‘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:
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)
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
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.
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)
Books & Boots 