpler pattern going on here, which is that Bellamy’s is where the novel opens and where it closes. Symmetry.

Thus the epilogue opens with Guy being accosted by the usual suspects, not least the humorous press man Ian Kilbannock and his earnest MP brother-in-law, Box-Bender. The former wants to know more about the Ivor Claire affair, then informs him Virginia is doing her patriotic duty and accompanying Trimmer on a tour of munitions factories in Scunthorpe, Hull, Huddersfield, Halifax…

Box-Bender informs Guy that his nephew Tony has written from his German prisoner of war camp asking for works of religious devotion, which troubles him. Why should it? asks Guy.

All the conversation is about help for Russia, Tanks for Russia Week, his allying with Russia has, at least, motivated the working classes to work harder in those factories. And bloody good thing, too!

Guy never wanted to come back, he wanted to join the Halberdiers in the Middle East but when he reports at Halberdiers barracks the C-in-C tells him it was the doctors at Alexandria’s hospital who reported that Guy needed a complete change of scene. (Or is that all part of Mrs Stitch’s ruse?)

And so the novel ends with Guy back where he began, practising drill on the barracks parade ground, waiting to find his place in the big world around him. Except that things are now no longer so clear and (childishly) simple as they were two years earlier. The performance of British services have been lamentable, the man he considered ‘the flower of English chivalry’ Ivor Claire, turns out to let the side down; but overarching everything, the alliance with barbaric Bolshevik Russia hugely compromises the claim of the war to be any kind of moral crusade. And so the novel ends with Guy back at square one, looking for a role and repossessed by his characteristic gloom and pessimism:

It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms. Now that hallucination was dissolved, like the whales and turtles on the voyage from Crete, and he was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.

Themes and images

Public school

As pointed out so many times, when Waugh (or his characters) reach for a comparison, almost always the first ones that come to mind are taken from their experiences at prep school or private school. Thus, for Guy, in the middle of an air raid:

Guy was momentarily reminded of Holy Saturday at Downside; early gusty March mornings of boyhood; the doors wide open in the unfinished butt of the Abbey; half the school coughing; fluttering linen; the glowing brazier and the priest with his hyssop, paradoxically blessing fire with water.

Snobbery

Waugh’s belief in a class system can be deduced from comments he makes about being an officer in the army:

In all his military service Guy never ceased to marvel at the effortless transitions of intercourse between equality and superiority. It was a figure which no temporary officer ever learned to cut. Some of them were better than the regulars with their men. None ever achieved the art of displaying authority over junior officers without self-consciousness and consequent offence. Regular soldiers were survivals of a happy civilization where differences of rank were exactly defined and frankly accepted.

‘Where differences of rank were exactly defined and frankly accepted.’ That is his ideal world, a medieval world of precise rankings, accompanied, ideally, by sumptuary laws.

The working classes rarely appear in his narratives except as servants, waiters, valets, drivers, cooks and so on. They rarely if ever speak, they are nameless serfs at the beck and call of the only people who have agency, Waugh and his class.

If they do speak it is either to reveal they are solid chaps – like some of the brave soldiers Guy meets in Crete whose dialogue is entirely restricted to either ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir’ – or it is to reveal their coarse, petty money-mindedness, as is the case with the scheming Cuthberts who try and evict nice old Mr Crouchback from their hotel, and are indicted either by their dropped h’s and plebeian idioms or, more subtly, by their complete failure to understand the superior moral standards of their lords and masters:

‘He’s a deep one and no mistake. I never have understood him, not properly. Somehow his mind seems to work different than yours and mine.’

Amateurism

I appreciate from everything I’ve ever read about them that lots of plans and arrangements in times of war are shambolic, but Waugh goes out of his way to emphasise the shambolic nature of pretty much everything his hero encounters, from office politics and rivalries, the loss and misplacement of paperwork, errors over train or shipping times and so on.

These litanies of relatively minor incompetence are then reflected in actual military operations – on a small scale by Operation Popgun, on a massive scale in the fiasco of Crete (which itself followed the fiasco of Norway [described in Put Out More Flags] and the fiasco of Dakar [described in Men at Arms]).

The breezy incompetence displayed by almost every aspect of the military is connected to the cult of upper-class nonchalance, of displaying your upper class credentials by refusing to be seen to be trying too hard, and refusing be fazed or perturbed by anything.

This is exemplified by the elephantine imperturbability of old Jumbo Trotter or, in a different way, by the administrative officer of HOO HQ who gets used to hearing the most preposterous stories. ‘My entire platoon has just been ambushed and massacred.’ ‘Oh, I say, bad show, old boy.’

Drunkenness

At luncheon Mr Crouchback drank a pint of burgundy.

Everyone gets drunk. ‘Have a drink?’ remains the watchword among these people, as it had been in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. ‘Tight’ is the word they use for ‘drunk’. The narrative describes what this or that individual is like ‘when they’re tight’ because it is just taken for granted that everyone will gets tight at some point or another, sometimes every night.

These posh characters’ haunt is their London club, where they drink prodigious amounts of booze, indeed the novel opens with the image of fine wine and brandy flowing in the gutters of Blitzed London. Evening drinks and evening dinner are always accompanied by plentiful booze. On Mugg they get drunk and in Cape Town they get drunk and in Alexandria they get drunk.

They ate lobster pilaff and a great dish of quail cooked with Muscat grapes…They ate six birds each and drank a bottle of champagne. Then they had green artichokes and another bottle. (p.163)

The character who dominates the first book, Apthorpe, literally drinks himself to death (and is thus a spiritual cousin of pretty boy Sebastian Flyte who drinks himself into impoverished middle age in Brideshead Revited).

And Waugh venerates this drunkenness, finds it admirable, stylish, amusing. I was really struck by the ending of the short South Africa interlude, where we have witnessed Eddie and Bertie getting drunk all day long before going off to a club to drink some more, while Guy admires Ivor Claire do a kind of sub-Noel Coward impersonation of nonchalance and airy superiority. Guy delivers quite a pompous reflection on these three fellow officers:

Guy thought instead with deep affection of X Commando. ‘The Flower of the Nation’, Ian Kilbannock had ironically called them. He was not far wrong. There was heroic simplicity in Eddie and Bertie. Ivor Claire was another pair of boots entirely, salty, withdrawn, incorrigible. Guy remembered Claire as he first saw him in the Roman spring in the afternoon sunlight amid the embosoming cypresses of the Borghese Gardens, putting his horse faultlessly over the jumps, concentrated as a man in prayer. Ivor Claire, Guy thought, was the fine flower of them all. He was quintessential England, the man Hitler had not taken into account, Guy thought.

This strikes me as a ludicrous thing to write. Hitler had accurately counted on the decadence of the class which ran the British Empire, which had appeased him throughout the mid-1930s and which, for a year or so after the declaration of war, continued to seek some kind of accommodation with him, led in the cabinet by Lord Halifax. Hitler, of course, had many sympathisers among the British upper classes, even among Waugh’s own friends, even the abdicated king.

The thought that two drunks and a camp horserider represented the spirit which defeated Hitler is absurd. The brute fact of the English Channel and the heroic efforts of the RAF during the Battle of Britain stymied Hitler’s ambitions but didn’t defeat him, just led to a stalemate. Where Hitler did badly miscalculate was in thinking Soviet Russia would collapse like a pack of cards in the autumn of 1941 and then thinking he could take on Russia and America after Pearl Harbour (December 1941). Set against the enormity of these vast mistakes, the antics of Guy and his drunken shambolic friends seem risible, almost shameful.

‘What say we all have a drink?’ said Bum. (p.215)

(Then again, I suppose you could argue this pompous passage reflects badly on Guy not his author; that it has an artistic purpose which is to set Guy’s childish patriotism up for the fall it receives when Ivor Claire betrays his high calling and lets the side down. Maybe it’s there to set up this further step in Guy’s slow disillusionment with the war and the values it’s supposedly being fought for.)

Childishness

Arguably the amateurishness and the drunkenness are related to the prep school obsession in that they are all childish. These people live in a state of permanently retarded development. The most praised characters, Mr Crouchback and Jumbo Trotter are, in effect, schoolboys protected by their prep schoolboy innocence. The comedy of a character like Mrs Stitch is that she’s a childish cartoon. Ditto the comic figure who dominates the first book, Apthorpe. Occasionally he writes phrases which bring the implicit childishness of the entire worldview into the open:

Guy set his intelligence section to make a map of the camp, for Major Hound had returned from one of his trips to Cairo with a case labelled ‘intelligence stores’ which proved to contain a kindergarten outfit of coloured inks and drawing materials.

Mental illness

The exception which proves the rule to the dominating sense of childishness is Waugh’s odd fictional relationship with mental illness and states of extremity. They tend to come at the end of the books as a climax to the narrative, hence the description of Tony Last’s delirium then despair at the end of A Handful of Dust.

And so the final passages of this brilliant novel include a) a prolonged passage describing the moral and mental collapse of Major Hound and b) the wonderful, luminous description of Guy’s detached mental state and mutism in the hospital in Alexandria, as he recovers from the terrible effects of prolonged exposure at sea, but for a long time is incapable of responding to anyone, even friends, doctors, nurses.

But there is a wide array of odd mental states throughout the book: for example, the laird of Mugg with his potty obsession with explosives; the laird’s great-niece Katie Carmichael with her outrageous support of the Nazis; remember that Guy’s elder brother, Ivo, went mad and starved himself to death. Guy himself suffers from recurrent feelings of emptiness and depression. Waugh’s books are weirder and deeper than you first realise.

Credit

Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1955. All references are to the 1984 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on January 5, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Literature, Second World War

Tagged Air Marshall Beech, alcoholism, Alexandria, Apthorpe, army bureaucracy, Arthur Box-Bender, Battle of Britain, Bellamy’s, Ben Ritchie-Hooke, Blitz, Brazzaville, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, British Army, British Empire, Brook Park, Bum Schlum, Canary Castle, Cape Town, Castello Crouchback, Catholicism, Chatty Corner, Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole, comedy, Corporal-Major Ludovic, Crete, Daily Beast, Downside, Dr Glendening-Rees, E.M. Foster, Egypt, English literature, Evelyn Waugh, Fall of Crete, General Whale, Guy Crouchback, Happy Warriors, Hazardous Offensive Operations, HOO HQ, Hookforce, Ian Kilbannock, In The Picture, Isle of Mugg, Ivor Claire, James Pendennis, James Pendennis Corner, Joe Mulligan, Julia Stitch, Jumbo Trotter, Katie Carmichael, Kerstie Kilbannock, London, Lord Copper, Lord Halifax, Major Albright, Major Grigshawe, Major Hound, Marchmain House, Matchet, McTavish, Miss Vavasour, Mrs Algernon Stitch, Mrs Stitch, Mrs Tickeridge, Mrs Troy, mutism, North Africa, novel, Officers and Gentlemen, Operation Popgun, Pearl Harbour, public school, Royal Corps of Halberdiers, satire, Scab Dunz, Scapa Flow, Scotland, Second World War, Sergeant Smiley, Sidi Bishr, snobbery, South Africa, Southsand-on-sea, Special Service Forces, Sphakia, Stuka, Sword of Honour trilogy, Tanks for Russia Week, the Cuthberts, Thimble, Tommy Blackhouse, Tony Box-Bender, trilogy, Trimmer, turtles, Virginia, war, X Commando

Posted by Simon on January 5, 2022

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Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh (1952)

‘I’m what’s called a “conducting officer”. I take American journalists round fighter stations. But I shall find something else soon. The great thing is to get into uniform; then you can start moving yourself round. It’s a very exclusive war at present. Once you’re in, there’s every opportunity.’
(Lord Ian Kilbannock explaining to Guy the importance of getting on in a war, Men at Arms)

Men at Arms is the first in what developed into a trilogy of novels about the Second World War which Waugh named The Sword of Honour trilogy. It tells the story of devout Catholic, conservative, standoffish but honourable and frequently depressed fellow, Guy Crouchback:

Thirty-five years old, slight and trim, plainly foreign but not so plainly English, young, now, in heart and step…

The novel starts with the outbreak of the Second World War and follows Guy’s long, clumsy and sometimes very funny progress through the military machine, with a world of details about the farcical bureaucratic aspects of army life.

But the book also includes, like a persistent background hum, Guy’s deep Catholic faith and his feel for the ‘old’ values of religion and an older traditional way of life embodied in the figure of Guy’s venerable father, Mr Crouchback.

And the book’s other understated but persistent theme is for Guy’s loneliness and isolation, his unhappiness, sometimes sinking as low as actual despair. For too long, the narrative tells us, Guy has inhabited a ‘dry, empty place’ of the soul.

The Crouchback family

How so? Well, Guy’s character is carefully constructed to evoke the same kind of pity and compassion he was seeking to evoke in Brideshead Revisited, the sense of the decline and fall of a once noble family, the sense of quietly heroic old buffers trying to keep up ancient values and dignity in a world gone to hell.

Guy’s father is over 70, a quiet, decent man of deep devout Catholic faith who has nobly weathered a series of setbacks. He is the representative of a family which can trace its lineage back to the time of Henry I. For centuries the Crouchback family have lived in a country estate named Broome, somewhere in north Devon. But the family suffered a) personal and b) financial setbacks.

On the personal front, Mr Crouchback’s wife gave him four children then died young, leaving him with a permanent sense of sadness. Worse was to come because, at the outbreak of the Great War, the eldest son and heir, Gervase, went straight from his Catholic private school, Downside, into the Irish Guards, where he managed to get himself killed on his first day in the trenches. Then the second son, Ivo, always a loner and oddball, when he was 26 went missing from home and was discovered months later, holed up in a lodging in Cricklewood where he was deliberately starving himself to death. He was brought home but the damage was done and he died soon after.

There was an only daughter, Angela, who married a non-Catholic, an ambitious chap who’s gone on to become a successful Conservative MP, Arthur Box-Bender.

And Guy himself. Guy also ‘married out’ of the family religion, marrying the beautiful non-Catholic socialite, Virginia. He took his younger son’s share of the diminished family fortune and settled in Kenya, running a farm beside a mountain lake where the flamingos rose at dawn first white then pink. Wow. But his wife pined and said she needed to go to England for a break and then, after 6 months or so, wrote to announce she was leaving him, for a mutual friend named Tommy Blackhouse.

‘Poor Guy, you did get in a mess, didn’t you? Money gone, me gone, all in one go. I suppose in the old days they’d have said I’d ruined you.’
‘They might.’

Now, Guy is a Catholic, his father is a Catholic, his sister is a Catholic and so they all take it for granted that, although he can get divorced according to the law of the land, he cannot be divorced in the eyes of God. In other words, he will never be able to remarry, never be able to have children, in particular a son. Therefore the family name is doomed to die out. This is the pessimistic scenario Waugh has engineered for his characters, one source of the sense of loss and mild depression which hangs over the figure of Guy Crouchback.

His non-Catholic brother-in-law Box-Bender is just the most prominent of their friends who think this is all nonsense: Guy should just remarry, have children, reclaim the home farm, revive the estate and the family name. Where’s the problem? When Guy meets up with his ex-wife again in London, she also is blissfully light-hearted about it all:

‘You never married again?’
‘How could I?’
‘Darling, don’t pretend your heart was broken for life.’
‘Apart from my heart, Catholics can’t remarry, you know.’
‘Oh, that. You still keep to all that?’
‘More than ever.’

But Box-Bender, Virginia and all the rest of them are pagans, non-believers, not part of the clique, not part of sinn fein (Irish for ‘ourselves’), of the cosa nostra (Italian for ‘our thing’), of the special ones. They are not Catholics, and Catholicism, at least in Waugh’s hands, is not only a theological but a sociological marker, which sets the believer apart and, though he doesn’t overplay this, pretty obviously marks them as morally and spiritually superior to everyone else around him.

So much for a) the personal; as to b) the financial situation, in the aftermath of the First World War the estate became slowly too large and costly for Mr Crouchback to run. So he sold off the contents (attending the auction himself), let the house to a convent and retired to a hotel in Matchet, a nearby seaside resort.

However, it is important for Waugh and his characters that the ancient rituals do not completely die out and so ‘the sanctuary lamp still burned at Broome as of old’ and Guy’s father attends mass there once a year.

So, both financially and personally, the Crouchback family has fallen a long way and Guy is its embattled, lonely, often depressed last representative.

Guy is a loner

Guy’s Kenya period is underplayed, referred to only in a couple of sentences. Much more is made of the family’s Italian property, ‘Castello Crouchback’, on the idyllic Italian island of Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, a property bought by Guy’s grandfather back in the time of Queen Victoria. In fact the novel opens with a historical passage describing the first arrival of those grandparents on a yachting holiday at the island and their decision to buy the run-down ruins.

You might have thought these opening passages would afford luxury descriptions of pre-war Italy, and they do, a bit, but what they’re really for is to establish a) the penumbra of sadness which hangs over Guy ever since his wife left him eight years earlier, and b) the way he can never really make friends. He’s always an outsider. The Italian villagers take to nearly all the other expats on the island, they are sympatico, but Guy is not simpatico.

He was not loved, Guy knew, either by his household or in the town. He was accepted and respected but he was not simpatico.

Guy is lonely. Inside him is a blankness, an emptiness he can’t put into words, his imagination a prey to mournful images:

Sometimes he imagined himself serving the last mass for the last Pope in a catacomb at the end of the world.

It is against this complex family and personal background that the declaration of war comes on 3 September 1939 and (like many other men) Guy is hugely relieved to escape the frustrations and unhappiness of personal life, and make a clear and unambiguous commitment: to return to England to serve his king and country and fight against unambiguous evil.

Guy back in England

All the above is explained in a sort of prologue to the book. The main action of the novel opens with the declaration of war and Guy packing his stuff to return from his Italian island home to England to serve king and country.

Guy arrives in London hoping to find a role in the army straightaway. He goes to his club, Bellamy’s, every day. Everyone is in turmoil. Everyone has evacuated their families from their London places and sent them down to the country. Box-Bender is locking up his London place and moving in with two male friends. Guy embarks on a campaign to get himself into the army, buttonholing military friends and writing countless letters to ministries and old contacts. No joy.

So he goes to stay with his sister Angela at her home in Gloucestershire.

Box-Bender’s house was a small, gabled manor in a sophisticated village where half the cottages were equipped with baths and chintz.

In a typically comic/farcical detail, their hallway is stuffed with crates of ‘Hittite tablets’ evacuated from the British Museum.

Guy is impressed by Arthur and Angela’s son, Tony, young and keen, who’s already got himself a place in the army, lucky blighter. They gossip about all the local families, some who’ve left the country altogether (the Abercrombies have decamped to Jamaica) and about the numerous accidents resulting from the blackout. Scandalised reports of the crime wave prompted by the blackout, lots of muggings.

After staying the night Guy travels down to see his father at the pub, the Marine Arms, in Matchet, where he took rooms as a long-term resident after he relinquished the estate at Broome. Like everywhere in England it’s in a tizzy because of the war, packed with an unusual numbers of guests, some of the staff have been conscripted etc. In the dining room, his father introduces him to Tickeridge, a hairy old cove who’s a major in the Halberdiers. When Guy expresses a genuine wish to be in the army, Tickeridge says he’ll see what he can do. Ha! Contacts. It’s not what you know, or who you know – it’s who your father knows!

Guy joins the army

And so Guy finds himself one of a new cohort of officers in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers, nicknamed the Apple Jacks and the Copper Heads, a fictional regiment which is going to be central to his career in the army and all three novels. His closest associate is a lightly eccentric fellow called Apthorpe.

Both being that much older, they find themselves referred to as ‘uncle’. Lots of detail of army protocol, an extension of the strict rules around correct dress which were drummed into him at school, then university. Regimental traditions. Pen portraits of the other new officers, namely de Souza, Sarum-Smith, Leonard and a slightly shifty chap called Trimmer.

Guy joins his regiment

Guy joins the Halberdiers at their peacetime barracks. There is basic training and squarebashing i.e. drill on parade grounds. There is a lot of fuss about dressing correctly for different functions at different times of day, for example, the officers have to dress appropriately, and immaculately, for dinner in the mess hall.

It is obvious to me, at any rate, how life in the army follows naturally from life at prep school, life at private school, life at Oxford or Cambridge, and then life in the kind of upper class country house which Waugh idealises. What they all have in common are servants who do all the drudgery, change bedding, do all laundry, clean shoes and boots and cook and bring drinks. Their country houses are full of servants, their junior boys fag for the seniors at private school, there are ‘scouts’ to clean their rooms at Oxford and waiters bring meals in hall dinners, but on the other side of the ledger, in return for all these privileges, it is expected that the beneficiary, the boy growing up in a country house, at private school or Oxford, and then an officer in a good regiment, will follow the rules and there are lots and lots of rules governing all aspects of behaviour, dress, speech and thought.

It is a world of huge privilege but also of tremendous constraints. There is often no legal punishment for breaking the rules, but the army has a wide variety of sanctions for chaps who do not behave like an officer and a gentleman, and the narrow society of London clubs which Guy moves in also has its sanctions, its ability to cut or snub anyone who behaves incorrectly.

Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook

We are introduced to the feared and renowned figure of Ben Ritchie-Hooke, who will become their brigadier. I don’t really understand the structure of the British army, but I think what is happening is that , now war has been declared, all regiments, which had been allowed to dwindle in peacetime, are being rapidly up to full strength, recently retired officers asked back in and new officers being recruited. This is the new intake of officers which Guy is part of. First they will be trained, then newly recruited and conscripted ordinary soldiers will arrive and be put in their charge. At some point the regiment will become fully operational and Ben Ritchie-Hook will come into full command.

Throughout the first part of this novel this process takes place, observed from Guy’s point of view, sometimes, confusing the reader, sometimes confusing even Guy who’s in the thick of it.

Anyway, Ritchie-Hook is an almost Monty Python level of a caricature of a senior army officer. He wears an eye patch and a black leather glove on one hand, having lost an eye and fingers and thumb in battle. A sharp line is drawn between the initial commander in chief of the barracks who oversees thorough but pedestrian training, and the terrific change in mood which takes place when Ritchie-Hook arrives and takes over. He is all about biffing the enemy.

For example, the initial rifle range practice consists of long boring afternoons loading your gun, lying down, firing at a distant target, and having the target monitor flag whether you got a hit, a bullseye etc. By contrast, under Ritchie-Hook the brigadier himself runs up and down the trench at the end of the range waving a stick with a tin hat on it above ground level and defies his men to hit it. Later they have to crawl on their hands and knees just under a barrage of live fire.

Ritchie-Hook is a wonderful comic creation and the trigger for a series of comic incidents. For example he first appears at a drinks party held by a senior officer where, through a series of verbal misunderstandings, he mistakes Guy for Apthorpe the fellah who was in Africa for years, gruffly dismissing the fact that one of his officers seems to have spent the 1930s in Italy, no good that, don’t like the sound of that – which of course refers to Guy who keeps very silent about the fact for the rest of the evening. Comedy of manners.

but he also allows Waugh to create the kind of war he wants, which is farce. If you read war books from the Great War you are left in no doubt that it was a tragedy of enormous scale. Anyone coming to Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy expecting the same will be surprised. It is overwhelmingly concerned with the boring humdrum details of training and office politics (as officers jostle for promotion) and bureaucracy and pettifogging rules, interspersed with moments of ludicrous farce. Only at the very end are any guns fired in anger and then only a dozen or so and for a few pages, on a tiny night-time excursion onto a beach in Africa which is over half an hour after it began and achieves nothing.

Southsand prep school

The officers are sent to a place called Kut-al-Imara House at Southsand-on-sea. It is a preparatory school, vacated by staff and pupils so the army can take over. Its rooms are named after World War One battles and, as Guy explores it on arrival, he paints a very vivid picture of a certain kind of lower league school, redolent of embarrassment and shame.

He leant against a coil of antiquated iron pipes and was surprised to find them hot. They seemed to lack all power of radiation; a yard from them there was no sensible warmth. He could imagine a row of little boys struggling to sit on them, tight-trousered boys with adenoids and chilblains; or perhaps it was a privilege to sit there enjoyed only by prefects and the First Eleven. In its desolation he could see the whole school as it had been made familiar to him in many recent realistic novels; an enterprise neither progressive nor prosperous. The assistant masters changed often, he supposed, arriving with bluff, departing with bluster; half the boys were taken at surreptitiously reduced fees; none of them ever won a scholarship or passed into a reputable public school or returned for an Old Boys’ Day or ever thought of his years there with anything but loathing and shame. The History lessons were patriotic in design, turned to ridicule by the young masters. There was no school song at Kut-al-Imara House. All this Guy thought he snuffed in the air of the forsaken building.

It’s one more image which brings the reader up short and makes you realise just how much Waugh was writing for readers of his own class and not for the humble likes of you and I. And also one more example of the way this class obsesses about its prep and private schools. It’s a common observation that Waugh’s generation of writers – including George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, W.H. Auden and many others – never really seem to have escaped the clothes, drill, mannerisms and world view inculcated by an English public school system which reached a kind of acme in their day.

And then the equally commonly commented-on fact that so many of the institutions of English public life – the quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge, the quadrangles of the inns of court for lawyers, the quads and committee rooms of Westminster, the parade grounds and officers messes of the army – are a continuation of that ordered, regimented, elite, blinkered, narrow but highly effective view of life.

The characters frequently compare this or that army regulation to ‘school’, the narrator compares this or that situation to something similar at a public school. It comes as no surprise when a prep school moves into Malchett and hire old Mr Crouchback as a supply teacher, teaching, of course, not maths or geography or something useful, but, of course, Classics, ancient Greek to be precise. Apthorpe even takes Guy, one drunk night, in a taxi out to the location of his prep school Staplehurst, now, he discovers to his horror, demolished and a modern estate built over it. Sic transit…

Anyway, life at Southsand is the backdrop for Waugh giving a thousand and one little details of army life, starting with the typical ‘foul-up’ that Guy and his cohort of officers arrive at Southsand station an hour after the bus arranged to pick them up had left and having to make their own way by taxi. Bureaucratic cock-up typical of hundreds and hundreds more which Guy will become used to in army life.

There are comic incidents. At a guest night for the regiment the officers end up getting drunk and playing a game of rugby with a waste paper basket and when everyone piles onto Guy his knee is painfully wrenched. It swells up and so for weeks afterwards, he wears a bulky dressing, needs a cane to walk and is excused drill practice.

When his fellow older officer, Apthorpe also manages to injure his leg on a drunken night out, the two eldest new officers, who had both already gained the ambivalent nickname ‘uncle’, both appear limping and using canes, to general hilarity. The comedy is like that. Schoolboy comedy.

Similarly, Guy discovers he can’t actually see the targets at the firing range at the statutory 300 yard distance, thus discovering that he needs glasses, but on a whim, instead has a monocle made by a local optician, which solves his firing range problem but, of course, also contributes to making him a figure of fun.

Another little plot strand is the Italian restaurant kept by Mr Pelecci which they take to frequenting, chatty Mr Pelecci often sitting with them and chatting about the news. They don’t at first realise that he is a spy.

Catholic theology on Guy’s marriage

The officers are allowed out to explore the town. Guy and Apthorpe join the town yachting club, chiefly for its bar. He meets a Mr Goodall, Ambrose Goodall, who turns out to be a Catholic convert with a hobby of studying the old Catholic families of England. They have lunch and dine and go to the yacht club bar and it emerges that Goodall knows the history of Broome and Guy’s own family. And then, in the context of another family, in passing remarks that, theologically, it is no sin or crime for a man to have sex with his divorced wife as, in the eyes of God, she has never been separated from him. Although Virginia has been unfaithful, he hasn’t, and so the marriage is still, theologically speaking, valid.

Seduction of Virginia

This leads to disastrous episode where Guy tracks Virginia down in London. She is, typically for him and the circles they move in, staying at Claridge’s hotel. He moves into a room down the hall and she is initially delighted to bump into him, as she is delighted to bump into everyone, darling, during this beastly ghastly war. He invites her round for drinks and it is then that he puts his arm along the back of the sofa and makes an attempt to kiss her. Virginia thinks he’s being ridiculous. If you’re going to do it, do it properly, and puts down her drink and kisses him back.

But then she asks what’s brought this one and Guy makes the disastrous mistake of explaining the theological position i.e. she is still his wife in the eyes of God and it is still theologically permitted for him to have sex with her. This shocks and horrified her much more than if it were a casual attempt at sex and she stands up and moves to the fireplace expressing horror, at which point Guy really screws things up by venting 8 years of frustration and accusing her of being a tart. Then there is a big silence when they both react to what has happened and been said.

Virginia: ‘You take too much for granted.’
Guy: ‘That’s an absolutely awful expression,’ said Guy. ‘Only tarts use it.’
Virginia: ‘Isn’t that rather what you think I am?’
Guy: ‘Isn’t it rather what you are?’

Guy grovellingly apologises, more because it’s bad form and poor manners than untrue, and they sort of patch things up. But, later, leaving Claridge’s, the incident does have the positive effect that it seems to have laid a ghost. His true feelings for Virginia have come out and he feels some sense of closure. It is 14 February 1940.

Apthorpe

His fellow ‘new’ officer, Apthrope, is arguably the dominant figure of the novel. Indeed the three main sections the book is divided into each use a Latin word to describe the three stages of Apthorpe’s progression, namely: Apthorpe Gloriosus, Apthorpe Furibundus and Apthorpe Immolatus where gloriosus is self evident, furibundus means ‘frantic, frenzied, maddened’ and immolatus means ‘having been immolated or sacrificed’.

Apthorpe’s character fascinates Guy from the start, his comic obsessions and behaviour. Thus, when Apthorpe is promoted to rank of captain ahead of Guy, he insists Guy salute him, and asks him to ask all the other new officers to do so, too. This, apparently, was technically correct but not necessary and makes Apthorpe look like a pedantic fool; in fact his fellow officers play various games with the act of saluting or not saluting when Apthorpe expects it which drives the poor man into a frenzy.

A platoon of signallers are billeted with the Halberdiers and Apthorpe insists they conform to Halberdier discipline and procedure, which leads to a long and increasingly embittered feud with their commanding officer, Dunn, which eventually escalates up to commanding officer level. Although he has been promoted. Apthorpe is acquiring a reputation as an eccentric.

Apthorpe and the saga of the Thunder-Box

One of Apthorpe’s eccentricities has been carrying round an enormous amount of lumber and ‘kit’ and ‘gear’ with him which he insists was vital to his much-mentioned but obscure ‘time in Africa’. ‘Somewhere among these possessions lay something rare and mysterious which Apthorpe spoke of as his “Bush Thunder-box”.’

This develops into the book’s best-known comic sequence, the kind of extended comic digression which characterised the best of his 1930s comic novels, reminiscent of Basil Seal’s scams in Put Out More Flags. The thunder-box is a beautifully made Edwardian chemical toilet, a cube of solid wood, which opens to reveal a porcelain seat and bowl. But why? asks Guy: there are toilets just down the hallway. ‘The clap old chap,’ Apthrope confidently explains. ‘A chap can never be too careful.’ So Guy watches Apthorpe surreptitiously, one evening, when the other chaps are in the game room, haul this big box out of the general lumber room and drag it across the prep school playing fields into a little games storeroom hidden among the bushes. For a couple of days Apthorpse disappears for ten minutes at a time and only Guy knows where he’s going.

However, disaster strikes when one evening Apthorpe encounters fearsome Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke exiting the clump of bushes which conceal his secret. Both are forced to salute each other but very uneasily. Apthorpe tells Guy the terrible news but worse is to follow. Next day Apthorpe goes for his daily evacuation and is horrified to see a sign pinned on the little outhouse saying the place is out of bounds to everyone below the rank of brigadier.

Apthorpe anxiously discusses the situation with Guy and ropes him into moving the dread device. So one evening they sneak down to the outhouse and manhandle it some distance away to another hiding place, returning very satisfied with their work. A few evenings later Apthorpe makes his usual excuses and slips off and a few minutes later Guy hears a muffled explosion. He knows at once what it is, and sets off running across the playing fields and into the bushes. He discovers a dazed Apthorpe sprawled on his face a few yards from the thunder-box which is now a splintered smoking wreck. Ritchie-Hook, in one of his famous practical jokes, had rigged the thing with a small explosive device.

The sequence of events themselves are fairly funny, but what turns it into award-winning farce is the tremendous seriousness with which Apthorpe takes it all, and the completely straight-faced way Guy plays along with him.

Penkirk

The regiment is moved to Penkirk not far from Edinburgh in a camp of tents. A castle is nearby. Here Apthorpe’s eccentricities continue to flourish. It is here that he commences his long-running vendetta against the officer in the Signalling regiment.

It is here that the first division of commands is given and Guy is bitter to be given only a platoon while Apthorpe is promoted above him. Only later does a friendly superior explain this is because Apthorpe is actually fingered for promotion into purely administrative positions whereas the Brigadier doesn’t want anyone in command of actual fighting units who hasn’t started out with experience of commanding a platoon. That cheers him up a bit.

A new commander is assigned, one Hayter, who Guy comes to dislike. There is a great deal about relations between the new officers of his rank and the complex array of commanding officers who come and go as the regiment is restructured and reorganised.

There is a long sequence which Waugh cleverly arranges around the one hundred and forty-three questions in the Army Training Memorandum No. 31 War. April 1940 which all the officers receive and are ordered to complete.

On 10 May 1940 Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, replacing the hapless Neville Chamberlain. It is worth lingering over what Waugh, or at least his character Guy, thinks of him:

Guy knew of Mr. Churchill only as a professional politician, a master of sham-Augustan prose, a Zionist, an advocate of the Popular Front in Europe, an associate of the press-lords and of Lloyd George.

He thinks he’ll be better than the other chap. But this is a novel and another character, Major Erskine, who, in the dim-witted nature of these characters is thought to be ‘brainy’ because he reads novels and is a bit scruffy, this Erskine is made to say, prophetically:

‘Churchill is about the only man who may save us from losing this war.’

The difference between history and novels is in novels opinions, ideas, perspectives are distributed among different characters for dramatic effect. Might be worth also quoting the place where Waugh gives his clearest explanation of Guy’s motive for fighting, for taking part in this war:

[Guy] was a good loser, but he did not believe his country would lose this war; each apparent defeat seemed strangely to sustain it. There was in Romance great virtue in unequal odds. There were in morals two requisites for a lawful war, a just cause and the chance of victory. The cause was now, past all question, just. The enemy was exorbitant. His actions in Austria and Bohemia had been defensible. There was even a shadow of plausibility in his quarrel with Poland. But now, however victorious, he was an outlaw. And the more victorious he was the more he drew to himself the enmity of the world and the punishment of God.

Note the complete absence of political analysis. Waugh doesn’t, for example declare his protagonist an enemy of fascism or Nazism (in fact, having lived in Italy for most of the 1930s, Guy has a relaxed attitude to the reality of Italian fascism on the ground). Certainly not in the way that English left-wing or liberal thinkers thought of Nazism as unambiguously evil and a threat to all notions of freedom. Guy just seems to think that in invading Poland, Nazi Germany has gone a bit too far. And then this phrase ‘the enmity of God.’ Is Waugh serious? Well, his character probably is. Guy is a devout and in many ways simple Catholic, with a simple sense of right and wrong.

The flap

All this is taking place in the spring and early summer of 1940 which saw, in the wider world of war, the Russian invasion of Finland and the German invasion of Norway, this latter prompting a badly organised and chaotic British attempt to land troops and hold the German advance. (Waugh’s earlier novel, Put Out More Flags, includes towards the end a passage describing the ill-fated involvement of one of the characters, Cedric Lyne, in this badly organised fiasco.) And then, of course, the evacuation of Dunkirk, 26 May to 4 June 1940.

All kinds of rumour reach our chaps and this is a useful social history aspect of the novel, what makes it more than history, that it doesn’t record what happened, but what educated people of the time thought was happening and was going to happen.

Aldershot

So they’re sent to Aldershot in Surrey, with some description of the surrounding sandy heathland. Apthorpe distinguishes himself again by, the second he’s put in charge when the commander in chief is briefly absent, causing a great panic when he claims he has reports of German paratroopers landing.

Maps of Calais are issued as if they’re going to be shipped across to fight there, the officers memorise them, discuss lines of defence and so on. Guy’s platoon is dominated by the impressive figure of Company Sergeant Major Rawkes. Guy leads his men on a training exercise on the big barren heathland, everyone gets lost, some men go absent without leave, no-one knows what is going on, rumours fly in all directions.

Tony

Guy receives two letters from his father, the first one (2 June 1940) lamenting that his nephew, Tony, appears to be missing presumed killed in France, the second one (12 June 1940) with the reassuring news that he is in fact a prisoner of war, but the doleful commentary that a) it was shameful that his regiment surrendered to the Germans, but they were ordered to and b) it is likely to be a long war and so a shame that such a fine fellow is going to spend the best years of his young manhood behind bars. He receives both letters on the day the Germans march into Paris, 14 June 1940.

The world has shifted on its axis. Nobody expected France to fall at all, and certainly not so quickly. Now Britain really is alone. Churchill gave his ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’ speech on 4 June 1940.

North Cornwall

The regiment is moved to Cornwall. Waugh details the boredom of hanging round not knowing what the future holds. There are wild rumours that the Germans are about to take Limerick in Ireland and the Halberdiers are about to be shipped over to defend it. Much studying maps of Limerick. Nothing happens. The officers have to cook up ways to keep the men entertained, lectures (Guy gives a well received one about wine making, knowledge he gained in Italy). Football. Evening games of bingo which, surprisingly, Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke recommends and calls ‘housey-housey’.

Extraneous figures came to add to the congestion. An odd, old captain like a cockatoo in the gaudy service-dress of a defunct regiment of Irish cavalry. He said he was the cipher officer and was roped in to lecture on ‘Court Life at St. Petersburg’.

Seen from Waugh’s perspective, army life is one surreal and farcical event after another. This is what makes the books so supremely readable and enjoyable, the tone of quiet humour which suffuses them, occasionally rising to moments of supreme farce.

South Cornwall

Then they are ordered to pack up everything and shunted on a series of trains across to the South Cornwall coast where they are ordered to guard several miles of heavily barbed wired beach. Top brass come for an inspection and one of the intelligence officers goes out of his way to emphasise the risk of fifth columnists, a concept and phrase which had only recently been coined, by General Franco during the Spanish Civil War.

This leads to an incident when Guy has a touch of the Apthorpes and reacts with paranoia when two officers turn up at his HQ (a requisitioned hotel) claiming to be from A Company, the 5th Loamshires. Guy suspects them of being fifth columnists, is impressed by their accurate seeming papers and posh English accents, but nevertheless instructs the sergeant major to take over the bren gun next on the clifftop and cover the pair as they’re taken down for a dip in the sea by a soldier he deputes for the job. If they make one funny move, the sergeant major is to shoot them. The dismay of Sergeant Major Rawkes who had, until this moment, thought Guy wasn’t too bad, for an officer, is very funny.

Brook Park

They’re ordered to pack up yet again and entrain for Brook Park in Surrey. Here occurs an event which the sardonic and witty fellow officer, de Souza, nicknames ‘the Languishing of Leonard’. Early on we had met officer Leonard’s wife, Daisy, who is distinctly not the right class, who drops her aitches and speaks out of turn at dinners or drinks for the regimental officers. She has followed her man from base to base, taking hotel rooms and now announces that she is pregnant. She kicks up an immense fuss and wants Leonard seconded to a safe domestic posting so he can be with her. Very sheepishly Leonard falls in line with her demands, secures his posting, from which point onwards the Adjutant, or acting head of the regiment, requests that his name never be mentioned again. Shame.

Liverpool

Next thing they know they are given two days leave (Guy goes to visit his father and finds him, of course, knee deep in the classics text he’s teaching the little chaps at the evacuated prep school) before returning to barracks at which point the entire regiment is packed up and sent to Liverpool.

After the usual chaos, embarking, disembarking and so on, they finally set sail to the Bay of Biscay, are joined by a fleet and sail on to the coast of Africa, near Dakar, to be precise (capital of what is now Senegal).

Here the fleet moors and numerous high level meetings are held. Initially Brigadier Ritchie-Hook is excited because they are finally going to get to land and biff the enemy. But this turns to bitter frustration when the raid is called off. The ordinary soldiers celebrate but Guy is called to a meeting of senior officers, namely the Brigadier, Colonel Tickeridge and the ship’s captain.

The beach raid in Africa

Ritchie-Hooke is furious that the raid has been called off because naval intelligence has some aerial photos of the beaches which could be interpreted to indicate that they’re criss-crossed with wire. But in this little meeting he is gleeful because he and Tickeridge have persuaded the captain of the ship to let them send a tiny little landing party to ascertain whether this is true. And Guy is to lead it.

He is told to go and choose a dozen men who will be taken aboard a launch by a navy captain, shuttled ashore under cover of darkness, faces blacked, carrying minimal equipment. Their mission is to ascertain the existence or not of ‘wire’ and capture a souvenir, a coconut, say, as proof of their trip.

The atmosphere of tense excitement is beautifully conveyed. There’s a beautiful little description as Guy and his men wait in the hold for the little sally-port, or door low down in the side of the ship, to be opened so they can climb a short distance down a rope ladder into the launch:

The lights were all turned off in the hold before the sally-port was opened by one of the crew. It revealed a faintly lighter square and a steamy breath of the sea.

Well, to be brief, they chug onto the beach, slip over the side and wade through the warm water, tiptoe up the ashore and do, indeed, find wire, rows of wire amateurishly strung across it. Then sounds and someone starts firing and then lots of guns start firing. Guy blows his whistle for general retreat but one of his chaps goes haring forward into the darkness. The rest return to the boat unharmed and the sailor captaining it reports everyone present and correct but Guy knows he saw someone else and goes back to check.

Just as well he did, for he discovers one of his men crawling back through the dunes, wounded in the leg. Guy curses, runs forward, supports him arm over shoulder back to the launch, heaves him in and the launch turns and putters back to the ship. As he helps him Guy realises this disobedient man is none other than… Ben Ritchie-Hook. Not only that, but after he is manhandled into the launch he slips into Guy’s lap the object he’s been hugging close all this time. It is the severed head of an African soldier.

The ‘gruesome’ in Waugh

What to make of this? It is at the same time farcical, comic and gruesome. But readers will remember this is the sometimes puzzlingly extreme tone he takes in many of his books. It is as if part of his approach to humour is to occasionally crank it up to broad farce, and then sometimes to take farce way over the top into The Gruesome.

It’s easy to forget that in his very first novel, Decline and Fall, when the young innocent Paul Pennyfeather finds himself in prison, he discovers that the padre is none other than one of his teachers at the crappy private school he taught at in Wales, Prendergast, who has retrained as a chaplain, and how the prison governor with his fancy ideas, decides it is a good thing to try and reform one of their most notorious prisoners by allowing him to express himself in the carpentry shop – and how this prisoner takes the first opportunity to saw off the padre’s head.

Ritchie-Hooke later explains that the man raised his gun at him so Ritchie chucked a grenade which blew him to bits, one of the bits of which was the head (which he proceeded to ‘trim’ a bit). The beheading of the African is no more offensive than the decapitation of Prendergast i.e. a bit offensive against good taste and restraint. What definitely is offensive is the way Ritchie-Hook refers to the head as his ‘coconut’ and so does everyone else concerned during the incident’s repercussions.

The repercussions are that Ritchie-Hooke has gone too far this time and is recalled to London for a bollocking and possibly the end of his military career. Guy was only obeying direct orders but finds himself also condemned to have a black mark against him.

Freetown

Having abandoned the attack on Dakar the allied fleet sails on to Freetown, the port capital of Sierra Leone (a British colony which remained secure during the war). Damaged ships turn back. The two ships carrying the Halberdiers dock and they go ashore.

There is a new brigadier. He calls Guy in, tells him that during the journey he was promoted captain but that, in light of his involvement in the Dakar fiasco, he has been demoted again. He is to be recalled to London. He will be flown there along with Ritchie-Hooke as soon as the latter is fit enough to travel.

Here in Freetown he makes his second mistake. Apthorpe took the opportunity of leave to go up country. Now word comes back that he is ill. In fact he has been brought back by native bearers in a Victorian style ‘sheeted hammock’ and deposited in hospital.

The brigade major gives Guy permission to visit Apthorpe and recommends he take a bottle of whiskey along, it’s always a nice gesture, though strictly speaking advised against. Guy does so and has a long rambling encounter with Apthorpe who is genuinely ill. Guy slips the whiskey under his bedclothes. A nurse coming in smells it on their breath and says the doctor has forbidden it but Guy lies and says he just gave Apthorpe a nip from his flask.

During this interview Apthorpe, in his comically earnest and tragic way, entrusts Guy with a last wish, which is to ensure that he (Guy) hands over Apthorpe’s legendary pile of kit and equipment to his old friend ‘Chatty’ Corner (who we met earlier in the book when he attended one of the regimental drinks parties). Guy promises and leaves.

A few days later the brigade major calls him in to tell him that Althorpe is dead. Drank the whole bottle of whiskey in a day. Guy is shocked but then more shocked to learn that he is being blamed. The brigade major was the one who suggested the idea, but now holds him responsible.

(Throughout Apthorpe’s dying scenes there is another thread of Waugh’s irrepressible cheeky comedy, which is that Apthorpe solemnly assures him that when he told him, all the way back at the start of the book, that he had two aunts, he was, in fact, fibbing: he only has one. Guy accepts this deathbed confession with a straight face. But this misconception, that Apthorpe had two aunts who will grieve his loss, is then repeated by every other officer and official involved in the case, adding a wonderful thread of humour to counterpoint the rather grim fact of his actual death.

Again, as in the story of the decapitated African, grim death is inextricably intertwined with farce. It is a conscious policy.

So anyway, now Guy has two black marks against him. A flying boat lands in the harbour. It is to take him and Ritchie-Hook back to London and at this point the novel ends.

Cutaway ending

Except that, as Guy flies back to Blighty and an uncertain future, Waugh uses his characteristic technique of cutting away from the protagonist to have him and his plight be discussed by people at some distance from the action who, therefore, treat it with the levity and half attention we all give to gossip about people we half know or have vaguely heard of. It is a home counties version of the Alienation Effect. It is half humorous, half-despairing. It is the way human life is, never really understood, immediately transformed into gossip, all our lives, ultimately, dust. Sarum-Smith and de Souza attend the funeral of Apthorpe, laid to rest in the English cemetery in Freetown, and then remark on the fact that both of the oldest ‘new’ officers, the ones they nicknamed ‘uncle’, have left on the same day (one being buried, the other flying home under a cloud):

‘Both Uncles gone the same day.’
‘Funny, I was thinking the same. I rather preferred Crouchback on the whole.’
‘He seemed a nice enough fellow. I could never quite make him out. Pity he made an ass of himself.’
Already the Second Battalion of the Halberdiers spoke of Guy in the past tense. He had momentarily been of them; now he was an alien; someone in their long and varied past, but forgotten.

The old truth: life is intense tragedy to the person living it, but comedy to everyone else.

Waugh’s worldview

Snobbery

Only members of his class count. The narrator is scornful of anyone outside his circle and its very limited extension into the narrow circle of People Like Us.

The vulgar middle class

Throughout his works Waugh is snooty about people who make a living through trade, shopkeepers, merchants, and what you might call the lower professions, accountants and the like. Thinking about the professions, the very big gap in his oeuvre is the legal profession. If you think about Dickens, his works are full of lawyers and legal cases. None in Waugh. The central profession is, in the 1930s comedies, journalism and, in the novels from Put Out More Flags, the army.

The working classes

The working class is invisible except for servants, publicans, waiters and waitresses (in civilian life) and batmen, valets, servants and drivers (in the army). Oh and the actual soldiers, the common soldier, the private. Almost none of these are mentioned and none are named. When Guy takes his little troupe ashore at Dakar the sergeant has a name but none of the men. They are anonymous extras.

But what interests me is not Waugh’s snobbish, privileged, entitled elitism, as such. It’s more to do with the way that, operating within this closed, super-narrow, elite worldview – the upper class, private school and Oxbridge, country house and the-old-regiment kind of world, bolstered by the exclusiveness and elitism of his upper-class Catholic faith – enables his discourse, allows the texts to be written. A writer can’t write about the entire world; you have to pick a subject. Waugh isn’t trying to describe the great shambling chaos of the modern world. His bright, alert, highly regimented, policed and orderly world is the unshakeable foundation which allows him to create these comic, satirical and, occasionally, devastating fictions.

The elitism is as much a genre as a worldview, with its own customs and conventions. If, for the purpose of reading and enjoying his books, you accept this worldview, then the interest moves on from anatomising the worldview itself, to enjoying the way Waugh subverts, bends and occasionally breaks it.

Private schools and prep schools

Authors of his generation just can’t get away from memories of their childhood prep schools and boyhood private schools. They make endless comparisons to them, something reminds them of this or that at prep or public school, somehow prep schools are always cropping up as actual items: thus the location of training in Southsea is a requisitioned prep school and Mr Crouchback finds a private school evacuating to near his hotel and is invited to become a teacher, a Classics teacher, of course. I wasn’t at all surprised when (in the third book in the trilogy) de Souza tells Guy:

‘All army courses are like prep schools–all that welcoming of the new boys.’ (Unconditional Surrender, page 97)

It’s the first point of comparison for all these privately educated men.

Mental illness

I’ve mentioned it repeatedly in my reviews of Waugh’s novels, but a surprising number of them feature characters or passages dealing with mental illness or mental breakdown. Thus the nervous collapse of Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies, the teetering on the brink of shocked breakdown of Tony Last in A Handful of Dust, the decline into depressed alcoholism of former High Society doyenne Angela Lyne in Put Out More Flags, the mental collapse of Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited, not one but two suicides in The Loved One. Several of his short stories are about homicidal lunatics (Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing and The Sympathetic Passenger).

In the trilogy Waugh continues his interest in several ways, at several levels. Guy’s elder brother, Ivo, has a complete collapse into psychosis and starves himself to death. Guy himself has been down enough to qualify as depressed and there are plenty of descriptions of his sense of hollowness, emptiness and futility:

He [was] himself destitute, possessed of nothing save a few dry grains of faith.

His brother-in-law, Box-Bender, frankly expects Guy to go mad at any moment, like his older brother, which doesn’t help. And then there’s something odd, ‘rum’, about the central figure, Apthorpe, mounting in eccentricity all the way through to his final collapse.

It feels like madness is constantly lurking just around the corner in any Waugh text. For the most part Waugh manages to keep the lid on it, contain it, and express it in socially acceptable form as a sense of the ludicrous or the farcical. But sometimes, pop! madness or despair emerge into the open.

Influence of film

1. As I’ve pointed out in other reviews, the film technique of quick cutting between scenes is something Waugh absorbed and used to great effect, most notably in an early novel like Vile Bodies but more subtly throughout all his fictions. He is still using it liberally throughout the trilogy, which often features sequences of 2 or 3-page scenes, moving quickly from one setting to another.

2. At moments, like so many of us, like so many characters in twentieth century fiction, Guy compares his behaviour to what people would do in a film and finds himself failing to live up to the Hollywood ideal of dashing masculinity.

3. And then, sometimes, he just takes the mickey out of movies, very amusingly:

Once Guy saw a film of the Rising of ’45. Prince Charles and his intimates stood on a mound of heather, making a sad little group, dressed as though for the Caledonian Ball, looking, indeed, precisely as though they were a party of despairing revellers mustered in the outer suburbs to meet a friend with a motor-car who had not turned up.

An awful moment came when the sun touched the horizon behind them. The Prince bowed his head, sheathed his claymore and said in rich Milwaukee accents: ‘I guess it’s all off, Mackingtosh.’

Influence of books

The comparing oneself with cultural ideals comes over more clearly in his comparisons with popular fiction. Early on in the book Guy recalls a story of derring-do he was read at prep school (naturally) during the Great War, and which inspired him and his friends with images of dashing heroism. The memory comes when the Brigadier addresses the men:

‘Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘to-morrow you meet the men you will lead in battle.’

It was the old, potent spell, big magic. Those two phrases, ‘the officers who will command you…’, ‘the men you will lead…’ set the junior officers precisely in their place, in the heart of the battle. For Guy they set swinging all the chimes of his boyhood’s reading…

‘…”I’ve chosen your squadron for the task, Truslove.” “Thank you, sir. What are our chances of getting through?” “It can be done, Truslove, or I shouldn’t be sending you. If anyone can do it, you can. And I can tell you this, my boy, I’d give all my seniority and all these bits of ribbon on my chest to be with you. But my duty lies here with the Regiment. Good luck to you, my boy. You’ll need it”…’

The words came back to him from a summer Sunday evening at his preparatory school, in the headmaster’s drawing-room, the three top forms sitting about on the floor, some in a dream of home, others – Guy among them – spell-bound.

This passage explains much, about ideals and identity and the centrality of his bloody private school in both of them. But it also, on a comic level, gives rise to a recurring trope which is when Guy finds himself in a tight corner and wonders what this ‘Truslove’ character from his boyhood stories would have done in his place. Thus he refers, later on, to an officer volunteering for a mission ‘Truslove style’, and ironically nicknames the farcical episode on the beach of Dakar ‘Operation Truslove’.

It is a variation on the deep central issue I’ve mentioned above, of the way so many men – well, writers, anyway – of this generation, never escaped their public school manners, morals and essentially immature, schoolboy worldview.

Credit

Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1952. All references are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on January 3, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Novel, Second World War

Tagged 1940, Africa, alcoholism, Ambrose Goodall, Angela Crouchback, Apthorpe, Apthorpe Furibundus, Apthorpe Gloriosus, Apthorpe Immolatus, Arthur Box-Bender, Bellamy’s, Ben Ritchie-Hook, bingo, British Army, Brook Park, Broome, Bush Thunder-box, Castello Crouchback, Catholicism, Chatty Corner, Claridge's hotel, classy system, Daisy Leonard, Dakar, de Souza, decline and fall, Dunkirk, elitism, English literature, Evelyn Waugh, farce, Fiasco, fiction, Freetown, General Franco, German invasion of Norway, Gervase Crouchback, Guy Crouchback, Halberdiers, history, idealism, Ireland, Italy, Ivo Crouchback, Kenya, Kut-al-Imara House, Leonard, Limerick, Literature, Liverpool, Lord Kilbannock, Major Erskine, Major Tickeridge, Marine Arms Matchet, Matchet, Men at Arms, mental illness, Mr Pelecci, Neville Chamberlain, north Devon, novel, Paul Pennyfeather, Penkirk, practical joke, Privilege, Royal Corps of Halberdiers, Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, Sarum-Smith, Second World War, second world war literature, Senegal, Sergeant Major Rawkes, Sierra Leone, snobbery, South Cornwall, Southsand, Southsand-on-sea, Spanish Civil War, Sword of Honour, Thunder-Box, Tommy Blackhouse, Tony Box-Bender, trilogy, Trimmer, Truslove, upper class, Winston Churchill, working classes

Posted by Simon on January 3, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/03/men-at-arms-evelyn-waugh/

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh (1948)

‘Pardon me. Aren’t you the friend of the strangulated Loved One in the Orchid Room? My memory’s very bad for live faces.’
(Miss Aimée Thanatogenos in The Loved One, page 70)

In Hollywood with Dennis Barlow

We are in the British expat community in Hollywood, California. Dennis Barlow is 28 (p.33). He was a budding poet back in Britain but was lured to Hollywood on the promise of extending his literary potential and making a lot of money. However, he didn’t like the life of a lackey to the Megalopolitan film studio. ‘He repined, despaired, fled,’ and got a (poorly paid) job at a pet cemetery (The Happier Hunting Ground) run by fast-talking, business-minded Mr Schultz, working alongside brisk Miss Poski. Here, grateful Americans pay to have their pet cats, dogs, parrots, goats and many other species embalmed, stuffed, buried or cremated. They like Dennis because:

‘They find me reverent. It is my combination of melancholy with the English accent. Several of our clientele have commented favourably upon it.’

Sir Francis Hinsley

Since he moved to Hollywood, Dennis has lived with Sir Francis Hinsley. A generation earlier Sir Francis had been the only Brit with a knighthood in Hollywood, ‘the doyen of English society, chief script-writer in Megalopolitan Pictures* and President of the Cricket Club.’ Twenty-plus years later his career has not prospered. He now works in the lowly studio press department and the swimming pool which used to flash with the shining limbs of lovely young starlets is now ‘cracked and over-grown with weed’ (an entirely coincidental but slightly eerie overlap with the dominant image from J.G. Ballard’s short stories).

(* Mention of Megalopolitan Pictures will remind anyone who’s read Waugh’s short stories that this is the name of the fictional film company mentioned in the 1932 short story lampooning the British film industry, ‘Excursion in Reality’. Even in relatively small details like this, Waugh reused names and characters which, cumulatively, go to create the strong sense of a parallel comic universe. If the shabby world of seedy sin and sweaty guilt portrayed by Graham Greene came to be called Greeneland, surely Waugh’s use of recurring comic names and characters throughout his oeuvre helped to create WaughWorld.)

‘Juanita del Pablo’

Hinsley’s most recent triumph is the PR creation of a new star, ‘Juanita del Pablo.’ That isn’t her real name, her real name is Baby Aaronson. She was spotted by a director for her eyes, and handed over to Hinsley to mould. So he changed her name, got her plastic surgery to make her look more Hispanic and got her flamenco lessons. Unfortunately, a few movies into her career and the League of Decency has cracked down on immoral films i.e. ones which include passionate Hispanic babes. Now Irish women are all the rage, so Hinsley’s getting ‘Juanita’s hair dyed auburn, they’ve pulled out all her teeth and given her dentures to help her learn Irish brogue. Hinsley is sitting on the verandah of his rundown bungalow with Dennis trying to decide on a suitably Irish name for his remodelled creation.

Sir Ambrose Abercrombie

Thus the narrative opens when Sir Francis and Dennis are enjoying a sundowner at the end of another arid scorching California day. Another venerable Brit pops by. This is Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, who ‘used to bounce about the lots in his famous series of fatiguing roles, acrobatic, heroic, historic, and come almost nightly to Sir Francis for refreshment’. His career has continued to thrive and he is now very much President of the Cricket Club and acknowledged head of the English expat community. He very very much disapproves of Dennis taking a job at the pet cemetery. Lets the side down, very bad form.

Sir Francis is fired by his studio…

The plot, such as it is, kicks in when, a few week later, Sir Francis makes a presentation to the assembled board of the studio, reading out his press release for Juanita’s new Irish backstory and profile. It goes down badly and, as soon as he’s left the room, the execs agree to hand the project over to someone else. For a few more days Francis works from home with the studio secretary. Then one day she fails to turn up. He makes a few calls to the studio, finds himself put off and batted around various secretaries, then finally pops into the studio, to discover his office has been given to someone else (with thumping satire, named ‘Lorenzo Medici’), his name removed from the door, his stuff chucked in a skip, and that he has been fired, without anyone having the guts or decency to tell him.

… and hangs himself

Dennis comes home late from work to discover Sir Francis has hanged himself on the stairs. He has to cut him down and call the cops. It is Sir Francis’s death which triggers the main content of the book, which is Dennis’s visit to the largest cemetery and morticians in Los Angeles, the famed Whispering Glades.

Whispering Glades Memorial Park

There is some attempt at fictionalisation but the long passage which dominates the first half of this short book reads almost like a piece of magazine journalism, as Dennis is given a guided tour of the cemetery by a series of immaculately presented, polite and efficient young women, who talk him (and the reader) through every possible variety of service and product which the cemetery offers, for example: is the body to be embalmed, buried or cremated? In fact, in the words of the soft-spoken and sensitive guide:

‘Normal disposal is by inhumement, entombment, inurnment or immurement, but many people just lately prefer insarcophagusment. That is very individual. The casket is placed inside a sealed sarcophagus, marble or bronze, and rests permanently above ground in a niche in the mausoleum, with or without a personal stained-glass window above. That, of course, is for those with whom price is not a primary consideration.’ (p.37)

Is there to be a funeral service, in which case which denomination, Protestant, nonconformist, Catholic, Jewish or other? Will the body be displayed for mourners, in which case full body lying on a sofa, or in a casket, casket half closed, casket only revealing the face? What should the body be wearing, formal attire or did he or she have favourite clothes? Holding symbolic objects, for example a favourite toy, if it’s a child, or a flower to symbolise peace? In which part of the cemetery should the body be buried, in a family plot or Pilgrims’ Rest, in Lovers’ Nest or on the beautiful Lake Isle or, if a writer, in Poets’ Corner?

Throughout the presentation the winsome young lady uses the phrase The Loved One rather than the deceased, the body, the corpse – ‘The Loved One’ and the repetition of this phrase begins to give it a noumenal, rather unreal charge.

We learn that Whispering Glades was founded by a Wilbur Kenworthy who had a dream of presenting the dead to their mourners as happy and at peace, and so is reverently referred to by his employees as The Dreamer. (By the way, just as the deceased is referred to as The Loved One, so the the mourners, relatives and so on of the deceased are uniformly referred to as The Waiting Ones.)

This is all very entertaining (although note the way, that as with so much Waugh, it is also deeply factual; as I the smooth sales patter of the cemetery’s sales woman went on and on it began to make me think about my own funeral arrangements i.e. I don’t have any, and whether I ought to make some).

Identikit American young women

But at one point in the tour the saleswoman hands over to a cosmetician and something happens: Dennis is smitten by her. Part of the reason reads, nowadays, as pretty controversial. It is because she is different, different from the identikit appearance of so many many young American women which Dennis (and Waugh) note, lament and satirise – and he goes on to describe the way post-war America was covered by identikit lookalike stewardesses and hostesses and waitresses and so on. Of the saleswoman who’s brought him this far, he writes:

She left the room and Dennis at once forgot everything about her. He had seen her before everywhere. American mothers, Dennis reflected, presumably knew their daughters apart, as the Chinese were said subtly to distinguish one from another of their seemingly uniform race, but to the European eye the Mortuary Hostess was one with all her sisters of the air-liners and the reception-desks, one with Miss Poski at the Happier Hunting Ground. She was the standard product. A man could leave such a girl in a delicatessen shop in New York, fly three thousand miles and find her again in the cigar stall at San Francisco, just as he would find his favourite comic strip in the local paper; and she would croon the same words to him in moments of endearment and express the same views and preferences in moments of social discourse. She was convenient… (p.45)

Obviously, young #metoo feminists might read this as an objectifying, degrading description, typical male condescension etc, and there is obviously something to this. But you could turn it right around and say that Waugh had noticed, and was satirising, precisely the ‘honey I’m home’ identikit model of American womanhood which feminists of the 1960s protested against and are still protesting against. Later on, Waugh repeats the same sort of idea i.e. the way American women in particular were slaves to American consumerism and advertising.

[She] spoke the tongue of Los Angeles; the sparse furniture of her mind—the objects which barked the intruder’s shins—had been acquired at the local High School and University; she presented herself to the world dressed and scented in obedience to the advertisements; brain and body were scarcely distinguishable from the standard product. (p.105)

Miss Aimée Thanatogenos, cosmetician

Anyway, the cosmetician that the standard-model guide and hostess hands Dennis over to is not a ‘standard product’, she is more rare and refined and individual, less plastered in just the right make-up. Waugh gives her Greek parentage and the comic name Aimée Thanatogenos and Dennis falls in love with her. The only snag is that Aimée Thanatogenos adores the most senior figure at Whispering Glades, the head embalmer, the fabulously named Mr Joyboy. What a great name. A truly great piece of comic invention.

Mr Joyboy, chief embalmer

Mr Joyboy is not handsome or attractive but he is a master at his trade.

Mr Joyboy was not a handsome man by the standards of motion-picture studios. He was tall but unathletic. There was lack of shape in his head and body, a lack of colour; he had scant eyebrows and invisible eyelashes; the eyes behind his pince-nez were pinkish-grey; his hair, though neat and scented, was sparse; his hands were fleshy; his best feature was perhaps his teeth and they though white and regular seemed rather too large for him; he was a trifle flat-footed and more than a trifle paunchy. But these physical defects were nugatory when set against his moral earnestness and the compelling charm of his softly resonant voice.

Mr Joyboy can make any corpse, no matter how mangled, appear beautiful and serene for its resting in state. Not only that but when he arrived at Whispering Glades he brought new manners and decorousness to the operation. Under the previous head cosmetician the trolleymen referred to corpses and stiffs and even the ‘dead meat’. Under Mr Joyboy all such disrespect was scrupulously banned. He not only is a master cosmetician, he enforces respect and courtesy wherever he goes. And so that is why Miss Aimée Thanatogenos adores him.

Now, the plot is padded out with various events, for example Sir Ambrose takes charge of the funeral arrangements and commissions Dennis to research materials for Sir Ambrose’s eulogy and to write a poem in honour of the deceased, so there is quite a lot of bother about Dennis going through the dead man’s books and looking for inspiration.

(By the way, I was expecting to get a description of Sir Francis’s funeral, complete with comic caricatures of Hollywood types, but Waugh resists the temptation and the funeral is barely even mentioned, glossed over in order to get on with the plot.)

Encounter on the Isle of Rest

But the real core of the story is the way Dennis, a genuinely sensitive soul, becomes fascinated by the setup at the Whispering Glades and obsessed by Aimée Thanatogenos. Their interaction is crystallised when he finds himself wandering into the Glades and taking the ferry to the Isle of Rest, there to lie down amid the sound of the bees (a recording emitted from loudspeakers hidden in the mock bee hives) and bumps into Aimée Thanatogenos who has come there for her lunch break. They chat, he finds out more about her, he starts sending her poems.

Dennis’s purloined poems

Admittedly, in a nice comic touch, they’re not poems written by him but cherry-picked from anthologies of English verse although, in another comic touch, Dennis quickly discovers that most of the well-known English poems are unsuitable for plain and simple wooing:

Nearly all were too casual, too despondent, too ceremonious, or too exacting; they scolded, they pleaded, they extolled. Dennis required salesmanship; he sought to present Aimée with an irresistible picture not so much of her own merits or even of his, as of the enormous gratification he was offering. The films did it; the crooners did it; but not, it seemed, the English poets. (p.84)

Miss Thanatogenos consults the Guru Brahmin

Anyway, poor Miss Thanatogenos finds herself torn between dawning feelings for her ardent if sometimes incomprehensible English suitor and her adoration of the older expert in her field, with the result, that in a further comic/satirical strand, she writes a series of querulous letters to a well-known Los Angeles agony aunt:

Once, in days of family piety, it bore the title Aunt Lydia’s Post Bag; now it was The Wisdom of the Guru Brahmin, adorned with the photograph of a bearded and almost naked sage. (p.80)

With predictable inevitability, we are told that the daily column and sensitive replies of this woman agony aunt are, in fact, churned out by two overworked, harrassed, middle-aged hacks.

The Guru Brahmin was two gloomy men and a bright young secretary. One gloomy man wrote the column, the other, a Mr Slump, dealt with the letters which required private answers. (p.93)

Promotion and dinner with Mr Joyboy

Her situation becomes further complicated when Mr Joyboy makes a move on her, to her surprise, dismay and bewilderment. First of all he gives her the frabjous news that the owner of Whispering Glades has decided it is high time it had its first woman embalmer and that Mr Joyboy has recommended her, Miss Thanatogenos, for the role (p.86).

But she is even more thrilled when he modestly and chastely asks if she would do him the honour of dining with him this evening to celebrate. Miss Thanatogenos excitedly accepts, dashing off yet another note to the two disgruntled hacks who go by the name of Guru Brahmin and are beginning to get fed up of her continual requests for advice about her love life.

In the event, the dinner clarifies a lot of things because, eminent in his field and wonderfully competent though he may be, Mr Joyboy is, at the end of the day, just an embalmer in a morticians, not that well paid, and so lives in a very average seedy house in an estate far out on the edge of town with his mother who keeps a crapulous parrot (Sambo) and whines and criticises throughout their shabby meal (tinned noodle soup, a bowl of salad with tinned crab compounded in it, ice-cream and coffee, p.91). Mr Joyboy compounds his crassness by not driving her home but turning her out and telling her a street car back into town runs from the corner. Oh what disappointment!

Miss Thanatogenos becomes engaged to Dennis

As you might imagine, this bitter disappointment makes Miss Aimée Thanatogenos reconsider Dennis as a prospect. At the same time we see Dennis asking the owner of Happier Hunting Grounds for a raise. When Mr Schultz roughly turns him down, Dennis buttonholes the minister performing the funeral of their latest customer (a much-loved Alsatian) how you get into the minister racket and how well it pays. Not very well at all, replies the mournful minister (p.97).

Later that day, Miss Aimée Thanatogenos leads Dennis to one of the many fake chapels and churches scattered around the vast grounds of Whispering Glades, this one a fake Scottish kirk near which is situated a solid granite bench with a heart-shaped hole cut out and a snatch of love poetry. Miss Aimée Thanatogenos makes Dennis solemnly repeat the verse and then they kiss through the big heart-shaped hole. They regard themselves as engaged.

Mr Joyboy sulks

Alas, from that day onwards Mr Joyboy, who had always had a kind world for Miss Aimée Thanatogenos and always gave the corpses she was to paint and finalise an extra special smile, becomes distant and sulky. The corpses no longer have the same smiles. He is himself disappointed, and jealous.

But one day Miss Aimée Thanatogenos makes a special effort to be nice to Mr Joyboy who responds by telling her his mother has experienced a bitter tragedy, her old parrot has passed away and she is inconsolable. Mr Joyboy has gone to the trouble of arranging a funeral for the parrot at the Happier Hunting Ground pet cemetery and invites Miss Aimée Thanatogenos to join them.

Oops. That’s where Dennis works. And once or twice during their engagement, Miss Aimée Thanatogenos has casually let slip that she disapproves of the Happier Hunting Ground and the way it applies to mere animals the ceremony and respect which should be reserved for humans. Although she was introduced to us as an exception to the identikit young American woman, Miss Aimée Thanatogenos is portrayed as every bit as inflexibly moral and high-minded as her devout women ancestors and zealous feminist descendants.

Moreover, Miss Aimée Thanatogenos shows Mr Joyboy a poem Dennis has ‘written’ for her and he is impressed and promises to show it to a writer he knows, to see if it can be published. Oops. We know all of them are simply copied from The Oxford Book of English Verse.

We are now only 20 pages from the end so I expected the narrative to lead up to the comic scene when Miss Aimée Thanatogenos attends the funeral of Mrs Joyboy’s parrot and is shocked to discover that her fiancé works at the despised pet cemetery, has lied to her and might even, with his numerous questions about Whispering Glades, have been just pumping her for commercial tricks and technique all along. Except I was wrong. Like the funeral scene I was expecting, the Big Reveal scene is omitted, and glossed over in a sentence, announcing that Miss Aimée Thanatogenos is so shocked that, in the words of the raddled old hacks who write the Brahmin Guru column, ‘she marries the other guy’.

The engagement of Dennis and Aimée had never been announced in any paper and needed no public denial. The engagement of Mr Joyboy and Aimée had a column-and-a-half in the Morticians Journal and a photograph in The Casket, while the house-journal, Whispers from the Glades, devoted nearly an entire issue to the romance. A date was fixed for the wedding at the University Church. Mr Joyboy had been reared a Baptist and the minister who buried the Baptist dead gladly offered his services. The wardrobe-mistress found a white slumber-robe for the bride. Dr Kenworthy intimated his intention of being there in person. The corpses who came to Aimée for her ministrations now grinned with triumph. (p.106)

This is genius not only because it’s funny, but because of the crispness of the prose. There is no fat. Each comic aspect of the situation is briskly and lucidly described.

Encounter at the nutburger bar

Dennis doesn’t even realise he’s been dumped till he follows Miss Aimée Thanatogenos to a nutburger bar and asks why she hasn’t been returning his calls. She explains a) he lied about the poems b) he lied about working at Happier Hunting Grounds c) he’s an awful person and d) Mrs Joyboy’s dead parrot looked awful in its tiny casket with its head lying on a pillow.

Once he’s grasped the situation, Dennis replies with a barrage of arguments and self justification, none of which sticks till he almost at random mentions the silly vow they took at the Scottish Kirk. To his surprise, this hits home and Miss Aimée Thanatogenos is quelled. In her American dimness, she thinks this is a real, enduring vow and is suddenly struck silent as Dennis drives her home and pulls up outside her flat.

Mr Joyboy fails to offer comfort

Dennis drives off and Miss Aimée Thanatogenos phones her new fiancé, Mr Joyboy, for comfort and reassurance. But she can barely hear him for the tremendous racket in the background. Mr Joyboy’s mother has bought a new parrot and is breaking him in. Miss Aimée Thanatogenos pleads for his time, pleads to see him, but Joyboy persists in saying that at a time like this his mother needs him. It is a new parrot.

Mr Slump counsels suicide

Thoroughly disillusioned, Miss Aimée Thanatogenos next phones the news paper which publishes the Brahmin Guru. It’s the evening so the receptionist tells him the column is written by several gentlemen, she can probably reach Mr Slump at Mooney’s Saloon, so she gets the number and calls him there. The bartender takes the call and hands over the phone. Now as bad luck would have it, Mr Slump, who has been drinking more and more and turning up later and later for work, has been fired just that very day. When Miss Aimée Thanatogenos begins blathering about her love life down the phone he lays the receiver on the counter, takes a drink, orders another drink, and chats to his neighbour till the tinny little voice has quite finished. Picks up the receiver to hear Miss Aimée Thanatogenos pitifully asking what she should do. Take a lift, Mr Slump tells her, to the top of your building then throw yourself off, then hangs up.

Miss Aimée Thanatogenos commits suicide

Miss Aimée Thanatogenos takes some sleeping pills and sleeps till dawn. She wakes, dresses and walks the short distance to Whispering Glades, goes in the staff entrance, sits by the lawn watching them change colour as dawn comes up. Then enters the building, goes to the main workroom, finds a big bottle of poison and injects herself with it. It is cyanide. She dies.

Mr Joyboy comes blubbing

Next morning Mr Joyboy arrives at the Happier Hunting Ground to break the news to Dennis. Dennis had hardened his heart against Miss Aimée Thanatogenos so is not that upset. Joyboy blames him – Dennis brushes aside his accusations – Joyboy wants Dennis to help him dispose of the body before the owner of Whispering Glades finds it. Might be difficult to explain away. Dennis says he’ll think about it and sends him away.

Sir Ambrose makes Dennis an offer

Far funnier is the surprise news that Dennis has quit the Happier Hunting Ground. Without too much effort he has managed to qualify as a non-denominational priest or minister, and has sent round to the British expat community a card announcing the services of ‘Squadron Leader the Rev. Dennis Barlow’.

This brings Sir Ambrose briskly to his door to tell him that working at a pet cemetery was one thing but this, deer boy, this is quite another. It simply won’t do. In the current fraught political situation, it reflects very badly on the old country. Slowly they fence and negotiate and it emerges that the Cricket Club have had a whip-round to pay for Dennis’s ticket home – and that Dennis was expecting precisely this to happen. In fact Sir Ambriose has arrived with a cheque made out to Dennis for travelling expenses which he suavely pockets.

Playing Mr Joyboy

The story ends with Dennis transformed from the sensitive poet obsessed with Whispering Glades and Miss Aimée Thanatogenos and metamorphosed into the confident practical joker / scammer Basil Seal. For when Mr Joyboy returns, still upset and panicking about what to do, Dennis has worked out a very smooth plan.

Problem one, how to dispose of the body? Well, after hours Mr Joyboy must bring Miss Aimée Thanatogenos’s body to the Happier Hunting Ground. As their senior employee, Dennis has free use of the crematorium and they’re often cremating pets who don’t require ceremonies or funerals at all times of day or night. So the staff will leave and he will incinerate Miss Aimée Thanatogenos safely and securely.

Problem two, how to explain Miss Aimée Thanatogenos’s mystery disappearance? Well, everyone knows she had a thing with Dennis and Dennis has abruptly returned to England so all her few acquaintance and workmates need to know is that she’s run off to England with him. Eloped. Unethical but romantic.

Problem three, money. Dennis smoothly extorts $1,000 from Mr Joyboy for performing this service, and tells him to cash Sir Ambrose’s cheque while he’s at the bank.

Cremating Miss Aimée Thanatogenos

And so it is that Dennis drives the Happier Hunting Ground van over to Whispering Glades after dinner and he and Mr Joyboy furtively manhandle a coffin into it. Then he drives them back to the Happier Hunting Ground, they carry the heavy coffin up to the furnace, push it in, turn on the gas and ignite the flames. It will take an hour and a half, and then pulverising the skull, the pelvis and bigger bones, scraping it all into an urn and burying it somewhere. Mr Joyboy departs in disgust.

In a final twist of the satirical knife, Dennis conscientiously makes an entry in the Happier Hunting Ground Book of Remembrance, entering Mr Joyboy as the customer and Aimée as the name of his beloved pet. This means that tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground exists a postcard will be sent to Mr Joyboy with the message: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you.

Unlike so many Englishmen who came hopefully to southern California and failed and broke their hearts and lost all their money, Dennis is leaving triumphant and enriched. What’s more, he will be taking with him back to Blighty a priceless chunk of Experience, of Life, which the artist in him will be able to labour over long and hard. What more could a man ask of life?

Credit

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1948. All references are to the 1971 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on December 30, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in America, Comedy, Literature

Posted by Simon on December 30, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/12/30/the-loved-one-evelyn-waugh/

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Evelyn Waugh: A Biography by Selina Hastings (1994)

Evelyn Waugh 28 October 1903 to 10 April 1966 (aged 62)

Selina Hastings

‘That’

Father, Arthur Waugh

Bad relations with father

Home in North London

Waugh’s diary

Lancing College

Hertford College, Oxford

Nicknames

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Writing

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His wife’s betrayal

Childishness

Conversion to Catholicism

Politics

Fascist Spain and Italy

Waugh’s Second World War

Sex

Music

Anti-Americanism

Post war

1. Writing for money

2. Comic dislike of his children

3. Boredom and depression

Credit

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh

Spin-offs from novels or no short stories at all

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Waugh’s understated debt to Modernism

Waugh and mental breakdown

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1. The Balance (1926)

In the cinema

Adam outside the film

A boyhood memory

Adam talks to his reflection

A shift of perspective

Short conclusion

A House of Gentlefolks (1927)

The Manager of ‘The Kremlin’ (1927)

Love in the Slump (1932)

Too Much Tolerance (1932)

Excursion in Reality (1932)