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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/

Work Suspended by Evelyn Waugh (1942)

Work Suspended was the title give to the fragments of a novel Waugh abandoned to take up active service during the Second World War. It was published on Waugh’s return, in 1945, in an edition of 500 copies.

Waugh clearly put a lot of effort into the 100 or so pages of what was intended to be a complete novel, before abandoning it. It begs all sorts of questions, the most obvious one being why did he abandon it? I think the answers are pretty straightforward, namely that the text as we have it is long-winded and directionless.

All Waugh’s previous novels were told by a third person narrator and characterised by a very clipped, taut manner, accompanied by a technique which allowed him to cut between scenes, achieving brevity and speed.

This appears to have been his first attempt at a first-person narrative (apart from a handful of first-person short stories) and, at a stroke, adopting this perspective denies him all the features which so characterise the successful novels – the short scenes, the clipped style, the sudden cutaways to completely different settings.

Part One – A Death

John Plant in Morocco

Instead, we are introduced to the long-winded and lugubrious lucubrations of the fictional novelist, John Plant. He tells us he is an established author of popular crime novels, with seven to his name. Having tried various places to work, he has settled on Fez, in north-east Morocco, where he was completing his latest novel, Murder at Mountrichard Castle, when he got a telegram from his Uncle Andrew telling him that his father has died.

They weren’t close. His father was a successful painter in the old manner. There follows an extended passage describing his father’s career and lucrative sideline as not quite a forger, but a painter of paintings in the manner of famous Victorian artists which he sold to the dealers, Goodchild and Godley, who sold on to clients under the impression they were buying an original Millais or whatever. The money from this allowed his father to keep up a nice house in St John’s Wood with servants, the Jellabies, who amiably ripped him off, overcharged on groceries, had little parties when he was out of town etc.

There is a passage describing his father’s apoplectic fury when a nearby house is sold to developers who pull it down to erect a jerry-built block of flats (Hill Crest Court), such a sustained vengeful fury that the narrator wondered if his father was quite sane (one among many Waugh characters, or fictions, which hint at mental illness).

Anyway, he’s dead now, and his Uncle Andrew’s telegram arrived too late for him to attend the funeral. So he sets off for his weekly visit to the Moulay Adullah, a kind of red light district between the old city and the ghetto and is looking forward to an evening of entertainment with his regular girl, ‘a chubby little Berber’ named Fatima, when there is a raid by the French police. All the European customers are lined up and the police take their details. These are passed onto the British Consul and the narrator feels his anonymity has been broken.

Forget the subject matter for a moment. The relevant thing about all this is it’s very slow, slow and wordy, completely unlike the sharp, rapid, precise, clipped style of all his previous works. Here’s a prime slab of text which demonstrates what I mean, as the narrator reflects why being caught in a police raid of the brothel means he can no longer be happy in Fez.

They were still serving dinner at the hotel; the same game of billiards was in progress in the bar; it was less than an hour since I went out. But that hour had been decisive; I was finished with Fez; its privacy had been violated. My weekly visit to the Consulate could never be repeated on the same terms. Twice in twenty minutes the Consul had been called to the telephone to learn that I was in the hands of the police in the Moulay Abdullah; he would not, I thought, be censorious or resentful; the vexation had been mild and the situation slightly absurd—nothing more; but when we next met our relations would be changed. Till then they had been serenely remote; we had talked of the news from England and the Moorish antiquities. We had exposed the bare minimum of ourselves; now a sudden, mutually unwelcome confidence had been forced. The bitterness lay, not in the Consul’s knowing the fact of my private recreations, but in his knowing that I knew he knew. It was a salient in the defensive line between us that could only be made safe by a wide rectification of frontier or by a complete evacuation. I had no friendly territory into which to withdraw. I was deployed on the dunes between the sea and the foothills. The transports riding at anchor were my sole lines of support.

See what I mean by long-winded and slow? Everything is elaborated, everything is spelled out, and with a rather florid array of metaphors towards the end. The opposite of his entire previous style. One guess at why Waugh abandoned it would be that he realised that, if he wrote every single development in the plot out at this kind of length, the finished work would end up being two or three times as long as his previous novels. Indeed, this is what happened with Brideshead Revisited.

John returns to London

So he packs his (small number of) things and returns to London. His uncle has arranged the closure of the family house and dismissing the not particularly grateful Jellabies with an honorarium of £250. He tries to settle into his London club but is restless. When he visits the empty, shut up house in St John’s Wood he is suddenly overcome by grief but it is for his lost youth, not his father. His novel was so close to completion but what with his inheritance and change of scene he finds it impossible to settle to complete it. Restless and unhappy.

Roger and Lucy

He goes for lunch with a chap he was at university with, Roger Simmonds. They ran an undergraduate magazine and the chap’s made a career writing comic novels. He is himself a comic type, having married a rich heiress (Lucy) and become a Socialist. They have a ludicrous conversation which veers from in-depth consideration of how many formal hats a man needs (they eventually conclude a chap can get away with three) to just how they will abolish property after the Revolution.

The brittle comedy of this links up with the way the text refers to some characters from Waugh’s comic novels, Mrs Algernon Stitch the high society power broker in Scoop and the sudden emergence of Basil Seal in part two.

Suddenly it feels like we’ve leaped from the long-winded, slow, lugubrious tone of the opening into a very different text, one of the 1930s comedies. And yet it’s interspersed with moments of more adult reflection. Take a striking couple of sentences in which he reflects on the fact that he supposes he was part of a ‘set’ at university, but has grown old enough to come to dislike them all:

He was one of the very few people I corresponded with when I was away; we met often when I was in London. Sometimes I even stayed with him, for he and half a dozen others constituted a kind of set. We had all known each other intimately over a number of years, had from time to time passed on girls from one to the other, borrowed and lent freely. When we were together we drank more and talked more boastfully than we normally did. We had grown rather to dislike one another; certainly when any two or three of us were alone we blackguarded the rest, and if asked about them on neutral ground I denied their friendship.

Atwater

Both tones – the farcical and the more sombre, middle-aged – are uneasily combined in an odd scene when one day, out of the blue, a servant at the club announces the presence of a man named Atwater who insists he knows Plant and makes him take him to a discreet side room where he cheerfully announces that he’s the man who ran over and killed Plant’s father. He describes the way his father refused to get out of the way, which chimes with several references earlier to Plant’s father actually being obsessed with death and looking forward to it.

But the real point of the scene is to convey the oikish, lower class manner and speech of this ghastly little man, who masquerades as a Mr Thurston to gain admittance to the club but then admits his name is Atwater. Atwater combines bad manners with whining self-pity, mixed with outrageous requests for a loan, and fantasies about setting off for the colonies to make a new start in life. Plant can’t usher him out of the club fast enough.

Destruction of the family home

Same kind of uneasy mood surrounds the final section in which Plant finds it harder than expected to sell his father’s house. Basically the presence of the block of flats has significantly undermined prices and he has to accept £2,500 rather than the £10,000 he had hoped for. And who does the only offer come from? The seedy owner of the said block of flats, a Mr Hardcastle, whose office is in a top floor dingy flat whose door bears the names of half a dozen dodgy real estate companies. Plant imagines the world of sharp practices which emanate from this little room, the deal is done, and within weeks he revisits his family home to find it already half destroyed, his father’s studio in the garden reduced to a concrete base piled with rubble.

So there is some comedy buried in these 50 or so pages, but heavily weighed down by sadness and loss. Decline and fall. Sic transit gloria mundi. Ou sont les neiges d’antan, and so on. Although the subject matter is different, to lugubrious style and gloomy melancholy are substantially to that of Bridehead Revisited.

So when he tots up the profit from the house, combined with his father’s life insurance policy, Plant finds he has a total capital of £3,500 with which to start a new life. What shall he do?

Part Two – A Birth

Move to the country. Waugh is almost always interesting, in the sense that his texts are light on ’emotions’ and psychology and heavy with facts and details. In this aborted text he allowed himself some editorialising which could almost come from a magazine article.

In all the previous novels it was taken for granted how the characters moved from one country house party to another (and this is also the ambience of Aldous Huxley’s early novels). So I found the following passage very useful and insightful as social history. When word gets around that Plant is thinking of buying a place in the country, he sees a shine of interest in his friends’ eyes:

Country houses meant something particular and important in their lives, a system of permanent bolt-holes. They had, most of them, gradually dropped out of the round of formal entertaining; country life for them meant not a series of invitations, but of successful, predatory raids. Their lives were liable to sharp reverses; their quarters in London were camps which could be struck at an hour’s notice, as soon as the telephone was cut off. Country houses were permanent; even when the owner was abroad, the house was there, with a couple of servants or, at the worst, someone at a cottage who came in to light fires and open windows, someone who, at a pinch, could be persuaded also to make the bed and wash up. They were places where wives and children could be left for long periods, where one retired to write a book, where one could be ill, where, in the course of a love affair, one could take a girl and, by being her guide and sponsor in strange surroundings, establish a degree of proprietorship impossible on the neutral ground of London. The owners of these places were, by their nature, a patient race, but repeated abuse was apt to sour them; new blood in their ranks was highly welcome.

Julia and Lucy

But the long second part focuses entirely on Lucy, Roger Simmonds’ new bride. In a nutshell, Plant falls in love with her. Simple idea but it is described in sometimes staggering detail. There are numerous passages of very unWaughesque psychology, pages of description of what it is like to fall in love.

This Lucy is heir to a staggering £58,000 fortune and so had numerous suitors. Plant finds himself hooked up by Basil Seal, who we know from other Waugh novels, in a campaign to get into Lucy’s good books. But she is won over by Roger’s honesty and good sense, which is described in unusual detail, as if by a completely different kind of novelist, one interested in the details of psychology and character.

There’s a strange passage because it’s so banal about Plant’s campaign of inviting the newly married couple to luncheon at the Ritz. The etiquette of invitations and replies and notes of thanks is gone into in painstaking detail: maybe this is meant to be funny, but it isn’t. Or, more precisely, the audience for the social comedy intrinsic in the precise phrasing of invitation and thank you cards has dwindled into insignificance. But then again, maybe that is the point. Maybe the narrator (and through him, Waugh) are demonstrating the generation and caste they belong to in a way that emphasises how its manners and etiquette are vanishing.

There’s an odd plot development which is that Lucy has two young cousins which her mother wanted introduced to London society. One, Julia, just eighteen, turns out to have a crush on Plant, to have worshipped him at school to have made him the focus of her school literary society. So she is beside herself with excitement when Lucy tells her she’s going for lunch at the Ritz with the famous John Plant, and Julia begs to be allowed to sit at a table behind a pillar just to watch him go by.

In a nutshell, over a series of further social engagements, Plant goes out of his way to be kind and sweet to Julia which, although it risks exacerbating her crush in him, persuades Lucy that he is a good man.

Lucy for her part, becomes pregnant and finds herself a little isolated in married life. Her father was a major and she grew up in Aldershot. She doesn’t know many of Roger’s friends. But Plant’s kindness to Julia makes Lucy decide he’s the one of Roger’s friends that she will become friends with.

And so they develop a friendship, utterly platonic on her side, increasingly love-lorn on Plant’s side, and based on regular meetings to go and see country houses of the particular type that Plant wants to buy. (There’s an interesting digression on the fondness in his generation for architecture, for English houses and Regency terraces. He makes the interesting point that what Nature was for the Victorians, English vernacular architecture was for his generation. You only have to think of John Betjeman.)

This goes on for some time, with Waugh writing at uncharacteristic length about the subtleties of Plant’s changing feelings for Lucy.

Lucy gives birth

Anyway, this long part leads up to Lucy actually having the baby. This is interesting in a number of ways. First and foremost if it’s any indication of male attitudes to childbirth, it’s a fairly horrifying portrait of how utterly ignorant and useless her husband, Roger is. He hasn’t got a clue what’s going on or how to react; all he can think of is ringing up Plant and suggesting they go and get drunk. Just as well he, like his class in general, had hired a nurse named Sister Kemp.

At London Zoo

But this isn’t possible because Plant, horrified when Roger phones him to tell him that Lucy’s crisis has begun, goes to the zoo, London zoo. He and Lucy used to go there often to mooch about and there’s a passage about a particular monkey whose cage they stop in front of, Humboldt’s Gibbon. Now he taunts the skinny monkey, pretending to have food, till the monkey hisses and spits. Is this intended as a kind of objective correlative of his mood of hopelessness?

But it’s barely described before things take an odder turn. For loitering behind him and then coming up to introduce himself is none other than Atwater, the cad who ran over and killed his father. Surprised and then dismayed, Plant listens to Atwater’s jabber of self-pitying gossip about himself and then realises that at least it is taking his mind off thinking about Lucy’s agony.

Atwater’s club

So he lets himself be invited to Atwater’s ‘club’, which is a characteristically shabby, seedy joint, ‘the Wimpole Club’ mews off Wimpole Street. There’s no-one there except the porter having a crafty sandwich and a bored barman named Jim. Plant allows himself to be bought, and then to buy, a series of strong cocktails, while Atwater jabbers on, until both of them are paralytic, eat a steak which appears from nowhere, then stagger out onto the street and so a cab back to his rooms where he passes out.

Plant wakes in the early hours to a phone call from Roger saying the baby’s been born, a boy. Roger invites him for a middle of the night drink but Plant turns him down and crawls back to bed.

Next morning he bathes and makes himself presentable and turns up at Lucy and Roger’s house, taking flowers for lovely Lucy, shaking Roger’s hand and then shown the bonny baby boy in his cradle by Nurse Kemp who, to Plant’s well-bred horror, Lucy is now calling ‘Kempy’. Well, really. Giving pet names to the hired staff. Whatever next!

And there the narrative ends, leaving the reader asking themselves what was the point of all that?

Conclusion

The text as we have it has a little postscript telling us the baby was born at the end of August 1939, in other words just as the Second World War broke out. It gives us a postscript of what became of the main characters during the war, namely that the country house he had finally chosen and begun steps to buy was brutally requisitioned by the authorities and used to house pregnant women for the duration;

Lucy and her baby moved back to her aunt’s. Roger rose from department to department in the office of Political Warfare. Basil sought and found a series of irregular adventures. For myself plain regimental soldiering proved an orderly and not disagreeable way of life.

I met Atwater several times in the course of the war—the Good scout of the officer’s club, the Under-dog in the transit-camp, the Dreamer lecturing troops about post-war conditions. He was reunited, it seemed, with all his legendary lost friends, he prospered and the Good scout predominated. To-day, I believe, he holds sway over a large area of Germany.

Like the ending of Brideshead Revisited, there is the same sense that the war changed everyone’s plans, uprooted everyone’s lives and that, somehow, the most rascally (Basil) or the most caddish (Atwater) were the ones who thrived. The difference is that Brideshead is a finished work of literature and so has earned the ‘sic transit’ tone of its epilogue, whereas the sombre tone of this little coda hardly bears any resemblance to what came before it.

Waugh is always interesting, he writes so well, so clearly and always has something to say, so this hundred or so pages have interesting things on every page, whether it’s the brief description of life in Fez or the architectural fetish of his generation or the etiquette of invitations and thank you cards among his social set or the raffish schemes of Basil Seal or the schoolgirl crush of cousin Julia, or his father’s rage against the erection of blocks of cheap flats in his square, and so on and so on. Even the scenes with the monkey in London Zoo or the scene in Atwater’s shabby club are crisply and vividly described.

But why? Where was it ever going? There seems to be no overarching plan and the lack of plan seems to be reflected in the flabbiness of a lot of the writing. Having plumped for a first person narrator, Waugh commits to a more long-winded style in which we hear a bit more about the protagonist’s psychology, feelings and opinions than we really care about.

He writes a very great deal indeed from inside the mind of this character, John Plant, but you can’t help feeling that, once he’d established him, he didn’t know what to do with him. Having an affair with a friend’s wife is a pretty banal storyline, so he spiced it up by having the friend’s wife be pregnant and get progressively more pregnant as his infatuation proceeds. But this, too, feels like a hiding to nothing. What was going to happen after the baby was born? Was Plant going to seduce the shell-shocked mother of a newborn baby? It would be not only immoral but frightfully bad manners.

Long before the end of part two it feels like Waugh had written himself into a dead end. If you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Credit

Work Suspended by Evelyn Waugh was published in a limited edition in 1942. A revised version was published by Chapman and Hall in 1943. All references are to the text in the 2011 Penguin paperback edition of the Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh (1942)

‘[A uniform] is the best possible disguise for a man of intelligence. No one ever suspects a soldier of taking a serious interest in the war.’
(Colonel Plum to Basil Seal in Put Out More Flags, page 150)

Background

In his preface to the 1966 edition, Waugh tells us Put Out More Flags was the only book he wrote for pleasure and it shows. It isn’t exactly a comic masterpiece like Decline and Fall or Scoop, it isn’t a scandalous portrait of a generation like Vile Bodies, it isn’t scarred by a devastatingly bleak conclusion like Black Mischief or A Handful of Dust. Instead it is suffused by a warm, deep sense of English patriotism, embodied in a surprisingly buoyant good humour, occasionally rising to real laugh-out-loud comedy.

Waugh wrote Put Out More Flags on a troopship back from Crete after the island fell to the Nazis in 1941. He had been serving in the army for two years (experiences which would be transmuted into the wonderful Sword of Honour trilogy). Now, as the ship sailed slowly around the entire coast of Africa, he had time on his hands, so he took advantage of the enforced idleness and wrote all day every day, completing the first draft in just a month.

Subject

The narrative covers the period of the Phoney War or what some humourists called the Bore War, between Britain’s declaration of war on Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939 and the sudden German attack on France in June 1940, a long nine months during which we were technically at war but there was no direct attack on Britain. The narrative is divided into four simply named sections, Autumn, Winter, Spring, with a brief epilogue, Summer.

The return of Basil Seal

In part, Waugh wanted to find out what had happened to the characters he’d created in his previous novels. As Waugh himself puts it:

The characters about whom I had written in the previous decade came to life for me. I was anxious to know how they had been doing since I last heard of them, and I followed them with no preconceived plan, not knowing where I should find them from one page to the next.

The narrative opens with Basil Seal, the dashing scapegrace who was at the centre of Black Mischief, because Waugh obviously realised he could use Basil as an entry point to different aspects of English life.

1. Thus we hear for the first time about Basil’s extended family and in particular his sister, Barbara Sothill, who lives at a classic Waugh country house, Malfrey, beside a lovely village in a lovely part of the Midlands, somewhere. This allows Waugh to do lovely descriptions of the countryside and repeat the rather sentimentalised vision of the English country squire he had deployed in A Handful of Dust.

But the house now wears a mournful aspect: Barbara’s servants have mostly gone off to work in factories, and her husband, Freddy, has rejoined his reserve regiment. To her own surprise, Barbara has become the billeting officer for her district, that’s to say she has responsibility for finding accommodation for evacuees from the nearest city (Birmingham) among the local villages. This is played for laughs as Barbara, previously a welcome sight to friends and neighbours, now becomes a scourge, the arrival of her car in the drive now the prelude to requests to the tremendous inconvenience of putting up ghastly working class families or children.

2. Basil’s mistress is Angela Lyne. In what develops into an interesting and moving storyline, we watch Angela hurry back from the South of France immediately after war is declared, back to a service flat in Mayfair and then… then something happens. She holes up in her bedroom and becomes addicted to listening to the news on the radio and… takes to drinking, takes to asking her maid for a drink early in the morning and then… takes to wearing dark glasses, at home, during the day, even with the curtains drawn. It’s a really interesting portrait of someone badly undermined by the declaration of war, someone thrown off their game, made ill by uncontrolled thoughts.

Insofar as Angela was once a luminary of London high society she is also a kind of entrée into that world, occasionally leaving her seclusion to attend a party given by the egregious Lady Metroland, no matter how peripherally, in every Waugh novel since Decline and Fall.

Also, Angela has a husband, Cedric Lyne. They’re in their later thirties now and it is very sympathetically handled, the way Cedric was initially upset when his wife began an affair with Basil, thinking it would all blow over, accepted it was going to last a bit longer, and only slowly realised Basil was in the fact the love of her life. They remain married because, well, the fuss my dear, of getting divorced. So disruptive. More importantly, being a ‘divorced woman’ would close society doors to her, and being in society is her life, and so she persuades Cedric not to divorce her but to continue living on at the family place in the country where he has poured the energy which should have gone into being the head of a happy family into, instead, collecting, importing and installing grottos from around southern Europe.

3. Thirdly there is Basil’s mother, the rather formidable Lady Seal, on first name terms with the Prime Minister, a type of the grand old lady of London society, who is endlessly fussing and fretting about her errant son.

Sir Joseph Mainwaring

Sir Joseph is a minor character who provides great amusement. He is an old friend of Basil’s mother. He enjoys her company but dreads the conversations they have to have about her scapegrace son’s future. As soon as war is declared Lady Seal conceives the ambition to get Basil into ‘a good regiment’. For people like her the war isn’t so much a thing to be fought and lost – or their assumption is simply that England, being in the right, will win – it is about having the right sort of war.

Thus she persuades a very reluctant Sir Joseph to invite Basil for lunch at his gentlemen’s club, the Travellers, with the aim of introducing him to the Lieutenant-Colonel of a (fictional) regiment, ‘the Bombardiers’ who, as Waugh goes on to say with typical bitchiness, is ‘-an officer whom Sir Joseph wrongly believed to have a liking for him’.

Basil’s luncheons at the Travellers’ with Sir Joseph Mainwaring had for years formed a series of monuments in his downward path. There had been the luncheons of his four major debt settlements, the luncheon of his political candidature, the luncheons of his two respectable professions, the luncheon of the threatened divorce of Angela Lyne, the Luncheon of the Stolen Emeralds, the Luncheon of the Knuckledusters, the Luncheon of Freddy’s Last Cheque – each would provide both theme and title for a work of popular fiction.

The lunch with the Lieutenant-Colonel is a predictable and amusing disaster, Basil turning up unshaven and unkempt, and making a disastrous impression. He follows this up with a visit to the L-C in his office which goes even worse, with the old boy almost choking with fury at Basil taking for granted that he will be quickly promoted and able to leave the boring old Bombardiers behind. He barely escapes the old boy’s office without a serious shouting-at.

So much for Sir Joseph. After this abortive attempt to help Basil, he settles down to become a bit character, pompous possessor of ‘a peppercorn lightness of soul, a deep unimpressionable frivolity’, occasionally wheeled on to give opinions and predictions about the war which are consistently and hilariously wide of the mark.

A theory of gossip

A word about gossip. Waugh loved gossip. If his novels weren’t enough of an indication, we have Waugh’s extensive letters and diaries which show what a tremendous party animal, socialiser, snob and social climber he was. From private school through Oxford and on into London’s society and literary circles, it was very important to Waugh to cultivate friends in the right places, be au courant with the young party set, and hobnob with the finest titles he could manage.

So far, so biographical. The point I want to make is the distinctive effect this has on his fiction. This is that no matter what happens to the main characters, Waugh always shows us its impact on ‘society’, on other people gossiping and commenting about them. There are always two levels: the level of the main events happening to the central protagonists; and then a fog of rumour and gossip about them.

In A Handful of Dust an entire extra layer is added to the narrative by the way Waugh describes not only the central tragedy of the accidental death of little John Andrew, but the way every step of Tony Last’s response is reported, repeated, commented on and analysed by outsiders, people not directly connected, people in London’s endless parties who get the facts wrong, twist the facts, and end up making Tony the bad guy in his divorce with Brenda in which, as we the readers see and know, he is utterly innocent.

Although the word ‘gossip’ sounds trivial, I think the way Waugh deploys it in most of his novels reflects a profound truth about human life. Gossip is, in fact, how most of us are perceived in society – not as the brave, clever, hard-working people we think ourselves to be, but as other people see us: the cranky one who’s always getting into arguments, the boring one who always sits in the corner, the scruffy one who always arrives late, who got drunk and did something embarrassing at the Christmas party, and so on.

Most of us live our lives very much for-ourselves and only occasionally overhear what other people really think about us. And when it happens, it is without exception profoundly disturbing to overhear friends or work colleagues everso casually dismissing you, reducing you to a few crude strokes of caricature, to the punchline to a few unrepresentative anecdotes. ‘But I’m more than that,’ you want to protest, ‘I am all these wonderful feelings and perceptions and thoughts and intuitions!’ Not to other people, you aren’t. To other people you’re the one who’s rubbish at telling jokes, gets drunk and argumentative at parties, and broke the office photocopier. A ridiculous caricature.

Lots of people rattle off John Donne’s quote about ‘No man is an island’, but it would be far more accurate to say no person can escape the comments, jokes, criticism, and behind-their-back sniggering of family, friends and work colleagues. No one.

Waugh’s fiction brilliantly conveys this sense that, despite our fondest illusions, we may like to think of ourselves as people-for-ourselves but can never escape mostly being people-for-others. The mistreatment of Tony Last in Handful of Dust, the way his behaviour is misrepresented and traduced by everyone else in the story, even his own servants, is probably the epitome of this vision of humans trapped in a web of other people’s commentary, but it is present in all Waugh’s novels – the notion that all human lives are lived on two levels: first, the actual events themselves and the feelings and motivations of the main actors; and then the limitless way all these fine feelings and high motivations are eclipsed by the superficial rush to judgement of hundreds of strangers who don’t the know the first thing about you but gleefully repeat the most malicious distortions of what you said or did.

Most of the time Waugh plays it for laughs but sometimes to bring out the intense bitterness his characters feel at society’s misunderstanding and judging them (as in Handful of Dust). That’s one it its strengths, as an approach to fiction, this deployment of ‘society’ as a kind of permanent chorus on the action, is that it can be either comic or tragic, as required. But it is always there. Not the fashionable ‘Other’ of sociology and literary theory, much worse: the others, the potentially endless ranks of people who don’t give a toss about you or, if they think about you at all, it’s as a monster, a bully, an oaf, or a fat figure of fun.

In the deftness with which he captures this often overlooked aspect of society, I think Waugh is more profoundly realistic than many more supposedly ‘serious’ novelists.

In this book this aspect of society is epitomised by the incident of Angela at the cinema. As mentioned above, the once supremely confident and renowned Mrs Angela Lyne undergoes a sort of breakdown, taking to her bed, obsessively listening to the radio news and drinking. Her only escape is now and then to totter down the road to the pictures.

One of the recurring characters, Peter Pastmaster, son of Lady Metroland, has a) joined the army b) decided he ought to get married so, in a comically frivolous way, is dating three of the most eligible young heiresses in London. One evening he’s taking one of them, Molly Meadowes, to the pictures and they come across Angela making a fuss because she can’t get the kind of ticket she wants, down at the front. As Peter and Molly push through the queue to get to her, Angela trips and sits down with a bump and the commissionaires are starting to make a fuss. So they pick her up, call a cab, and take her back to her flat, leaving her in the hands of her maid, Grainger.

And then – and this is the point in mentioning it – Waugh shows us how this fairly simple event gets quickly blown up by society gossip into a legend about a roaring drunk Angela getting into a fight with the commissionaire and cabby before being rescued by Peter. Nothing goes ungossiped about. Nobody can escape their life being pawed and prodded and simplified and ridiculed.

(There’s also something profoundly psychologically true in the way that the little escapade of helping drunk Mrs Lyne back to her flat brings Molly and Peter together. Molly thinks it’s sweet the way naive Peter doesn’t even realise Angela is drunk. And she is touched by his genuine chivalry and concern. And so she decides to marry him, a fact Peter proudly announces to his mother, Lady Metroland, later the same evening.)

Left wing intellectuals

So the book reintroduces us to a number of recurring characters from the previous novels, but there are also some new developments. One is a departure for Waugh, a comic description of left-wing bohemians. This is the social set revolving around the fiery painter Poppet Green. A bit like in Vile Bodies Waugh establishes the speech patterns or the recurring topics of conversation in Poppet’s circle so that he can drop snippets of their conversation into larger chapters; so he can cut away to brief dialogue between Poppet and comrades for a quick page before cutting away to something else, having established their tell-tale topics of conversation.

We generally know we’re in that milieu because Poppet and all her friends talk endlessly about communism, and the proletariat, and Russia, are very quick to throw the accusation of ‘fascist’ about (how nothing changes in the ‘progressive’ mind) but above all, how they obsess about the two noted communist poets and best friends, Parsnip and Pimpernell. This pair and their fierce and urgent poetry are seen as the ne plus ultra of the proletarian pose in the arts, literature, specifically poetry.

It helps if you know that Parsnip and Pimpernell are Waugh’s (very effective) comic nicknames for the poet W.H. Auden and his best friend, the playwright Christopher Isherwood. For the entire decade of the 1930s Auden’s thrillingly modern poetry had dominated the world of literature, capturing everything, describing everything, making all political issues more burning and urgent with his brilliantly modern tone of voice and imagery of factories and cars and planes and skyscrapers.

However, just as his reputation was at its height, and just as the political world they had described so well finally reached the crisis they had predicted for so long, with the outbreak of war against international fascism…that’s the moment when Auden and Isherwood, in real life, decided to leave England and emigrate to America (in January 1939). And so, in this fictionalised caricature of events, the great debate which rages among Poppet Green and her friends, is whether Parsnip and Pimpernell were right to abandon their country in its time of need… or did they do the right thing, by staying loyal to their muses and their ART?

The name of the poet Parsnip, casually mentioned, reopened the great Parsnip-Pimpernell controversy which was torturing Poppet Green and her friends. It was a problem which, not unlike the Schleswig-Holstein question of the preceding century, seemed to admit of no logical solution for, in simple terms, the postulates were self-contradictory. Parsnip and Pimpernell, as friends and collaborators, were inseparable; on that all agreed. But Parsnip’s art flourished best in England, even an embattled England, while Pimpernell’s needed the peaceful and fecund soil of the United States. The complementary qualities which, many believed, made them together equal to one poet, now threatened the dissolution of partnership.

In the five novels and four travel books up to this point, Waugh had shown himself a master of depicting the English upper classes partying in Mayfair or at home in their delightful country houses. Describing the rougher, avowedly left-wing and ‘radical’ world of bohemia and the arts is a notable departure of milieu but one he brings off very well. Poppet and her creatures’ endless internecine bickering over ideology and the ‘correct’ line to take is very funny in itself and shows the reader just how little changes in the harshly judgemental and accusatory progressive mindset.

Ambrose Silk

A doyen, a leading figure in this world, although older than many of the others and not as politically engaged as the young firebrands, is the gay, Jewish aesthete Ambrose Silk. The novel contains a number of new characters, but Silk is the one, standout, major new character. He is a great creation and joins Basil as the other major protagonist of the story.

For Ambrose has depths. He is unhappy. He feels like a man out of time. He is an aesthete. He should have been born in the age of Oscar (Wilde) and Aubrey (Beardsley). He goes along with the fashionable political chatter of Poppet Green and her salon of fashionable communists, but feels alienated from them.

But then, he feels alienated from everyone. When he finds himself in the kind of fashionable society party he feels just as ill at ease. He gets a comedy job at the Ministry of Information, in the religious department of all places, and, as an atheist Jew, feels out of place among his caricature Catholic, Anglican and nonconformist colleagues.

And Ambrose is clinically paranoid, a prey to fluttery ‘persecution mania’ (p.174). Just as Waugh shows us Sir Joseph Mainwaring on a number of social occasions making wildly inaccurate predictions about international affairs (for example, that Italy is biding its time before allying with Britain and France), so Waugh shows us a series of scenes in which Ambrose anxiously asks the people he’s with whether they think that, if the Nazis win and invade Britain, they’ll come for Jews like him? And ‘communists’ like him? And intellectuals like him? And homosexuals like him?

On all these occasions Waugh goes deep into Ambrose’s thoughts, giving us almost stream of consciousness depictions of his anxiety and alienation, something he rarely does. Most of his characters just act and talk and we see them only from outside. This dwelling on Ambrose’s inner world is most unusual. It sounds like this:

The party left the restaurant and stood in an untidy group on the pavement, unable to make up their minds who was going with whom, in what direction, for what purpose. Ambrose bade them good-bye and hurried away, with his absurd, light step and his heavy heart. Two soldiers outside a public-house made rude noises as he passed. ‘I’ll tell your sergeant-major of you,’ he said gaily, almost gallantly, and flounced down the street. I should like to be one of them, he thought. I should like to go with them and drink beer and make rude noises at passing aesthetes. What does world revolution hold in store for me? Will it make me any nearer them? Shall I walk differently, speak differently, be less bored with Poppet Green and her friends? Here is the war, offering a new deal for everyone; I alone bear the weight of my singularity.

Ambrose’s magazine

Out of this swirl of emotions and worries, Ambrose conceives the idea of publishing a literary magazine. But isn’t this the worst possible timing, people ask, just as a war is breaking out? No darling, Ambrose explains, it is exactly the right time for a magazine which will preserve all that is best in our civilisation. So he persuades the niche and not very successful publishers of his previous books to back him, being Rampole and Bentley. His magazine will breathe the same rarefied atmosphere as the famous Yellow Book and will be called the Ivory Tower.

There is comedy in the way, over the next few weeks, it becomes clear that almost all the articles in the magazine will be written by Basil himself. His publisher says this will spark criticism, he needs to think up some noms de plums to give the sense of a variety of contributors and so he comes up with some ludicrous names:

Ambrose rather let himself go on names. ‘Hucklebury Squib’, ‘Bartholomew Grass’, ‘Tom Barebones-Abraham’.

Above all, Basil realises the magazine will give him an outlet to express his great, romantic (homosexual) love for a good-looking German boy he met and had an affair with only last year, a youth named Hans. He quickly pens a 50-page hymn to the young man’s virility and good looks and vitality. Tragically, although Hans was a keen member of the Nazi Brownshirts, when it was discovered that he was (like Ambrose) Jewish he was swiftly arrest, disgraced and taken away to a concentration camp, while Ambrose was forced to flee Germany in fear of his life (shades of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin memoirs).

The memoir will, Ambrose breathlessly tells his friends, be titled ‘Monument to a Spartan’ and he shows his friend Basil a copy.

Basil’s scams

Back to Basil for a moment. In the winter section, having signally failed to join the army he goes to Malfrey to stay with his sister. She’s grateful for the company and they soon fall back into the nicknames and games rough and tumble they shared as small children.

The Connollys

Basil gets involved with his sister’s role as evacuating officer and soon discovers there is one particular set of orphaned kids from Birmingham who no-one will touch, the Connolly children:

There was Doris, ripely pubescent, aged by her own varied accounts anything from ten years to eighteen. An early and ingenious attempt to have her certified as an adult was frustrated by an inspecting doctor who put her at about fifteen. Doris had dark, black bobbed hair, a large mouth and dark pig’s eyes. There was something of the Esquimaux about her head, but her colouring was ruddy and her manner more vivacious than is common among that respectable race. Her figure was stocky, her bust prodigious, and her gait, derived from the cinematograph, was designed to be alluring.

Micky, her junior by the length of a rather stiff sentence for house-breaking, was of lighter build; a scrawny, scowling little boy; a child of few words and those, for the most part, foul.

Marlene was presumed to be a year younger. But for Micky’s violent denials she might have been taken for his twin. She was the offspring of unusually prolonged coincident periods of liberty in the lives of her parents which the sociologist must deplore, for Marlene was simple. An appeal to have her certified imbecile was disallowed by the same inspecting doctor, who expressed an opinion that country life might work wonders with the child.

There the three had stood, on the eve of the war, in Malfrey Parish Hall, one leering, one lowering, and one drooling, as unprepossessing a family as could be found in the kingdom.

It should be added that Marlene pees and poos everywhere, indiscriminately. Well, to cut a long story short, after some attempts at trying to park these delinquents with decent folk, Basil has a brainwave. Potential hosts take against them so quickly and totally that one of them offers him money to take them back. Bingo! He realises they are a money-making proposition. And so Basil gets hold of Barbara’s address book and embarks on a campaign of parking the revolting children with the sweetest, nicest, kindest people he can find – almost all of whom ring up within a few days, sometimes a few hours, begging to have them taken off their hands. How much? asks Basil, and start to turn a tidy profit.

What makes it that much more realistic and funny is that flirtatious Doris takes a massive shine to Basil and wants to follow him everywhere and be with him all the time. Basil is a rascal and they soon come to an understanding, namely he is nice to Doris provided she controls her horrible siblings and then obeys orders to play up the second he’s left them with an innocent family.

Meanwhile, as a kind of side order, Basil comes across a nubile recently married young woman whose husband has gone off to join his regiment, is all sad and lonely and so… being the charmer he is, starts an affair with her.

The Ministry of Information and the Ambrose scam

From time to time he travels up to London and hangs around the Ministry of Information, located in Senate House, Bloomsbury (where George Orwell worked, where John Wyndham worked, where half London’s unemployed writers hung around hoping to get a gig, and where Ambrose Silk incongruously gets a job in the Religious Department).

A fluent liar he bluffs his way past security telling them he works for (the non-existent) M.I.13. Utterly at random he is distracted by a very good-looking young woman and follows her down corridors and into the office of one Colonel Plum. He resolves to get a job here, purely and solely to see if he can seduce Susie the sexy secretary, but to do so he finds himself having an impromptu interview with the Colonel in charge of this little unit.

In this absurd interview, Colonel Plum makes it clear he needs to track down and, ideally arrest, enemies of the state. Basil reflects on Poppet Green and her circle of left-wing bohemians, and quickly ad libs:

‘I know some very dangerous communists,’ said Basil.
‘I wonder if they’re on our files. We’ll look in a minute. We aren’t doing much about communists at the moment. The politicians are shy of them for some reason. But we keep an eye on them, on the side, of course. I can’t pay you much for communists.’

What the colonel can pay for is fascists, does Basil know any fascists, he’ll make him a captain in the Marines if he can hand over some fascists? Basil thinks again and has a characteristic brainwave. Ambrose and his essay about beautiful German youth, Hans, a member of the Hitler Youth! Basil tells the colonel he may be onto something, he’ll report back in a few days.

Basil goes his ways, which involve dropping into the office of the Ivory Tower. There are some proofs of the first edition lying around and also a passport, from an Irish priest of all things, a Father Flanagan, S.J., Professor of Dublin University. He wants to visit the Maginot Line in his capacity of correspondent for some Catholic paper and, in the usual chaotic way of the ministry, his application along with his passport have found their way to the religious department of the Ministry of Information, where Ambrose pretends to work. On a whim, Basil nicks it, like he steals so many other random bits and bobs, never knowing when they’ll come in handy or he can flog them for a little cash in hand.

Anyway, he rifles through the proofs and rereads Ambroise’s stirring essay about Hans again. When Ambrose returns to the office, Basil tells him it’s a masterpiece, except for the ending, the bit where the hero is dragged off kicking and screaming to a Nazi concentration camp. Reads like pure propaganda, Basil says, the worst kind of yellow press melodrama, ruins the artistic integrity of the whole.

Ambrose, permanently nervous and paranoid, takes Basil at his word and cuts the final pages of his memoir thus, unintentionally, converting it into a hymn to Nazi youth. A few days later, once it’s printed, Basil triumphantly re-enters Colonel Plum’s office and throws on his desk a copy of Ivory Tower open at the Nazi essay.

The Colonel is delighted, all the more so since the magazine is so obviously a hotbed of Nazi sympathisers, this Hucklebury Squib, Bartholomew Grass and Tom Barebones-Abraham, yes he’s going to arrest the lot of them!

Only as he overhears the Colonel phoning up the police and Special Branch to plan a dawn raid on the magazine’s offices does it dawn on Basil, for the first time, that he might have overdone it a little. It is worth remembering that Basil is prepared to betray one of his closest ‘friends’ and a number of other utterly innocent people (the publishers Rampole and Bentley) purely so that he can get the promised job of captain in Marines and maybe sleep with Susie, ideally both. Basil is charming, funny, and utterly amoral which sounds funny but boils down to the fact that he is a scumbag.

Waugh milks the unfolding disaster for all the comedy he can. Officials interview Mr Bentley, the younger of the two publishers and, seeing the way the land lies, he agrees to co-operate fully and, in a funny scene, proceeds to give detailed descriptions of the magazine’s other contributors, Hucklebury Squib, Bartholomew Grass and Tom Barebones-Abraham, people we know to be utterly fictional but the cops don’t.

In a comic scene written in a deliberately arch knowing style, Waugh describes the arrest of the older partner in the publishing firm, Mr Rampole, his bewilderment at the accusations, his trial, conviction and sending to prison, Brixton Prison to be precise, up the road from me as I write, where, with typically Waughian whimsy, he turns out to be quite comfortable, discovers a taste for reading light literature and gains face, especially with the prison padre, from personally knowing several of the authors. ‘He was happier than he could remember ever having been.’ Waugh likes throwing his characters in prison; remember how half the cast of Decline and Fall end up in chokey and the way Paul Pennyfeather, also, rather enjoys its solitude, the lack of distractions, the luxury of reading all day long. Waugh’s vision of prison makes it sound like a cross between a monastery and a rarefied college library.

So what about Ambrose Silk, the man Basil has told Colonel Plum is at the centre of this dangerous Nazi conspiracy? Basil doesn’t let him be arrested like the publishers but has another brainwave / elaborate scam up his sleeve.

Remember the passport of the Irish priest he pinched in Ambrose’s office? Turns out to be a vital prop or peg for the plot because. For late the night of the arrests Basil bursts into Ambrose’s flat and tells the half-awake wretch that the authorities are coming to arrest him (Ambrose doesn’t need much persuading and doesn’t put up any resistance because, as has been amply emphasised throughout the book, he is a quivering jelly of paranoid fear that ‘they’ are out to get him). Basil persuades him his best course of action is to flee to Ireland in the guise of this Jesuit priest, Father Flanagan and he has brought along ‘a clerical collar, a black clerical vest ornamented with a double line of jet buttons, and an Irish passport’. He hustles Ambrose out of his flat, down the stairs and they are at Euston station waiting for the train to Holyhead in 15 minutes.

‘But what about my flat and my things?’ wails Ambrose at which point Basil has another, simple brainwave. ‘I’ll move in,’ he tells Ambrose,’ and look after everything for you.’ ‘Oh you are so kind,’ smiles Ambrose, in a moment which exemplifies Waugh’s technique of comic and malicious irony. So Ambrose keeps his hat pulled low over his head and tells the rosary beads Basil has provided and catches the train to Holyhead and the ferry to Ireland and then travels as far west as he can in order to escape the pursuing ‘authorities’ In the event he finds a room in a remote village on the west coast, settles in with his minimal belongings and finally finds himself with the peace and time on his hands to write the Great Book he’s been meditating for so long. He, also, rather like Rampole, has found an unexpected peace amid the beautiful Irish scenery.

And thus Basil takes over Ambrose’s luxurious flat which is a far more fitting scene for his seduction of Susie, which proceeds like a dream, especially after he wangles her a promotion at the Ministry, and soon she has moved in with him, the latest in a long line of conquests. In a typical detail which is both funny and heartless, Basil sets Susie to work with needle and silk and embroidery scissors, unpicking the As from the monograms on Ambrose’s crêpe-de-chine underclothes and substituting in their place a letter B for Basil.

Schoolboy japes

The book’s two highpoints are Basil’s scams, the Connolly scam in part one, and the Ambrose scam at the end of part three. From my descriptions you can see how both are really schoolboy japes, species of practical joke. they rank up there with the premise of Scoop, i.e the mistaken identity of William Boot, or the practical joke which launches his entire novel-writing career, the debagging and dunking in a college fountain of Paul Pennyfeather, for which it is Pennyfeather and not the hooligans who assaulted him who are punished. Waugh’s world is one where innocence is always abused and honour is traduced (as poor Tony Last is traduced in Handful of Dust). Clever people play practical jokes on dim people, and Fate plays practical jokes on everyone.

The war

Oh, the Second World War, that one? Well there is comedy or satire in the way that almost all the characters think about the Second World War as an opportunity and worry about whether they will have ‘a good war.’ (An example of a ‘good war’ is that of Rex Mottram, summarised in Brideshead Revisited: ‘His life, so far as he made it known, began in the war, where he had got a good M.C. serving with the Canadians and had ended as A.D.C. to a popular general’. That’s the way to do it: win a medal and get promoted.)

In a brisk, business-like way the older characters remembers friends or brothers or cousins who did damn well in the First War and worry about getting themselves or their sons into the new one as quickly as possible, but only in a ‘good’ regiment, of course, old boy.

Hence Basil’s half-hearted attempts to wangle a commission in the Bombardiers, and the more effective efforts of younger characters lie Peter Pastmaster and Alastair Trumpington to join ‘special forces’.

Sad Angela is visited in her London flat be her sad husband, Cedric, bringing their little boy Nigel. He’s been allowed out of boarding school to come and see his Daddy. Daddy takes him shopping and buys him a model bomber which the other chaps at his school will think ‘absolutely ripping’. It is a sad interview between two utterly estranged people.

We then follow Cedric as he rejoins his regiment and is dispatched on the ill-equipped and ill-organised British expedition to Norway, which had been invaded by the Germans in April 1940. The narrative gives two extended passages describing Cedric’s experiences: first in the chaotic night-time loading of ships in British port, in which Cedric struggles against a welter of contradictory orders and timings (i.e. symbolic of the generally shambolic nature of the British campaign); and then a very long passage right at the end of the book describing actual fighting in Norway, where Cedric is ordered to liaise between British units which have become split up by the German advance.

This scene is not remotely funny, but a kind of quintessence of Waugh’s bitter sense of futility. Two things are notable: in terms of content Cedric is dispatched to run across open ground to find A company and tell them to withdraw in the face of the German advance. Waugh is careful to tell us the A company have, in fact, already realised this and packed up and withdrawn; which is to say that Cedric’s brave run across country to their last know position is absolutely unnecessary. Second thing is that, in a very Waugh kind of way, his brave run through a hail of bullets is not described in itself, but through the dialogue of the Colonel and adjutant who watch him through binoculars i.e. the event is commentated on, viewed from a distance, detached, bleakly distant, alienated.

And then Cedric takes a bullet through the head and dies instantly.

Epilogue: tying up loose ends

At which point the narrative cuts away, as so many Waugh narratives cut, exit, leaving a scene briskly and brutally, the more devastating the event, the more brutal the cut.

The last short section is titled Epilogue: Summer. Waugh conveys the calamitous fall of France in June 1940 through the idiotic eyes of Sir Joseph Mainwaring, a useless fuddy-duddy from the old times. The Chamberlain government falls on a vote of confidence and is replaced by the government of national unity led by Churchill (10 May).

I haven’t mentioned at all two second string characters who recur throughout the novel, Alistair and Sonia Trumpington. You might remember Basil finding himself round this couple’s apartment at the start and end of Black Mischief. Here they are revived to form a comic commentary on the main action, with the comic conceit that, after Alistair has joined his regiment, Sonia ups sticks and follows him round the country as he is regularly posted, as soldiers are, to barracks all round the UK. Here, in the final paragraphs his regiment comes to rest on the south coast, tasked with coastal defence, mining the beaches, setting up rolls of barbed wire and machine gun emplacements. And in the evenings, when he has liberty, Alistair spends a few fleeting hours with his loving Sonia who is now pregnant. Ominous times to become pregnant.

But Alistair shares his boyish excitement that Peter Pastmaster and some of the other chaps are setting up new, small, mobile units to be called ‘commandos’. They carry knives and knuckledusters and rope-souled silent shoes and are parachuted behind enemy lines to assassinate VIPs and cause mayhem. He is everso excited!

Basil marries the newly widowed Angela. The jaded, sophistiqué tone of their conversation reprises all those dialogues from Vile Bodies a decade earlier.

‘I shall be a terrible husband.’
‘Yes, darling, don’t I know it.’

Brief mention of Ambrose, holed up in a tiny village on the far west coast of Ireland. It is not enough. He feels the urge to wander in his Jewish soul. Maybe Waugh is setting him up to reappear in a sequel.

We see Rampole in his prison cell, ‘happier than he could remember ever having been.’

Peter Pastmaster is at Bratt’s (Waugh’s ubiquitous fictional gentleman’s club) drawing up a list of officers to join his new unit. They include Basil, ‘a tough nut’.

Cut back to Basil telling Angela he’s going to join a new unit. It will be a lovely new ‘racket’ for the spring. Pulling the wool over old Colonel Plum’s eyes at the Ministry of Information was fun at the time, but:

‘Besides, you know, that racket was all very well in the winter, when there wasn’t any real war. It won’t do now. There’s only one serious occupation for a chap now, that’s killing Germans. I have an idea I shall rather enjoy it.’

The final word is given to Lady Seal, lunching with Sir Joseph. When she mentions Basil’s name his heart, as always sinks. Only this time it is not to beg yet another favour; it is to inform him that Basil has joined a new unit, all by himself, under his own steam. For once Sir Joseph smiles with genuine happiness. For once he says something unarguably true:

‘There’s a new spirit abroad,’ he said. ‘I see it on every side.’

So despite a hundred pages satirising, mocking and ridiculing the English social and military establishment, the novel ends on a resoundingly, if somewhat unexpectedly, patriotic note.

Summary

In Waugh’s oeuvre, it’s easy to overlook Putting Out More Flags because it doesn’t have the defined central protagonist and unified action of most of the other novels. But it does contain some of the best comic scenes in all the pre-war books and in the figure of Basil Seal his most monstrous trickster. Alongside other more interesting themes, namely the semi-serious, paranoid self-pity of Ambrose Silk and the darker story of Angela Lyne’s strange descent into drunken loneliness, themes which give it a deeper, richer flavour.

If someone who’d never read him asked you to recommend a Waugh novel, I think I’d recommend this or Scoop, probably Scoop because it is more timeless in its satire on the press in general and foreign correspondents in particular, but Put Out More Flags runs it a close second for ripe comedy laced with evocative period observations, for the standout characters of Basil the Rascal and Ambrose the Sensitive Victim, but also for that thread of despair and futility which is always glinting at the edge of any Waugh story.

Credit

Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1938. All references are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

‘We must return to the Present,’ Ambrose said prophetically.
‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Bentley. ‘Why?’

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by Simon on December 20, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Novel, Second World War, War

Tagged A Handful of Dust, aesthete, Alastair Trumpington, alcoholism, Ambrose Silk, Angela Lyne, army, Barbara Sothill, Bartholomew Grass, Basil Seal, Birmingham, Black Mischief, Bombardiers, Brixton Prison, Brownshirts, caricature, Cedric Lyne, Christopher Isherwood, Colonel Plum, comedy, Communism, country house, decline and fall, English literature, Evelyn Waugh, Father Flanagan, fiction, George Orwell, gossip, High Society, homosexuality, Hucklebury Squib, infidelity, Ireland, Ivory Tower, John Donne, John Wyndham, Lady Metroland, Lady Seal, Literature, London, Malfrey, marriage, MI 13, Ministry of Information, Molly Meadowes, Monument to a Spartan, Nazis, Neville Chamberlain, Nigel Lyne, novel, Oxford, Parsnip and Pimpernell, patriotism, Paul Pennyfeather, Peter Pastmaster, Phoney War, Poppet Green, practical jokes, private school, progressives, Put Out More Flags, Rampole and Bentley, Rex Mottram, satire, Scoop, Second World War, Sir Joseph Mainwaring, Sonia Trumpington, Susie, the Connollys, Tom Barebones-Abraham, Vile Bodies, W.H. Auden, war

Posted by Simon on December 20, 2021

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Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh (1932)

Black Mischief was Evelyn Waugh’s third novel, published in 1932. It very obviously recycles material from his six-month-long trip to Ethiopia and then along the East Coast of Africa which he had chronicled in the previous year’s travelogue, Remote People (1931).

The novel describes the efforts of Seth, the young English-educated Emperor of ‘Azania’, a fictional island off the East coast of Africa, based loosely on Zanzibar, to modernise his Empire, aided by the 28-year-old scapegrace and ne’er-do-well, Basil Seal.

Jaded author of jaded characters

Having just finished reading Vile Bodies and still reeling from its shockingly nihilistic ending, I think I can understand why Waugh leapt at the opportunity of fleeing rancid England. He had gone, as a temporary foreign correspondent for a London newspaper, to go and cover the coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie in November 1930. The disgust and misanthropy which becomes slowly more obvious in Vile Bodies goes a long way to explaining why he felt the need to get clean away from the shallow party culture he describes in that book.

This hunch was confirmed a third of the way into the novel by the book’s leading character, Basil Seal, who is depicted as sick and tired of the posh, jaded, endlessly partying circles he moves in. Here he is talking to a crusty old colonel at his club:

‘Don’t you hate London?’
‘Eh?’
‘Don’t you hate London?’
‘No, I do not. Lived here all my life. Never get tired of it. Fellow who’s tired of London is tired of life.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Basil. ‘I’m going away for some time,’ he told the hall-porter as he left the club.

And a bit later, talking to Lady Metroland:

‘I want to go abroad. I’ve been in England too long.’

And, a little later, to his mother:

‘You see I’m fed up with London and English politics. I want to get away.’

So it’s repeated three times. Sick to death of London life and desperate to escape. No ambiguity about Basil’s motives, then.

Waugh’s recurring characters

Basil starts out in a London full of the same cast of characters we encountered in Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, and who were expanded in the sequel, Vile Bodies – people like Lady Metroland (who played such a central role in Decline and Fall), her son Peter Pastmaster, Lord Monomark the owner of the Daily Excess, whose gossip columnists played a central role in Vile Bodies, Sonia Trumpington who keeps a genuinely bohemian menage with husband Alisdair and who Basil visits before his departure. In an atmosphere of loucheness significantly further down the line than anything in Bodies we find the couple in bed and their bedroom littered with drunk or passed-out young men whose names they don’t even know. It’s that kind of behaviour, which Basil himself is expert at, which he has grown sick of.

Thousands of Europeans for well over a century had fled to the colonies to leave behind unsatisfactory lives and reinvent themselves. Obviously Waugh didn’t become a settler or anything like, but the complete change of scene offered by this sudden opportunity to become an (albeit temporarily) freelance journalist, allowed him to apply his forensic gaze and lucid style in a new way. It gave him radically new subject matter and a drastic new variety of characters to depict. To mercilessly describe what he saw in the wildly different setting of a rundown, backward and sometimes barbarous African nation. And then, being a professional, to recycle the everything he’d seen into the humorous and satirical exaggerations of this novel.

Black Mischief’s prose more solid and descriptive

What is immediately and strikingly different is the abandonment of some of the modish techniques in Vile Bodies. That novel gives the impression of being mostly made up of dialogue, the brittle, mannered dialogue of febrile London society, sometimes page after page of only dialogue and, in particular, the telephone conversations of the shallow young couple, Adam and Nina which Waugh was, rightly, proud of.

On the first few pages you realise Black Mischief is a different thing entirely. Describing London, even with satirical intent, had been done to death. It had been done by Dickens and Conan Doyle and E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley and a thousand lesser known writers. Waugh does it very well when he wants to, he can knock off beautifully lyrical paragraphs when they need to be deployed. But not often, and short.

Whereas a fictional African country gave Waugh the opportunity to write huge chunks of descriptive prose, much of it recycled or reworked from the travel book, which is genuinely fresh and unusual and flavoursome.

For two centuries the Arabs remained masters of the coast. Behind them in the hills the native Sakuyu, black, naked, anthropophagous, had lived their own tribal life among their herds — emaciated, puny cattle with rickety shanks and elaborately branded hide. Farther away still lay the territory of the Wanda — Galla immigrants from the mainland who, long before the coming of the Arabs, had settled in the north of the island and cultivated it in irregular communal holdings. The Arabs held aloof from the affairs of both these people; war drums could often be heard inland and sometimes the whole hillside would be aflame with burning villages. On the coast a prosperous town arose: great houses of Arab merchants with intricate latticed windows and brass-studded doors, courtyards planted with dense mango trees, streets heavy with the reek of cloves and pineapple, so narrow that two mules could not pass without altercation between their drivers; a bazaar where the money changers, squatting over their scales, weighed out the coinage of a world-wide trade, Austrian thalers, rough stamped Mahratta gold, Spanish and Portuguese guineas. From Matodi the dhows sailed to the mainland, to Tanga, Dar-es-Salaam, Malindi and Kismayu, to meet the caravans coming down from the great lakes with ivory and slaves. Splendidly dressed Arab gentlemen paraded the water-front hand in hand and gossiped in the coffee houses. In early spring when the monsoon was blowing from the north-east, fleets came down from the Persian Gulf bringing to market a people of fairer skin who spoke a pure Arabic barely intelligible to the islanders, for with the passage of years their language had become full of alien words — Bantu from the mainland, Sakuyu and Galla from the interior — and the slave markets had infused a richer and darker strain into their Semitic blood; instincts of swamp and forest mingled with the austere tradition of the desert.

The prose itself is like a tropical fruit, sumptuous and full of flavour.

Civil war in Azania

In actual fact the opening chapter is a little confusing. It hardly reads like Waugh at all. He clearly decided to make the most complete break possible with the world of Decline and Bodies.

Instead the opening chapter of Black Mischief plunges the reader straight into the confusion and anarchy which prevails in, Matodi, the port town of its fictional island nation Azania, amid the civil war prompted by the death of the old empress. Young prince of the realm Seth should have inherited the throne but instead has faced a rebellion led by prince Seyid.

The enemy army has appeared camping on a hill outside the town. During a long night of fear and paranoia everyone, including the emperor, expects them to enter Matodi the next day and trigger a bloodbath.

There are some very unpleasant episodes in which a noted Armenian merchant is threatened with hanging by troops who want to discover where he’s hidden one of the last boats on the island so they can escape. The emperor’s canny Indian scribe, Ali, is first interrogated and then strangled to death, making an awful shrieking sound in the courtyard outside Seth’s chambers. The entire chapter, its setting, the mood and its details are utterly unlike Waugh. They feel much more modern. They reminded me of the John Updike novel, The Coup or the hard, violent atmosphere of Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah.

But the next morning it turns out that the army camping in the hills outside town was not the enemy army, but forces loyal to the emperor led by the Irish mercenary, General Connolly. Early the next morning he rides into town on a donkey followed by his victorious army to tell the emperor he has won, the emperor’s crown is secure, Seyid is defeated.

Is Seyid alive, can he be brought before Seth? Er, no. Connolly regrets to inform the emperor that Seyid surrendered to a party of the hard core native tribe, the Wanda, and that they, er, killed and ate him. So far so gruesome. It is very Waugh that it is only at this rather startling moment, that we receive the further startling news that Seyid was Seth’s father (!)

‘They should not have eaten him — after all, he was my father . . . It is so . . . so barbarous.’
‘I knew you’d feel that way about it, Seth, and I’m sorry. I gave the headmen twelve hours in the tank for it.’

The reference is to the one and only tank which Seth had purchased in Europe, wishing to make his army more up to date. Seth wants everything in his country to be modern and European. However, Connolly informs him that the tank turned out to be completely useless in jungle warfare until he found an alternative use for it. Since it heated up so quickly in the tropical sunlight, it turned out to be a good punishment cell. Hence locking the offending headman up in it for 12 hours for eating Seth’s father, a fierce punishment.

(Connolly, we learn, was previously an Irish game-warden. He has taken a local wife, who he lovingly refers to as ‘Black Bitch’, which scandalises everyone in the novel, and will scandalise any young modern reader, but the point is they are genuinely in love, he defends her, is faithful to her and she sticks by him right to the end of the story.)

The British diplomats in Azania

Having thoroughly undermined our expectations and landed us in a strange and terrible foreign setting, the narrative then switches to an extensive description of the British diplomatic community in Azania, who have been hunkering down during this regrettable war.

They are a collection of ripe caricatures, posh, nonchalant, stiff-upper-lip types, showily obsessed with trivia and utterly indifferent to the progress of the war or the two opposing sides, the names of whose leaders they affect to forget, in that blithe, dismissive, posh English way (same as Lottie Crump introducing frightfully important people as ‘Lord thingummy-jig’).

‘His Britannic Majesty’s minister, Sir Samson Courteney’ is more concerned about the frequency with which the cook serves up tinned asparagus every day than the perishing war, and likes to relax by having a long bath in the morning and a spot of knitting in the evening.

Lady Courtenay is full of empty tittle tattle about the doings of the small British community, especially their children, which schools they’re going to, how they’re managing with their various ponies. Her main concern is securing cuttings from London to continue embellishing the splendid little English garden she’s been cultivating at the Legation.

The Courtenays have a frivolous daughter, Prudence, who is in love with more or less the only eligible young man available, William Bland, the honorary attaché and assistant to Sir Samson. Sometimes the rather earnest bishop pops round for luncheon but the legation buildings are an inconvenient seven miles out of town along a bad road so he always ends up staying the night, which turns into a trial for all concerned. With the handful of other posh Brits who work at the Legation, they play endless games of bridge or poker dice or bagatelle, or Happy Families or consequences.

Prudence is writing a deep and meaningful book titled The Panorama of Life and Waugh shares with us some of her witless, factually incorrect vapourings. It is a cast of jolly English innocents abroad.

It is a running joke that the little French diplomatic community, led by Monsieur Ballon, are fierce rivals with the British and live in paranoid fear that the Brits are getting one over on them, are scheming and plotting and up to something, a seething paranoia which is satirically contrasted with the actual activities of the Brits, which are sleeping late, having long baths, supping cocktails before a long lunch, fussing about their roses or gymkhana ponies, having a nap in the afternoon, before dressing for an elaborate dinner and then spending all evening playing bridge – completely oblivious of French paranoia.

The rivalry is exemplified in the way William translates a top secret cable from London and breathlessly presents it to Sir Samuel (‘Kt to QR3 CH’) only to be told it contains the latest chess move young Percy is playing with a chap at the Foreign Office. Whereas the French – who are, inevitably, spying on the British and hacking into their cables –suspect this very same chess move of being an extra-secret code conveying some kind of diabolical Anglo-Saxon plot.

Enter Basil Seal

It is only at this point, maybe a third of the way into the text of the novel, that we are first introduced to its protagonist, Basil Seal, who we first encounter in characteristically jaded, post-party mode:

For the last four days Basil had been on a racket. He had woken up an hour ago on the sofa of a totally strange flat. There was a gramophone playing. A lady in a dressing jacket sat in an armchair by the gas-fire, eating sardines from the tin with a shoe-horn. An unknown man in shirt-sleeves was shaving, the glass propped on the chimneypiece.
The man had said: ‘Now you’re awake you’d better go.’
The woman: ‘Quite thought you were dead.’
Basil: ‘I can’t think why I’m here.’
‘I can’t think why you don’t go.’
‘Isn’t London hell?’

‘On a racket’. 1930s slang. Basil traipses round various friends, pops into Lady Metroland’s party, then goes to see his mother, basically to cadge money off anyone who’ll lend him five hundred quid to go to Africa. Why? Because, as he puts it, history only happens in a few places at any one time, and it’s happening right now in Azania. And he needs a break from London. Badly.

In the event the older, married women he’s having an affair with, Angela Lyne, coughs up the money which allows Basil to pack and leave London, flying from Croydon airport to Le Bourget, catch the train south to Marseilles, and so by steamer across the Med, down the Red Sea to Djibouti (exactly the itinerary Waugh himself took on his three journeys out to Ethiopia – except for the flying, Waugh caught a train across France) to arrive at the fictional island of ‘Azania’.

As well as throwing away all the advantages he has been given in life (for example, he was handed a safe Conservative seat which would have allowed him to become a Tory MP with almost no effort, but managed to throw away the opportunity) Basil is a thief. At the interview with his mother in her boudoir he nicks her expensive emerald broach and flogs it for a fraction of its price at Port Said. He shares a cabin on the ship to Djibouti, and his cabin mate only realises a few days after Basil’s departure that he’s nicked his shaving soap, bedroom slippers and ‘fine topee’. Like all Waugh’s characters, Basil is a cartoon but a complex cartoon.

Basil in Azania

Basil’s first impressions of Azania are described in luxurious detail. See the long paragraph I quoted at the start. He travels from the coastal port of Motadi to the nation’s capital, Debra Dowa, in the centre of the island. Basil’s impressions and journey overlap with scenes showing Seth impatiently telling his advisers what he needs is a modern man, a European, to help him bring Progress and the New Age to Azania.

We never see the scene where the two men meet or converse or Seth realising Basil is the man for the job. Instead the narrative jumps to a new chapter in which we find Basil already in charge of the ‘Ministry of Modernisation’. His official title if High Commissioner and Comptroller General. While still in the coastal town of Modati (where the narrative opened) Basil had come across the services of the excellent Armenian, Mr Krikor Youkoumian, owner of the Amurath Café and Universal Stores in Motadi. It is a pleasant joke that Basil makes Mr Youkoumian his number two, and very able he proves to be.

(It is worth remembering that in Remote People Waugh says that of the hundreds of people he met, it was two Armenians who stood out as the most steadfast and dependable, and he gives a little dithyramb praising their nation.)

Anyway, Basil has been commissioned by the Emperor Seth to modernise his country. What does this mean in practice? Oh, lots of things. First they must undertake a complete ‘reform of manners’. The capital, Debra Dowa, must be torn down and rebuilt in the modern style. Instead of wiggly lanes lined by low shanties, there must be a grand square, named Seth Square, with broad avenues radiating outwards (one to be called Boulevard Basil Seal, another the Avenue Connolly). Seth asks if they can build an underground tube network. Er, no.

He becomes obsessed with the topic of birth control. (It’s fascinating that the idea that women in developing countries must be given free birth control and education so they can stop being baby machines and become modern women in control of their bodies, educated into working in offices at modern jobs – that all this was familiar enough to be included in a comic novel 90 years ago. Thus Seth demands that the Anglican cathedral must be torn down and the square it’s set on be renamed Place Marie Stopes.)

Seth generates an ever-growing list of demands for reforms he has read about in all the European books and magazines which pile up on his tables, all for the cause of Progress and the New Age. This comic thread climaxes in a note he sends Basil:

For your information and necessary action, I have decided to abolish the following: Death penalty. Marriage. The Sakuyu language and all native dialects. Infant mortality. Totemism. Inhuman butchery. Mortgages. Emigration. Please see to this. Also organize system of reservoirs for city’s water supply and draft syllabus for competitive examination for public services. Suggest compulsory Esperanto.

His next fad is money and he decides to produce a home-made currency (with his own portrait on them) which he enthusiastically prints by the thousand in contravention to all economic orthodoxy. Basil is, by now, too tired and harassed by the emperor’s endless fads, to even try to talk him out of it. The worthlessness of the new currency provides a recurring thread of comedy from then on.

Growing opposition

All these changes generate opposition across a wide range of society. First to go into opposition is General Connolly. He strongly resents Seth interfering with the army which preserved him in power. There’s an extended comic theme whereby Seth decides the army must have boots, modern boots, European boots, like a European army. General Connolly is furious, explaining that the natives’ feet are tough enough to tramp through jungle whereas Western-style boots will give them blisters, infections and trench foot. Nonetheless, there is an extended comic thread as Mr Youkoumia hunts around for an importer of European boots, finds one, has them delivered in a big pile at Connolly’s barracks.

Connolly storms into Basil’s office and we wonder if he’s going to announce a mutiny but instead tells Basil that… his men ate all the boots (and then claimed they tasted more nutritious than their standard rations).

Then the birth control campaign arouses the ire of the churches. They are led by the leading Christian in the country, the Nestorian Patriarch who rallies the Chief Rabbi, the Mormon Elder and the chief representatives of all the creeds of the Empire against contraception and in favour of the decencies of married life etc. (Nestorianism is a Christian ‘heresy’ i.e. a branch of Christianity which early on diverged from what later became recognised as orthodox belief, was stifled in Catholic Western Europe but continued to flourish in the Middle East, hence then Patriarch’s authority here in remote Azania.)

Finally the French. M. Ballon and the French contingent hate and fear whatever the English are doing so they are infuriated by the influence the scapegrace Englishman has over the emperor. Only French scapegraces should have influence over African emperors.

Basil and Prudence

Basil has affair with Prudence Courtenay. She is a fresh young English rose, he is a dashing, handsome scapegrace, who never shaves or looks presentable but is tall and strong and manly and powerful. Of course, in the real world women are never attracted to tall, dark, handsome and rather dangerous men.

The RSPCA

Into the mix are thrown two prim, proper and high-minded ladies who arrive from England, Dame Mildred Porch and Miss Sarah Tin, on a mission to support animal welfare.

Their arrival is signalled at the start of a new chapter which opens with a refreshing change of modality or medium, namely from authorial narrative, to the texts of Dame Mildred’s letters back to her hubby in England complaining about pretty much every aspect of Azanian life.

This starts with the slapdash and almost insolent behaviour of the young attaché (William Bland) who is sent to collect them from the train station but makes it pretty plain his first priority is the monthly mail bag (complete with brand new records and magazines) rather than the two misses.

There isn’t space in his little car for the mail bag, the ladies and Miss Tin’s large trunk, which he leaves at the station assuring them he’ll send for it later and it becomes a running joke that this trunk never is retrieved and Miss Tin spends the rest of her stay bitterly complaining about it and having to borrow clothes.

The contraception campaign

The emperor’s contraception and family planning campaign becomes more feverish. He cares not that it will overthrow all native culture, both black African and Arab, by insisting on enforced birth control and smaller families. There’s a comic passage about a modern poster he gets made up and put everywhere showing two families.

It portrayed two contrasted scenes. On one side a native hut of hideous squalor, overrun with children of every age, suffering from every physical incapacity — crippled, deformed, blind, spotted and insane; the father prematurely aged with paternity squatted by an empty cook-pot; through the door could be seen his wife, withered and bowed with child-bearing, desperately hoeing at their inadequate crop. On the other side a bright parlour furnished with chairs and table; the mother, young and beautiful, sat at her ease eating a huge slice of raw meat; her husband smoked a long Arab hubble-bubble (still a caste mark of leisure throughout the land), while a single healthy child sat between them reading a newspaper. Inset between the two pictures was a detailed drawing of some up-to-date contraceptive apparatus and the words in Sakuyu: which home do you choose?

The comedy comes in the way the entire native population fails to get the message and picks the wrong home:

See: on right hand: there is rich man: smoke pipe like big chief: but his wife she no good; sit eating meat: and rich man no good: he only one son.
See: on left hand: poor man: not much to eat: but his wife she very good, work hard in field: man he good too: eleven children: one very mad, very holy. And in the middle: Emperor’s juju. Make you like that good man with eleven children.

It all leads up to the great Pageant of Contraception complete with floats depicting the Modern Woman, empowered by birth control to lead modern economically productive lives.

Achon the pretender

Meanwhile the emperor’s enemies have joined forces. The central trio of Connolly, Patriarch and Ballon realise they’ll need someone to replace Seth when they overthrow him. They have heard rumours that a long-lost cousin of Seth’s, Achon, a son of the Great Emperor Amurath, was seized by Amurath’s daughter (the Empress whose recent death signalled Seth’s ascension) and sent away to be incarcerated for life in the remote monastery of St Mark the Evangelist.

He must be pushing 90 now, but the trio command the Earl of Ngumo, a comically traditionalist black chieftain, to journey through the jungle to the remote monastery and retrieve him. (The monastery itself, down to its layout and description of its ceremonies, is clearly based on the monastery of Debra Lebanos which Waugh visited on his 1930 trip and described in great (comic) detail in Remote People.)

There then follow long and canny negotiations between the Earl and the ancient Abbot about whether Achon was ever taken there, if so whether he’s still alive, if he’s still alive, how much it will cost to take Ngumo to him. This takes days, the stylised and formal discussions ringing very true and testifying to Waugh’s first hand experience of this kind of culture.

When finally revealed, it turns out Achon is pushing ninety and has been kept for decades in a cave chained to the wall. He can’t walk and can’t talk and has no idea what’s happening to him. So this is the walking skeleton the Earl of Ngumo brings back to the capital, where he is kept a secret by the trio of conspirators.

The pageant of contraception

And so the day dawns for the dramatic climax of the book, the great Birth Control Gala commences, a great festival day for the population of Debra Dowa. In a nice narrative decision Waugh doesn’t describe the thing as an omniscient narrator, but makes us see the entire thing from the point of view of Dame Mildred Porch and Miss Tin, whose hotel room overlooks the town’s main street but is quickly so overrun by uninvited guests that they decamp up to the corrugated metal roof of the hotel, with its short concrete parapet, to enjoy the scene.

Unfortunately, what they witness is the chaotic coup staged by Connolly, the Patriarch and Ballon. The procession of floats of the Modern Woman and Girl Guides carrying inspiring banners (“WOMEN OF TOMORROW DEMAND AN EMPTY CRADLE”, “THROUGH STERILITY TO CULTURE”) is suddenly interrupted by gunfire, the screaming of crowds, and then machine gunfire as troops move in.

After a long, confused and terrified afternoon trapped on the hotel roof in the blazing sun, as night finally falls the two women hear pukka English voices coming from down in the street. It is none other than young William from the Legation who has come to check they are OK. He is about to drive off when they chuck a whiskey bottle then a pillow down at his car which delays him long enough for them to run down the stairs and into the street and insist that he take them to the British Legation, despite his protestations and the knowledge that he’ll get it in the ear from his boss, Sir Sampson, who hates the even peacefulness of Legation life being disturbed in any way. Even by a coup.

The coronation of Achon

Again the omniscient narrator is ditched in favour of retailing the confused events of the next few days as they trickle through to the British Legation, isolated and fearful, 6 or 7 miles from the capital. Word comes through that Seth survived the coup but has fled.

Then we cut to the great ceremony, a week or so later, of the state coronation of Achon, who Connolly, the Patriarch and Ballon’s various propaganda channels have been telling the populace is the true heir to the throne. Unfortunately, when the Patriarch places the elaborate crown of Azania on Achon’s head it snaps his feeble neck and he dies on the spot. Chaos ensues.

At the British Legation

Fear in the Legation. Basil turns up in native disguise with camels and African servants. He helped Seth escape from the capital in the chaos after the coup, accompanied by bodyguards etc and has arranged a rendezvous in a week’s times.

Then he’s come to the Legation to see if they need his help. He takes over security and sets a watch of armed guards in case the locals or Connolly’s troops try to attack, but there is no attack. Instead, after a few days, a plane flies overhead and drops a stone with a message tied round it telling them to pack their stuff, more planes will be along soon. A few hours later some planes land in open fields by the Legation and tell the gathered Brits they are being evacuated. All the characters gather up whatever can be stashed in a small suitcase, and scamper into the planes which taxi and take off.

Prudence just has time for a last scene with Basil, begging him to catch a plane with them. But he is determined to make a rendezvous in the jungle with Seth. Prudence is wearing a rather fetching red beret. Sadly she scampers back to the planes which were waiting for her before they all take off together.

The view from up in the air is frightfully ripping till her plane suddenly seems to be flying lower than the others, the pilot yells something back to his passengers, then he has to make an emergency landing in a clearing. ‘Should have it fixed in a jiffy,’ he quips. I expected maybe Basil, trekking through the jungle with his camels, might find and rescue her. Little did I know…

Basil’s trek

There’s then quite a long description of Basil’s trek through the jungle to the rendezvous point with Seth. One by one the natives abandon him. On the second day his servants intercept a messenger who’s carrying a piece of paper stuck in the traditional cleft stick. The message is from Viscount Boaz to the Earl of Ngumo and says a) he is loyal to the new emperor Achon b) he has with him the former emperor Seth c) should he take steps to relieve the new emperor of this embarrassment? I.e. murder Seth?

Immediately grasping that Seth’s life is at stake, Basil orders the reluctant messenger to turn round and run back to Boaz and tell him Achon is dead, the coup has failed, so Seth has been restored as the rightful emperor, and not to kill him.

A day later Basil arrives at the rendezvous but, to cut a long story short, discovers Seth is dead. If only the messenger had returned a day sooner he would be alive. Boaz, who had captured Seth and is responsible for his murder, makes up various excuses and tells a stream of fictions about how Seth met his end, accident, illness, suicide and so on. Whatever the cause, he is dead. They take Basil to see Seth’s body, which native women are sewing up in a shroud with herbs and spices.

Basil decides on the spot to do the decent thing and take the body back to Seth’s ancestral birthplace, in the heart of the Wanda people. There follows more trekking through the jungle with camels bearing the dead emperor’s body.

Eventually Basil arrives and is sadly welcomed and there is a long, detailed and genuinely moving description of the funeral rites the Wanda people give their dead leader. Basil makes a long and noble exequy, such as would befit the funeral rites of a dead hero in the Iliad or Beowulf. There is not a shred of condescension as Waugh describes with forensic accuracy the ritual feast in which Basil joins, as the assembled tribal notables eat from a large pot of stew, scooping up the chunks of meat with flatbread, along with the ritual drinking and other traditional funeral rites. Waugh endows it all with great beauty as it builds to its climax of an impressive funeral pyre.

Soon the pyre was enveloped in towering flames. The people took up the song and swayed on their haunches, chanting. The bundle on the crest bubbled and spluttered like fresh pine until the skin cerements burst open and revealed briefly in the heart of the furnace the incandescent corpse of the Emperor. Then there was a subsidence among the timbers and it disappeared from view.

I actually found this scene genuinely moving because it is described so precisely and without a shred of patronage or condescension, Waugh and his character taking it completely at face value as rites becoming a dead emperor.

All the more shocking, horrifying and bitterly nihilistic is the sequel. Walking away from the ongoing celebrations around the burning pyre Basil comes across a drunk old man in the shadows, nodding and drooling. Suddenly a flare of light from the pyre reveals the old man is wearing a red beret. Basil realises it’s Prudence’s. Is she here? Basil shakes the old man and asks where the owner of the hat is. The old man pats his tummy and says ‘Here. We’ve all just eaten her.’

Waugh achieves his best psychological or emotional effects by distancing them, like the casual deaths in Decline and Fall or Vile Bodies. He doesn’t give Basil’s response or reaction or feelings. The chapter, and the entire Africa section ends on this genuinely shocking revelation.

Back in London

Next thing we know we are back in silly frivolous superficial London and Basil is ringing up his dissolute chums, owners of the bedroom where we first met him coming round from a drunken stupor, Sonia and Alisdair.

They inform him that while he’s been away there’s been some kind of ‘crash’ and everyone’s now beastly poor. It’s just too too dull. He pops round, they drink and play silly parlour games and every time he threatens to tell them anything about his African adventure they all tell him to shush. Nothing serious here, thank you very much. Later in the evening he goes round to see his mistress, the married woman Angela Lyne. The sense is of him picking up the shallow, cynical merry-go-round of London life exactly where he left off. Nothing has changed in the tone of eternal frivolity, the worship of superficiality, the casual, depthless amorality. Except for Basil. He has changed, changed utterly.

Bleak endings

You often read people referring to the bleak ending of A Handful of Dust as an epitome of futility. I’d forgotten that the endings of Vile Bodies and Black Mischief are every bit as devastatingly nihilistic. Some people might find the killing and eating of Prudence funny, maybe I did when I was a callow youth, but now I am appalled by it and, like the death of vivacious Agatha Runcible, it casts a gloomy pall over everything which preceded it.

Epilogue

The League of Nations steps in and makes Azania a ‘protectorate’ to be jointly administered by France and Britain. We are swiftly introduced to the new generation of civil servants who are going to run the place, are building roads and hospitals and pretty little bungalows on the hill and gossip gaily about all the characters who have featured in the novel and have now departed. Sir Samson, his wife, the other Legation officials are old news now. Waugh shows with devastating accuracy how the gossip and common opinion about them has been twisted and distorted out of all recognition. It’s what happens to everyone all the time. Everything any of us does is quickly twisted and distorted out of all recognition by people who have never met us and don’t care.

The narrative focuses in on two young Brits who’ve joined the recently appointed Protectorate staff as they discuss the fate of old Colonel Connolly. They pride themselves on having gotten him expelled from the country and speculate that he might end up in Abyssinia, funny how he’s so attached to that native woman of his (Connolly’s ‘Black Bitch’ loyal to the last).

And then they agree how they all rely on the services of the estimable Armenian, Mr Youkoumian. Rulers may come and rulers may go but quick-thinking, flexible and adaptable merchants go on for ever.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on December 8, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Comedy, Novel

Posted by Simon on December 8, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/12/08/black-mischief-evelyn-waugh/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Basil Seal

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

1. Waugh’s conservative values

Elitist

Snob

Catholic elitism

Catholic belief

Individual responsibility and expression

The British Empire

The international alternatives

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 Labour Party’s socialist policies

Nationalisation

The theft of private property

The faceless bureaucracy

The NHS

Rationing

Shabby housing

3. Specific topics satirised in Long Among the Ruins

The abolition of individualism

The abolition of personal responsibility

The failure of modern architecture and town planning

The rise of State murder

State sterilisation

The irreligious amorality of modern science

The feeble replacement of Christmas

Summary

Credit

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Evelyn Waugh reviews

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Work Suspended by Evelyn Waugh (1942)

Part One – A Death

John Plant in Morocco

John returns to London

Roger and Lucy

Atwater

Destruction of the family home

Part Two – A Birth

Julia and Lucy

Lucy gives birth

At London Zoo

Atwater’s club

Conclusion

Credit

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Evelyn Waugh reviews

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Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh (1942)

Background

Subject

The return of Basil Seal

Sir Joseph Mainwaring

A theory of gossip

Left wing intellectuals

Ambrose Silk

Ambrose’s magazine

Basil’s scams

The Connollys

The Ministry of Information and the Ambrose scam

Schoolboy japes

The war

Epilogue: tying up loose ends

Summary

Credit

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Evelyn Waugh reviews

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Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh (1932)

Jaded author of jaded characters

Waugh’s recurring characters

Black Mischief’s prose more solid and descriptive

Civil war in Azania

The British diplomats in Azania

Enter Basil Seal