Nowadays it is not what you do that counts, but who informs against you.
Scott-King’s Modern Europe is a short, high spirited, at times farcically crude satire on the state of Britain and Europe just after the Second World War. I found it humorous and enjoyable all the way through and, as so often with Waugh, also packed with fascinating social and political history.
Waugh’s worldview
Born in 1903, Waugh had been to a good public school and Oxford, experiences which had trained him to be a snobbish, superior, social climber. In all the pre-war novels this attitude doesn’t come over as offensive because the aim of the novels is to mock, satirise, caricature and lampoon the pranks, foibles, eccentricities, cruelty and amorality of just these same upper classes.
However, the Second World War forced Waugh, like so many other people in the arts and the broader population, to really think about what they were fighting for. For a large part of the British population this crystallised into a determination that the country would never go back to the mass unemployment and poverty seen in the 1930s. The mood was captured in the famous Beveridge Report of 1942, which proposed widespread reforms to social welfare system in order to address the big five issues of ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.’
So, well before the war ended the Labour Party made it known it proposed a programme of mass housebuilding, nationalising the medical profession to create a national health service, reforming and extending the state school system, and introducing comprehensive unemployment insurance and state pensions.
Sensible though these ideas might seem to you and me (and they were widely adopted in most other European countries at the time) someone like Waugh could only see the negative sides of these sweeping changes: beautiful countryside disappearing under horrible council estates; dictatorial state intervention into medicine and other professions; the promotion of ghastly grammar school types into the civil service and other professions; the triumph of the crude and common lower middle classes; all to be paid for by ruinously high taxes and, in particular, the introduction of death duties, designed by socialists to ensure the ‘redistribution of wealth’, meaning that old and venerable families, owners of the big estates and country houses so beloved of Waugh, would find themselves financially ruined and having to sell off their property in order to pay the new death tax.
So by mid-way through the war which he and his peers had so enthusiastically joined up to fight in (as described in Put Out More Flags and the Sword of Honour trilogy) Waugh and his peers could see which way the wind was blowing: in the direction of crushing the upper classes, the fox-hunting landed gentry and the high society party society he loved, and replacing it with a more meritocratic, grammar school-run, council housing and welfare state society, paid for by the ruination of everything he loved.
Brideshead Revisited
Thus, as he turned 40, Waugh hardened his heart against every aspect of the modern world and this finds its fullest expression in his longest novel, Brideshead Revisited, which amounts to a prolonged, often self-indulgent, over-written lament for the old ways. It is, in a way, a reprise of his first novel, Decline and Fall, but whereas that was written with all the carefree high spirits of youth, Brideshead is written in a grim mood of middle-aged melancholy. Brideshead is Decline and Fall without the lolz.
This trajectory of fall and collapse is clearly enacted in the main storylines:
- the decline of Sebastian Flyte from high-spirited undergraduate in Oxford to wrecked alcoholic in North Africa
- the long drawn-out decline of the Marchmain family through generations of infidelity (first Lord Marchmain’s and then Julia’s), symbolised by:
- the death of old Marchmain and the inheritance of the estate by the eldest son who has married a ghastly middle-class (and barren, post-menopausal) woman
- the way their pad in London, Marchmain House, one of the last grand old family houses in London (so the gloomy narrator tells us) is sold off to developers who tear it down to build yet another anonymous block of flats
- and then The War and the way that their entire world of fine feelings, fine meals, fine wine and fine theological scruples is swept away in the vast deluge of the war in which the venerable old house is requisitioned by the army and treated appallingly, trees cut down, terrace badly damaged, interiors of all the rooms boarded over or desecrated, and all swarmed over by chavvy squaddies half-heartedly supervised by scruffy NCOs like the demon figure, Hooper, Hooper, the long-haired, unshaven, lackadaisical junior officer whose lack of backbone, discipline or morality comes to epitomise for the narrator the shabby new world which is taking over
- and the other negative figure, the brash, confident Canadian careerist Rex Mottram, whose admittedly impressive efficiency in dealing with the authorities, his loudmouth friends and political ambitions seemed to be going nowhere in peacetime but suddenly come into their own with the arrival of war
So in its outline and mood Brideshead is a surprisingly grim and downbeat novel – venerable old families decline and disintegrate to be replaced by the swarming mob of the new social welfare state. Nonetheless, there are many moments of humour and some passages recapturing Waugh’s old-style, high-spirited comedy.
A grumpy old man complaining about the modern world
But despite its gloom Brideshead can also be seen as beginning to include a new source of comedy, which is the pose of a grumpy-old-man complaining about all aspects of the modern world. As with grumpy old men in general, it’s not clear whether Waugh is genuinely vexed by elements of the modern world or playing up to the role of grumpy old man who can’t be doing with all these new-fangled gadgets and rules. There is an element of exaggeration for comic effect.
This new thread in his comedy is most obvious in the passage set in New York whither the narrator, Charles Ryder, has returned from a long trek through South America before boarding a transatlantic liner back to Blighty. He loathes American hotels and American service. He hates the way Americans, unbidden and uninvited, embark on long soliloquies about their lives on train journeys (‘Their matter passed clean through the mind, and out, leaving no mark, like the facts about themselves which fellow travellers distribute so freely in American railway trains’).
He loathes the way his New York hotel room is overheated but, if he opens the window to get relief, is assailed by the unceasing noise of New York’s streets. This growing dislike of America and Americans reflects the resentment of (some of) Waugh’s generation at the way American manners and idioms were infecting British culture at all levels, most obviously through the medium of the movies, the cinema, which he and his characters enjoyed in the 1930s but which came to symbolise the unstoppable rise of common, vulgar culture (he laments the modern townscape with its ‘close, homogeneous territory of housing estates and cinemas‘; the over-the-top party his wife arranges for him is, in a phrase obviously intended to convey contempt for shallow, meretricious glamour, ‘a cinema actor’s dream.’)
On this transatlantic liner all kinds of things vex the narrator, not least the impractical tackiness of the big ice swan containing caviar which his wife organises as the centrepiece of an overcrowded party. But his irritation with the modern world is maybe epitomised by the utterly trivial but symptomatic way that the ship claims to offer every convenience of the modern world and yet he can’t get a simple whiskey and soda without ice because all the soda water on the ship is iced, that’s the American way, sorry sir.
Scott-King’s Modern Europe
At just 50 pages in the Penguin paperback edition of the Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh and 17,285 words long, Scott-King’s Modern Europe is longer than a short story but far short of being a novel. If anything it reads like a prose version for a screenplay for a particularly madcap Ealing Comedy.
The novella takes the thousand and one aspects of the horrible modern world which the grumpy old man described above detests, and plays them entirely for laughs, high spirited satirical laughs although (as always with Waugh) with an increasing sense of bite.
As to the plot, Scott-King is a dusty old failure of a dull-as-ditchwater classics teacher at some public school, Grantchester who the boys nickname ‘Scotty’ and the other teachers ignore. He has devoted his spare time to the fabulously pointless task of translating an epic poem by the unknown 17th century poet Bellorius into Spenserian stanzas (i.e. the stanza form used in the genuinely wonderful English epic poem The Faerie Queene by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser). The key thing about this fictional poet Bellorius is he is made to come from the utterly fictional nation of ‘Neutralia‘.
Once Scott-King has completed his opus he sends it off to a few literary magazines who politely rebuff him and there the matter lies until he receives an unexpected invitation. A smart envelope contains an invitation with an embossed coat of arms from ‘His Excellency Dr Bogdan Antonic, international secretary of the Committee, Simona University, Neutralia.’ Turns out it’s the tercentenary of the death of the great Bellorius and, to his surprise, Scotty-King discovers that he has been invited to attend an academic conference about Bellorius’s Great National Poet. Fortunately the little week-long break falls during the school vacation and so Scott-King accepts the invitation, secures permission from the headmaster, packs his bags and reports to the airport for to collect the ticket which has been bought for him.
Neutralia
You won’t be surprised to learn that just about everything which can possibly go wrong, does go wrong. For a start, where is ‘Neutralia’? Waugh cleverly blends aspects of central, eastern and south-eastern (Balkan) nations, but when he says that the current military ruler of the country, The Marshall, shrewdly kept Neutralia out of the Second World War (hence its name) the reader suspects there’s a strong element of Franco’s Spain. Its capital:
Simona, stands within sight of the Mediterranean on the foothills of the great massif which fills half the map of Neutralia.
The text describes Neutralia’s history in a kind of St Trinian’s, Ealing Comedy caricature:
For three hundred years since Bellorius’s death his country has suffered every conceivable ill the body politic is heir to. Dynastic wars, foreign invasion, disputed successions, revolting colonies, endemic syphilis, impoverished soil, masonic intrigues, revolutions, restorations, cabals, juntas, pronunciamentos, liberations, constitutions, coups d’etat, dictatorships, assassinations, agrarian reforms, popular elections, foreign intervention, repudiation of loans, inflations of currency, trades unions, massacres, arson, atheism, secret societies—make the list full, slip in as many personal foibles as you will, you will find all these in the last three centuries of Neutralian history. Out of it emerged the present republic of Neutralia, a typical modern state, governed by a single party, acclaiming a dominant Marshal, supporting a vast ill-paid bureaucracy whose work is tempered and humanized by corruption.
At the airport Scotty hates being treated as a ‘VIP’. He hates being strapped into his plane seat like a chicken in an oven, he hates the safety demonstration the smooth and insincere air stewardesses give.
She was a neat, impersonal young woman, part midwife, part governess, part shop-walker, in manner.
Dripping with grumpy old man condescension. Anyway, Scott-King befriends another British academic flying out, Whitemaid, but soon discovers he knows next to nothing about Bellorius and is along for the freebie. There’s a pushy woman journalist, Miss Bombaum, another type who rubs the grumpy old man up the wrong way:
She did not look a lady; she did not even look quite respectable, but he could not reconcile her typewriter with the callings of actress or courtesan; nor for that matter the sharp little sexless face under the too feminine hat and the lavish style of hair-dressing. He came near the truth in suspecting her of being, what he had often heard of but never seen in the life, a female novelist.
When you read a paragraph like that you realise that Waugh has concocted the character of a fuddy-duddy old Classics master in order to give his narrative maximum scope for grumpiness and complaint. And you realise the enormous scope the pose of grumpiness gives you. If you stop trying to keep up with all the changes in the modern world and resign yourself to settling into a kind of permanent sulk against everything – well, it’s surprisingly easy, it’s very reassuring, and by turning the attitude up a little you can soon have friends and family laughing at your grouchy soliloquies.
Viewed from another angle, you can see how Scott-King is a middle-aged version of the naive young Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, only stumbling into a world with far more shadows and darkness. So that thought gives rise to the question: was the external world, the world situation, significantly gloomier in 1946 than it was when Decline and Fall was conceived, in around 1927? I.e. is Waugh’s grumpy aversion to the world of 1946 genuinely justified ? Or purely a result of growing old and resenting change? Discuss.
It’s a darker vision than the earlier books because, beneath under the various running jokes and the comic mishaps of the various characters, is a half serious description of life under a modern dictatorship. The Marshall speaks, and so all the newspapers and media of Neutralia echo his speeches, about ‘Revolution and Youth and Technical Progress and the National Genius’, and all the Neutralians have to parrot the Party line about the wisdom of the Marshall and his regime.
But the shabby reality that Scott-King encounters is poverty and starvation, fear and political manipulation. The host of the motley group of academics and hangers on from all over Europe who assemble for the so-called conference are hosted by Arturo Fe, doctor of Bellacita University. On the bus journey from the airport into the capital Dr Fe casually tells them that Neutralia has lovely food, it’s a shame only the very rich can afford it. Dr Fe explains that everyone who is anyone has to have at least five jobs to keep their heads above water. Thus Dr Fe is not only a scholar,
he is also a lawyer, a judge of the Lower Court. He edits the Historical Review. He has a high position in the Ministry of Rest and Culture, also at the Foreign Office and the Bureau of Enlightenment and Tourism. He speaks often on the radio about the international situation. He owns one-third share in the Sporting Club.
Among the other guests at the reception and gala dinner is the very funny comic figure of an ice blonde from Sweden named Svenginen.
He had taken notice of her in London where she had towered some six inches above the heads of the crowd.
‘I come,’ she said.
Dr Fe bowed. ‘Fe,’ he said.
‘Sveningen,’ she answered.
‘You are one of us? Of the Bellorius Association?’ asked Dr Fe.
‘I speak not English well. I come.’
Dr Fe tried her in Neutralian, French, Italian and German. She replied in her own remote Nordic tongue. Dr Fe raised hands and eyes in a pantomime of despair.
‘You speak much English. I speak little English. So we speak English, yes? I come.’
‘You come?’ said Dr Fe.
‘I come.’
‘We are honoured,’ said Dr Fe.
There is plenty more comedy. The Brits are introduced to a range of comic foreign types, for example, Engineer Garcia (yes, definitely Spain) who once worked for seven years with the firm Green, Gorridge and Wright Limited at Salford and is convinced all the guests must have heard of it and know Salford well, an assumption in which he is sadly disappointed.
But at the same time the sky slowly darkens and things start to unravel. At the night of the gala dinner both Scott-King and Whitemaid get plastered as a result of having travelled all day and had nothing to eat. A few days later they are taken to Bellorius’s home town and forced to be present at the unveiling of a statue of Bellorius which turns out to be the worst thing Scottie has ever seen.
More sinisterly, they are driven some distance out of town to a vast memorial to the war dead and told to lay a wreath in honour of the national poet while being photographed by a rank of photographers – only realising too late that the photos are used by the Neutralian press to show ‘foreign dignitaries’ laying wreaths at the tomb of the dead in the most recent Neutralian civil war.
Slowly they realise the entire conference is a sham and an elaborate public relations exercise in which they are being used by the regime to bolster its international credentials. Scottie enters the hotel drawing room to find the other guests (from numerous European countries) in a dark mood:
The cause of offence emerged through many words and the haze of tobacco smoke. In brief it was this: the Bellorius Association had been made dupes of the politicians.
When he meets Dr Bogdan Antonic, the International Secretary of the Bellorius Association, who invited him, he discovers him to be a very anxious man, a Croat not a Neutralian at all, worried that the authorities are closing in on him, convinced there are spies everywhere. As another Neutralian attending the gala dinner tells him:
‘There is jealousy and intrigue everywhere.’
Two of the delegates to the ‘conference’, a Swiss Professor and a Chinese, go for a little drive in a rented car and are kidnapped by partisans, left over from Neutralia’s civil war. Chances are the two foreigners will be murdered.
In a similar dark vein, as Scott-King’s stay progresses Dr Fe comes under increasing pressure to deliver positive results. He tells Scott-King that there is a plot against his (Dr Fe’s) life and, towards the end of the story, is rumoured to have displeased the Marshal and so ‘disappears’.
Catastrophe
Unfortunately, with the disappearance of Dr Fe go all arrangements for Scott-King’s hotel stay and, more importantly, his return flight. He goes from one government office to another with no joy, in a sample of the bureaucratic obstructionism of new, model post war dictatorships.
Worse is to come because when Scott-King visits the British Consul (the contemptuously named Horace Smudge) he discovers that, since he didn’t register his visit with the British government and does not have all the requisite visas, he is not officially in Neutralia and so the Consul can do nothing to help. Well, how long will it take to apply for a visa, Scottie asks. Ooh could be a long time, old boy; 3, 4 weeks.
But Scott-King only has £75, nowhere near enough to live in the hotel where he’s staying. The consul tells him they’ve already had one sticky case, man named Whitemaid who tries to evade the money-changing laws. Tut tut. Very sad.
Scott-King staggers out of the Consul’s office a broken man. Well, maybe he’ll just stay at the conference hotel till his money runs out and then…?
Scott-King has another, longer meeting with depressed Dr Antonic, supposed host of the Bellorius conference, who takes him to see his even more pessimistic wife in their shabby flat in a tower block whose lift has, in the classic style, broken down. There Scotty sees Neutralian life in all its despair and paranoia:
Do you think,’ he asked, ‘that in Neutralia Western Culture might be born again? That this country has been preserved by Destiny from the horrors of war so that it can become a beacon of hope for the world?’
‘No,’ said Scott-King.
‘Do you not?’ asked Dr Antonic anxiously. ‘Do you not? Neither do I.’
This is coming across as bleak, and it is, but various moments are also very funny. Black humour. But also because it is a return to the clipped and often heartless dialogue of his best comic novels such as Vile Bodies, the comedy of hopelessness.
Anyway, luckily for Scott-King that evening in the hotel restaurant he bumps into Miss Bombaum, the go-getting modern lady journalist, tells her his problem, and she reveals the existence of ‘the Underground’. This is on the model of the underground networks which smuggled Allied airmen out of occupied Europe (or, further back, of the Underground Railway which smuggled slaves out of the American South into the free North)
Bombaum she takes him to meet a man who takes him to meet another man, who turns out to be a ‘major’ in the police, leading the breaking of one of his own laws in an acme of the kind of corruption which flourishes in this kind of repressive state. The policeman agrees to smuggle him out of the country in exchange for all his money, he does it all the time.
In a comically brutal aside, the major also tells Scottie that he has a deal with the government to help ‘disappear’ inconvenient persons.
‘I also have a valued connexion with the Neutralian government. Troublesome fellows whom they want to disappear pass through my hands in large numbers.’
So that’s how later that night Scott-King finds himself travelling in a packed charabanc with six other escapees all dressed up as Ursuline nuns (!). They are taken to a warehouse down by the docks in the port of Santa Maria where he waits for over a week in very hot, very unhygienic conditions. He gives a comically exaggerated but still very pungent sense of post-war Europe, which for several years after the end of the war continued in a state of chaos, with huge numbers of displaced persons (DPs) travelling in all directions:
There were a detachment of Slovene royalists, a few Algerian nationals, the remnants of a Syrian anarchist association, ten patient Turkish prostitutes, four French Pétainist millionaires, a few Bulgarian terrorists, a half-dozen former Gestapo men, an Italian air-marshal and his suite, a Hungarian ballet, some Portuguese Trotskyites. The English-speaking group consisted chiefly of armed deserters from the American and British Armies of Liberation. They had huge sums of money distributed about the linings of their clothes, the reward of many months’ traffic round the docks of the central sea.
One day there’s a panic when it becomes clear that a new police chief has been appointed who isn’t as corrupt as the old one (yet) and is on his way to raid the warehouse. With the result that all the waiting evacuees are rounded up and loaded onto the one boat moored for them in the harbour, far more than it was ever designed for.
Scott-King is locked below decks with this gang of desperados with no food or drink for three very long days as the ship sails the hot Mediterranean. At last the ship docks, the hatches are opened and Scott-King and the others stagger into the dazzling Mediterranean sun. But where is he?
There are soldiers; there is barbed wire; there is a waiting lorry; there is a drive through a sandy landscape, more soldiers, more wire. All the time Scott-King is in a daze. He is first fully conscious in a tent, sitting stark naked while a man in khaki drill taps his knee with a ruler.
‘I say, Doc, I know this man.’ He looks up into a vaguely familiar face. ‘You are Mr Scott-King, aren’t you? What on earth are you doing with this bunch, sir?’
‘Lockwood! Good gracious, you used to be in my Greek set! Where am I?’
‘No. 64 Jewish Illicit Immigrants’ Camp, Palestine.’
Home sweet home
And then, as in so many Waugh the text cuts drastically and completely and we are back in the common room at Grantchester and so, after no doubt difficult diplomatic complications, is Scott-King.
There’s a joke that all the other teachers are swapping yarns about the adventures they had on their summer holidays which all, of course, pale into insignificance to the trauma of what Scott-King has been through but is too shy, or traumatised, to mention. And so everyone carries on thinking what a dull dog ‘Scottie’ is.
Later the headmaster asks him into his study and informs him there’ll be fewer students for the classics class than ever before. Parents are going off the subject. ‘They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?’
But Scott-King does blame them. He is determined to teach classics for as long as he possibly can. For him they represent humane values, civilisation and culture. And as to preparing boys for the modern world, well after what he’s seen of the modern world this summer, he declares:
‘It would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.’
Grumpy old man
Scott-King is made to be exactly the same age as Waugh when he wrote this lampoon, 43. He serves several ends. As a fusty classics teachers he is a kind of grumpy old man par excellence, for whom every aspect of the modern world is displeasing. His retired situation also allows him to be naive and simple, a fool abroad, in the time honoured manner of this kind of comic picaresque.
Lastly, Scott-King can be made, however improbably, into a champion of the very best of Western culture – if, that is, you accept the notion that the literature and culture of ancient Greece and Rome represent the best of Western culture – so that his stubborn refusal to relinquish teaching classics, his determination to hold out for these values of clarity and civilisation as long as he can, and his disgust at the idea that education is about fitting boys to the disgusting ‘modern world’, can be depicted as heroic.
The pleasure of the text
Maybe Waugh’s attitude is risible but it has the merit of being a coherent worldview. Easier to analyse and argue with a worldview which is, at least, coherent, even if you disagree with it.
But also, opinions don’t necessarily matter if their ultimate purpose is to give rise to comedy. An artist may pain the same thing over and over again until you are completely familiar with the subject – take Cézanne’s obsessive painting and repainting of Mont Sainte-Victoire: the point is not that it’s a mountain, the point is the experiments in light and shade and tone and, ultimately, the pleasure of painting itself, the joy of technique.
Something similar with Waugh. On one level you can take issue with his politics, his religion and his general worldview, revealed with increasing grumpiness as he got older. But on another level, you can simply enjoy the absurdity of the farce and, above all, the pleasure of his prose. Almost everything Waugh ever wrote is a joy to read:
The little Mediterranean seaport of Santa Maria lay very near the heart of Europe. An Athenian colony had thrived there in the days of Pericles and built a shrine to Poseidon; Carthaginian slaves had built the breakwater and deepened the basin; Romans had brought fresh water from the mountain springs; Dominican friars had raised the great church which gave the place its present name; the Habsburgs had laid out the elaborate little piazza; one of Napoleon’s marshals had made it his base and left a classical garden there. The footprints of all these gentler conquerors were still plain to see, but Scott-King saw nothing as, at dawn, he bowled over the cobbles to the water-front.
Credit
Scott-King’s Modern Europe by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1947. All references are to the 2011 Penguin paperback edition of the Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh.
Related link
Evelyn Waugh reviews
- Decline and Fall (1928)
- Vile Bodies (1930)
- Remote People (1931)
- Black Mischief (1932)
- Ninety-Two Days (1934)
- A Handful of Dust (1934)
- Waugh in Abyssinia (1936)
- Scoop (1938)
- Work Suspended (1942)
- Put Out More Flags (1942)
- Brideshead Revisited (1945)
- Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947)
- The Loved One (1948)
- Men at Arms (1952)
- Love Among the Ruins (1953)
- What is Waugh satirising in ‘Love Among The Ruins’?
- Officers and Gentlemen (1955)
- The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)
- Unconditional Surrender (1961)
- The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh
- Evelyn Waugh: A Biography by Selina Hastings (1994)
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